In May 2024, Horizon 2045 hosted a panel of Far Futures contributors, with each contributor talking about their respective stories, their approaches to imagining a world without nuclear weapons, and the value of bringing creativity and storytelling to our planet’s most pressing problems. One of those panelists was Peter Waring—writer, podcaster, early core member of the Horizon 2045 team, and currently a research consultant for the United Nations Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs. Peter’s story, and the thoughts he shared during the panel, hold in them a kind of wisdom for how to think more expansively—across time, across perspectives, and even across species—about what futures are possible. His (lightly edited) answers to the questions posed to him are below. Eager to watch the full event? Click here for the video.
There were some things I was reading when I wrote my story, and one was the fact that we’re living in this time of information overload. Some have even called it social acceleration, which is this widespread feeling that the tempo of life has increased and, with it, anxiety and stress and the sense of endless hecticness. It’s this general belief that there aren’t enough minutes in the day. I think I can speak on behalf of many of the people I know on this call who probably feel that way on a day to day basis. But what I think it leads to is a kind of narrowing of our sense of now, of our sense of the present. We feel that everything is moving swiftly but we also feel as though we’re stuck. We’re stuck with the social structures we have, we’re stuck with the prevailing rhythm of life, and frankly we’re stuck without there being any meaningful alternative. I think it’s probably not controversial to argue that as societies we’ve come to the end of something without fully defining what comes next. And so it feels like we’ve just doubled down on moving faster and faster toward nothing in particular.
Thomas Pynchon writes about this concept of “temporal bandwidth,” which he describes as “the width of your present, your now…. The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth, the more solid your persona. But the narrower your sense of now, the more tenuous you are.” And so what I think I was trying to get at in my artist statement was that you have to step outside of yourself, out of the present. For me it was a case of stepping outside of writing reports on nuclear programs. If you really want to properly understand the present you have to step outside of it. And I think that means remembering the past in its many different versions and imagining the future, which I think is equally various.
So much of our present-day future making, whether it’s in the hands of Elon Musk or others in Silicon Valley, it’s so ahistorical. It tends to make our current circumstances feel somehow inevitable and so all the things we have in the world are there because there was no hope of it being otherwise. But there’s nothing inevitable about the way things are, and there’s no sense in talking about path dependency without considering the paths not taken and without thinking deeply about the problems our predecessors were trying, however imperfectly, to solve. It’s a simple fact that nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence solved a problem for our predecessors, and I think that can be really hard for us to imagine now. I don’t know anything about what the year 2095 will look like. But what I can tell you with almost absolute certainty is that the people of that time will consider some of our efforts, even the best intentioned efforts, as deeply misguided if not deeply immoral. And that’s worth keeping in mind. It’s the act of engaging imaginatively with these others, both our predecessors and our ancestors, having a conversation with both, that I think is so necessary for escaping this age.
Another phrase that’s been used to describe our time is “frenetic standstill.” I think we need to take a breath and think about what we want and how we can make it happen. And so my story is about others, in fact it’s about a different species. It’s hard to talk about the story without giving any spoilers away, but it’s the existence of these others that helps shake loose the status quo and helps shake us loose. But really it’s just an allegory. The idea was to show that you don’t need to write science fiction to find “others.” I think there are others everywhere, all around us—other societies, other ways of seeing and knowing, other people from other times. I think all of them see the world differently and they can help us see the world differently. They’re all trying to speak to us. We just don’t seem to have the time to listen.
I think we need to “thicken” our approaches to problem-solving. And that means to some degree expanding our temporal bandwidth but probably also our spatial bandwidth, by looking at the geographies we come from and thinking both globally and locally. But there’s also the issue of intellectual bandwidth, and I think this is where fiction can help us see things a little bit differently and see things from other perspectives.
When it comes to stockpiles and data and the quantifiable, we’ve somehow come to believe that the things that count are the things you can most easily count, and that the only way to solve a problem is to find the right metric. But that only works for the kinds of linear problems that existed in the past. That’s not to say there aren’t still linear crises, but the polycrisis or the Anthropocene dictates that we need to find better, thicker approaches. And that means, I think, making things easier for decision-makers who want to be able to point to a number and say that number went up and that’s a success. But changing things takes longer; it’s harder and it’s harder to communicate it. So, for the funders listening: If we can make a toolkit for how to take a broader perspective on decision-making, that would be a good thing.
If you read dystopian novels, usually the destruction of the Earth happens in the space of an afternoon. That’s probably not how it might play out, but the work of building a better future is the work of generations. It’s kind of boring. It involves sitting behind a computer screen writing boring reports and hoping for the best. So perhaps that’s part of it. But perhaps we also have to find better ways of telling stories.
Read Peter Waring’s Far Futures story, “Inter-locution.”