Long Now

Stefan Sagmeister: Finally, something good.

The Long Now Foundation — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 10:16:33 -0700

"The world is terrible, and the world is better," Stefan Sagmeister said. "Both can be true." It all depends on perspective. In his Long Now Talk, Finally, something good, Sagmeister urged us to zoom out. The faster the news cycle spins, and the more we scroll, the more we catastrophize. Meanwhile, the things that improve tend to do so slowly and quietly. In this visually stunning talk, Sagmeister takes us on a journey through his body of work, transforming long-term data on human progress into striking works of art.

Indy Johar: Civilizational Optioneering

The Long Now Foundation — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 09:53:59 -0800

Indy Johar pointed to the first photographs of the whole Earth taken from space. “This was the moment the planet became self-aware." This planetary consciousness came with new responsibility, he argued. The task before us is not simply to survive, but to reimagine civilization as a planetary project. As climate and ecological instability creates extreme whiplash effects, we will find it increasingly difficult to predict, prepare, or govern at a global scale. And as artificial intelligence reshapes labor and value, Johar urged us all to reevaluate what it means to be human. So what does that require in a time of such intense, cascading volatility? Indy’s answer is civilizational optionality: the breathing room that keeps futures open when shocks compound and our fates are systematically coupled. As humans, we can't know everything — it's a cognitive impossibility. “But there is a beautiful liberation in accepting our partial knowing,” he said. Reframing this limitation as possibility opens us up to more curiosity and “ways of being that are about tenderness, tentativeness, and care.” Johar imagines a future that leverages human–machine systems that expand our civilizational capacity for complex discourse and problem solving. Intelligence, in this view, is a conversational field: a meta-capacity for coordination, dialogue, and collective sense-making across sectors, species, and systems. Climate cascades will not be local; our planetary fates are entangled. Meeting this reality demands an approach to civilization that is capable of responding to volatility and holding uncertainty. As Johar said with a smile: “It is time to have a fucking worldview.”

Kate Crawford: Mapping Empires

The Long Now Foundation — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 11:22:00 -0800

Kate Crawford’s Long Now Talk traces an historical arc from Renaissance perspective to AI image models, illustrating how shifts in representational power shape empires, economies—even our shared sense of reality. During the talk, Crawford gives a tour through her detailed artwork Calculating Empires. Through examples ranging from Liebig’s critique of agriculture “robbing” soil nutrients, to Faraday’s latex insulation that devastated rubber forests, Crawford shows how technologies have long created “metabolic rifts”: systems that extract more than they regenerate. Don't miss the closing Q&A, where host Kevin Kelly asks Crawford what responsible, non-extractive AI might look like.

Lynn Rothschild: Nature’s Hardware Store

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 09:42:14 -0800

What if the solutions to humanity’s greatest challenges — on Earth and beyond — have already been invented by nature? In this forward-looking talk, evolutionary biologist and astrobiologist Dr. Lynn Rothschild explores how life’s patterns, materials, and mechanisms, refined over billions of years, can serve as a blueprint for building better futures on Earth and other planets. Drawing on insights from deep time, Dr. Rothschild will open the doors to “nature’s hardware store” — a vast, largely untapped reservoir of biological strategies available to scientists, engineers, and innovators. From self-healing materials and bio-inspired architecture to regenerative systems for space exploration, she reveals how biology is shaping the frontiers of technology and inspiring bold, surprisingly practical solutions to complex problems. Grounded in astrobiology and evolutionary insight, this talk invites us to rethink innovation through the lens of life itself and to explore what’s possible when we tap into nature’s storehouse of intelligence to solve the challenges of tomorrow. Lynn J. Rothschild is a research scientist at NASA Ames and Adjunct Professor at Brown University and Stanford University working in astrobiology, evolutionary biology and synthetic biology. Rothschild's work focuses on the origin and evolution of life on Earth and in space, and in pioneering the use of synthetic biology to enable space exploration. From 2011 through 2019 Rothschild served as the faculty advisor of the award-winning Stanford-Brown iGEM (international Genetically Engineered Machine Competition) team, exploring innovative technologies such as biomining, mycotecture, BioWires, making a biodegradable UAS (drone) and an astropharmacy. Rothschild is a past-president of the Society of Protozoologists, fellow of the Linnean Society of London, The California Academy of Sciences and the Explorer’s Club and lectures and speaks about her work widely.

Blaise Agüera y Arcas: What is Intelligence?

The Long Now Foundation — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 14:49:53 -0700

Blaise Agüera y Arcas’s talk took us on a journey through What is Intelligence?, his groundbreaking new work connecting the evolutionary dots between life, computation, and symbiogenesis. He explores how, in our symbiotic world, things combine to make larger things all the time. We might think of humanity in terms of the individual — but we're already part of everything we're creating, which is in turn co-creating us. In the story of technology and humanity, are we distinct from the technologies that we make? Agüera y Arcas' cuts through the essentialist dogma with a functionalist view: Biological computing — computation through DNA, RNA, and proteins — is not a strange outcropping of life but its very nature. Blaise Agüera y Arcas is a VP and Fellow at Google, where he is the CTO of Technology & Society and founder of Paradigms of Intelligence (Pi). Pi is an organization working on basic research in AI and related fields, especially the foundations of neural computing, active inference, sociality, evolution, and artificial life. During his tenure at Google, Blaise has innovated on-device machine learning for Android and Pixel; invented Federated Learning, an approach to decentralized model training that avoids sharing private data; and founded the Artists + Machine Intelligence program.

Kim Carson: Inspired by Intelligence

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 11:25:00 -0700

What if AI is not here actually to replace us, but to remind us who we actually are? That was the question at the heart of Kim Carson’s Long Now Talk. In _Inspired by Intelligence: Purpose and Creativity in the AI Era_, Carson challenged us to avoid the easy narratives of tech-driven utopia and dystopia, charting a course through those two extremes that made the case for AI not as a way to make humans unnecessary but to emphasize our most important creative capacities. In her talk, Carson drew on her experience working in AI at organizations like IBM, where she helped lead Watson Education, which helped connect educators in underserved communities to AI technology, in the name of facing down some of the wickedest problems in society. But she also drew on her own more personal engagement with AI, discussing at length the nuances of how she uses personalized versions of generative pre-trained transformers as collaborators and enablers for creativity. For Carson, AI is a sort of tool for thought — a mirror that we can use to re-inspire ourselves towards greater creativity. Accompanied by video art made using the SORA text-to-video model by Charles Lindsay, she made the case that AI could be used not just for automating labor but also for reclaiming human agency. That means using these new technological modes as enablers for human thought and action, while recognizing their gaps, too — the questions about ourselves that only we can answer, no matter how sophisticated our technology becomes. Throughout her talk, Carson expounded upon the power of vulnerability. The ability to use AI tools to help us reconnect with ourselves, to jar us into seeing our own identities and creative capacities in new lights, is one that will fundamentally help us change our world. In Carson’s view, vulnerability and creativity are the necessary precursors to any sort of technological innovation. As she ended her remarks, Kim made one final note on how we can make a better world collaboratively and creatively: our society does not need “more optimization, it needs more imagination.”

Sara Imari Walker: An Informational Theory of Life

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 28 May 2025 19:23:00 -0700

“What is life?” In her Long Now Talk, astrobiologist and theoretical physicist Sara Imari Walker explores the many dimensions of that seemingly simple question. Starting from the simplest precursors, Walker assembled a grand cathedral of meaning, tracing an arc across existence that linked the fundamentals of organic chemistry, the possibility space of lego bricks, and the materialist philosophy of Madonna. As the leader of one of the largest international theory groups in the origins of life and astrobiology, Walker has worked an interdisciplinary team of researchers to devise assembly theory: a theory of life and its origins that finds that life is the only way to create complex objects, and that the existence of complex objects is fundamentally and quantifiably rare. Assembly theory’s focus on complexity and countability allows astrobiologists like Walker to grapple with the sheer vastness of combinatorial space — the set of all things that could possibly exist. That set is vaster than the universe itself can hold, which, of course, raises a foundational question: if the universe cannot exhaust all possibilities of what can exist, what determines what actually exists, and what merely could exist? Assembly theory uses the concept of the "assembly index" to measure the complexity of objects in the universe, quantifying how many steps are required to build something — a molecule like ATP, the primary energy-carrier in cells, for example. The theory finds that items above a given assembly index of 15 cannot be produced repeatedly by any known process save for life itself — a complexity threshold governed by the size of the possibility space. Implied here is that matter itself holds information. Within the physical dimensions and history of any given object is a measure of the information required to construct it. Likewise, historical contingency matters: it determines what gets constructed within the space of all theoretically possible constructions. In Walker's words: "We are our history." Life is causal histories — lineages of propagating information. Assembly theory conceptualizes objects as entities defined by their possible formation histories, allowing a unified language for describing selection, evolution and the generation of novelty. Within assembly theory, the fundamental unit of life is not the cell, but the lineage.

Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson: Abundance

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 16 May 2025 07:00:00 -0700

As they look upon the United States of America in 02025, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson see a country wrought by a half-century of failed governance. They see states and cities theoretically committed to progressive futures instead bogged down in labyrinthine mires of process — a society stuck in low gear. Yet they also see opportunity to turn those failures on their heads, and to build a better society based around more responsive, efficient governance. This is the vision that animates _Abundance_, Klein and Thompson’s new book and the focus of their Long Now Talk, hosted by Michael Pollan and co-sponsored with Manny’s and City Arts & Lectures. Despite Long Now’s focus on long-term thinking — of counterbalancing civilization’s pathologically short attention span — there was much to appreciate in Klein and Thompson’s call for American governance to “rediscover speed as a progressive value.” In their wide-ranging discussion, the two authors made the case for a vision of liberalism that builds, both for its own sake and as a bulwark against reactionary right-wing movements that have capitalized on its current shortcomings. Klein and Thompson spent much of their conversation diagnosing the precise ways in which American governance has become bogged down. They identified a set of breakdowns in the social contract ranging from the overly-restrictive barriers to building housing and green infrastructure to the utterly inadequate governmental support given to technological development and scientific discovery. On the topic of scientific research, they spoke of the value of long-term science, noting that vital discoveries like penicillin, mRNA vaccines, and GLP-1s all benefited from the long-term investment that the private sector rarely provides. At the close of the conversation, Pollan thanked Klein and Thompson for providing “not empty hope” but a vision “with a real path in front of it.” In their talk, Klein and Thompson didn’t just outline that path — they made clear the stakes of moving down it. We do not, as they argued, have the “luxury of time.” In order to build the abundant, progressive society that they envision, we must abandon “learned helplessness” and commit to building it with all necessary urgency and focus.

Kim Stanley Robinson & Stephen Heintz: A Logic For The Future

The Long Now Foundation — Thu, 01 May 2025 08:15:00 -0700

Stephen Heintz and Kim Stanley Robinson say we live in an “Age of Turbulence.” Looking around our geopolitical situation, it’s easy to see what they mean. Faced with the ever-growing threat of climate change, the looming potential breakdown of the post-01945 international order, and the ambiguous prospects of rapid technological changes in fields like AI, biotechnology, and geoengineering, it is clear that we need new answers to new challenges. Stephen Heintz, a Public policy expert and president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF), and Kim Stanley Robinson, one of the most acclaimed science fiction authors writing today, work in very different fields. But each of them in his own way has sketched out a vision of what we must do to face down the intersecting crises of our time: While their methods may differ, they align on their conclusions. In their Long Now Talk, Heintz and Robinson propose what they refer to as _A Logic For The Future_ — a new path for international relations in the face of the chaos of our current age. Over the course of their conversation, Stephen and Stan drew on a wide variety of historical examples to contextualize our seemingly unprecedented geopolitical moment. In all of these case studies — from the writing of the Atlantic Charter in the darkest days of World War II to the fraught deal-making and relationship-building that allowed for the signing of the Iran Nuclear deal in 02015 — the two focused on the power of human-driven, almost utopian visions of the future as tools for building a better world. Now, in a moment of geopolitical uncertainty and internal democratic crisis, Stephen and Stan see space for the kinds of utopian imagination and creativity that were so solely missed in prior moments of flux and chaos. Long-term thinking is key to this kind utopian thinking. In Stan’s words, the “optimistic” possibilities of long-term thinking are not just useful in dreaming up a better future. They’re “reinvigorating in how we address the problems we face on a day-to-day basis.”

