Project Vision 21

In the frenzied, fast-paced rhythm of today’s news cycle—what Walter Ong once described as “pumping data at high speed through information pipelines”—stories overlap and pile up without offering direction or purpose, and often without any meaningful context beyond novelty or entertainment. But there are exceptions.
 

Recently, for instance, a report emerged based on an article in the journal The Astrophysical Journal Letters, revealing that the planet K2-18b—located 124 light-years from Earth—might be a habitable water-covered world. According to researchers from the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge, it could host liquid water across its surface.
 

More specifically, the scientists detected “the most promising signs yet of a possible biosignature” on that exoplanet. In plain terms, life—likely microbial—might exist or might once have existed on K2-18b.
 

Almost simultaneously, another headline reported that experts from Google’s DeepMind division declared that artificial intelligence has now grown “beyond human knowledge.” In their presentation, Welcome to the Era of Experience, researchers David Silver and Richard Sutton argued that AI will develop “incredible new capabilities” once it begins learning through experiences and interactions.
 

Meanwhile, yet another report detailed how two scientists from the University of California, San Diego, identified the “rules” the brain uses to form memories. The most significant rule? The brain adapts these rules to determine how neurons communicate based on what is being learned.
 

According to researchers William Wright and Takaki Komiyama, the brain’s billions of neurons simultaneously apply several different sets of learning rules. This allows the brain to encode new information “with greater precision.” This, they say, is how memory is formed.
 

Taken together, these three stories (and others like them) make it clear that humanity is now measuring times and distances—both natural and artificial—that are wildly disproportionate to our capacity for understanding. They render our human existence small, fleeting, and nearly irrelevant.
 

These ideas resonate with the work of contemporary philosopher Benjamin Cain, who explores the notion of deep time—a scale of time so vast it exceeds human comprehension yet constantly surrounds us like an impersonal abyss.
 

Similarly, philosopher Tim Morton discusses the existence of hyperobjects—entities so massive in temporal and spatial dimensions that they escape the scale of human cognition. They cannot be fully visualized, located, or sensed through ordinary means or even our most advanced technologies.
 

And in a 2015 paper, Greek researchers Helen Lazaratou and Dimitris Anagnostopoulos introduced the idea of transgenerational objects—psychological constructs unconsciously passed from one generation to the next, shaping the thoughts, behaviors, and emotions of multiple generations.
 

If Deep Time reveals the sacred vastness of our universe, Hyperobjects reveal the unseen mesh we’re embedded in, and Transgenerational Objects reveal the hidden stories we carry, then we are, indeed, on the edge of consciously seeing deeper and wider.
 

So, we are left with a profound question: Will we learn to live—and co-live—within this new spacetime entanglement and psychohistorical depth? Or will we stubbornly cling to a separate, autonomous “self”