Few have made more comprehensive creative use of these devices than Ruff, whose works have anticipated and riffed off key developments in photography over the past 40 years, from ubiquitous surveillance to face-swapping apps. In the 1980s, for example, he blew passport-style headshots up to colossal proportions that shockingly revealed every detail of his sitters’ features – detail that can now be captured by anyone with a high-resolution smartphone camera.

But it was those portraits that soured Ruff on conventional photography: he disliked the sense that he had staged the images to be “the view into Big Brother’s camera”, as he says at the opening of a retrospective of his works at London’s Whitechapel Gallery. So for his next project, Sterne, he set out to take “the most objective photograph possible”, procuring deep-field images of the night sky from the European Southern Observatory. Ruff, who says he struggled to choose between studying astronomy and art, cropped those images and created monochrome compositions that loom over the viewer with a kind of chilly grandeur.

The realisation that he lacked the equipment or skills to take such pictures himself liberated Ruff to make use of other archive and found images, ranging from internet porn to decontextualised newswire pictures. His reworks invite the viewer to reflect on the production and uses of such images, often taken for granted. Nonetheless, an artist reconfiguring astronomical images might raise hackles: aren’t they self-evidently beautiful already?

For a more recent series, ma.r.s., Ruff took images from the HiRISE instrument mounted on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the most powerful camera ever sent to another planet. haven’t been bashful about promoting the beauty of their images themselves, turning them into a and a coffee-table book. But for Ruff, “colour in space doesn’t exist, it’s nonsense”. The colours in the official HiRISE images don’t represent what human eyes would see; introducing colour to space-probe imagery has become a rather competitive hobby for online enthusiasts.

So Ruff added his own colours to the raw HiRISE images – sometimes conforming to what was known of the Martian landscape, sometimes according to his own whim. “There are no green sands on Mars,” he laughs: the features in many of his pictures aren’t what we would see even if we viewed them with our own eyes. The photographic prosthesis can take us only so far. “But aliens could have completely different access to the electromagnetic spectrum,” he says. “So perhaps I’ve also made images for aliens.”

runs at , London, until 21 January 2018

JOURNALISM has famously been described as “the first rough draft of history.” żìĂš¶ÌÊÓƔ‘s own brand of journalism – which is – is a bit different. We aim to provide a first rough draft of the future.

Over the past 60 years we have not just reported new discoveries and inventions in science and technology. We have also tried to explain why they matter and where they’re likely to lead. That’s not easy. There can be very fine lines between testable predictions, educated guesswork and flights of fancy.

Many early issues of The żìĂš¶ÌÊÓÆ” contain eerily prophetic stories about ideas and issues that would go on to shape the world – that rough draft of the future. We hope the same will be true of what we’re publishing today. But it is very much a rough draft: then, as now, attempting to predict the future in detail is a largely futile enterprise.

The internet, global warming, artificial intelligence and genetic engineering were all on our radar in 1956. But our ideas about how they might pan out bore little resemblance to how they have actually evolved, particularly when it comes to their social ramifications. Ubiquitous information has not created rationalist utopias, ecological catastrophes have not culled our population and we have neither super-human machines nor people, though we’re getting there.

Can we hope to do any better at predicting the future today? One way to proceed is to simply extrapolate: in other words, look at what’s happening now and assume that the trends you see will continue. This works well when you can expect a system to remain governed by the same principles. Celestial dynamics don’t vary much, so we can predict with confidence that Halley’s comet will return to our skies in 2061.

As systems get more complex, however, accurate prediction becomes more difficult. Long-term weather forecasting, for example, is fearsomely hard. When we think about social change, it becomes harder still. There are far more factors to take into account and they unfold in complex and interacting ways. Linear extrapolation invariably fails: it’s the kind of thinking that leads people to jokily ask “where’s my jetpack?”, a question borne of post-war trends in transport and the space race – none of them relevant today.

In some circles, extrapolation has given way to exponentialism – the belief not only that what is happening will keep happening, but that it will happen ever faster. Adherents of this view have elevated Moore’s law, which states that computer processors double in complexity every two years, to the status of a natural law governing all sorts of things.

