Deep Time

Deep Time

Author: Henry Gee

Publisher: HarperCollins UK

Published: 2008-06

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 000729154X

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This work introduces a revolution in how we look at the history of life, and humanity's place within it. Cladistics overturns the traditional linear theories of evolution and shows the possibility of creatures far wilder than human imagination.


Deep Time of the Media

Deep Time of the Media

Author: Siegfried Zielinski

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2008-02-15

Total Pages: 391

ISBN-13: 026274032X

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A quest to find something new by excavating the "deep time" of media's development—not by simply looking at new media's historic forerunners, but by connecting models, machines, technologies, and accidents that have until now remained separated. Deep Time of the Media takes us on an archaeological quest into the hidden layers of media development—dynamic moments of intense activity in media design and construction that have been largely ignored in the historical-media archaeological record. Siegfried Zielinski argues that the history of the media does not proceed predictably from primitive tools to complex machinery; in Deep Time of the Media, he illuminates turning points of media history—fractures in the predictable—that help us see the new in the old. Drawing on original source materials, Zielinski explores the technology of devices for hearing and seeing through two thousand years of cultural and technological history. He discovers the contributions of "dreamers and modelers" of media worlds, from the ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles and natural philosophers of the Renaissance and Baroque periods to Russian avant-gardists of the early twentieth century. "Media are spaces of action for constructed attempts to connect what is separated," Zielinski writes. He describes models and machines that make this connection: including a theater of mirrors in sixteenth-century Naples, an automaton for musical composition created by the seventeenth-century Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, and the eighteenth-century electrical tele-writing machine of Joseph Mazzolari, among others. Uncovering these moments in the media-archaeological record, Zielinski says, brings us into a new relationship with present-day moments; these discoveries in the "deep time" media history shed light on today's media landscape and may help us map our expedition to the media future.


Deep Time Reckoning

Deep Time Reckoning

Author: Vincent Ialenti

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2020-09-22

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 0262539268

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A guide to long-term thinking: how to envision the far future of Earth. We live on a planet careening toward environmental collapse that will be largely brought about by our own actions. And yet we struggle to grasp the scale of the crisis, barely able to imagine the effects of climate change just ten years from now, let alone the multi-millennial timescales of Earth's past and future life span. In this book, Vincent Ialenti offers a guide for envisioning the planet's far future—to become, as he terms it, more skilled deep time reckoners. The challenge, he says, is to learn to inhabit a longer now. Ialenti takes on two overlapping crises: the Anthropocene, our current moment of human-caused environmental transformation; and the deflation of expertise—today's popular mockery and institutional erosion of expert authority. The second crisis, he argues, is worsening the effects of the first. Hearing out scientific experts who study a wider time span than a Facebook timeline is key to tackling our planet's emergency. Astrophysicists, geologists, historians, evolutionary biologists, climatologists, archaeologists, and others can teach us the art of long-termism. For a case study in long-term thinking, Ialenti turns to Finland's nuclear waste repository “Safety Case” experts. These scientists forecast far future glaciations, climate changes, earthquakes, and more, over the coming tens of thousands—or even hundreds of thousands or millions—of years. They are not pop culture “futurists” but data-driven, disciplined technical experts, using the power of patterns to construct detailed scenarios and quantitative models of the far future. This is the kind of time literacy we need if we are to survive the Anthropocene.


Scenes from Deep Time

Scenes from Deep Time

Author: Martin J. S. Rudwick

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1995-11-08

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 022614903X

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How did the earth look in prehistoric times? Scientists and artists collaborated during the half-century prior to the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species to produce the first images of dinosaurs and the world they inhabited. Their interpretations, informed by recent fossil discoveries, were the first efforts to represent the prehistoric world based on sources other than the Bible. Martin J. S. Rudwick presents more than a hundred rare illustrations from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to explore the implications of reconstructing a past no one has ever seen.


In Search of Deep Time

In Search of Deep Time

Author: Henry Gee

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780801487132

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Cladistics--the science of comparison--is transforming the way paleontologists view evolution. In Search of Deep Time strips away conventional assumptions about the evolution of life to reveal a world that may be far stranger and more humbling than had been previously imagined. The concept of deep time was first used by John McPhee to describe intervals of time incomprehensibly greater than our daily experience. Henry Gee explains the rise of cladistics as the best technique for making sense of the organic changes that unfold within deep time.


Deep Time

Deep Time

Author: Gregory Benford

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2000-11-21

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 0380793466

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Combining the logical rigor with the lyrical finesse of a novelist, award-winning author Gregory Benford explores these and other fascinating questions in this provocative analysis of humanity's attempts to make its culture immortal. In "Deep Time" he confronts our growing influence on events hundreds of thousands of years into the future and explores the possible "messeges" we may transmit to our distant descendants in the language of the planet itself, from nuclear waste to global warming to the extinction of species. As we begin our incredible journey down the path of eternity, Gregory Benford masterfully calls forth some of the intriguing, astounding, undreamed-of futures which may await us in deep time.


An Anthropology of Deep Time

An Anthropology of Deep Time

Author: Richard D. G. Irvine

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-05-28

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 1108869955

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In the face of debates about the Anthropocene - a geological epoch of our own making - and contemporary concerns about ecological crisis and the Sixth Mass Extinction, it is more important than ever to locate the timeframe of human activity within the deep time of planetary history. This path-breaking book is a timely critical review of the anthropology of time, exploring our human relationship with the timescale of geological formation. Richard D. G. Irvine shows how the time-horizons of social life are a matter of crucial concern, and lays bare the ways in which human activity becomes severed from the long-term geological and ecological rhythms on which it depends.


Time Machines

Time Machines

Author: Peter D. Ward

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 1461216729

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What is the past? It is a time as well as a place. Acclaimed author Peter D. Ward describes the tools that contemporary scientists use to uncover facts about the past - terrain, climate, and the life forms that once inhabited this planet. Time Machines presents fascinating profiles of the deep past and the scientists who are making it come alive. "...for the general reader, Time Machines may be the most interesting book yet by the University of Washington prof..." -SEATTLE WEEKLY "For anyone interested in how and why as well as the what of paleontology, Time Machines is a must read."-AMERICAN SCIENTIST


Ages in Chaos

Ages in Chaos

Author: Stephen Baxter

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2004-11

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 9780765312389

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In the lusty and turbulent world of Enlightenment Scotland, he set out to prove it.".