It's all a question of tempo, but it is very difficult to accurately assess the temporality of each process because there are several whose multiple combinations cannot be predicted. Modern physics has refuted Newton's concept of absolute time, which nevertheless remains the a priori form of our sensibility, as Kant said. We constantly think as if time were linear, when in fact there are many different temporalities intersecting in a present that has nothing of the consistency of an instantaneous slice of life or the immobile coexistence of all beings that mystics portray. There is only a multiplicity of trajectories with their own times, some cyclical or very short-term, others astronomical. It is therefore certain that we are mortal and that our planet is not eternal either, nor is our sun, nor even the entire universe, which is doomed to disappear (before its rebound?). However, it is very difficult for us to imagine the billions of years that were necessary for life to become so complex.
The end of humanity, which is measured in millions or thousands of years at most, affects us much more, but enlightened individuals are not afraid to announce that it will happen tomorrow or almost tomorrow. It is true that we expect the worst, but this is still an exaggeration of predicted disasters that are already dramatic enough without going as far as the disappearance of the species, i.e., of all human beings! It is essential to keep a sense of perspective on different time scales, and this is too often neglected.
Many trends are quietly emerging, more or less unnoticed. Others, such as increasing precariousness and the importance of human development in a digitalized economy, are significant enough to be taken seriously by the media, but the pace of adaptation to post-industrial production remains uncertain, and is undoubtedly faster than we think. We have seen how crises, whether economic or epidemic, accelerate change. It is also difficult to accurately assess the timeframes for demographic and energy transitions, CO2 capture and urbanization, which may be more or less lengthy, even though these are major trends that are already well underway, as is the digital (cognitive) revolution, which will undoubtedly accelerate for decades to come but is impossible to predict with any precision (discoveries and innovations are by definition surprising; we cannot know before we know).
Technological evolution is cumulative, with unexpected leaps forward that never go backwards. This is not the case with processes such as globalization, which is being imposed materially by the market, networks, and climate change, but is provoking an unwelcome final surge of nationalism, a rejection of effective change and of the local, which idealizes relatively recent nations whose history is not so glorious. How long will this authoritarian and xenophobic regression last, which could span more than a decade and be prolonged by serious unrest, disrupting the ecological transition at its most crucial moment? The human, political, and military factors are the most unpredictable and frightening, with well-intentioned voluntarism that claims to resist history but, as always, only adds to the disaster in the name of a fantasized Good. Feminist and anti-racist trends are now gaining momentum, but they are not immune to backlash (surprisingly, Emmanuel Todd sees a global decline in women's rights, which seem to be advancing almost everywhere). These regressions are undoubtedly temporary, but for how long? In the long run, everything always works out, but by then we're already dead and other problems arise...
In any case, we can see that there is no single future, as if the future already existed, a simple extension of our present, but that there are all kinds of developments that can be disrupted by new pandemics, natural or even cosmic disasters, etc. We do not know whether the current pandemic will end next year or start again with renewed vigor, wave after wave. In any case, the simple fact that there is no absolute time, no unified flow of time, discourages any projection into the future and what we might have believed to be “our future,” transforming us instead. Prospective thinking is therefore impossible, even though we must preserve our future and invest without delay in long-term strategies despite this context of imperfect information. The fact that the future does not exist does not prevent us from being responsible for the world, not only for our fellow human beings (or our families), and from confronting its destructive entropic tendencies one by one, according to their different temporalities and not according to a unified global project.
We must realize that this is not an exceptional or temporary situation, but rather the foundation of our existence in the world and of life itself. Much of chance (automaton) results from the accidental encounter of independent causal series, and it is this unpredictability of the future that underlies our perception of time, our lived experience, and the very experience of existence in its contingency, of a life whose end we cannot foresee, real time that exists only insofar as it eludes us. It is indeed the uncertainty of the future that constitutes our existence as such, as a long learning process, this need for information on the part of consciousness in order to overcome the ever-threatening entropy.
