Contemporary humans live in a system of incompatible time scales. On the one hand, there is the slowness of geological processes that have a major impact on our perception of life. And at the other end of the spectrum there is the elusive speed of the fabricated digital infosphere that supports life but also manipulates it intensely. Just as plants, animals, systems and collective bodies such as forests or coral reefs, we develop knowledge of the world at different speeds, and use that knowledge to adapt.