A New Theory of Time: X-tention is Simultaneously Discrete and Continuous

Time has been conceived mainly as either discrete or continuous, but not widely as a simultaneity of the two. I would like to articulate a new theory of time in which time is reconceived as a ‘raw material’ whose natural state is both discrete and continuous. This is a “middle third” position that extends Husserl’s theory of internal time consciousness by being a new form of time in the middle between and connecting retention-protention (which are continuous) and recollection-expectation (which are discrete). What I am naming X-tention is this middle kind of time, existing in a primordial state that is simultaneously discrete and continuous, with the capacity to solidify into either in the case of a specific situation. Time could be analogous to another fundamental physical element, light, which exists in a superposition state of both particle and wave before collapsing into one or the other per observation.

Husserl's theory of internal time structure 
In The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness (1893-1917), Husserl expounds his theory of the structure of time. His core claim is that any present-now moment is comprised of three elements. There is a primal impression, the pure perception of the present now, plus a link to what this perception retains of just-recently past-now moments (retention) and what it anticipates of quickly-upcoming future-now moments (protention). Husserl distinguishes between two kinds of memory, primary memory as retention and secondary memory as recollection. Retention does not break continuity with the present-now moment; it is the part of a temporal object that contemplates its pastness and allows the present to emerge from the temporal background. Recollection does break continuity with the present; the current moment is interrupted to recall and re-represent past memory. Husserl’s theory is depicted in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

A new middle third form of time: X-tention
Retention-protention is continuous; recollection-expectation is discrete. Recollection and expectation are piled-up snapshots of discrete past moments and imagined future events. When brought to mind, they are reproduced in a new present-now flow, but exist prior to recall or replay as un-presented discrete elements. The structure of the present-now moment, on the other hand, is a continuous flow of the intentional unity of primal impression and retention-protention. How far the retention-protention horizon extends is unclear. It might only encompass the most immediate recent-pasts and near-futures surrounding the primal impression of the present-now moment, or it might extend to include all previous and future experiences in the realms of recollection and expectation. I posit the conception of a middle third form of time, X-tention, to sit respectively between recollection and retention, and protention and expectation. My addition to Husserl’s theory is illustrated in Figure 2. Whereas protention and retention are continuous, and recollection and expectation are discrete, X-tention as the middle form of time is simultaneously discrete and continuous.

Figure 2.

X-tention: a superposition of raw time collapsible into discreteness or continuousness
X-tention as the middle third conception of time is conceptually similar to light’s wave-particle duality. Like light, the idea is not that time is an either/or kind of a thing. Light is not the kind of thing that is a particle or a wave, light is the kind of a thing that is more fundamentally not either, and may behave like a wave or particle depending on the situation. Likewise, the nature of time could be that it is fundamentally a kind of a thing that is more malleable in its core state, and that may behave as discrete or continuous based on the situation. X-tentive time thus exists as a possibility space where time is simultaneously discrete and continuous, a superposition of the possibility of both until collapsed into a reality situation of one or the other. The metaphor is that of Schrödinger’s cat, which exists in a quantum superposition state of being simultaneously both dead and alive until an observer looks into the box and the state collapses into one or the other. With X-tention too, it is possible to “look into the box,” i.e.; force the superposition state of dual time possibility to collapse into a reality instance of either discreteness (recollection-expectation) or continuousness (retention-protention). The possibility state collapses into one determination or the other. Since time is a function of the intentional act of meaning, for Husserl, in the case of time, “observing” would be applying an intentional act of meaning. Applying an act of meaning, in the sense of directing intentionality toward an object or objective, would collapse the potential time instance into either retention-impression-protention (continuous) or recollection-expectation (discrete).