Accept this and it makes for dizzying outcomes in surprisingly short order. You end up with a technological singularity, a point at which superintelligent machines usher in an age of runaway technological advance, with unfathomable consequences. This is perhaps the most transformative change conceivable in the next 60 years.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think that will happen any time soon, and nor do many AI researchers (see “The world in 2076: Machines outsmart us but we’re still on top“). Moore’s law is not a law of nature but a self-fulfilling prophecy that has held because people strived to make it hold. They are now beginning to struggle because the actual laws of nature have intervened. And while the current pace of AI research is stunning, I expect there will be some bumps in the road there, too.

So prediction and extrapolation are of limited use: fine up to a point if you need to place semiconductor orders, perhaps, but not so much if you want to work out how semiconductors are changing society.

Is it futile to think about the future, then? Not entirely. We’re bound to get most things wrong – although some futurologists have bucked the trend (see “StanisƂaw Lem: The man with the future inside him“). But perhaps we can get enough right to make a difference.

żìĂš¶ÌÊÓÆ” is an optimistic publication. We think the future can be better than today. But we are not Panglossian. We do not simply insist that we reside in the best of all possible worlds; we think we have to make it so. That’s what humanity has always striven to do. And we only succeed if we think about the future.

In that spirit, in this issue we’re indulging in some educated guesswork about what might happen over the next 60 years. We have chosen scenarios that look plausible today – which might mean they look as naive as those jetpacks tomorrow. Perhaps you should think of this as a guide to what the future will almost certainly not be like.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Welcome
 to the future”

IT IS forbidden by law to die of natural causes in Longyearbyen, the world’s northernmost town – because the rock-hard permafrost makes it impossible to bury you. Nor can you be born here, due to the peculiar legal status of the Svalbard archipelago, a thousand kilometres north of Norway.

Forty-two nations, including the unlikely Arctic powers of Afghanistan and Venezuela, have the right to settle and exploit its resources: from whales in the 18th century, to furs in the 19th and coal in the 20th. Now, with coal on its way out, Svalbard is presenting itself as a location for scientific research, ecotourism and the arts. As such it may find itself at the nexus of a new global reality.

“With the melting of the ice and thus new trade routes, Svalbard and places like it are really at the cutting edge of geopolitics,” says Katya GarcĂ­a-AntĂłn, who runs Norway’s Office for Contemporary Art. That’s why OCA and theÌęNorthern Norway Art MuseumÌęlast month brought artists and scientists there to discuss representations of the fast-changing global north.

It quickly became apparent that there are few simple narratives to be had. Early panels at Thinking at the Edge of the World focused on Arctic indigenes’ relationships with the land, and the value they place on it – attitudes that might be instructive when it comes to global stewardship of resources.

But Svalbard has no indigenous people, and its historic resources are increasingly worthless. So how do you represent the value – be it economic, cultural or ecological – of a place that belongs to everyone and no one, that’s both untamed wilderness and Anthropocenic canary, whose fate is both utterly solitary and entirely global?

Delightful horror

Part of the problem is that our impressions of such places don’t correspond with current realities. The “frozen wastes” of popular imagination don’t cut it today. Another part is that what we find pleasing isn’t always what’s wise: a neat lawn is an ecological horror.

Lisa Phillips, director of New York’s New Museum, which focuses on the dynamics of the 21st century, suggested that our aesthetic values might be out of date, failing to reflect today’s ethics. What might a more appropriate aesthetics be like?

In 1688, literary critic John Dennis took a Grand Tour of Europe, as was de rigueur for gentlemen of his station. During his passage of the Alps, he wrote that he experienced “a delightful Horrour, a terrible Joy and at the same time that I was infinitely pleased, I trembled”. A term used in transcendent literature seemed appropriate: such experiences were “sublime”.

The sublime caught on, with other adventurers extolling the terrible beauty of the wilderness. In 1757, the philosopher Edmund Burke defined it as an aesthetic category distinct from beauty, and it became a potent concept in 19th-century Romantic literature and art, in part as a reaction to early industrialisation.

Today’s visitors to Svalbard, Europe’s largest wilderness, might also be in search of the sublime, knowingly or otherwise. But the experience is not the same as it was for earlier adventurers. Gaze at the Arctic ice, and you become uneasily aware that it is vanishing, even if you can’t see that directly – and that your own presence is contributing to its thaw.