K Allado-McDowell: On Neural Media

The Long Now Foundation — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 11:19:15 -0700

How will AI shape our understanding of our creativity and ourselves? In February, artist and technologist K Allado-McDowell delivered a fascinating Long Now Talk that explored the dimensions of Neural Media — their term for an emerging set of creative forms that use artificial neural networks inspired by the connective design of the human brain. Their Long Now Talk is a journey through the strange valleys and outcroppings of this age of neural media. That journey began in 02015, in the wake of K Allado-McDowell’s encounter with an image known as “trippysquirrel.jpg.” That picture — a squirrel flowing into dog into a slug, a hallucinogenic collection of misplaced eyes and waves of color — was generated by what was then a cutting-edge artificial intelligence system: a convolutional neural network. What AI researchers did with the creation of images like “trippysquirrel.jpeg” was to invert the traditional role of the neural network as classifier: transforming it into a tool for the generation of novel material. The captivating, uncanny potential of these AI-generated images inspired Allado-McDowell to form and lead the Artists + Machine Intelligence program at Google, and to begin their own explorations into co-creating art with artificial intelligence. Now, after a decade spent composing novels, operas, and more alongside a variety of AI models, Allado-McDowell sees the mode of creativity offered by these non-human intelligences as not just a novelty but an entirely new, sometimes bizarre paradigm of media. Allado-McDowell tells a fascinating story involving statistical distributions, anti-aging influencers at war with death itself, and vast quantities of “AI Slop,” the low-quality, faintly surreal output of cheap, rapidly proliferating image models. Yet even in this morass of slop Allado-McDowell sees reason for optimism. Referring to the title of their 02020 book Pharmako-AI, which was co-written with GPT-3, Allado-McDowell notes that the Greek word pharmakon could mean both drug and cure. What may seem poisonous or dangerous in this new paradigm of neural media could also unlock for us new and deeper ways of understanding ourselves, our planet, and all of the intelligent networks that live within it.

Ahmed Best: Feel The Future

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 11:34:06 -0700

When you feel the future, how do you share that feeling in order to build community? Ahmed Best’s Long Now Talk was the first in the more-than-twenty-year history of Long Now Talks to be held on Valentine’s Day. It was also the first to feature a sing-a-long performance of Al Green’s 01970s soul music classic “Let’s Stay Together,” with the speaker accompanying the audience at San Francisco’s Herbst Theatre on a 7-piece drum kit. Finally, it was the first to feature a live theater performance from audience volunteers, depicting the past, present, and future through glances, gestures, and play. Yet beyond these firsts, Ahmed Best’s Long Now Talk felt deeply rooted in the spirit of Long Now Talks. Over the course of _Feel the Future_, Ahmed’s Valentine’s Evening Long Now Talk, he lead the audience on a journey through creativity and imagination, drawing on his experiences as a cast member on the award-winning percussion performance Stomp, as Jar-Jar Binks, the ground-breaking first major CGI character actor in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, and as a lecturer at the Stanford d.school and one of the leaders of the AfroRithms Futures Group. The core of Ahmed’s argument? Feeling is a form of communication in itself, beyond words — and only by taking action and sharing our feelings of the future with each other in our communities can we create the futures we want for ourselves. Using a diverse range of creative and imaginative tactics, Best incorporated play and motion in order to help us Feel The Future.

Benjamin Bratton: A Philosophy of Planetary Computation

The Long Now Foundation — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 15:41:38 -0700

We find ourselves in a pre-paradigmatic moment in which our technology has outpaced our theories of what to do with it. The task of philosophy today is to catch up. In his Long Now Talk, Philosopher of Technology Benjamin Bratton took us on a whirlwind philosophical journey into the concept of Planetary Computation — a journey that began in classical Greece with the story of the Antikythera mechanism, the analog computer that gave his think-tank Antikythera its name. But his inquiry stretched far beyond antiquity — back to the very origins of biological life itself and forward to a present and future where we must increasingly grapple with artificial life and intelligence on a planetary scale in time and space. How might complex planetary intelligence thrive over the long now? To Bratton, that intelligence is a “emergent phenomenon of an ancient and deep biogeochemical flux” — not merely resident to the Earth but an outcropping from it. Our planet has evolved us, and we have in turn evolved a stack of technologies that can help us understand and govern that very same planet that produced us. The preconditions for long-term adaptiveness, Bratton argues, will need to be artificially realized, and we won’t be able to control what happens as a result of bringing them into existence. This, Bratton says, is the Copernican trauma of our time. In concluding his remarks, Bratton turns to James Lovelock, the pioneering environmental scientist who first proposed the Gaia Hypothesis. Referencing Lovelock’s final book, Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence (02019), Bratton notes that for both Lovelock and himself the potential coming of post-human intelligence was not cause for “grief.” Instead, the frame of the planetary makes it so that finding ourselves in a grander story where “the evolution of intelligence does not peak with one terraforming species of nomadic primates,” is, to Bratton, “the happiest news possible.”

Roman Krznaric & Kate Raworth: What Doughnut Economics Can Learn From History

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 18:06:30 -0800

Social philosopher Roman Krznaric and renegade economist Kate Raworth explore how we can survive and thrive by looking to the past for clues on how to build more regenerative economic frameworks. Doughnut economics describes the social and planetary boundaries needed for all people to prosper within the means of the living planet. Studying historic examples through the lens of doughnut economics, Krznaric and Raworth find the environmentally safe and socially just space in which humanity and all other living things can flourish.

Neal Stephenson: Polostan

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 17:52:30 -0800

Neal Stephenson, visionary speculative fiction author and long-time friend of Long Now, joined us for a conversation with journalist Charles C. Mann on the research behind his new novel _Polostan_ , the dawn of the Atomic Age, and the craft of historical storytelling. _Polostan_ is the first installment in a monumental new series called Bomb Light - an expansive historical epic of intrigue and international espionage, presaging the dawn of the Atomic Age. Set against the turbulent decades of the early twentieth century, Polostan is an inventive, richly detailed, and deeply entertaining historical epic from Stephenson, whose prior books include [_Cryptonomicon_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon) and [_The Baroque Cycle_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Baroque_Cycle)

Alicia Escott & Heidi Quante: The Bureau of Linguistical Reality Performance Lecture

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 01 May 2024 13:49:21 -0700

The Bureau of Linguistical Reality is a participatory artwork facilitated by artist Alicia Escott and Heidi Quante which collaborates with the public to create new words for feelings and experiences for which no words yet exist. Recognizing the climate crisis is causing new feelings and experiences that have yet to be named, the project was created with a deep focus on these and other Anthropocenic phenomena. The Bureau views the words created in this process as also serving as points of connectivity: advancing understanding, dialogue, and conversations about the greater concepts these words seek to codify. This talk was an intimate sharing of The Bureau's findings from their decade long social art practice as well as a Word Making Field Session where Escott and Quante collaborated with participants to collectively coin a term together. Participants were encouraged to consider in advance their personal unnamed experience(s) of our changing world as well as their unique feelings for which they wish there was a word and to bring the diversity of their linguistic backgrounds to this conversation as the Bureau creates neologisms in all languages.

Jonathan Cordero: Indigenous Sovereign Futures

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 12:19:23 -0700

Alternative visions for social change rooted in the frameworks of capitalism and colonialism only reproduce contemporary structures of power. How can indigenous perspectives and knowledge inform the structural transformation necessary to improve the health of the natural world and of human communities? Dr. Cordero discussed how indigenous epistemologies challenge the ideas and practices related to capitalism and colonialism and how the enhancement of indigeneity and sovereignty are critical to the maintenance of indigenous epistemologies. Throughout his talk, Dr. Cordero drew from academic and communal discourses on decolonization, settler colonialism, and epistemicide, revealing the nuances of indigenous worldviews with deeply researched case studies. Dr. Cordero also shared how indigenous perspectives and knowledge inspire work of the [Association of Ramaytush Ohlone](https://www.ramaytush.org/), where he serves as Executive Director.

Denise Hearn: Embodied Economies

The Long Now Foundation — Thu, 07 Mar 2024 09:27:05 -0800

Economic policy can seem abstract and distant, but it manifests the physical world, affecting us all. Our economic stories shape our systems, and they in turn shape us. What myths continue to constrain us, and how might new stories emerge to scaffold the future? This talk explores concepts we often take as gospel: profits, competition, economic value, efficiency, and others — and asks how we might reshape them to better serve planetary flourishing — today, and well into the future. Drawing on insights from economics and the social sciences more broadly, writer and researcher Denise Hearn makes the case that the challenge for 21st century policy-making is figuring out how much we can "hold economic reasoning back." In her Talk, she asks: in what areas can we bring in new paradigms and systems of understanding that don't produce the same problems that our societies are trying to escape?

Jared Farmer: Chronodiversity: Thinking about Time with Trees

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 22 Dec 2023 11:33:22 -0800

_What really interests me is how long-lived plants allow humans to think about—and emotionally relate to—long units of time. They provide a bridge between human time and geological time. - Jared Farmer_ In his Long Now Talk, Geohumanist and historian Jared Farmer shared his multi-faceted approach to understanding our human relationship with trees over millennia. From ancient stories, as objects of reverence, named individuals and clonal organisms, sources of wealth in ancient and modern times, the lungs of the planet and the wood wide web - trees are deeply interwoven with our histories, cultures and growing scientific understanding of our complex global ecosystem. Through his work, Farmer reflects on our long-term relationships with long-lived trees, and considers the future of oldness on a rapidly changing planet.

Abby Smith Rumsey: Hijacked Histories, Polarized Futures

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 15:27:19 -0800

As authoritarianism continues to rise around the world, the stories we tell ourselves about our collective history become a battleground for competing visions of the future. Drawing extensively from Russian history in the 20th century, Rumsey offers a framework to discuss our current social and political tensions and how our increasing polarization could shape our future. Abby Smith Rumsey was joined by archivist and filmmaker Rick Prelinger for the Q&A. This Long Now Talk is presented in partnership with the [Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences](https://casbs.stanford.edu/about?ref=longnow.org) (CASBS) at Stanford University. CASBS brings together deep thinkers from diverse disciplines and communities to advance understanding of the full range of human beliefs, behaviors, interactions, and institutions. A leading incubator of human-centered knowledge, CASBS facilitates collaborations across academia, policy, industry, civil society, and government to collectively design a better future.

Henry Farrell: The Complex Aftermath of Globalization

The Long Now Foundation — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 11:26:58 -0800

Over the last two years, the US government has started thinking about the future of the world in a very different way. Across speeches and policy papers, a vision of world politics has emerged which breaks sharply both with the old logic of the Cold War and the newer politics of globalization. The globalization bet has turned sour, but it has created a far more closely connected world than ever existed before. Problems such as climate change, economic inequality, food security, supply chain vulnerabilities, democratic weakness and mass migration emerge from the interdependent choices of people and governments in a global system without any global rulers. In a complex interdependent world, is the only way forward to accept these complexities, and try to work with them? That is the challenge that the US now faces – moving from the simple imagined futures of the past to a more entangled and realistic vision of our planet's future. This Long Now Talk is presented in partnership with the [Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences](https://casbs.stanford.edu/about/about-us?ref=longnow.org) (CASBS) at Stanford University. CASBS brings together deep thinkers from diverse disciplines and communities to advance understanding of the full range of human beliefs, behaviors, interactions, and institutions. A leading incubator of human-centered knowledge, CASBS facilitates collaborations across academia, policy, industry, civil society, and government to collectively design a better future.

Coco Krumme: The False Promise of Optimization

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 22:28:28 -0700

Coco Krumme traces the fascinating history of optimization from its roots in America's founding principles, to its dominance as the driving principle of our modern world. Optimized models underlie everything and are deeply embedded in the technologies and assumptions that have come to comprise not only our material reality, but what we make of it. How did a mathematical concept take on such outsized cultural shape? Krumme's work in scientific computation made her aware of optimization's overreach, where she observed that streamlined systems are less resilient and more at risk of failure. They limit our options and narrow our perspectives. Optimal Illusions exposes the sizable bargains we have made in the name of optimization and asks us to consider what comes next.

Chelsea T. Hicks & Bette Adriaanse: Radical Sharing

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 17:33:40 -0700

Our bodies, our houses, our land, our space: we humans don’t always like to share. Author Bette Adriaanse engaged in deep discussion with fellow author Chelsea T. Hicks. as well as virtual guests Brian Eno, Margaret Levi, and Aqui Thami, about property, sharing, and how to make a lasting positive change in the way we share the world with each other. Alternating between thinkers and doers whose approaches are helping to foster long term equality, this talk explored the choices that can be made to share time and resources with others in radical ways. **Virtual guests:** **Brian Eno** is a musician, artist, writer, and co-founder of Earth Percent and The Long Now Foundation. **Margaret Levi** is an American political scientist and author, noted for her work in comparative political economy, labor politics, and democratic theory. **Aqui Thami** is an Indigenous artist, activist, academic, and member of the Himalayan Janajati Thang-mi community.

