Deep time

“Hyperobjects loom into human time like the lengthening shadow of a tree across the garden lawn in the bright sunshine of an ending afternoon. The end of the world is not a sudden punctuation point, but rather it is a matter of deep time” (Morton 2013, 122).

“Alienation is perhaps the most logical reaction to sublime, inhuman timescales. Confronted by stretched-out temporal horizons, the human figure is marginalized, decentered as measure of all things” (Ginn, Bastian, Farrier, and Kidwell 2018, 214).

“The Anthropocene involves us in a kind of deep-time negative capability, inducting us into the strangeness of a temporality that vastly exceeds both personal experience and intergenerational memory” (Farrier 2019, 86).

“The deep time the Anthropocene invites us to consider is not only the past. It also projects a deep future which explodes the temporal horizon of all established forms of prognostication and planning” (Horn and Bergthaller 2019, 165).

“There’s a deep connection between [deep time] and the space zone of unthinkable distance, hundreds of thousands of miles or even light-years away. Both are almost beyond our capacity to imagine: the sedimentary layers of Earth a kind of weighty corollary to the almost infinite expanses of outer space” (Dick 2023, 35).