20 THE HUT
OF KNOWLEDGE:
TOMORROW
STARTS TODAY

• How do we want to proceed? Understanding how we want to live, with the world and one another.

If our museum has “Tomorrow” in its name and each stage of its journey is associated with an aspect of time (Always, Yesterday, Today…), why should it culminate precisely in “Us”? The meeting between the first person plural and the future is imminent. What good – or bad – things does it portend?

We are all familiar with the concept of a time machine. From H. G. Wells’ novel to science fiction movies, we have become used to observing, fascinated, as characters are launched straight to a future 1,000, 5,000 or 1 million years from now. They are somehow catapulted from the present to an extemporaneous, out-of-time now. In these representations, the “ship” in which we undertake this voyage is generally destined to go along this straight line, to which, at some point, the future has been arbitrarily fixed.

Other less obvious representations explore alternatives such as lateral deviation options. Instead of following a straight line, our hero suddenly appears ahead and – in another surprise – he can make the return journey, going back in time, leaving a now-now for a now-past now. All these visions have features in common, however. In them, time is generally seen as a figure that unfolds in the plane of space. Furthermore, our adventurer is always an individual hero. This should not be of any surprise to us: humanity obviously would not fit into these futuristic vehicles.

Apart from a naive idea, activated by a greater or lesser number of levers and driven by more or less disheveled scientists, what mobilizes our imagination about these fantasies is a fascinating possibility. This possibility was expanded and turned inside out by science as of the 20th century, as we now conceive of time in a very different way. The Theory of Relativity, for example, talks to us about loops in time, in which we march ever forward, do not make any deviations, and yet, paradoxically, arrive back at our starting point.

In a more complex way than the one adopted by a mechanical clock, what is being worked on here is the dimension of tomorrow, a present not yet lived, a purely conjectural present: a time that only exists in the imagination.

Just over two centuries ago, an extraordinary device started to take charge of our lives: the mechanical clock. To some extent, it is also a time machine, as it leads us to experience a certain kind of temporality. It began to tell us, every moment, in which place on the road of time we find ourselves. At a given instant we are at the point that marks midday; later we will be at the point that marks two o’clock – something like 2 km ahead, just as previously we were 2 km behind.

However, a certain quality is lacking from this temporality. A quality we find, for example, in a carved ivory object, discovered by archeologists in the French countryside and produced 30,000 years ago. What first attracts our attention in that artifact is its apparent uselessness. It cannot be used to hit, drill or cut – none of those functions we would deem essential to an inhabitant of the Pleistocene. Nevertheless, regular marks are carefully and laboriously inscribed in its surface. Why was such a deliberate action taken? What is the function of these marks? Scholars finally realized that it was a representation of the Moon’s cycles. On the back there are elementary drawings: ripples, the outline of a fish and the shape of a seal. On this extraordinary object, regularities in time – the Moon’s cycles and the migrations of schools of fish – are recorded and associated through spatial regularities. In other words, it is an artifact that converts time into space. Through it, the artisan preserves and shares with the community the knowledge accumulated from countless observations of the phases of the Moon, the tides, the season when salmon go up rivers, attracting seals behind them. In a more complex way than the one adopted by a mechanical clock, what is being worked on here is the idea of a present not yet lived, a purely conjectural present: a variety of possible futures, which only exist in the imagination. The dimension of tomorrow.

Many types of “tomorrows” were until recently outside our field of perception, given that our senses can only perceive objects of medium dimensions. Very small or brief things – or, conversely, very vast or long-lasting things – were outside our horizons. We were therefore excluded from sensing both microscopic and super-structural dimensions; the ephemeral or very fast, and the perpetual or infinitely large. Until then, it is as if we were observing the world through a very narrow window, leaving outside our field of vision many of the modalities encompassed by the word “tomorrow.” For example, thanks to the resources of science, we now interact with extremely long-lasting objects, which until recently were ignored by us.

We therefore live in a singular moment, unprecedented in all our history. As the French poet and essayist Paul Valéry said in another context – the shock caused by the carnage of the First World War – “the future is not what it used to be.” In reality, this phrase makes even more sense for us, the first generation to live with the new objects that have been included within the frontiers of what we consider the world: objects of vast dimensions, like global warming. This is a phenomenon that cannot be grasped by the senses. Nevertheless, our sensors, distributed on satellites, are capable of telling us that a planetary-scale process is under way. The same can be said of the vision of Russian astronaut Yuri Gagarin, who shared with us his unprecedented view of Earth as observed from space.

Armed with this new knowledge, we return our eyes to the past and we realize that long-term events, of geological nature, have had historic consequences, such as the volcanic eruption and resulting tsunami that destroyed the magnificent Cretan civilization, inspiring the myth of Atlantis. Geology acted on history: the excessive has therefore always acted, in the form of the unexpected, the unforeseen, the accidental.

Now, however, we are faced with something very different: it is history that is becoming geology. By detonating the first nuclear bomb and those that followed it until the 1970s, our species produced a deposit of radioactive materials around Earth that is entirely artificial, and it will remain there for many thousands of years. In other words, no natural process would be capable of laying down this deposit. A human gesture, an artifact produced by us, has had a global effect. Therefore, the human being has made geology. Human time, so short, has been capable of achieving these vast durations of nearly cosmic character.

Entities such as these radioactive deposits, global warming or the vision of Earth as an integrated system are objects of great duration, which we will have to live with going forward. This is our time. This is the age of humans, the Anthropocene. We will no longer live like our ancestors, but in a very different world, which we ourselves will construct.

The reflection proposed by our museum is aimed at demonstrating that we are an integral part of the Universe and that Earth is a complex system, whose equilibrium is fundamental for our survival. At this moment we are confronted with a fact indicating a new era: our actions are having an unprecedented impact on Earth. Moreover, we now already perceive various trends in the development of our species and its relationship with the planet, pointing to different possibilities and futures. Faced with this crossroads before us, we will have to make choices.

In the last stage of our journey, the emphasis is not on information, but values. They are associated with the way we want to live: interacting sustainably with the world and with other people. And it is in this space that we find one of the museum’s few physical objects, a churinga: an Australian indigenous people’s artifact designed to house the soul of a member of the community after their death. The soul remains there until it can reincarnate in a child’s body. In this way, it symbolically promotes a connection between past and future generations. It represents the collective spirit, a sense of belonging to a group and its purpose to move on. To us, belonging is no longer restricted to a small village, but it encompasses the whole planet and all of humanity, sealing a commitment to the sustainability of life and peaceful interaction among human beings. The churinga represents the knowledge we acquire and pass on. It is up to us to decide what to do with this knowledge.

The churinga represents the knowledge we acquire and pass on. It is up to us to decide what to do with this knowledge.

Not by chance, this object is placed in a ritualistic space, in an environment that invites contemplation. As the stage for this reflection, we chose an environment inspired by a hut, a home of indigenous people’s knowledge, a structure erected in the material language of wood, bringing together the members of a given community. The elders tell the youngsters myths and legends about their people’s creation and formation, promoting continuity between past and future. Earth is our village and the world is our community. In this space, we present two concepts: the idea that dawn is breaking somewhere, i.e. in some place, now is tomorrow; and the idea that tomorrow is always the same, and yet always different.

The last moment in our journey through the museum should correspond to the first steps of visitors, who are ready to return to their everyday life. Facing the familiar landscape of Guanabara Bay, they may embrace another vision of our species and their role in constructing a new protagonist of this future, a planetary community, willing to make choices able to change reality. This new subject is US, and our time is now.