The Retrofuture series is all about deep time, and expanding our perceptions of what is past, what is current, and what is the future.

A common criticism I get is that these maps are misleading, that these sea level rise scenarios will never happen in our lifetimes. This is something I always try to make clear…these are maps of the far future.

But so what? The lives of the descendants of our children will be just as valuable as our own. Temporal myopia is a big part of the problems we’ve created for ourselves–we don’t understand the log-term effects of our choices. As a society, we can barely see past the next five years, let alone the next decade, or into the next century. If we think about time more deeply, maybe out to the seventh generation, we can more clearly understand the consequences of the actions we take every day.

Looking at these maps of the past, we can see the massive changes humans have made over the decades or centuries. Adding the sea level rise brings the future…a world that may exist seven generations from now. We are in the middle, between the known and the possible.