About Time - Chapter 4 - The future

Our foraging ancestors possessed an extensive store of ready, natural knowledge. Recognition of the seasons increased our understanding of the growth cycles of plants, when to plant their seeds and when to harvest them. This allowed us to cultivate crops on a large scale, which required us to stay close in order to take care of them. Slowly we exchanged our roaming lifestyle for a sedentary one, living in service of our crops. This ‘invention of agriculture’ forced us to look further into the future than we ever had to before.

00:51 - The more food we produced, the greater the amount of people our cities could sustain. But this made us increasingly dependent on successful harvests and more invested in the process of cultivating. Our experience of time was no longer confined to the present and the short term but was greatly stretched to anticipate future threats that could endanger our livelihood and to reflect on past experiences. We paid a high price for growing food on a massive scale, but it allowed our societies to grow larger This in turn would raise the challenge of managing their complexity, which yielded the invention of number systems and initiate the search for a tool to facilitate planning and preparation of works on the land on a larger time scale. .