Anthropocene Magazine: The Climate Parables: Reporting from the Future

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 12:05:08 -0700

**Story & Performance Credits:** **Dodging the Apocalypse** story by Mark Alpert | Actor: Stuart Briggs | Video: Ruda Virginio | Score: Tristan de Liège **Victory Condition** story by Eliot Peper | Actor: Marilyn Pittman | Video: Back Pocket Media and Ruda Virgini | Found footage by: Chris Lange, Oscar Osbo, Robert Pullum, Sean Kirmani, Matt Trainor, Billy Bjork, Loren Hamilton, Panorama International Productions, Living with Fire_ The USGS Southern California Wildfire Risk Project | Score: Tristan de Liège **Glacial Elevation Operations** story by Kim Stanley Robinson | Actor: Conrad Cecil | Video: Alborz Kamalizad | Score: Tristan de Liège

Becky Chambers & Annalee Newitz: Resisting Dystopia

The Long Now Foundation — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 11:00:22 -0700

One of our guiding principles at Long Now is that in order to get to a future that we want to live in, we must first be able to imagine it. For many, it is much easier to imagine a dystopia than a thriving civilization. Our cultural visions of the future are increasingly occupied by tales of impending doom and despair. These stories have a role to play — in showing how current trends could lead to dire consequences in the future, or how certain totalizing technological or ideological worldviews have risks that are at times unaccounted for — but they can’t be the only narratives our culture has for what the future looks like. Becky Chambers and Annalee Newitz are two of the leading lights in contemporary speculative fiction. In their writing, which ranges from novels and short stories to history and journalism, they imagine quietly radical propositions: worlds that we might actually want to live in. Over the course of an adventurous, far-ranging conversation at The Interval in April 02023, the two of them walked through how they build their visions for a cozier, more interconnected society — and made the case that those visions could not only serve as an escape from the troubles of the modern world but as pathways to a better future. At times, Newitz referred to their novels as “Topian” — neither utopian nor dystopian. To Newitz, the appeal of writing in the Topian mode is that it reflects the state of our own society: not as hopeless as some would despair, but also not as perfect as some would exalt. Chambers follows along similar lines — though perhaps a tinge more utopian. Her work has been at times called “Hopepunk.” In contrast to grimmer, darker modes of speculative fiction, her worlds ditch gloom without returning to the sometimes-tired paths of more conventional heroic narratives. She noted, with a certain glee, that her narratives lacked traditional protagonists and all-encompassing villains. Instead, she tells stories of normal people like the ones she knows in real life: except, of course, for the fact that some of them live in a “fantastic, galactic future.” May we all be so lucky, someday.

Ryan Phelan: Bringing Biotech to Wildlife Conservation

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 15:28:40 -0700

How can we turn the tide on species loss and help biodiversity and bioabundance flourish for millennia to come? Ryan Phelan is Executive Director of [Revive & Restore](https://reviverestore.org); the leading wildlife conservation organization promoting the incorporation of biotechnologies into standard conservation practice. Phelan shared the new Genetic Rescue Toolkit for conservation – a suite of biotechnology tools and conservation applications that offer hope and a path to recovery for threatened species. In this talk, Phelan presented examples of the toolkit in action, including corals that better withstand rising ocean temperatures, trees that withstand a fungal blight, and the genetic rescue of the black-footed ferret, once thought to be extinct. Revive & Restore brings biotechnologies to conservation in responsible ways; from engaging local communities where ecological restorations are underway, to connecting stakeholders in disciplines like biotech, bioethics, conservation organizations and government agencies. Together, they are forging new paths to bioabundance in our changing world. Ryan Phelan was joined by forecaster and Long Now Board Member [Paul Saffo](https://longnow.org/people/paul-saffo/) for the Q&A; to discuss long-term outcomes and the Intended Consequences framing used by Revive & Restore.

Jenny Odell: Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 14 Apr 2023 16:14:51 -0700

Jenny Odell describes _Saving Time_, her second book and the inspiration for her first Long Now Talk, as a “panoramic assault on nihilism.” The particular nihilism that Odell confronts is rooted in what she calls “Clock Time.” While the rigid, regular progression of clock time may feel like a universal truth to those of us raised under its regime, Odell argues that it is merely one among many ways of keeping time found across societies and ecosystems. Told loosely as a road trip around the San Francisco Bay Area — from the bustling port of Oakland to the beachside cliffs of Pacifica — Odell’s tale of temporal dissonance and harmony weaved together a story of time and modernity. Her core thesis: our lives have become rigid and contorted by the demands of profit-maximizing industrial clock time, but they do not have to stay that way. In order to make that case, she told a narrative that stretches across epochs and topics, stringing together stories from European imperialism, scenes from Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, and contemporary anecdotes from online communities of working mothers and disabled activists. The principle uniting all of these threads is a dogged pursuit of the capricious nature of time, with each new facet or mode of timekeeping challenging the monolith of industrial clock time. In both her talk and in her book, Odell refrained from offering prescriptive solutions, whether on the scale of individual change or revolutionary upheaval. Her approach is neither that of a self-help book nor a manifesto, but something weirder and more ambiguous. As she concluded her remarks to Long Now, Odell invoked the language of cultivation — both metaphorically, in terms of nurturing an intergenerational web of friends and allies, and literally, as she discussed how the temporal rhythms of growing beans and observing garden life can teach us about the latent chronodiversity of the world around us.

Ismail Ali: Psychedelics: History at the Crossroads

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 16:17:21 -0700

Psychedelics and other mind-altering substances have been used for thousands of years across the world in religious, spiritual, celebratory, and healing contexts. Despite a half century of a "War on Drugs" in the United States, there has been a recent resurgence in public interest in ending drug prohibition and re-evaluating the roles these substances can play in modern society. What can our several-thousand year history with these substances teach us about how they can be used in a modern society? What legal & cultural frameworks can be used to increase access to these substances, and what are the potential downsides of these frameworks? Ismail Ali works daily developing and implementing the legal and policy strategies that will define the next several decades of psychedelic access, and joined Long Now for a Talk that explored the deep history of psychedelics and what role they can play in our future.

Ryan North: How to Invent Everything

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 28 Feb 2023 15:09:45 -0800

How would someone fare if they were dropped into a randomly chosen period in history? Would they have any relevant knowledge to share, or ability to invent crucial technologies given the period's constraints? Ryan North uses these hypothetical questions to explore the technological and implicit knowledge underpinning modern civilization, offering a practical guide of how one could rebuild civilization from the ground up.

Alicia Eggert: This Moment Used To Be The Future

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 16:38:30 -0800

In _The Clock of the Long Now_, Long Now founder Stewart Brand wrote, in response to Zen poet Gary Snyder, the following musing on the nature of time: >THIS PRESENT MOMENT USED TO BE THE UNIMAGINABLE FUTURE Interdisciplinary artist Alicia Eggert’s work uses neon, steel, and time to expand the scope and possibilities of the carefully chosen quotes she uses in her work. In This Present Moment, Brand’s quote flickers between its original form to Eggert’s subtly edited version: >THIS MOMENT USED TO BE THE FUTURE In this Long Now Talk, Alicia Eggert and Long Now's Executive Director Alexander Rose discussed time, art and long-term thinking.

Johanna Hoffman: Speculative Futures: Design Approaches to Foster Resilience and Co-create the Cities We Need

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 14:48:01 -0800

Urbanist, researcher and writer Johanna Hoffman gave a Long Now Talk about speculative futures — a powerful set of tools that can reorient urban development help us dream and build more resilient, equitable cities. Navigating modern change depends on imagining futures we’ve never seen. Urban planning and design should be well positioned to spearhead that work, but calculated rationale often results in urban spaces crafted to mitigate threats rather than navigate the unexpected, leaving cities increasingly vulnerable to the uncertainties of 21st century change. Long used in art, film, fiction, architecture, and industrial design, the methodology of speculative futures offers powerful ways to counter this trend by moving us beyond what currently exists into the realms of what could be. Far from an indulgent creative exercise, speculative futures is a means of creating the resilient cities we urgently need.

Jonathan Haidt, Kevin Kelly, & Stewart Brand: Democracy in the Next Cycle of History

The Long Now Foundation — Thu, 06 Oct 2022 12:14:08 -0700

Jonathan Haidt sees that we have entered a social-psychological phase change that was initiated in 02009 when social media platforms introduced several fateful innovations that changed the course of our society and disintegrated our consensus on reality. In this conversation with Long Now co-founders Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly, Haidt explored questions of technological optimism, morality vs ethics, teen mental health, possible platform tweaks that could reduce the damage and just how long this next cycle of history could last. Prompted by Haidt's piece on [Why The Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/), this discussion offers a behind the scenes look at the thinking going into Haidt's next book, _The Anxious Generation_.

Michael Tubbs: Upsetting the Setup: Creating a California for All

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 15 Aug 2022 21:18:13 -0700

Governance moves slow. The work of the politician and the public servant ought to inherently be one of long-term thinking — of taking in concerns both urgent and longstanding and crafting solutions to them that will live on beyond any official’s term of office. As Mayor of Stockton, California, Special Advisor for Economic Mobility to California Governor Gavin Newsom, and founder of End Poverty in California, Michael Tubbs has taken on some of the deepest problems in the public sphere. In his Long Now Talk, he focused on one of the most long-standing of all issues in human society: poverty. To Tubbs, who grew up in poverty in Stockton and witnessed its consequences first-hand, poverty is not just an ill for its immediate negative effects but how it shapes one’s perceptions. When you’re living under the deprivation of poverty, it’s harder to think about the long-term future. You are faced with an array of short-term demands on your resources: not just your financial resources, but also your mental ones. It is an “incredible privilege,” Tubbs noted, “to have the space, to have the time, to have the mental capacity to think about the future.” Tubbs’ solution — both in his talk and in his time as mayor and advocate — is to start by providing the direct, near-term aid to those pressing problems in the form of cash: a Universal Basic Income. Tubbs pointed to the positive results from UBI trial runs both in Stockton and cities across the country, showing how lifting people out of extreme scarcity allowed them to start thinking about the future. In his remarks, Tubbs was realistic about the depth of the challenge of fighting poverty. No one policy proposal can fully solve a problem that, he said, was built into the “setup” of this country. Yet his tone throughout was one of deep optimism, invoking what he called the “prophetic” power of long-term thinking and calling on all of us to take an active role in planning for the future. Once we are all committed to creating a brighter tomorrow, the slow work of governance can succeed.

Edward Slingerland: Drinking for 10,000 Years: Intoxication and Civilization

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 25 Jul 2022 17:44:53 -0700

Philosopher Edward Slingerland’s latest research is a deep dive into the alcohol-soaked origins of civilization — and the evolutionary roots of humanity’s appetite for intoxication. “Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization” elegantly cuts through the tangle of urban legends that surround our notions of intoxication to provide a rigorous, scientifically-grounded explanation for our love of alcohol. Drawing on evidence from archaeology, history, cognitive neuroscience, psychopharmacology, social psychology, literature, and genetics, Slingerland shows that our taste for chemical intoxicants is not an evolutionary mistake, as we are so often told. In fact, intoxication helps solve a number of distinctively human challenges: enhancing creativity, alleviating stress, building trust, and pulling off the miracle of getting fiercely tribal primates to cooperate with strangers.

Creon Levit: Space Debris and The Kessler Syndrome

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 14 Jun 2022 15:17:01 -0700

More than one hundred million pieces of human-made space debris currently orbit our planet, most moving at more than 10,000 mph. Every year their number increases, creating a progressively more dangerous environment for working spacecraft. In order to operate in space, we track most of this debris through a patchwork of private efforts and government defense networks. Creon Levit spent over three decades at NASA, and is now the Director of R&D; at Planet, a company that is imaging the earth everyday with one of the largest swarms of micro-satellites in the world. In his Long Now Talk, Levit discusses the history of space debris, the way the debris is currently tracked, and how we might work to reduce it before we see a cascading effect of ballistic interactions that could render low orbit all but unusable.

