I’m talking with Andy King, from the soon-to-be-opened Museum of Bristol, this Saturday at the Arnolfini. We’re going to be “In Conversation” as part of their Futurology programme, and I think it should be really interesting. I hope so, anyway, as it’s a public event.

I mailed Andy with some thoughts about what we could talk about, and I’m going to put them here as well, in case we don’t get round to them: I think some of them are things I’d like to follow up.

So, I’ve been thinking about what history and futures studies have in common, and what makes them different, and it seems to me that in each case there’s a kind of common-sense assumption about the discipline (if that’s not too grand a word for futures studies) and the way it works that might not be how it seems to those who try and practise it.

For example, a common-sense view of history might be: things actually happened a certain way in the past, and the historian’s job is to find out what that was as accurately as possible. But actually, my sense is that historians are very finely attuned to the idea that there as many pasts as there are historians, and each age’s view of what happened before it says as much about the dominant ideas of the time as it says about previous events.

Similarly, a common-sense view of the practice of looking at the future might hold that things will turn out a certain way and no other, and that if we know enough about present circumstances we can say confidently what that might be. But actually, most respectable futures practitioners would say that dominant ideas about the what the future might be say more about the attitudes and assumptions of the age in which they emerged than about the way things might be in the future, and that it’s more useful to consider a range of possible alternative futures.

So there’s something both have in common, perhaps – trying to counter dominant popular ideas about what each discipline is for – and a difference – futures studies might focus more on examining alternatives.

Or perhaps another talking point could be around the way time is represented in each. I don’t know very much about how historians discuss the representation of time, but from the perspective of someone trying to talk usefully about the future it’s been fascinating to see the ways different models of how time works shape conversations about the future (sometimes ‘the future’ is waiting for us, presumably having started at the other end of time’s arrow and travelled backwards to meet us; at others, it never arrives, being perpetually deferred to be invoked as a call to action in the present).

Ethics might be another interesting area of discussion: how far ought we, as people who talk about people who for various reasons are not with us at the present moment, whether because they’re dead or not yet born, to extend the respect we show living people to people of the past or the future? If rights to privacy, respect, understanding and so on are universal, shouldn’t they be extended through time? But is there a difference in the degree to which they’re entitled to such rights between people who have lived and people have yet to live?

Another useful area to think about might be to consider what each discipline offers to society: what use is it to talk about the past or the future? Are there different arguments for each, or are there general arguments to do with enlarging our understanding of the way in which people and societies work that support both?

We could move from that into thinking about the ways each act as a force of authority within society: the weight carried by ‘tradition’, the effect of ‘government forecasts’, the self-fulfilling prophecies of science-fiction and the ways historical dramas rewrite and refine national identities.

There’s maybe something to be said about the balance between detail and timescale, the ways in which it’s harder perhaps to be detailed the further one moves from the present (until you get far enough away to say what you like). Or a discussion about the way each generation thinks it’s the first to have ever lived in the present (those beforehand must have known they lived in history, and the ones after us must surely know that they live in the future). Or maybe just a recognition that both of them are attempts to answer questions that lie at the heart of trying to understand our place in the world: asking “what happened? What will happen?” is a fundamentally human thing to do.

Let me know how appealing any of these conversations are, or what alternatives we could consider. We could do worse, I suppose, by just telling each other what we do all day. I’d love to know more about your
work.

So there we are – that’s what we’ll talking about, I hope, for a couple of hours on Saturday afternoon. Come along!

It’s often assumed that a time-traveller would be uniquely placed to profit from their knowledge of events, things that to them were historical but to their new contemporaries would be yet to occur, investing in little-known technologies that were destined for greatness, or remaining aloof from ill-fated fashions. But what about the other qualities one needs to do well? What about character, or luck?

A man sits at a corner table in the company of nothing but his thoughts and a third gin: his downcast eyes are looking beyond the tabletop and his lips twitch as he rehearses the choices that led him to his present position. Arriving in what was to him then history, he found himself more informed than his peers on almost every area of human endeavour: paralysed by the choices available to him, he invested his efforts in a reckless and haphazard manner, investing money in this new technology, travelling to that soon-to-be-pivotal region of the world, advising influential individuals to take advantage of the other recent development. Spreading his resources so broadly prevented him nurturing any one of his enterprises as they deserved, and soon he became aware of his reputation as a dilletante and shyster, a diverting accquaintance with an uncanny knack of guessing how things might fall out, but not one you would wish to have as a partner. Now you see him desparate and confused, at a loss to explain how he has squandered the best possible advantage a man might want in the world.

(It doesn’t end badly for our friend, by the way: he discovers that relinquishing the idea that he has a special advantage allows him to behave in a calmer and more trustworthy way, and by the end of his life he sometimes smiles to think that the distinction he is most proud of is no longer his time-traveller status but his champion carrot cake).

Knowing things that other people don’t yet is all very well, but it wouldn’t do on its own: you’d still need something like character to succeed, and that’s timeless.

I’ve been thinking a lot about time, recently. More specifically, about how we perceive it, and relate to it, and talk about it, and I’ve been wondering if we wouldn’t benefit from having more ways of making it visible. I don’t mean just ways of representing it passing: clocks are good at that, and there are plenty of ways the passage of time reveals itself that are transparent. Rather, I’ve been thinking about how to make the implicit passage of time explicit, to break something that seems temporally static into pieces that make it clear to us that time was passing when it happened, whether that stasis in time appears to us because something is instantaneous or because it seems to persist as part of our surroundings, the context in which temporally more active things happen.

From one of our meeting rooms you can see some trees standing in the flagstones outside the old IMAX building. The trees are young, with a slim trunk and a clear head of leaves on top, like a child’s drawing: the leaves are large and well defined, and if the sun shines brightly enough the trees cast clear shadows. I was struck, recently, by the indissoluble link between the tree and the shadow, and thought how satisfying it would be to be hold the shadow in place as the sun moved slowly round, breaking that link. As the shadows of the other trees crept across the flagstones, the discrepancy between them and the one shackled in place would become more visible: the angle between them would tell you how long it had been held in place.

Not literally possible, of course, and probably for the best. But I thought perhaps there might be a way to mimic this, to fix the shadow on the ground somehow so that it would be clear that wherever the shadow might be at present, at some point in history it had been elsewhere. You can get hold of photosensitive paper fairly easily, I think, but I wanted something that would act faster than paper. At the moment, I’m thinking about evaporation. I want to find some kind of mixture that would stain the ground at about the same rate that it evaporates, so that all you have to do to fix a shadow would be to spill this fluid over it and wait. If the sun was particularly strong that day, the shadow would be sharp and defined: if it was cloudy, or windy perhaps, it would be blurry and indistinct. The shadow would tell you not just that time had passed but also something about the weather: from a shape on the ground you could read the history of the sky.

The thing I like most about this idea is that you could make pictures by fixing overlapping shadows, if you had an object with the right shape in the way of the sun. I’d love to hand out vials of this shadow fixing elixir with a picture and GPS co-ordinates: from the angle of the shadows in the picture you’d have to work out when to pour the liquid on the ground in order to reproduce it. Or perhaps you’d just have a set of times and a location, and when you stepped back from the shadows you’d fixed over the course of the morning, a message would reveal itself. Lots of games. But in all of them, you’d have to think about the relationship between time and the world, and when you see it and when you don’t, and that would be, I think, a good thing.