Why is a middle third position of time needed? 
It may well be queried why a middle third position of time might be needed. How is it that Husserl did not more explicitly connect the two time regimes? Likewise, while other subsequent thinkers of time such as Heidegger and Derrida have critiqued many aspects of Husserl's theory, they essentially adopted wholesale the time structure of continuous retention-impression-protention and discrete recollection-expectation. However, I think that the discrete and the continuous are too disjoint, and do not seem to connect closely ontologically, methodologically, or practically to each other. Even just the posited structure of time as a binary “either-or” state is an indication that these might not be the only states, or that like light, the more foundational nature of the phenomenon is such that discreteness and continuousness are merely proximate behavioral dimensions of a more profound underlying phenomenon. Conceiving of time as simultaneously both discrete and continuous might also more closely correspond to the real-life phenomenological experience of time, which can seem to be both simultaneously snapshot and flow in the course of lived experience. Moreover, this is congruent with the Husserlian project of phenomenology, describing “how” things are experienced, not “what” is experienced. In summary, the concept of the middle third term of time, X-tention, is simultaneous time duality, where one of time’s properties is discreteness versus continuousness. "Raw time" or "pure time" exists simultaneously in a superposition of both states before an intentional act of meaning collapses it into one or the other state. X-tention can be seen as a perdurant (e.g.; temporal object-based) temporality of complexity because indeterminacy (as non-determinacy) is a key property. A temporality of complexity is important as we are now starting to have the understanding and technological tools to approach reality in the more nuanced manner of complex systems (non-linear, dynamic, emergent, open, unknowable at the outset, interdependent, self-organizing) as opposed to situations of simple linear causality.

Matter, energy, and light vs. space and time
I am positing the case of light wave-particle duality as a metaphor, not necessarily as justificatory grounds for my conjecture of a middle third designation for time. Just because duality is true for light does not mean that duality would be true for time. For one thing, matter, energy, and light are one class of physical phenomena, while space and time are another. Matter, energy, and light are ‘what is there,’ while space and time are the composition of the background. It is not that light is grounds for time, but it could be that many or even all physical phenomena ultimately turn out to have a property of duality or multiplicity. At small enough scales, many phenomena in physics might have a duality or multiplicity of states and behaviors, or more broadly indeterminacy as a general property that collapses from possibility to actuality per certain conditions. The presence of an observer is also a dynamic that is not yet fully understood. Matter, energy, and light are inter-translatable per Einstein’s equivalency of E=mc², and thus perhaps all subject to wave-particle duality in some sense.

Physics: Scientific formulations of time as simultaneously discrete and continuous 
The conceptualization of time as simultaneously discrete and continuous is an under-explored notion in the philosophy of time, but is enjoying some degree of investigation in physics. One interesting paper notes that information is a quantity which is both discrete and continuous, where time and other physical phenomena might be reconceived as simultaneously discrete and continuous with an information theoretic formulation. The specific calculation involves Shannon’s sampling theory, which is essentially scaling any ‘analog’ phenomenon down to a digital’ formulation, and translating between the two. Another theory, loop quantum gravity, also holds that time might be simultaneously discrete and continuous at small enough scales, like the smallest scale, the Planck length (1×10⁻³⁵ m). Nanotechnology, the precise placement of atoms in positional nanoassembly as a comparison for example, takes place at the (1×10⁻⁹ m) scale. At the Planck scale, fundamental building blocks of spacetime might be composable like Legos into different spacetime fabrics, such as those of “regular” baryonic matter, dark matter, and dark energy.

More information: Temporality of the Future

Magic Blockchains, but for Time? Blocktime Arbitrage

There is no doubt that blockchains are a reality-making technology, a mode and means of implementing as many flavors of our own crypto-enlightenments as we can imagine! This includes newer, flatter, more autonomous economic, political, ethical, scientific, and community systems. But not just in the familiar human social constructs like economics and politics, possibly in physical realities too like time. Blocktime’s temporal multiplicity and malleability suggest a reality feature we have never had access to before – making more time.

Blocktime: A General Temporality of Blockchains
Blocktime as blockchains’ own temporality allows the tantalizing possibility of rejiggering time and making it a malleable property of blockchains. The in-built time clock in blockchains is blocktime, the chain of time by which a certain number of blocks will have been confirmed. Time is specified in units of transaction block confirmation times, not minutes or hours like in a human time system. Block confirmation times are convertible to minutes, but these conversion metrics might change over time.

Blocktime Arbitrage
One key point is that the notion of blocktime, as an extension of computing clocktime more generally, creates a differential. Blocktime and human time already exist as different time schemas. A differential suggests that the two different systems might be used to reinforce each other, or that the differential could be exploited, arbitraging the two time frameworks. Through the differential too is the way to ‘make more time,’ by accessing events in another time trajectory. The conceptualization of time in computer science is already different than human time. Computing clocktime has more dimensions (discrete time, no time, asynchronous time, etc.) than human physical and biological time, which is continuous. Clocktime has always been different than human time. What is different with blocktime is that it builds in even more variability, and the future assignability of time through dapps and smart contracts. For example, MTL (machine trust language) time primitives might be assigned to a micropayment channel dapp as a time arbiter.

