Planning Horizon
- Emin Askerov
- Dec 28, 2025
- 1 min read
One constraint I keep running into in FOAK and scale-up work — and more broadly in climate and energy transition — is the planning horizon.
Climate change doesn’t just stress our systems - it breaks our intuition about time. Outcomes are shaped over decades, sometimes centuries — not five-year plans, not annual KPIs, not even political cycles. That alone makes climate one of the most complex global challenges we’ve ever faced.
Most other existential risks are easier to reason about. Pandemics, nuclear escalation, AI misuse, food shortages — they all carry immediacy. Clear and present danger. Fast feedback. Escalation you can see, track, model, and manage. Their signals are loud.
With the climate, everything is inverted. Causality is delayed. Feedback is weak. Even measurement is contested. We argue over baselines, scenarios, and models — while the physical system keeps moving, indifferent to our debates.
At some point, this turns into a more uncomfortable question: How do you act on a problem whose time horizon exceeds a human life?
I sometimes use fiction to explore questions that are hard to stress-test through frameworks or slide decks alone. With that in mind, I’ve published a short speculative novella, Planning Horizon, and made it free to read.
It’s a story about startups, climate decline, technology, and revenge.
Oh, and yes — there are vampires!
The story is free to read, and I publish it under a non-commercial license. Share if it resonates. English and Russian language PDFs are attached.
