In the interview, Prof. Firestein says that "the future is very different in different sciences", and I totally agree - the different sciences happen on very different timescales. If I were a biologist (and disclaimer - I'm definitely not), almost every process I'd be working with would happen on timescales between seconds and years. At the very extremes, some processes (such as the onset of cancer) might take decades, but in just 100s of years most individual organisms will die. In 10,000s of years, you might begin to see species evolving. Beyond 4 billion years ago, there isn't any biology left to study at all. Other fields like chemistry, sociology, and psychology fare far worse.
While this sort of thinking is useful within disciplines, I'd imagine it makes it very hard to think about events that take place on universe time scales. The supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy will take 10^100 years to evaporate - there's just nothing any of these fields work with on a daily basis to compare this (though admittedly this is an extreme example).