Dorie Clark: The Long Game: How to be a long-term thinker in a short-term world

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 18 May 2022 10:21:24 -0700

Personal goals need a long-term strategy too. Dorie Clark offers concrete practices to sharpen strategic thinking and incorporate a long-term perspective within a personal time scale. By reorienting ourselves to focus on the big picture, and using the power of small but persistent changes over time, Clark shows how long-term thinking can be applied to reshape our own futures. **Dorie Clark** is a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review, and consults and speaks for clients such as Google, Yale University, and the World Bank. Clark teaches executive education for Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and Columbia Business School, and offers continuing professional education through her newsletter, courses, writing and appearances. Clark is author of [_The Long Game_](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781647820572), [_Entrepreneurial You_](https://dorieclark.com/entrepreneurialyou/), [_Reinventing You_](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781422144138), and [_Stand Out_](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781591847403); all books which delve deep into her business acumen around helping individuals and companies realize their best ideas, take control of their futures and make an impact on the world.

John Markoff & Stewart Brand: Floating Upstream: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 26 Apr 2022 21:33:44 -0700

In his Long Now Talk, John Markoff was joined in conversation with Long Now's Co-founder Stewart Brand and Executive Director Alexander Rose around Markoff's new biography of Brand. Journalist John Markoff writes about technology, society and the key figures who shaped Silicon Valley and the personal computer revolution. Along the way, his stories and reporting intersected with Stewart Brand's paths numerous times and in surprising ways. And now Markoff has distilled Brand's formative rise from the Merry Pranksters and the Whole Earth Catalog, to the marriage of environmental consciousness and hacker capitalism into his newest book, [_Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand_](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780735223943).

Kim Stanley Robinson: Climate Futures: Beyond 02022

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 26 Apr 2022 22:21:21 -0700

Long Now continued our dialogue with the acclaimed writer Kim Stanley Robinson around [COP26](https://unfccc.int/conference/glasgow-climate-change-conference-october-november-2021) and his award-winning book [_The Ministry for the Future_](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780316300131). Clean energy advocate & author [Ramez Naam](https://rameznaam.com/) joined Robinson on stage after the talk for a further discussion. Tackling topics from carbon quantitative easing, to political action, to planetary-level engineering, Robinson describes our current situation as "all-hands-on-deck" where every possible mitigation strategy should be tried. You can find our [other talks with Kim Stanley Robinson](https://www.youtube.com/c/longnow/search?query=Robinson) on our YouTube channel.

Neal Stephenson: Termination Shock

The Long Now Foundation — Thu, 17 Feb 2022 13:03:41 -0800

From the Metaverse in Snow Crash to digital currency in Cryptonomicon, Stephenson's thrilling stories offer uncanny insights into our future. [Neal Stephenson](http://www.nealstephenson.com/)'s fifth Long Now Talk featured a reading from his book [_Termination Shock_](https://www.booksmith.com/book/9780063028050) (pub. 11/16/21) and a discussion with Long Now's Executive Director and 10,000 Year Clock builder, [Alexander Rose](https://longnow.org/people/board/zander/). Neal Stephenson’s sweeping, prescient _Termination Shock_ transports readers to a near-future world, and brings together a fascinating, unexpected group of characters from different cultures and continents, whose stories collide and transform. Ranging from the Texas heartland to the Dutch royal palace in the Hague, to the snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas, the novel grapples with the real-life repercussions of planetary system changes. Epic in scope while heartbreakingly human in perspective, _Termination Shock_ sounds a clarion alarm, considers dire risks, and ponders potential adaptations coming to our near future.

Parag Khanna: Why Mobility is Destiny

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 17 Feb 2023 15:10:18 -0800

The map of humanity isn’t settled -- not now, not ever. In the 60,000 years since people began spreading across the continents, a recurring feature of human civilization has been mobility—the ever-constant search for resources, stability and opportunity. Driven by global events from conflicts, famine, repression and changing climates - to opportunities for trade, social advancement and freedom of thought - humans have relocated around the globe for millennia. But what happens when billions of people are on the move? As climate change tips toward full-blown crisis, economies collapse, governments destabilize, and technology disrupts, we’re entering a new age of mass migrations. Futurist Parag Khanna discusses the deep trends that are shaping the most likely scenarios for our future and asks what map of human geography will emerge.

David Rooney: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 22 Dec 2021 23:00:11 -0800

As with all Long Now Talks, David Rooney’s talk on Thursday, September 9, 02021 began with a few tones from Brian Eno’s January 07003: Bell Studies for The Clock of the Long Now, based on the original algorithm for the Clock’s ever-changing chimes designed by Danny Hillis. These rings of the Clock’s bell were an especially good fit for Rooney’s talk, though: Over the course of an hour, his “History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks” engaged directly with the inexorably ticking logic of clocks just as Eno and Hillis’ work did so musically. Drawing on the wealth of stories on clocks contained within his recently published book, About Time, Rooney cleanly sketched a global history of imperial control, popular resistance, and the spread of information, illustrated vividly using clocks both ancient and modern. Rooney — a horologist and historian of technology by trade as the curator at the Science Museum, London — focused his story on three clocks within the United Kingdom and the British Raj in India between 01890 and 01920 CE. Yet his wide-ranging talk flowed naturally out of those more constrained examples, wading back through time to the reign of Timurid astronomer-king Ulūgh Beg in 01424 CE and the rule of Roman dictator and sundial-builder Manius Valerius Maximus in 00494 BCE and forward to the contemporary moment, where we are at once surrounded by clocks large and small and less aware of their presence in the form of technology like GPS satellites, which rely on atomic clocks to accurately track their positions. While his talk at times focused on the violent reactions against the imposition of clocks on oppressed populations in British India and the Roman Empire, Rooney’s overall message was one of hope: “while clocks might oppress us, clocks can and will save us as well.” The horologist, who first engaged with Long Now as the lead caretaker of Long Now's Prototype 1 10,000-year-clock, pointed to The Clock as a key example of how clocks serve as “proxies for humans,” their ticking mechanisms giving them a certain heartbeat-like quality that speaks to their deeply embodied humanity.

Geoff Manaugh & Nicola Twilley: Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 08 Feb 2022 08:37:58 -0800

**Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley** track the history and future of quarantine around the globe, chasing the story of emergency isolation through time and space—from the crumbling lazarettos of the Mediterranean, built to contain the Black Death, to an experimental Ebola unit in London, and from the hallways of the CDC to closed-door simulations where pharmaceutical execs and epidemiologists prepare for the outbreak of a novel coronavirus. But the story of quarantine ranges far beyond the history of medical isolation. In their book, [_Until Proven Safe_](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780374126582), the authors tour a nuclear-waste isolation facility beneath the New Mexican desert, see plants stricken with a disease that threatens the world’s wheat supply, and meet NASA’s Planetary Protection Officer, tasked with saving Earth from extraterrestrial infections. They also introduce us to the corporate tech giants hoping to revolutionize quarantine through surveillance and algorithmic prediction. We live in a disorienting historical moment that can feel both unprecedented and inevitable; Manaugh and Twilley helped us make sense of our new reality through a thought-provoking exploration of the meaning of freedom, governance, and mutual responsibility.

Kate Darling: The New Breed

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 13 Jan 2023 13:07:46 -0800

Robot ethicist Kate Darling offers a nuanced and smart take on our relationships to robots and the increasing presence they will have in our lives. From a social, legal, and ethical perspective, she shows that our current ways of thinking don’t leave room for the robot technology that is soon to become part of our everyday routines. Robots are likely to supplement, rather than replace, our own skills and relationships. Darling also considers our history of incorporating animals into our work, transportation, military, and even families, and shows how we already have a solid basis for how to contend with, and navigate our future with robots. Dr. Kate Darling works at the intersection of law, ethics and robotics; as a researcher at MIT Media Lab, author and intellectual property policy advisor. Her work with Dr. Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, and other institutions explores the difficult questions that lawmakers, engineers, and the wider public will need to address as human-robot relationships evolve in the coming decades. Darling's work is widely published and covered in the media; and her new book is [_The New Breed: What Our History With Animals Reveals About Our Future With Robots_](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781250296108/).

Prerna Singh: State, Society and Vaccines

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 25 Mar 2022 15:05:47 -0700

As a society, how do we address the "wicked hard problem" of vaccine acceptance? How can public health institutions reach those who are hesitant when even robust fact-based campaigns don't seem to work? Infectious diseases are one of the long-standing challenges for humanity; historical plagues and flare ups of disease have transformed societies, redrawn boundaries across the globe and instigated mass migrations. Successive civilizations have grappled with attempts to control contagion and tried to protect their populations. With the advent of vaccines in the late 1700's it seemed humanity had finally found the way out of this potentially existential threat. But despite humans' deeply embedded fear of infectious disease, issues of vaccine acceptance arose from the start. Through decades of public health campaigns in multiple countries, a persistent thread can be seen of reluctance to adopt vaccines, despite extensive educational campaigns or even coercive tactics to get populations fully vaccinated. Prerna Singh asks how do we go beyond the usual behavior modeling to find out what actually works for these critical public health campaigns? Can we uncover the keys to human motivation to get people to act for their own protection and for the greater good? **This Long Now Talk was presented in partnership with the[Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences](https://casbs.stanford.edu/about/about-us)** (CASBS) at Stanford University. CASBS brings together deep thinkers from diverse disciplines and communities to advance understanding of the full range of human beliefs, behaviors, interactions, and institutions. A leading incubator of human-centered knowledge, CASBS facilitates collaborations across academia, policy, industry, civil society, and government to collectively design a better future.

Eric Debrah Otchere: Sonic Spaces

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 10 Feb 2023 14:56:17 -0800

Eric Debrah Otchere's research revolves around the power of music in the context of work; covering an ambitious range from ethnographic research on Ghanaian indigenous fishing culture to personalized musical preferences via modern technology. Throughout history, the power of music to enhance productivity and focus at work has been explored, leveraged and exploited - by individuals and societies. Combining empirical data from his extensive fieldwork with a critical review of literature and theories from different areas of study, Otchere connects previously siloed research into a comprehensive body of knowledge on the intricate relationship between music and work. **This Long Now Talk is presented in partnership with the[Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences](https://casbs.stanford.edu/about/about-us)** (CASBS) at Stanford University. CASBS brings together deep thinkers from diverse disciplines and communities to advance understanding of the full range of human beliefs, behaviors, interactions, and institutions. A leading incubator of human-centered knowledge, CASBS facilitates collaborations across academia, policy, industry, civil society, and government to collectively design a better future.

Wade Davis: Activist Anthropology

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 14:34:24 -0800

What is the role and purpose of Anthropology today? Wade Davis looks back at the pioneering work of Franz Boas in the early 20th century that upended long-held Western assumptions on race & gender, along with definitions of "social progress". Boas and his students used comparative ethnography to advance “cultural relativism”-- the idea that every culture is as “correct” as every other culture. Boas showed that our differences can be completely explained by social conditioning, not inherent genetic makeup, upending a deep history of scientific racism. This fundamental change in understanding laid the intellectual foundations for the political movements for racial, gender, and cultural equality in the 20th century. But over the last few decades, the field of Anthropology has turned inward, and seems increasingly unable to address global challenges like linguistic loss, cultural erasure, environmental destruction, and economic injustice. Davis offers ideas on how the field could change direction and reclaim global activism as part of its core once again.

Suzanne Simard: Mother Trees and the Social Forest

The Long Now Foundation — Thu, 05 Jan 2023 14:30:54 -0800

Forest Ecologist Suzanne Simard reveals that trees are part of a complex, interdependent circle of life; that forests are social, cooperative creatures connected through underground mycorrhizal networks by which trees communicate their vitality and vulnerabilities, and share and exchange resources and support. Simard's extraordinary research and tenacious efforts to raise awareness on the interconnectedness of forest systems, both above and below ground, has revolutionized our understanding of forest ecology. This increasing knowledge is driving a call for more sustainable practices in forestry and land management, ones that develop strategies based on the forest as a whole entity, not on trees as isolated individuals.

Adam Rogers: Full Spectrum: The Science of Color and Modern Human Perception

The Long Now Foundation — Thu, 23 Feb 2023 22:31:39 -0800

Tracing an arc from the earliest humans to our digitized, synthesized present and future, Adam Rogers shows the expansive human quest for the understanding, creation and use of color. We meet our ancestors mashing charcoal in caves, Silk Road merchants competing for the best ceramics, and textile artists cracking the centuries-old mystery of how colors mix, before shooting to the modern era for high-stakes corporate espionage and the digital revolution that’s rewriting the rules of color forever. This journey has required millennia of remarkable innovation and a fascinating exchange of ideas between science and craft that’s allowed for the most luminous manifestations of our built and adorned world. Adam Rogers is the author of [_Full Spectrum: How the Science of Color Made Us Modern_](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781328518903) and [_Proof: The Science of Booze_](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780547897967/). He is a deputy editor at Wired, and was a Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT and a writer covering science and technology for Newsweek.