Longyearbyen’s residents attest to that thaw: the port opened months earlier than usual this year; last summer was sweltering; a polar bear had to be rescued from the bay’s thinning ice. “The landscape has changed dramatically over the 30 years I’ve been here,” says Kim HolmĂ©n, international director of the Norwegian Polar Institute.

Many attempts to capture this have translated climate models into graphical or sculptural forms. The effects can be stimulating to the eye, but less often to the mind. Straight depictions of its effects can be misleading, hence the furore over all those photos of gaunt polar bears: are they tragic victims or unlucky individuals? The sentimental imagery beloved of tree-huggers is unhelpful, too.

Climate change – its impact, complexity and persistence – is hard for human brains to parse. In his 2013 book Hyperobjects, the philosopher Timothy Morton described how “things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans” defy our intuition. Global warming is one such hyperobject: a panel about the ocean hinted at others.

Hidden depths

Anchorage Museum director Julie Decker talked in Svalbard about , a 2014 show based on how plastic pollutants travel the seas. “Alaska has a reputation as a pristine wilderness,” she said, “but we send trash around the world and receive the trash of the world on our shores.” It is also found, like handfuls of candy, in the entrails of animals and birds.

Presenting this in a way that doesn’t simply induce despair is tough. Part of the problem is that we are used to durability being of a piece with artisanry and scarcity. Our aesthetics are off: we don’t readily grasp that cheap, mass-produced junk will circle the globe and last almost forever.

“Part of the problem is that we can’t conceive that our junk will circle the globe and last almost forever“

Camilla Svensen, a marine biologist from the University of TrØmso in Norway, described the challenges of understanding food webs based on plankton, which are more abundant in the oceans than insects are on land. “The complexity is so huge: it’s like opening doors and doors to ever more universes,” she said. Hardly anyone has personal experience of this vast marine biomass, for all that we are its beneficiaries. Our efforts to manage the land, of which we at least have somatic knowledge, are fraught enough – how are we to manage the oceans, or for that matter the atmosphere or the ice? A return to the sublime in art might help us process them – but what does the 21st century version look like?

VĂ©rĂ©na Paravel, maker of 2012 documentary Leviathan, fixed cameras to a North Atlantic fishing trawler, and to its crew. “We were trying to diminish the men, or at least to portray them in a way that subsumed them in something larger,” she said, to achieve a “self-portrait of the sea”. The result is a visceral, occasionally poetic and frequently alienating film that captures both the hostile majesty of the seas and our impact on it. As HolmĂ©n said: “The ocean is very big, but we are also very big.”

The film’s imagery is at once appalling and beautiful: fish guts splatter, scavenging gulls wheel in the boat’s wake, torrents of scarlet blood and tumbling starfish are discarded as by-catch. Delightful horror and terrible joy, indeed.

The backup plan

Back in Svalbard, a tiny portion of the abandoned coal mines in the mountains around Longyearbyen has been converted into the Global Seed Vault, a geometric concrete wedge driven into the permafrost. It holds 864,309 seeds as a “backup” against agricultural doomsday. Stand next to it, and you can hear the regular whooshing of air intakes, like the breathing of some gigantic, slumbering beast.

Last winter, the vault saw its first withdrawal: barley, wheat and grasses to replenish a gene bank damaged in the Syrian civil war. That was much earlier than expected: the vault is designed to last centuries, the permafrost protecting its cargo even if the power goes out, the climate heats up and the vault stops breathing.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that it was an artificial disaster, not a natural calamity, that prompted the move. With climate change continuing to surprise, in mostly unpleasant ways, the permafrost’s guarantee no longer seems so rock solid. Perhaps one day there will be bodies buried in it, as a new Svalbard emerges from the ice.

In an age where old certainties are collapsing, we need to find values and aesthetics more fitting for the times – or to renew old ones. Perhaps it’s time the sublime made a comeback. But if it does, it will have to include not just the horrors and joys of nature – but of humanity too.

This article appeared in print under the headline “The terrifying faceof a new sublime”