Time has not been future-specifiable before, in the way that it can be assigned in blocktime smart contracts.

Temporality as a Smart Contract Feature
Time speed-ups, slow-downs, event-waiting, and event-positing (a true futures-class technology) could become de rigueur blocktime specifications. Even the blocktime regime itself could be a contract-specifiable parameter per drop-down menu, just like legal regime. Temporality becomes a feature as smart contracts are launched and await events or changes in conditions to update contract states. Time malleability could itself be a feature, arbitraging blocktime with real time. An example of a time schema differential arising could be for example, a decentralized peer-to-peer loan that is coming due in blocktime, but where there have not been enough physical-world time cycles available for generating the ‘fiat resources’ to repay the loan. 

Blocktime Standards
In blocktime, the time interval at which things are done is by block. This is the time that it takes blocks to confirm, so blockchain system processes like those involving smart contracts are ordered around the conception of blocktime quanta or units. This is a different temporal paradigm than human lived time (whether Bergsonian doubled duration (the internal sense of time passing) or external measurable clocktime). The human time paradigm is one that is more variable and contingent. Human time is divided and unitized by the vagaries of human experience, by parameters such as day and night; week, weekend, and holiday; seasons; and more contingently, crises, eras, and historical events.

Since blocktime is an inherent blockchain feature, one of the easiest ways to programmatically specify future time intervals for event conditions and state changes in blockchain-based events is via blocktime. Arguably, it is easier, and more congruent and efficient, to call a time measure from within a system rather than from outside. It could be prohibitively costly for example, to specify an external programmatic call to NIST or another time oracle. Possibly the emerging convention could be to call NIST, including as a backup, confirmation, or comparison for blocktime. Currently, blockchain systems do not necessarily synchronize their internal clocktime with NIST, but the possibility of a vast web of worldwide smart contracts suggests the value and necessity of external time oracles, and raises new issues about global time measurement more generally. Especially since each different blockchain might have its own blocktime, there could be some standard means of coordinating blocktime synchronizations for interoperability, maybe via a time sidechain for example.

Novel Temporalities of Computing (Discontinuous) and Big Data (Predictive)
First computing clocktime made time malleable through its different discontinuous forms. Then machine learning and big data facilitated a new temporality, one oriented to the present and future, instead of responding to just the past. There was a shift from only being able to react to events retrospectively after they had passed, to now being able to model, simulate, plan, and act in real-time as events occur, and proactively structure future events. The current change is that blockchains and particularly smart contracts add exponential power to this; they are in some sense a future reality-making technology on steroids. Whole classes of industries (like mortgage servicing) might be outsourced to the seamless orchestration of blockchain dapps and DACs in the next phases of the automation economy. While Bitcoin is the spot market for transactions in the present moment, smart contracts are a robust futures market for locking in the automated orchestration of vast areas of digital activity.

Blockchain Historicity: Computer Memory of Human Events
Blockchain logs are a human event memory server. Blockchains are already event history keepers, and now with blocktime have even more responsibility as the memory computer of human events. It is now possible to think in terms of blockchain time sequences, in the anticipation and scoping of future events and activities, as blockchain reality unfolds, as opposed to human time scales and events. For example, there are normal human time sequences, like a one-year lease agreement. Other sequentiality is based on human-experienced conditions like ‘the park is open until dark,’ which makes little sense in a blocktime schema. There are time guidelines that vary per lived experience in human realities. Likewise, there could be analogs in lived experience in blockchain realities. Different events could mark the historicity of blockchains, for example, the time elapsed since the genesis block, and other metrics regarding number, amount, and the speed of transactions. In cryptophilosophy, Hegel, Benjamin, Holderlin, and Heidegger’s conceptions of historicity and temporality might be instantiated in the blocktime paradigm, where, in ecstatic temporality, historicity is the event from the future reaching back to present now (Heidegger, Being and Time, 474).

Related Crypto-philosophy Talk: Swan, M. “Bergson’s Qualitative, Kant’s Time and Imagination, and Blocktime Smart Contracts.” Spatiality & Temporality Conference. 11-13 December 2015. Warsaw, Poland. 