Sean Carroll: The Passage of Time and the Meaning of Life

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 11:54:35 -0800

What is time? What is humankind’s role in the universe? What is the meaning of life? For much of human history, these questions have been the province of religion and philosophy. What answers can science provide? In this talk, Sean Carroll shared what physicists know, and don’t yet know, about the nature of time. He argued that while the universe might not have purpose, we can create meaning and purpose through how we approach reality, and how we live our lives. Sean Carroll is a Research Professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology, and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. His research has focused on fundamental physics and cosmology, especially issues of dark matter, dark energy, spacetime symmetries, and the origin of the universe. Recently, Carroll has worked on the foundations of quantum mechanics, the emergence of spacetime, and the evolution of entropy and complexity. Carroll is the author of [_Something Deeply Hidden_](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781524743031), [_The Big Picture_](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780525954828), [_The Particle at the End of the Universe_](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780142180303) amongst other books and hosts the [_Mindscape_](https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/) podcast.

Alexander Rose: Continuity: Discovering the Lessons behind the World’s Longest-lived Organizations

The Long Now Foundation — Thu, 23 Sep 2021 10:28:02 -0700

One of [Long Now](https://longnow.org/)’s founding premises is that humanity’s most significant challenges require long-term solutions, including institutions that caretake and guide the knowledge and commitment needed to work over long time scales. However, there are a limited number of organizations that have managed to stay stable over many centuries, and in some cases, over a millennium. Long Now has been informally tracking these organizations for years, and in 02019 formed [The Organizational Continuity Project](https://longnow.org/continuity/) to study long-lived institutions more formally. [Alexander Rose](https://longnow.org/people/board/zander/), Long Now's Executive Director, discusses how The Organizational Continuity Project hopes to discover the lessons behind these long-lived organizations and build a discipline of shareable knowledge that will help contemporary institutions, companies, and governments develop into robust, long-lasting structures. In turn, we hope these institutions will be better equipped to address civilizational-scale problems with multi-generational thinking.

Nathaniel Rich, Ben Novak, & Ryan Phelan: Second Nature: Green Rabbits, Passenger Pigeons, Cloned Ferrets, and the Birth of a New Ecology

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 20 Aug 2021 00:13:24 -0700

Reporter and writer Nathaniel Rich delves deep into conversation with [Revive & Restore](https://reviverestore.org/)'s Ryan Phelan and Ben Novak to discuss his newest book [_Second Nature: Scenes from a World Remade_](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780374106034), which attempts to come to terms with the massive changes that are underway on our planet, and how humans can better understand our role to caretake, conserve and thoughtfully manage our relationship with nature for the long term. From [_Losing Earth_](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html) to the film [_Dark Waters_](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9071322/) (adapted from his writing), Nathaniel Rich’s stories have come to define the way we think of contemporary ecological narrative. In Second Nature, he asks what it means to live in an era of terrible responsibility. The question is no longer, _How do we return to the world that we’ve lost?_ It is, _What world do we want to create in its place?_

Peter Leyden: The Transformation: A Future History of the World from 02020 to 02050

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 22 Feb 2021 21:49:00 -0800

A compelling case can be made that we are in the early stages of another tech and economic boom in the next 30 years that will help solve our era’s biggest challenges like climate change, and lead to a societal transformation that will be understood as civilizational change by the year 02100. Peter Leyden has built the case for this extremely positive yet plausible scenario of the period from 02020 to 02050 as a sequel to the Wired cover story and book he co-authored with Long Now cofounder Peter Schwartz 25 years ago called [_The Long Boom: The Future History of the World 1980 to 2020_](https://www.wired.com/1997/07/longboom/). His latest project, [_The Transformation_](https://medium.reinvent.net//), is an optimistic analysis on what lies ahead, based on deep interviews with 25 world-class experts looking at new technologies and long-term trends that are largely positive, and could come together in surprisingly synergistic ways.

Jason Tester: Queering the Future: How LGBTQ Foresight Can Benefit All

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 10:32:45 -0800

Jason Tester asks us to see the powerful potential of "queering the future" - how looking at the future through a lens of difference and openness can reveal unexpected solutions to wicked problems, and new angles on innovation. Might a queer perspective hold some of the keys to our seemingly intractable issues? Tester brings his research in strategic foresight, speculative design work, and understanding of the activism and resiliency of LGBTQ communities together as he looks toward the future. Can we learn new ways of thinking, and thriving, from the creative approaches and adaptive strategies that have emerged from these historically marginalized groups?

James Nestor: The Future of Breathing

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 22 Dec 2020 15:23:28 -0800

Drawing on thousands of years of medical texts and recent cutting-edge studies in pulmonology, psychology, biochemistry, and human physiology, journalist James Nestor questions the conventional wisdom of what we thought we knew about our most basic biological function, breathing. Nestor tracks down men and women exploring the science behind ancient breathing practices like Pranayama, Sudarshan Kriya, and Tummo and teams up with pulmonary specialists to scientifically test long-held beliefs about how we breathe. His inquiry leads to the understanding that breathing is in many ways as important as what we eat, how much we exercise, or whatever genes we’ve inherited.

Nadia Eghbal: The Making and Maintenance of our Open Source Infrastructure

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 09 Dec 2020 19:45:56 -0800

Nadia Eghbal is particularly interested in infrastructure, governance, and the economics of the internet - and how the dynamics of these subjects play out in software, online communities and generally living life online. Eghbal, who interviewed hundreds of developers while working to improve their experience at GitHub, argues that modern open source offers us a model through which to understand the challenges faced by online creators. Her new book, [_Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software_](https://press.stripe.com/working-in-public), is about open source developers and what they tell us about the evolution of our online social spaces. Eghbal sees open source code as a form of public infrastructure that requires maintenance, and that offers us a model through which to understand the challenges faced by online creators on all platforms.

Roman Krznaric: Becoming a Better Ancestor

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 18 Nov 2020 15:02:54 -0800

Human beings have an astonishing evolutionary gift: agile imaginations that can shift in an instant from thinking on a scale of seconds to a scale of years or even centuries. The need to draw on our capacity to think long-term has never been more urgent, whether in areas such as public health care, to deal with technological risks, or to confront the threats of an ecological crisis. What can we do to overcome the tyranny of the now? The drivers of short-termism threaten to drag us over the edge of civilizational breakdown, while ways to think long-term are drawing us towards a culture of longer time horizons and responsibility for the future of humankind. Creating a cognitive toolkit for challenging our obsession with the here and now offers conceptual scaffolding for answering one of the most important questions of our time: How can we be good ancestors? \---Roman Krznaric Roman Krznaric is a public philosopher who writes about the power of ideas to change society. His newest book on the history and future of long-term thinking is [_The Good Ancestor: A Radical Prescription for Long-Term Thinking_](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781615197309). Other books include [_Empathy_](https://smile.amazon.com/Empathy-Why-Matters-How-Get/dp/0399171401/ref=sr_1_3), [_The Wonderbox_](https://smile.amazon.com/Wonderbox-Curious-Histories-How-Live/dp/1846683939/ref=sr_1_1) and [_Carpe Diem Regained_](https://smile.amazon.com/Carpe-Diem-Regained-Vanishing-Seizing/dp/1783524936/ref=sr_1_1), which have been published in more than 20 languages. Krznaric founded the traveling [Empathy Museum](https://www.empathymuseum.com/) and is especially interested in the challenges of how we extend empathy to future generations. Roman Krznaric is also a [Long Now Research Fellow](https://longnow.org/people/associate/).

Julia Watson: Design by Radical Indigenism

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 06 Oct 2020 14:39:45 -0700

Responding to climate change by building hard infrastructures and favoring high-tech homogenous design, we are ignoring millennia-old knowledge of how to live in symbiosis with nature. Without implementing soft systems that use biodiversity as a building block, designs remain inherently unsustainable. There is a cumulative body of multigenerational knowledge, practices, and beliefs designed to sustainably work with complex ecosystems. Watson's work reconnects with this sophisticated global body of knowledge. Julia Watson teaches Urban Design at Harvard and Columbia University and is author of [Lo-TEK. Design by Radical Indigenism](https://www.indiebound.org/search/book?keys=Lo-TEK.+Design+by+Radical+Indigenism) (02019). Her work focuses on experiential, landscape, and urban design, with an ethos towards global ecological change.

Genevieve Bell: The 4th Industrial Revolution: Responsible & Secure AI

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 28 Aug 2020 11:27:26 -0700

>"I have always felt I have an obligation to build the future I want to see. >We know that AI-powered cyber-physical systems (CPS) will scale in society. The challenge we face now is how we do that responsibly and sustainably? If we act proactively, we can avoid some of the negative impacts we have seen during other technological leaps. >We know that AI-powered cyber-physical systems (CPS) will scale in society. The challenge we face now is how we do that responsibly and sustainably? If we act proactively, we can avoid some of the negative impacts we have seen during other technological leaps. >We need to start creating now for that future 30 years hence, when we are completely embedded in both a digital and physical environment, and are experiencing a climate unrecognisable from the climate of today [...] for a future characterised by economic prosperity, social equality and wellbeing, and environmental sustainability." -- Genevieve Bell Genevieve Bell is an Australian anthropologist best known for her work at the intersection of cultural practice and technology development. Bell established the [3A Institute](https://3ainstitute.org/) (at the Australian National University College of Engineering and Computer Science) to focus on exploring how to bring together data science, design thinking and ethnography to drive new approaches in engineering; and to question of what it means to be human in a data-driven economy and world.

Craig Childs: Tracking the First People into Ice Age North America

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 17 Aug 2020 13:39:22 -0700

Craig Childs chronicles the last millennia of the Ice Age, the violent oscillations and retreat of glaciers, the clues and traces that document the first encounters of early humans, and the animals whose presence governed the humans chances for survival. With the cadence of his narrative moving from scientific observation to poetry, he reveals how much has changed since the time of mammoth hunters, and how little. Across unexplored landscapes yet to be peopled, readers will see the Ice Age, and their own age, in a whole new light. Craig Childs is a writer, wanderer and contributing editor at _High Country News_ , commentator for NPR's _Morning Edition_ , and teaches writing at University of Alaska and the Mountainview MFA at Southern New Hampshire University. His books include [Atlas of a Lost World: Travels in Ice Age America](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780345806314 ) (02019), [Apocalyptic Planet](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780307476814) (02013) and [House of Rain](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780316067546) (02008).

Peter Calthorpe: Urban Planet

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 05 Aug 2020 21:52:34 -0700

Throughout Peter Calthorpe's decade-spanning career in urban design, planning, and architecture, he has developed and practiced the key principles of [New Urbanism](https://www.cnu.org/resources/what-new-urbanism): that the most successful places are diverse in uses and users, are scaled to the pedestrian and human interaction, and are environmentally sustainable. Calthorpe developed the concept of Transit Oriented Development, a strategy that is now the foundation of many regional policies and city plans around the world. His work internationally has demonstrated that community design with a focus on environmental sustainability and human scale can be adapted throughout the globe. Most recently Calthorpe launched the urban-planning software [UrbanFootprint](https://urbanfootprint.com/) which models the diverse impacts of urban planning scenarios for designers and planners working for cities, businesses, public agencies and nonprofits.

Lonny J Avi Brooks: When is Wakanda: Imagining Afrofutures

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 27 Jul 2020 12:37:55 -0700

"As a forecaster and Afrofuturist who imagines alternative futures from a Black Diaspora perspective, I think about long-term signals that will shape the next 10 to 100 years." ---Dr. Lonny J Avi Brooks Dr. Brooks develops and promotes a wider Afrocentric perspective that champions Black storytelling and imagination, to push beyond the colonial mindset into an expanded vision of possible futures. Through his work with the [Black Speculative Arts Movement](https://www.bsam-art.com/), [The Afrofuturist Podcast](http://www.theafrofuturistpodcast.com/) which he started with Ahmed Best, [Institute for the Future](https://www.iftf.org/home/), [Fathomers](https://www.fathomers.org/), [Dynamicland](https://dynamicland.org/) and others, Brooks aims to diversify and democratize the building of the future. Lonny J Avi Brooks is an associate professor in communication at California State University, East Bay. As the Co-Principal Investigator for the Long Term and Futures Thinking in Education Project, he has piloted the integration of futures thinking into the communication curriculum. As a leading voice of Afrofuturism 2.0, Brooks contributes prolifically to the field through diverse mediums including journals, conferences, anthologies, exhibits and festivals.

