When you’re on the clock, you’re always running out of time. The relentless countdown is making us and the planet sick. But clock time isn’t the only kind. There are older, deeper rhythms of natural time. We just forgot how to listen.More
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Deep Time
A Special Series in Partnership with the Center for Humans and Nature
Time rules our lives. We wake, eat, work, and sleep on the clock. Our days unfold in a standardized symphony of alarm clocks, school buzzers, and meeting timers. Meanwhile, global positioning satellites measure time in millionths of seconds, and financial trades circle the planet at the speed of light. Time-keeping is among the greatest accomplishments of the human species – but somewhere along the way, we made a fundamental miscalculation: we began to mistake our clocks for time itself.
Deep Time is a new series all about the natural ecologies of time from To The Best Of Our Knowledge and the Center for Humans and Nature — with support from the Kalliopeia Foundation. In Deep Time, TTBOOK will explore biological time, geological time, cosmic time, ancestral time. We’ll imagine time as a spiral, a loop, and also as an eternal present – as we learn to live beyond the clock.
Deep Time
Episodes
Interviews from this series
Audio
Time may be a fundamental quality of the universe, but physicists still can't explain what time is. That hasn't stopped theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser from devoting much of his life to studying the origins of time and the formation of the cosmos.More
Articles
Marjolijn van Heemstra is the poet laureate of Amsterdam. As her anxiety about climate change and other problems ratcheted up, she found solace in the larger cosmos and became a "dark sky" activist.More
Audio
Physicist Carlo Rovelli travels to the core of a black hole, where the arrow of time reverses and a white hole is born. More
Audio
Artist Katie Paterson works with melting glaciers, fossilized insects and the dust from meteorites to help us expand our time horizons. Her art bridges cosmic and human timescales, revealing the beauty in vast temporal expanses.More
Audio
Philosopher and conceptual artist Jonathon Keats engineers monumental-scale clocks that run on “river time” or “arboreal time” to un-standardize our atomic time. He says we need to make time more pluralistic, to envision a kind of chrono-diversity.More
Audio
Acoustic ecologist and sound artist Alex Braidwood has recorded many dawn choruses, from first-light to full sunrise, in his Iowa backyard and all over the world. On his album, “Serotinous Repose,” he turns the dawn chorus into music.More
Audio
Dustin Mater is a Chickasaw artist who's fascinated by ancient rock art. He says these images resonate with stories he heard from tribal elders, which he uses as inspiration for his own art. More
Photo Gallery
Stephen Alvarez — a National Geographic photographer and founder of the Ancient Art Archive — has spent years documenting ancient rock art around the world. He takes Steve Paulson on a long hike in the Cumberland Plateau, where they find an "unnamed cave" with 2,000-year old engravings.More
Articles
Geologist Marcia Bjornerud has a profound understanding of Earth's deep history. The author of "Timefulness," she says geologic literacy would give us a much healthier sense of time. More
Audio
Clocks control us – but who controls clocks? David Rooney gives us a brief political history of clocks. And a look at their future.More
Articles
Lately it’s been feeling like time is speeding up. Whether it’s the news cycle, social media, the information economy or global warming, the pace of life is accelerating beyond what many of us can handle. Jenny Odell blames the clock. More
Audio
Do physicists think about End Times? Noted string theorist Brian Greene does. He looks into the far future - billions of years from now - and sees a very dark universe.More
Audio
Brian Greene is a physicist who specializes in string theory. Greene says that time appears to move in one direction only to complex organisms like people. At the atomic level, electrons don’t know one direction from another.More
What would you do if you had all the time in the world?
About To The Best Of Our Knowledge
”To the Best of Our Knowledge” is a Peabody award-winning national public radio show that explores big ideas and beautiful questions. Deep interviews with philosophers, writers, artists, scientists, historians, and others help listeners find new sources of meaning, purpose, and wonder in daily life. Whether it’s about bees, poetry, skin, or psychedelics, every episode is an intimate, sound-rich journey into open-minded, open-hearted conversations. Warm and engaging, TTBOOK helps listeners feel less alone and more connected – to our common humanity and to the world we share. Learn more about the show here.
About The Center for Humans and Nature
The Center for Humans and Nature is a 501c3 nonprofit organization, publisher, forum, and place to explore, connect, and nurture our understandings of and responsibilities to the natural world. They share ideas that foster curiosity, build community, and inspire action. Their work provides in-depth and diverse perspectives about what it means to be human in an interconnected world. To learn more about what they do, visit their website.