Bergson, Free Will, and the Philosophy of Cognitive Enhancement

Bergson claims that free will exists. It occurs in moments when a living being experiences duration, which is tuning into the internal sense of an experience, and a freely-determined action flows from this state. His reasoning is that “if duration is heterogeneous [if we are tuned into the internal sense of experience], the relation of the psychic state to act is unique, and the act is rightly judged free.” An act is free if it flows from an internal qualitative experience. He suggests we understand this by considering an example in our lives of having made a serious decision; where even searching for such an example already starts to evoke the qualitative aspects, unique psychic states, and then the free-action undertaken as a result. The crux is that “We should see that, if our action was pronounced by us to be free, it is because the relation of this action to the state from which it issued could not be expressed by a law, this psychic state being unique of its kind and unable to ever to occur again.” Turning inward to our unique experience causes freely undertaken action to flow as a result, even if this action is a formulation of our mental state.

Philosophy of Cognitive Enhancement
The reason that Bergson is useful for the philosophy of cognitive enhancement is that he provides a reasonable ontological explanation for free will with prescriptive recommendations for its achievement. He draws our attention to the qualitative and characterizes it in usable detail instead of dismissing it as inaccessible due to being subjective (as did Kierkegaard). This could help in developing a philosophy of cognitive enhancement by articulating some of the goals and experience of what it might mean for humans to engage in such practices. It is not necessary to agree with Bergson's claim in favor of free will to implement some of the underlying ideas. What is important to us in cognitive enhancement (the targeted improvement of natural human cognitive abilities) is not just better memories, but accelerated subjectivation - the ability to extend our capacity by becoming ‘more’ of who we are and can be more quickly.

Cognitive Enhancement Tools
One first cognitive enhancement application of Bergson might be in having greater activation of free will; catalyzing more ‘living now’ moments where free will could be realized. Our everyday acts are quantitative and undoubled but cognitive enhancement tools might be able to help with greater activation of the qualitative experience of life. Another application could be exploring the emergence of freedom as a property of internal experience. Bergson does not discuss whether we are free to perceive our inner states in different ways, or just one default way. It would seem that qualitative multiplicity could extend to having discretion over experience. This could inspire an ethics of perception, and an ethics of reality, as topics of cognitive enhancement philosophy. Another application area could be quantitative-qualitative transitions; tracing how the quantitative becomes the qualitative, as this might be a way into a richer, ongoing, free will-activated experience of life. There could be many applications trying to help improve our psychic states, both in their quality and accessibility, and in our awareness and perception of them.

Reference: Bergson, Henri. (2001, 1889). Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience). London UK: Dover Publications. Bergson, Free Will, and Cognitive Enhancement

Subjective Experience and the Existence of Free Will in Bergson

With burgeoning progression in neuroscience projects across a variety of fields including stem cell generation, brain scanning, and natural language processing, the free will / determinism debate remains vibrant. One resource for understanding the problem is French philosopher Henri Bergson and his claim that free will exists, and can be understood through how time and free will are connected.

Henri Bergson lived 1859-1941. 1900s. He was well-known in philosophy and intellectual culture more broadly in the early 1900s, including for anticipating quantum mechanics 30 years ahead of its discovery due to his assessment of time as being asymmetrical. In the 1960s, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze reawakened interest in Bergson, highlighting the importance of Bergson’s concepts regarding multiplicity and difference. Now Bergson continues to be relevant to neuroscience and other areas interested in the understanding of subjective experience, free will, and mind/body dualism. Bergson published three masterworks:

• Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1889) arguing in favor of free will 
• Matter and Memory (1896) resolving mind/body dualism with a larger problem frame taking both dimensions into account 
• Creative Evolution (1907) linking the idea of the time as energy and the energy of time to evolution 

Linking Time and Free Will 

According to Bergson in Time and Free Will, and as explicated by Suzanne Guerlac in Thinking in Time, we cannot treat the inner world of consciousness and subjective experience with the same model we use to understand the physical world. We need to purify concepts from their objective scientific use for the purpose of examining subjective experience, where the important features are the intensity of qualities, the multiplicity of overlapping mental states, and duration, the lived experience of time. Time is a force because it has a causal role in experiences not being the same each time, or over time, and in allowing experiences to accumulate through memory. Time is therefore a force, but an internal force not subject to the laws of nature as external forces. Exactly because time is not governed by mechanistic external forces, it allows room for the exercise of free will. The force of time makes free will possible and we exercise it when we are living in time, tuned into our subjective experience, and acting passionately and decisively. A more accurate conceptualization of our freedom is not in deciding between two alternatives but rather in experiencing free actions carving themselves out of our hesitation as we plunder though the constant becoming of life. 

Further explanation: YouTube video

Technology vs. Free Will? Tuning into the Internal Qualitative Experience of Time

Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, was living and writing in a time (early 1900s) similar to today where the furious pace of innovation in science and technology was promising to elucidate the deepest secrets of the world such as how the mind works.

