“What you have is a situation no modern human being is reasonably empowered to understand. I will try to sketch it for you briefly. Although something similar has been going on for some time, you have entered a domain of high novelty where the basic features of your evolutionary situation have become hyperbolized. The situation now is like nothing that has ever existed on your world.

You have cultural streams running at different ‘rates’ of relational and developmental ‘time’. Not to mention those of nature, in which you are blindly immersed. Imagine a multilayered river, each layer comprised of myriad streams, some moving very slowly (but momentously), and others moving very rapidly. These streams inform each other. But you are the one agent on Earth who can easily move, like a honeybee, between them. Gathering and concentrating their ‘developmental nectars’, so to speak.

This by itself is fascinating, but it gets stranger. Some of these streams have become so advanced that they are functionally existing in the future of others, and not by small degrees. By hundreds of years. So it is as if you have stream [a] which is moving and developing slowly (year ratio: 50:1) and is still in the approximate equivalent of perspective and action circa Earth : 1950 AD — right next to another that is developing rapidly (1:200) and is existing in the approximate equivalent of perspective and action that is, compared to a reasonable norm, 500 years ahead — circa 2513. Cultures that are hidebound are static-defensive. Cultures that are progressive are liquid-intelligent. These two cultures conflict, and the hidebound elements are the traditional sources of infrastructure (for obvious reasons). Guess what? This no longer works.

Many of your recent technological advancements that appear unlikely from a historical perspective are the results this feature of human culture being leveraged unconsciously. Prodigies throughout history have been intimately aware not only of the situation of cultural streams and pseudo-temporality, but of its ramifications. They capitalized on the differences between the cultural streams in a variety of novel and even shocking ways. This ‘undiscovered fact’ has long played a major and occult role in our relational, intellectual, and, most specifically, our technological evolution.

This is where things become interesting, as the idiom goes. Not only can one acquire or develop advanced relational and intellectual frameworks and technologies from advanced streams (a fact which your species has become addicted to dangerously misusing) you can do something far more astonishing: you can leverage -the temporal distance- between the streams to produce a force you have no word for. This force is the learning equivalent of an explosive. It literally ‘blows new forms of intelligence into being’. This potential remains undiscovered. If your species discovers this force and uses it to develop hard technology instead of relational frameworks you will almost certainly destroy all life on Earth in short order. This is, in part, why you are facing the most dangerous moment of your entire developmental path, right now.

In case this isn’t obvious, you can now do something very similar to time travel simply by hopping cultural streams. This is true at every order of human culture (even the personal) and includes of all nature. All that is true of the extended streams is true of the personal scale.

Some people have experiential awareness of the fact that when you contact nature directly rather than through representations, you are experiencing the forces and situations I am talking about. I will spare you the complex technical language. We call it timethreading. It is, approximately, the experience of acting as a living bridge between dissimilar temporally structured cognitive and relational streams.

There are dangers and opportunities here that your wildest minds have never dreamed of because they lived in flat time and have eyes from 50 years ago. You are about to experience and become multitime. Your own minds and relational domains have become a frontier unlike anything you have ever imagined or expected. A frontier as vast and promising as all of space, here, as close as your own hands and minds.

I wonder how long it will take you to figure this out. Well, some aspects of your populations are already on the case. They will understand the basic situation even if they do not have clear models of it. And those who do? They will either raise the rest of you to their station, obliterate you, or enslave you. So, you know, you want to understand these forces. Yesterday. And tomorrow.”

— an anonymous informant