Project Vision 21

Recently, Spanish philosopher Daniel Innerarity proposed (and he is right) that the new social challenge consists of solving the dilemma interacting with those people who "live in the same space, but with different time horizons." Although we rarely think about it, let alone admit it, it is true that sharing a space does not mean sharing the same time.
The philosophical and practical consequences of this situation (I insist, whether we are aware of it or not) are immense. In the first place, we can no longer accept it as obvious or inevitable that the person who is in front of us (in the same physical space) shares the same time, that is, the same time horizon.

Second, that lack of simultaneity in temporal experience opens the possibility not only of multiple futures and not just one, but also of multiple futures emerging and occurring simultaneously (although simultaneity seems to be an almost arbitrary measure that depends on the observer and of the observer's consciousness).
Saying that each of us lives, so to speak, within their own time bubble sounds ridiculous and absurd, like a waste of time, like a “philosophical” exercise in the derogatory sense of the word. But it's not like that.

Consider, for example, that young children have a very different time horizon from their parents. In fact, many children have a hard time understanding that their parents were once children, too. And the time horizon of a historian, an archaeologist, a paleontologist, or an astronomer is much longer than that of a person without those specializations.

Only a little more than two centuries ago, the German poet and thinker Johann von Goethe said that, in order not to wander through life, it was necessary to know about 3,000 years of history, because 200 years ago it was considered that that was the time horizon of human civilization. Since then, that horizon has expanded exponentially.

These examples show that we do not all share the same temporal experience, a disparity that increases (I think) in the case of the future, a time horizon many people simply prefer not to even think about.

For this reason, Innerarity is right to suggest that, from now on, it will be increasingly difficult to live with those with whom we share the same space, but not the same time. And in the "new" time, our understanding of time and the universe is changing rapidly.

For example, recent experiments at the Fermilab particle accelerator (Illinois) shows that, in addition to the four fundamental forces of the universe (gravity, electromagnetism, strong nuclear force and weak nuclear force) there would be a fifth fundamental force, still unknown. (Consciousness? Just asking.) And those forces vary in different places in the universe.

In this context, the invitation to prepare ourselves to interact with people who literally live in a different time than ours (different, neither better nor worse) does not seem far-fetched. In fact, it might be the most important task we should be focusing on.