Brian Fisher: Edible Insects

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 15 Jul 2020 16:24:55 -0700

At the intersection of climate change, biodiversity loss, and food scarcity lies an unexpected and abundant resource: insects. [Brian Fisher](https://www.fisherlab.org/) has spent three decades documenting biodiversity in Madagascar, a nation off East Africa that's estimated to contain 5% of the world's total plant and animal life. Across the island, harsh economic realities force local people to choose between preserving their unique ecological heritage and clearing the landscape to make way for sustenance farming. To address the twin issues of malnutrition and habitat loss, Fisher with the [_California Academy of Sciences_](https://www.calacademy.org/) founded a Malagasy-based organization that manufactures protein-packed cricket powder. The edible insects alleviate pressure on endangered habitat while supplementing local diets, providing a model that can be replicated in other food-stressed areas around the world. Fisher is an unparalleled storyteller with updates from the cutting edge of conservation science — and the future of food. Dr. Brian Fisher is curator of entomology at the [California Academy of Sciences](https://www.calacademy.org/) and a world-renowned ant expert. Nicknamed the "Ant Man," Fisher has spent three decades documenting the island of Madagascar's beautiful biodiversity. Along the way, he's discovered over 1,000 new ant species. As he witnessed the biodiversity crisis unfold in Madagascar, Fisher began researching traditional insect-eating practices.

Rick Doblin: Transformational Psychedelics

The Long Now Foundation — Thu, 11 Jun 2020 15:40:39 -0700

Humans have consumed psychedelics for at least the last 10,000 years. The outlawing of psychedelics in most of the world in the 20th century didn’t stop that, but it did put an end to promising research into their psychotherapeutic applications to treat depression, addiction, PTSD, anxiety, and trauma. Today, we’re in the midst of a psychedelic renaissance, with some psychedelics fast on their way to becoming legal medicines. One of the key players behind this movement is Rick Doblin, Ph.D.. In 01986, he founded the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), a non-profit research and educational organization that has developed the medical and legal framework for the use of psychedelics to treat mental health conditions. MAPS has distributed over $20 million to fund psychedelic research and education, and in 02017 won fast-tracked “Breakthrough Therapy” designation from the FDA for using MDMA-assisted psychotherapy to treat Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). With legalization now in sight, what is the future of psychedelic medicine? Rick Doblin, Ph.D., is the founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). He received his doctorate in Public Policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. His life’s work is to develop legal contexts for the beneficial uses of psychedelics.

Laurance Doyle: Interspecies Communication and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 22 Jun 2020 21:50:25 -0700

Dr. Laurance Doyle is an astrophysicist and principal investigator at SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) with expertise in diverse subjects including extrasolar planets, signal processing and communications theory. He has worked on image analysis from the Voyager mission and Halley's Comet, developed statistical methodologies to search for extrasolar planets, and is applying those tools to analyze complex patterns and search for meaning in animal communications.

Eric Ries: Long-Term Stock Exchange

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 02 Mar 2020 22:15:40 -0800

Companies that operate with a long-term mindset tend to outperform their peers over time. But the pressure to achieve short-term quarterly gains often works against longer-term sustainable growth, and can push even the most visionary company into a short-term mindset. In 02019, the Long-Term Stock Exchange was approved as the country’s 14th and newest stock exchange. It offers a new framework for companies to raise capital while keeping their focus on long-term results. By requiring participating companies to accept a set of governance standards and incentive systems that deprioritize the short-term, the Long-Term Stock Exchange hopes to reward investments and business strategies that focus on a longer time horizon. Eric Ries is the founder and CEO of Long-Term Stock Exchange. He created the Lean Startup methodology and is author of _The Lean Startup_ and _The Startup Way_. Ries founded IMVU and served as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Harvard Business School, IDEO, and Pivotal.

Robert McIntyre: Engram Preservation: Early Work Towards Mind Uploading

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 02 Mar 2020 22:17:37 -0800

Is it possible to preserve and read memories after someone has died? Robert McIntyre thinks it is, and that the technology is closer than most people realize. His company [_Nectome_](https://nectome.com/) is working on documenting the physical properties of memory formation, and studying ways to preserve those physical properties after death. McIntyre has already won the Brain Preservation Institutes' [_"Small Mammal"_](https://www.brainpreservation.org/small-mammal-announcement/) & [_"Large Mammal"_](https://www.brainpreservation.org/large-mammal-announcement/) prizes for preserving a full brain down to the synaptic level, and is now taking the next steps in figuring out how to decode those synapses. These are early experiments, but this is the type of work that will be required if we are someday able to preserve a mind and memories past biological death. Robert McIntyre is a former AI researcher at MIT, where he worked with Marvin Minsky, Patrick Winston, and Gerald Sussman studying the role of embodiment in AI. He left MIT in 02015 to compete for the Brain Preservation Prizes, and is currently CEO of Nectome, a company he founded to further develop brain preservation technology.

Tiffany Shlain: 24/6: The Power of Unplugging One Day a Week

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 29 Jan 2020 10:58:46 -0800

As the world is becoming more technologically connected, finding time for oneself and face-to-face connections is becoming increasingly difficult. Many of our talks at Long Now have aimed to help expand our collective now by centuries or even millennia, but what about our personal present? [ _Tiffany Shlain's_](http://www.tiffanyshlain.com/) new book [_24/6: The Power of Unplugging One Day A Week_](https://www.24sixlife.com/) discusses one way to slow down and be more engaged: a technological shabbat, or day of rest. She explains some of the neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, and history of this 3000 year old concept, and how it can help promote creativity in our busy world. Honored by Newsweek as one of the “Women Shaping the 21st Century,” Tiffany Shlain is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker, founder of The Webby Awards and author of _24/6: The Power of Unplugging One Day A Week_. Tiffany’s films and work have received over 80 awards and distinctions including being selected for the Albert Einstein Foundation _Genius:100 Visions of the Future_. She lectures worldwide on the relationship between technology and humanity.

Bina Venkataraman: Long-Term Thinking in a Distracted World

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 29 Jan 2020 10:54:26 -0800

What does practical long-term thinking look like? Bina Venkataraman’s new book, [_The Optimist's Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age_](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780735219472), brings this abstract question to life. Through a series of anecdotes and case studies that draw from her background in public policy, climate change strategy, and journalism, Venkataraman explores pragmatic tactics that can help us think more clearly about our long-term future. Bina Venkataraman is the editorial page editor of _The Boston Globe_. Before joining the _Globe_ , she served as a senior adviser for climate change innovation in the Obama White House, was the director of Global Policy Initiatives at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and taught in the Program on Science, Technology, and Society at MIT.

Andrew McAfee: More From Less

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 02 Dec 2019 13:46:45 -0800

Andrew McAfee draws on a wide range of evidence to show that the world is already on the right track toward long-term health when it combines 1) technological progress, 2) capitalism, 3) responsive government, and 4) public awareness. That blend demonstrably gets humanity “more from less.” It dematerializes the economy and decouples it from exploiting nature while increasing prosperity for ever more people. McAfee argues that dematerialization is occurring because of the combination of capitalism and tech progress (especially progress with digital technologies). Contested markets provide the motive, and tech progress the opportunity, to save money by swapping bits for atoms throughout the economy. But competition and computers don't automatically deal with pollution or protect threatened ecosystems. Two other forces are necessary--public awareness and responsive government. When all four are present, societies can tread more lightly on the Earth and grow in confidence that both humanity and nature can thrive together into the future. The reality of what works departs from every ideology out there. It also makes clear what needs to be further improved in the places where it’s working, such as the US, and what needs to be introduced in the places where it’s not working yet. Andrew McAfee is a research scientist at MIT‘s Sloan School of Management and cofounder of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. He is the author of _More From Less_ (2019) and co-author (with Erik Brynjolfsson) of _Machine, Platform, Crowd_(2017) and _The Second Machine Age_ (2014).

Adrienne Mayor: Gods and Robots: Ancient Dreams of Technology

The Long Now Foundation — Sun, 22 Dec 2019 22:34:16 -0800

Millennia before engineering or software, robots and artificial intelligence were brought to life in Greek myths. The author of [_Gods and Robots Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology_](https://press.princeton.edu/titles/14162.html) traces the link between technology and tyranny from modern day concerns over AI to back to antiquities fear of beings were "made, not born.” [Adrienne Mayor](https://web.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Mayor.html) is a folklorist and historian of ancient science who investigates natural knowledge contained in pre-scientific myths and oral traditions. She has been at Stanford University since 02006; [_Gods and Robots_](https://press.princeton.edu/titles/14162.html) (2018) is her most recent book. Her other books include _The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greek and Roman Times_ (2000); _Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World_ (2003); _The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women_ (2014); and a biography of Mithradates, _The Poison King_ (2010), a National Book Award finalist. She is a 02018-19 Berggruen Fellow at the [Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences](http://casbs.stanford.edu/) (CASBS), co-sponsors of this talk. While at CASBS she is continuing her investigations about how imagination is a link between myths about technology and science. Other projects include researching interdisciplinary topics in geomythology, to discover natural knowledge and scientific realities embedded in mythological traditions about nature.

Annalee Newitz: We're in the Wrong Timeline

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 13 Dec 2019 09:58:23 -0800

[_Annalee Newitz's_](https://www.techsploitation.com/) new novel, [_The Future of Another Timeline_](https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780765392121), is about time travelers in an edit war over history. But it's also about using stories to change the course of civilization. Annalee discusses the idea of time travel, as well as the extensive scientific and historical research they did for the novel. Annalee Newitz writes science fiction and nonfiction. They are the author of the recent novel _The Future of Another Timeline_. Their previous novel, _Autonomous_ , was nominated for the Nebula and Locus Awards, and winner of the Lambda Literary Award. As a science journalist, they are a contributing opinion writer for _The New York Times_ , and have a monthly column in _New Scientist_. They have published in _The Washington Post_ , _Slate_ , _Popular Science_ , _Ars Technica_ , _The New Yorker_ , and _The Atlantic_ , among others. They are also the co-host of the Hugo Award-winning podcast [_Our Opinions Are Correct._](https://www.ouropinionsarecorrect.com/) They were the founder of _io9_ and served as the editor-in-chief of _Gizmodo_.

Suhanya Raffel: World Art Through The Asian Perspective

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 21 Oct 2019 12:12:16 -0700

Coming to the fore in this century is Asian perspective on everything. A thrilling place to watch the shift is in art. Extraordinary contemporary art from all over the world, especially Asia, has been collected for the new world-class museum in Hong Kong called M+. The massive museum won’t open for a year or two, but a rich sample of the collection as well as insight on why it was collected for display in Hong Kong, will be offered by Suhanya Raffel, Executive Director of M+. Before her appointment in 2016 to run M+, Suhanya Raffel was Deputy Director and Director of Collections at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Australia, and Acting Director of the Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art. This SALT talk was arranged as part of the partnership between The Long Now Foundation and the Asia Society Northern California.

Jacob Ward: The Loop: Decision Technology and How to Resist It

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 04 Dec 2019 14:34:25 -0800

If we use AI to write our favorite music for us, will we lose the ability to write music ourselves? If an AI coach keeps divorced parents from arguing by text, can they get along without it? If the only novels and screenplays that get a green light are the ones that AI believes match up with past hits, will we wind up reading and watching the same thing over and over? In this conversation, NBC’s [_Jacob Ward_](https://jacobward.com), described the loop: the endless feedback cycle of pattern-recognition that threatens to collapse the complexity of human behavior into a predictable set of patterns across politics, entertainment, relationships, and art itself. Why is the loop so powerful? Why do companies keep empowering it? And what can we, as private citizens, do to resist its pull? Jacob Ward is a Berggruen Fellow at [_Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences_](https://casbs.stanford.edu) (CASBS), co-sponsor of this talk. Jacob Ward is technology correspondent for NBC News, where he reports on-air for Nightly News with Lester Holt, MSNBC, and The TODAY Show. The former editor-in-chief of Popular Science magazine, Ward was Al Jazeera’s science and technology correspondent from 02013 to 02018, and has hosted investigative documentaries for Discovery, National Geographic, and PBS. As a writer, Ward has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Wired, and many other publications. His ten-episode Audible podcast, Complicated, discusses humanity’s most difficult problems, and he’s the host of an upcoming four-hour public television series, “Hacking Your Mind,” about human decision making and irrationality. Ward is a 02018-19 Berggruen Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, where he’s writing The Loop: Decision Technology and How to Resist It, due for publication by Hachette Book Group in 02020. The book explores how artificial intelligence and other decision-shaping technologies will amplify good and bad human instincts.