Determinism Victory from the Application of Quantitative Methods? 
As the social sciences gelled into departments of academic study unto themselves and sought to apply techniques from the hard sciences, Bergson became concerned about the potential loss of free will and a victory for determinism. Humans might be reduced to billiard balls in the sense that if human behavior could be predicted mechanistically like that of a billiard ball, it would mean that humans would lose their liberty and free will.

Doublings: Experiences with both Inner Qualitative Subjectivity and External Quantitative Objectivity
Bergson proposed that there are several concepts that are different in our internal experience (qualitative, subjective) than in our external experience of the world (quantitative, objective). This difference between internal and external experience (called a doubling) exists in areas like time, intensity, multiplicity, duration, self, and consciousness. The external aspects can be measured quantitatively, but the internal aspects cannot, they are states that overlap, merge into one another, and emerge and recede dynamically.

Prescription: Tune into the Qualitative Aspects of Inner Experience
To Bergson, freedom is most visible in spontaneity, the ability of a person to choose spontaneous action. To maintain free will, one should tune into the qualitative aspects of internal experience, understanding concepts like time as a qualitative overlap and ebb and flow of states dynamically, energetically. Bergson’s nomenclature for inner qualitative time is ‘duration’ as opposed to external quantitative ‘time’ – this is the difference between the sense of waiting for a train to arrive (qualitative) versus the time elapsing on the clock. Being attuned to the qualitative aspects of time, one can live more spontaneously.

Time, complexity, entropy, and the multiverse

FQXi, the Foundational Questions Institute, held a multidisciplinary meeting investigating the Nature of Time in Scandinavia August 27 – September 1, 2011 (Figure 1). FQXi promulgates original thinking and research on fundamental questions in physics and cosmology through research grants and essay-writing contests on topics such as “The Nature of Time,” and “Is Reality Digital or Analog?”

Figure 1. Multidisciplinary topics covered at the FQXi Time Conference

Time is familiar in the sense of the three space dimensions and the one time dimension around which human affairs in the physical world are organized. Additionally, each person has a subjective and identifiable relationship to time, even though this may be little more than a convenient construct. In science, time has been developed to the greatest degree in physics and cosmology, and in the philosophy of science. Other fields too are starting to consider time more robustly, including complexity, biology, and computation.

The conference addressed the issue of the arrow of time from many perspectives. While most fundamental laws of nature are time-symmetric, some areas have a time arrow flowing in one direction such as thermodynamics, quantum theory, radiation, and gravity. This can be problematic to explain. A suggested analysis structure involving the trade-offs between complexity and entropy as systems evolve over time served as a useful model for analyzing different aspects of time throughout the meeting.

Time malleability

There are differences between the conceptualization of time in computing systems and the human conceptualization of time. At the most basic level in computing, time is synonymous with performance and speed. At the next level in computing, there are “more kinds of time” than in the human and physics perspective where time is primarily continuous. In computing, time may be discrete, synchronous and asynchronous, absolute and relative, and not elapsing at all.

Concurrency trend in contemporary computing
Computing is now making time even more malleable as a side effect of the quest to develop concurrent systems (multi-cores and multi-processors, and cluster, grid, and cloud computing), in at least four ways. One technique is using functional languages such as Haskell, LISP, Scheme, Clojure, and F# where sets of items and processes may not need to be temporally ordered. A second method is enhancing existing computer languages with new commands like ‘happensbefore’ and concurrency control mechanisms like ‘lock free queues’ to manage multiple threads of code operating simultaneously. A third means is creating new models with less time dependency like MapReduce which automatically parallelizes large data problems into finding all possible answers (‘map’), and determining relevancy (‘reduce’). A fourth technique is extending alternative models such as clock free methods and asynchronous computing and restructuring problems to be distributed for more expedient resolution.

Building intelligent systems
The building of intelligent systems is a special problem in computing. There are many approaches ranging from attempts to model human thinking, including the conceptualization of time, to attempts to building intelligent systems from scratch. All models might benefit from incorporating biological time models such as temporal synchrony, the notion of a high-level background synchronization of processes.

Conclusion
Computers are already great time-savers. Computing approaches to contemporary problems like concurrency and building intelligent systems are increasing the ability to manipulate time. Ultimately, humans may be able to greatly extend the control of time, for all intents and purposes creating more time.

