ZONE 2

You have entered the Future Time Lab.

Here each moment fractures like a mirror into a thousand glass shards; here things spiral and crack at the speed of light and sound. Here acceleration and slowness are gods that cannot be overthrown.

You encounter a hooded man sitting hunched in the corner, counting carefully and listening for the passing of entire generations. He is The Architect. He binds both the instantaneous and the eternal in wicked geometries. He is the master of the primordial garden, the pyramidal ruin, and the cyber-beyond.

The Architect gives you the following clue below.

Read and choose your future wisely afterward.

Image: David Spriggs, Epoch (2018)

TIME LAB FRAGMENT

Humanity can trace its history back more than 45 thousand years. If we use one second as a baseline, 10 to the 11th seconds =3169 years: roughly speaking, the bulk of well-documented human history. And 10 to the 12th seconds = 31690 years, a terasecond: the outside edges of recorded human art/history – the Chauvet paintings are in this time period. We continue to discover and attempt to interpret these artifacts. But cosmological time spans billions of years: what if we decide to leave a marker, a monument for a civilization that might come millions of years after ours? What technologies might we need to develop to build such a ‘funeral pyre beacon’?

Example: Speculative architects are now thinking in cosmic and post-planetary scales.

Post_002: Cosmological Deep Time And Funeral Pyre Beacons by Edward Keller

Image: Mauricio Salazar, "Milky Way Over Uruguayan Lighthouse"

CHOOSE FUTURE

You have read the clue of the Future Time Lab.

The Architect has been scaling cliffs while you were reading. He opens his hands. In his left hand, he holds an hourglass. In his right hand, he holds the antique watch of a fallen king.

WHICH DO YOU CHOOSE?

HOURGLASS

WATCH