Kahle smiles, shrugs, and looks for some notebooks in Brand's closet. To be sure, Brand believes that there is a time and a place for sprinting. But we've all been going all out for almost a decade now, he says, and the strain of going so fast for so long is beginning to show. If you start thinking 20 years ahead, schools suddenly become really important to you, because that's where your workforce will come from 20 years from now. The simple truth is that investment in different time frames gets rewarded in different ways.
Brand pauses for a moment, deliberately, to let that idea sink in.
That would only set us back about eight years. But if the biosphere crashes . . . You see the point. At that point, our civilization will come to resemble a creature with one oversize limb, designed for speed, and one atrophic stump, formerly used for practicing patience. It's not a pretty picture.