We think of memories as being focused on the past. However, our ability to move freely in the temporal realm of past, present and future is far more complex and sophisticated than commonsense would suggest. In this paper I am concerned with our capacity to produce and extend ourselves into the far future, for example through nuclear power or the genetic modification of food, on the one hand, and our inability to know the potential, diverse and multiple outcomes of this technologically

more »

... d futurity, on the other. I focus on this discrepancy in order to explore what conceptual tools are available to us to take account of long-term futures produced by the industrial way of life. And I identify some historical approaches to the future on the assumption that the past may well hold vital clues for today's dilemma, hence my proposal to engage in 'memory of futures'. I conclude by considering the potential of 'memory aids for the future' as a means to better encompass in contemporary concerns the long-term futures of our making. Introduction: Production of futures As human beings we have the ability to move in space and time. For both spheres, technological aids have vastly enhanced and expanded the capacity for this mobility. For the mobility in time, memory and projection, retention and protention are inseparably intertwined and neither is possible without the other. Yet the two temporal extensions are not equivalent: our ever-increasing ability to know the past is not matched by a parallel KS Memory of Futures DS -240804