Lewis Dartnell: ORIGINS - How Earth’s history shaped human history

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 13 Nov 2019 15:30:25 -0800

From the cultivation of the first crops to the founding of modern states, the human story is the story of environmental forces, from plate tectonics and climate change, to atmospheric circulation and ocean currents. Professor [_Lewis Dartnell_](http://lewisdartnell.com/en-gb) dove into the planet’s deep past, where history becomes science, to explore a web of connections that underwrites our modern world, and that can help us face the challenges of the future. Lewis Dartnell is a Professor of Science Communication at the University of Westminster. Before that, he completed his biology degree at the University of Oxford and his PhD at UCL, and then worked as the UK Space Agency research fellow at the University of Leicester, studying astrobiology and searching for signs of life on Mars. He has won several awards for his science writing and contributes to the Guardian, The Times, and New Scientist. He is also the author of three books. He lives in London, UK.

Brittany Cox: Horological Heritage: Generating bird song, magic, and music through mechanism

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 06 Nov 2019 15:18:36 -0800

From kings and philosophers to craftsmen and inventors, horology has been prized as an extraordinary marriage between art and science. Antiquarian Horologist Brittany Nicole Cox shared her unique experience with objects born from this lineage. We traced their origins to discover how these objects serve as critical mirrors in a world of accelerated discovery. Her lifelong passion for horology has seen her through nine years in higher education where she earned her WOSTEP, CW21, and SAWTA watchmaking certifications, two clockmaking certifications, and a Masters in the Conservation of Clocks and Related Dynamic Objects from West Dean College, UK. In 2015 she opened [Memoria Technica](https://mechanicalcurios.com), an independent workshop where she teaches, practices guilloché, and specializes in the conservation of automata, mechanical magic, mechanical music, and complicated clocks and watches. Her original work has been exhibited at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York and she is currently working on a series of bestiary automata inspired by illuminated texts and a manuscript to be published by Penguin Press.

Monica L. Smith: Cities: The First 6,000 Years

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 23 Aug 2019 10:14:12 -0700

“Cities were the first Internet,” says archaeologist Monica Smith, because they were the first permanent places where strangers met in large numbers for entertainment, commerce, and romance. And the function and form of cities, she notes, have remained remarkably constant over their 6,000 years of history so far. Modern city dwellers would quickly find their way around any city in the past, given our shared architecture of broad avenues, monumental structures, and densely crowded residences. What we learn from examining the long history of cities is what makes them so freeing and empowering for humans and humanity. Density has always been crucial. So has infrastructure, skill specialization, cultural diversity, intense trade with other cities, an economy of acquiring and discarding objects, the delights of fashion and art, religious focus and political focus, intellectual ferment, and technological innovation. The digital internet has not replaced cities, nor is it likely that anything else will, Smith proposes, for the next 6,000 years. Monica L. Smith is an anthropology professor and also a professor in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainabilityat UCLA. She has done archeological fieldwork in India, Bangladesh, Madagascar, Egypt, Tunisia, Turkey, Italy, and England. Her new book is [_Cities: The First 6,000 Years_](https://smile.amazon.com/Cities-First-6-000-Years/dp/073522367X/ref=sr_1_1).

Gurjeet Singh: The Shape Of Data And Things To Come

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 28 Oct 2019 13:19:22 -0700

Big Data promises unparalleled insights, but the larger the data, the harder they are to find. The key to unlocking them was discovered by mathematicians in the 18th century. A modern mathematician explains how to find patterns in data with new algorithms for old math. Gurjeet Singh is Chief AI Officer and co-founder of [Symphony AyasdiAI](https://www.ayasdi.com). He leads a technology movement that emphasizes the importance of extracting insight from data, not just storing and organizing it. Beginning with his tenure as a graduate student in Stanford’s Mathematics Department he has developed key mathematical and machine learning algorithms for Topological Data Analysis (TDA) and their applications. Before starting Ayasdi, he worked at Google and Texas Instruments. Dr. Singh holds a Technology degree from Delhi University and a Computational Mathematics Ph.D. from Stanford. He serves on the Technology Advisory Board at HSBC and on the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Technology Advisory Committee. He was named to Silicon Valley Business Journal’s “40 Under 40” list in 02015. Gurjeet lives in Palo Alto with his wife and two children and develops multi-legged robots in his spare time.

Marcia Bjornerud: Timefulness

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 14 Aug 2019 14:07:06 -0700

We need a poly-temporal worldview to embrace the overlapping rates of change that our world runs on, especially the huge, powerful changes that are mostly invisible to us. Geologist Marcia Bjornerud teaches that kind of time literacy. With it, we become at home in the deep past and engaged with the deep future. We learn to “think like a planet.” As for climate change... “Dazzled by our own creations,” Bjornerud writes, “we have forgotten that we are wholly embedded in a much older, more powerful world whose constancy we take for granted…. Averse to even the smallest changes, we have now set the stage for environmental deviations that will be larger and less predictable than any we have faced before.” A professor of geology and environmental studies at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, Marcia Bjornerud is author of [_Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World_](https://smile.amazon.com/Timefulness-Thinking-Like-Geologist-World/dp/0691181209/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_1) (2018) and [_Reading the Rocks: The Autobiography of the Earth_](https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B001JAH7RE/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i1) (2005).

Mariana Mazzucato: Rethinking Value

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 12 Jul 2019 12:15:37 -0700

What happens when we confuse price with value? We end up undervaluing care. We pollute more. And the financial sector is allowed to brag about how productive it is—while often just moving around existing value, created by others. Most importantly we end up with a form of capitalism that rewards value extraction activities over value creation, increasing inequality in the process. Economist Mariana Mazzucato: “I will argue that the way the word ‘value’ is used in modern economics has made it easier for value-extracting activities to masquerade as value-creating activities. And in the process rents (unearned income) gets confused with profits (earned income); inequality rises, and investment in the real economy falls.” Markets have always been shaped, Mazzucato notes. They can be reshaped now to better reflect and foster real value—creating a more sustainable and inclusive economy. A professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London (UCL), where she founded and directs the [Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose](https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/home), [Mariana Mazzucato](https://marianamazzucato.com/) is the author of [_The Value of Everything: making and taking in the global economy_](https://marianamazzucato.com/books/the-value-of-everything/value-of-everything-us/) (2018) and of [_The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths_](https://marianamazzucato.com/entrepreneurial-state/) (2013).

Neal Stephenson: Neal Stephenson - Fall, or Dodge in Hell

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 14 Aug 2019 14:10:37 -0700

Neal Stephenson author of _Fall, or Dodge in Hell_ in conversation with Long Now Board Member, Kevin Kelly. Tickets included a signed copy of _Fall, or Dodge in Hell_. [_Fall, or Dodge in Hell_](https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062458711/fall-or-dodge-in-hell/) is pure, unadulterated fun: a grand drama of analog and digital, man and machine, angels and demons, gods and followers, the finite and the eternal. In this exhilarating epic, Neal Stephenson raises profound existential questions and touches on the revolutionary breakthroughs that are transforming our future. Combining the technological, philosophical, and spiritual in one grand myth, he delivers a mind-blowing speculative literary saga for the modern age. [Neal Stephenson](https://www.nealstephenson.com) is the bestselling author of the novels _Reamde_ , _Anathem_ , _The System of the World_ , _The Confusion_ , _Quicksilver_ , _Cryptonomicon_ , _The Diamond Age_ , _Snow Crash_ , and _Zodiac_ , and the groundbreaking nonfiction work "In the Beginning...Was the Command Line." He lives in Seattle, Washington.

David Byrne: Good News & Sleeping Beauties

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 21 Jun 2019 12:21:51 -0700

David Byrne has become a scholar and promoter of new good ideas that work in the world. He finds them in health, education, culture, economics, climate, science & technology, transportation, and civic engagement. He has great examples and great slides--as you might expect from an acclaimed visual as well as musical artist. His goal is to spread the word that there are a LOT of new things that work surprisingly well, and they can be applied far and wide. He has also delved into history for “sleeping beauties”—brilliant ideas that got overlooked or forgotten but can be revived. He’s interested in how that rediscovery process works and can be made better. Now 67, David Byrne’s prolific artistic career has earned honors including the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and Grammy, Golden Globe, and Academy Awards. Most famed for his new-wave band “Talking Heads” (1975-1991), Byrne continues to perform on the road and has made numerous films, books, and graphic art works. He frequently collaborates with Long Now board member Brian Eno.

Ian McEwan: Machines Like Me

The Long Now Foundation — Thu, 16 May 2019 22:29:33 -0700

In his new novel, _[_Machines Like Me_](https://smile.amazon.com/Machines-Like-Me-Ian-McEwan/dp/0385545118/ref=sr_1_1)_, Ian McEwan uses science fiction and counter-factual history to speculate about the coming of artificial intelligence and its effect on human relations. The opening page introduces a pivotal character, "Sir Alan Turing, war hero and presiding genius of the digital age.” The evening with McEwan featured conversation with Stewart Brand, based on written questions from the audience, along with some readings. [Ian McEwan](http://www.ianmcewan.com) is the author of _Enduring Love_ (1997), _Amsterdam_ (1998; Booker Prize), _Atonement_ (2001), _Saturday_ (2005), _The Children Act_ (2014), and others. Twelve movies have been made from his novels and short stories, five of them with screenplays by McEwan.

Elizabeth Lonsdorf: Growing Up Ape: The Long-term Science of Studying Our Closest Living Relatives

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 14 May 2019 16:14:30 -0700

Studying primates offers insight into human evolution and behavior. Primatologist Elizabeth Lonsdorf shares her ongoing work with wild chimpanzees and gorillas: a unique long-term project that extends the seminal research by Jane Goodall and colleagues into the 21st century. Modern humans wean years earlier than African apes, a fact that is associated with several unique behaviors of being human (involving fertility, brain development, and life span). But our understanding of weaning in apes is actually quite limited. Dr Lonsdorf uses new technology and tools to better understand chimpanzee and gorilla development, and in the process learn more about us. [Elizabeth V. Lonsdorf](https://www.elizabeth-lonsdorf.com/) is an Associate Professor of Psychology and the Biological Foundations of Behavior Program at Franklin & Marshall College. She began studying primates as an undergraduate at Duke University where she conducted research on percussive foraging in the endangered aye-aye. She completed her Ph.D. at the Jane Goodall Institute's Center for Primate Studies at the University of Minnesota, and was founding director of the Lester E. Fisher Center for the Study and Conservation of Apes at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. She directs Franklin & Marshall’s primate research laboratory, is a National Geographic Emerging Explorer, and serves on the board of directors for Chimp Haven and the National Chimpanzee Sanctuary. She returns annually to Gombe to maintain a research program focused on chimpanzee health and infant development in collaboration with the Jane Goodall Institute and other collaborators. She is a 02018-19 fellow at the [Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences](http://casbs.stanford.edu/) (CASBS) at Stanford University.

Maya Tudor: Can Nationalism be a Resource for Democracy?

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 06 May 2019 14:24:01 -0700

A political scientist examines how foundational nationalisms affect democracy globally, using countries like India and Myanmar to illustrate that some kinds of nationalism can be an essential resource for protecting democracy. Maya Tudor is a comparative political scientist whose research focuses on democracy, nationalist movements, and party competition. She is an associate professor of politics and public policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. She holds a PhD in politics and public policy and an MPA in development studies from Princeton and a BA in economics from Stanford University. Previously she was Special Assistant to Chief Economist Joseph Stiglitz at the World Bank, at UNICEF, in the United States Senate, and at the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee. A dual citizen of Germany and the United States, she has lived and worked in Bangladesh, Germany, France, India, Kenya, Pakistan, the Philippines, the United Kingdom and the United States. Dr. Tudor has held fellowships at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and Oxford’s Centre for the Study of Inequality and Democracy. She is a 02018-19 fellow at the [Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences](https://casbs.stanford.edu) (CASBS) at Stanford, co-sponsors of this talk.

Jeff Goodell: The Water Will Come

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 08 Apr 2019 12:32:42 -0700

The ocean is not just filling up, it’s swelling up. Half of sea-level rise comes just from the warming of the water. No matter what humans do next, we are now doomed to deal with drastically higher flooding of the world's coasts every year for decades, possibly centuries. Nearly half of humanity lives near coasts. Many of our greatest cities, and their infrastructure, will have to deal with the ever-rising waters. Some coasts in the world are already experiencing what is coming for every coast soon. Jeff Goodell's reports from those places are doubly grim. The harm is already huge, but the response of local people is even more disturbing. With few exceptions, they and their governments refuse to accept that the problem is permanent and will keep getting worse. Those most affected by global warming—rich and poor—remain perversely in denial about it. There’s lots of talk, but humanity is doing almost nothing to adapt to sea level rise. So far. Jeff Goodell is author of [_The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World_](https://smile.amazon.com/Water-Will-Come-Remaking-Civilized-ebook/dp/B06XFL2TJF/ref=sr_1_1) (2017), How To Cool the Planet (2010), and Big Coal (2006).