From “The conceptualization of time in computing”

How small is small? the pico, femto, atto world

Man continues to master the manipulation of matter and timescales further up and down the chain from observable quotidian life. Regarding time, ultrafast materials is the area of science that deals with phenomena occurring in picoseconds and faster.

The familiar time scale is one second, easily measurable with a stop watch. A picsecond is 10^-12 of a second or 0.000000000001 seconds, a timescale used in high speed electronics. A femtosecond is 10^-15 of a second, the timescale of molecular vibrations and carrier interactions in solids. An attosecond is 10^-18 of a second, the timescale of electron motion at atomic levels.

Scientists are now finding in nature that most energy transfer and charge transfer transactions are typically taking place at the vibrational range, at the femtosecond timescale. A prominent example is the rhodopsin photoreceptor for vision. Traditional models for describing these dynamics, e.g.; Bloch’s single-electron band structure model, work for condensed matter but not for regular matter.

New models are needed to understand the interplay between atomic structure and electronic structure. Atomic structural dynamics deal with ultrafast chemical reactions,
ultrafast phase transitions, and ultrafast biological processes. Electronic structural dynamics deal with bond dynamics, valence charge flow, charge transfer, and electronic phase transitions.

One new tool being applied is the femtosecond X-ray. Since femtosecond X-rays interact with atomic cores, they are useful for obtaining direct information about atomic positions as compared with traditional optical measurements which only provide indirect information. This has immediately transferable implications in electronics manufacturing and biological applications.

Moving beyond the femtosecond scale, a next-generation light source at the attosecond time scale is being planned for the 2020 timeframe at Lawrence Berkeley Lab.

Cryonics and the art of the long view

How surprising it is that those with a long view in thinking and behavior are not those with traditional religious beliefs but include sponsors and supporters of the Long Now Foundation and cryonicists. The Long Now Foundation has trans-millennial views on the order of 10,000 years, roughly the forward counterbalance to the history to date of human civilization. Cryonicists, in general, have a practical stance, simultaneously acknowledging the unproven nature of reanimation and assessing and focusing on contributing to the key challenges of the next 200-400 years, as opposed to the 20-50 year (or less) timeframe that appears to be implicit in current individual and political thinking.

Erstwhile cryonicists will do well to remain practically absorbed. It is easy to imagine a long-distanced future visit to the Met, where alongside the Egyptian tombs and mummies, dewars have been emptied to display frozen heads, bodies and pets. Excited expedition excavators from the three key sites, Alcor/Arizona, Cryonics Institute/Michigan and Suspended Animation/Florida pose next to their digs.

Stored possessions and artifacts of the time are neatly arranged in an exhibit with terse placards. "Little is known about the belief systems of these peoples. Middle-era Americans carried many nonmalleable gadgets though it is not clear how useful they were to daily life. It was not atypical for one person to carry cell phones, MP3 players, laptops, power cords, PDAs, cameras, recording devices, cords, batteries and recharging units at all times. [Portable lightweight inexhaustible energy source] was not yet available and devices were not yet appropriately nano-miniaturized and physically embedded."

How Long is a Long Time?

Time is of course subjective, it flows fast when you are having a good time and slow when you are waiting for something or having a not so good time. But what is a really long time? We are starting to put some long time frame events in a definitive timetable.

One long-term way of thinking is in terms of Russian astronomer Kardashev's Type I, II & II societies. Type I societies have fully harnessed all forms of their planetary energy including volcanoes, earthquakes, weather, hydrothermal vents, etc. We are currently a Type 0.7 society. Michio Kaku, talking about his new book, Parallel Worlds, thinks we are about 100 years from becoming a Type I society, as compared with Freeman Dyson suggesting a few years ago that we are 200 years away. No doubt the 2004 tsunami may help hasten the speed to a Type I society.

Other long-dated events on the horizon include:
-5 billion years to the engulfment of Earth by the sun
-10 billion years to the Andromeda galaxy collision w/ the Milky Way
-x billion/trillion+(?) years to the heat death of the universe when the accelerated expansion of the universe has driven all of the heat out

These events imply that human intelligence must take action to survive, first to get off Earth, then to get out of the galaxy and finally to get out of this universe. Or we could learn to control these events or manage around them such as by learning to live without heat/make heat unconventionally w/ dark matter/energy, better understand and manipulate physics, etc.

It seems likely that science will lead us to achieve these survival outcomes as a byproduct of other goals and imperatives occurring first.

One or more singularities may also supersede the timetable.