Ed Lu: Charting the High Frontier of Space

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 26 Mar 2019 16:28:20 -0700

Throughout human history, mapping has been the key to the opening of new frontiers. Mapping of previously uncharted regions has enabled economic expansion and the development of new markets, science, and defense. For similar reasons, mapping the locations and trajectories of the millions of uncharted asteroids in our solar system is the key to opening the space frontier. This four-dimensional space map will be crucial to the economic development of space, the protection of the Earth from asteroid impacts, and to understanding the origin and evolution of Earth. Join [Dr. Ed Lu](https://b612foundation.org/members/ed-lu/), former NASA astronaut, co-founder of [B612 Foundation](https://b612foundation.org/) and the current Executive Director of the Asteroid Institute as he makes the case for the need to chart the high frontier of space and learn how you can help. Dr. Ed Lu, Executive Director of the [Asteroid Institute](https://b612foundation.org/), served as a NASA Astronaut for twelve years. He flew aboard the Space Shuttle twice, flew on the Russian Soyuz to the International Space Station and has logged over 206 days in space. Dr. Lu has been an active research scientist working in the fields of solar physics, astrophysics, plasma physics, cosmology, and planetary science. He held positions at the High Altitude Observatory, the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics, and the Institute for Astronomy. At Google, he led the Advanced Projects group which built imaging and data gathering systems for Google Earth and Maps, Google StreetView, and Google Books. He is a co-founder of B612 Foundation, the only organization in the world dedicated to finding, mapping and deflecting asteroids.

Chip Conley: The Modern Elder and the Intergenerational Workplace

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 20 Mar 2019 14:59:26 -0700

What can fifty-somethings bring of value to companies that are mostly twenty-somethings, and vice versa? A needed blending of depth with currency. Chip Conley, a long-time hotelier (Joie de Vivre Hospitality) and author _(Peak; The Rebel Rules; Emotional Equations)_, was hired at 52 by the drastically youthful, disruptive startup Airbnb to be its Head of Global Hospitality and Strategy. He found he was simultaneously an intern learning the digital ropes and a seasoned veteran mentoring the company’s leadership. Expanding beyond the traditional Silicon Valley role of “executive whisperer,” Conley led the company’s focus on its countless hosts worldwide. His new book, _[Wisdom @ Work: The Making of a Modern Elder](https://smile.amazon.com/Wisdom-Work-Making-Modern-Elder/dp/0525572902/ref=sr_1_1)_ , makes the case for intergenerational savvy in organizations and explores what it takes to become a useful elder these days. A jolt of rejuvenation comes with the job.

Christopher Bryan: The Evolving Science of Behavior Change

The Long Now Foundation — Thu, 18 Apr 2019 15:02:21 -0700

Human civilization is used to being saved by technology. The 20th century was defined by humanity’s ability to invent a pill, vaccine, or device to overcome our biggest challenges. Today, many of the most serious threats to human health well-being require large-scale changes in individual behavior. The problem is people are really bad at prioritizing long-term goals over their immediate desires and the science of behavior change is still badly underdeveloped. Christopher Bryan's recent research suggests we can motivate long-lasting behavior change by aligning around values. He'll explain how it works. [Christopher Bryan](https://www.chicagobooth.edu/faculty/directory/b/christopher-j-bryan) studies persuasion and influence with an emphasis on how subtle differences in framing can shape people’s understanding of a behavior or decision and influence their behavior choices. Behavior choices play a critical role in society’s most daunting policy challenges—climate change, global hunger, and obesity, to name some—and have received increasing attention in academic and policy circles. He is a 02018-19 fellow at the [Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences](http://casbs.stanford.edu/) (CASBS) at Stanford University who are co-producers of this talk.

James Holland Jones: The Science of Climate Fiction: Can Stories Lead to Social Action?

The Long Now Foundation — Thu, 04 Apr 2019 11:46:30 -0700

The warming planet is increasingly the subject of all kinds of fiction. Beyond entertainment or distraction could climate fiction (“Cli-Fi”) actually help us in solving the climate dilemma? Biological anthropologist and environmental scientist [James Holland Jones](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=0_6ULyIAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao) explains the neuroscience of narrative: storytelling fits the human brain. Stories might be useful in bringing popular attention to climate and inspiring action on environmental issues. [James Holland Jones](https://people.stanford.edu/jhj1/) is an Associate Professor of Earth System Science and a Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. His research combines human ecology, infectious disease dynamics, social network analysis, and biodemography. Some current research interests include: Climate Change, Mobility, and Infectious Disease; The Evolution of Human Economic Preferences; The Evolution of Human Life Histories; Network-Informed Control of Ebola Virus Disease. He previously spoke at The Interval in 02017 about [Evolutionary Perspective On Behavioral Economics](https://theinterval.org/salon-talks/02017/jan/17/rationality-redeemed-evolutionary-perspective-behavioral-economics) following his fellowship year at the [Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences](https://casbs.stanford.edu/) (CASBS).

Alexander Rose, Kevin Kelly, & Stewart Brand: Siberia: A Journey to the Mammoth Steppe

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 30 Apr 2019 16:30:16 -0700

In August of 02018, Long Now founder Stewart Brand, renowned geneticist George Church, and a delegation of observers and scientists traveled to one of Earth's most remote places to witness the ongoing restoration of a part of Siberia back to its Pleistocene-era ecosystem. The team brought back DNA samples to evaluate for mammoth de-extinction, and lots of photos, video, and stories of a place where climate change and arctic deep time can be witnessed at once. At this event Long Now's Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, and Alexander Rose were joined by filmmakers David Alvarado and Jason Sussberg to discuss the trip and the things they learned along the way.

Martin Rees: Prospects for Humanity

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 22 Jan 2019 11:36:36 -0800

To think usefully about humanity’s future, you have to bear everything in mind simultaneously. Nobody has managed that better than Martin Rees in his succinct summing-up book: _ON THE FUTURE: Prospects for Humanity_. As the recent President of the Royal Society (and longtime Royal Astronomer), Rees is current with all the relevant science and technology. At 76, he has seen a lot of theories about the future come and go. He has expert comfort in thinking at cosmic scale and teaching the excitement of that perspective. He has explored the darkest scenarios in a previous book, _OUR FINAL HOUR: A Scientist’s Warning_ (2004), which examined potential extreme threats from nuclear weapons, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, climate change, and terrorism. Civilization’s greatest danger comes from civilization itself, which now operates at planetary scale. Consequently, he says, to head off the hazards and realize humanity’s potentially fabulous prospects, "We need to think globally, we need to think rationally, we need to think long-term.” And we can.

Niall Ferguson: Networks and Power

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 12 Dec 2018 16:30:58 -0800

“This time is different.” Historians: “Ha.” “The Net is net beneficial.” Historian Niall Ferguson: “Globalization is in crisis. Populism is on the march. Authoritarian states are ascendant. Technology meanwhile marches inexorably ahead, threatening to render most human beings redundant or immortal or both. How do we make sense of all this?” Ferguson analyzes the structure and prospects of “Cyberia” as yet another round in the endless battle between hierarchy and networks that has wrought spasms of innovation and chaos throughout history. He examines those previous rounds (including all that was set in motion by the printing press) in light of the current paradoxes of radical networking enabled by digital technology being the engine of massive hierarchical companies (Facebook, Amazon, Google, Twitter, and their equivalents in China) and exploited by populists and authoritarians around the world. He puts the fundamental question this way: “Is our age likely to repeat the experience of the period after 1500, when the printing revolution unleashed wave after wave of revolution? Will the new networks liberate us from the shackles of the administrative state as the revolutionary networks of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries freed our ancestors from the shackles of spiritual and temporal hierarchy? Or will the established hierarchies of our time succeed more quickly than their imperial predecessors in co-opting the networks, and enlist them in their ancient vice of waging war?” Niall Ferguson is currently a senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and visiting professor at the New College of the Humanities. [His books include ](http://www.niallferguson.com/books)_The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook_ (2018); _Civilization: The West and the Rest_ (2012); and _The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World_ (2009).

Kim Stanley Robinson: Learning From Le Guin

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 12 Jul 2019 12:18:50 -0700

The legacy of [Ursula K Le Guin](http://www.ursulakleguin.com/) lives beyond the page in generations of writers who have learned from her. She used fantastic fiction to imagine ideals for the real world. Kim Stanley Robinson, her student 40 years ago and now a celebrated science fiction writer himself, reflects on Le Guin the teacher, her impact on his work, and how she changed the world. [Kim Stanley Robinson](http://www.kimstanleyrobinson.info/) is an American novelist, widely recognized as one of the foremost living writers of science fiction. His work has been described as "humanist science fiction" and "literary science fiction." He has published more than 20 novels including his much honored "[Mars trilogy](http://www.kimstanleyrobinson.info/content/mars-trilogy)", [_New York 2140_](https://www.amazon.com/New-York-2140-Stanley-Robinson/dp/031626234X) (02017), and [_Red Moon_](https://www.amazon.com/Red-Moon-Kim-Stanley-Robinson/dp/0316262374/) due out in October 02018. Robinson has a B.A. in Literature from UC San Diego and an M.A. in English from Boston University. He earned a Ph.D. in literature from UCSD with a dissertation on the works of Philip K. Dick. [Ursula K Le Guin](http://www.ursulakleguin.com/) was one of the greatest imaginative writers of all time. Her science fiction and fantasy stories (as well as children's books, poetry, essays, and many other genres & forms) have sold millions of copies, earned dozens of awards, and stayed constantly in print. Her honors include six Nebula awards, seven Hugos, and the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In 02003 she became the 20th writer ever to receive the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America's Grand Master award. She passed away in January 02018. Le Guin's book of essays [_No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters_](https://www.amazon.com/No-Time-Spare-Thinking-Matters/dp/1328661598) won a 02018 Hugo award and the 02017 collected edition of her [_Hainish Novels and Stories_](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1598535374/) recently won a Locus award. A documentary entitled [_Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin_](https://worldsofukl.com) will debut in 02018.

Mary Lou Jepsen: Toward Practical Telepathy

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 05 Nov 2018 14:35:25 -0800

With her stunning breakthroughs in neural imaging, Mary Lou Jepsen is making the brain readable (and stimulatable) in real time. That will revolutionize brain study and brain medicine, but what about brain communication? Could a direct high-resolution interface to the brain lead to what might be called practical mental telepathy? What are the prospects for brain enhancement? What are the ethics of direct brain reading and intervention? Mary Lou Jepsen founds programs and companies on the hairy edges of physics, invents solutions and takes them to prototype all the way through to high volume mass production. She's done this at Intel, MIT’s Media Lab, One Laptop Per Child, Pixel Qi, Google X, and Facebook (Oculus). She is the founder and CEO of [Openwater](https://www.openwater.cc/), which is "devising a new generation of imaging technologies, with high resolution and low costs, enabling medical diagnoses and treatments, and a new era of fluid and affordable brain-to-computer communications."

Bruce Sterling: How to Be Futuristic

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 18 Feb 2020 12:30:17 -0800

The future is a kind of history that hasn’t happened yet. The past is a kind of future that has already happened. The present moment vanishes before it can be described. Language, a human invention, lacks the power to fully adhere to reality. We live in a very short now and here, since the flow of events in spacetime is mostly closed to human comprehension. But we have to say something about the future, since we have to live there. So what can we say? Being “futuristic” is a problem in metaphysics; it’s about getting language to adhere to an unknowable reality. But the futuristic quickly becomes old-fashioned, so how can the news stay news? [Bruce Sterling](https://www.wired.com/category/beyond_the_beyond/) is a futurist, journalist, science-fiction author, and culture critic. He is the author of more than 20 books including ground-breaking science ficiton and non-fiction about hackers, design and the future. He was the editor in 01986 of Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (1986) which brought the cyberpunk science fiction sub-genre to a much wider audience. He previous spoke for Long Now about ["The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole"](https://longnow.org/seminars/02004/jun/11/the-singularity-your-future-as-a-black-hole/) in 02004. His [Beyond the Beyond](http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/) blog on Wired.com is now in its 15th year. His most recent book is [_Pirate Utopia_](https://www.amazon.com/Pirate-Utopia-Bruce-Sterling/dp/1616962364).

Stewart Brand: Whole Earth Catalog 50th Anniversary Celebration

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 14 Dec 2018 14:11:50 -0800

50 years ago, Stewart Brand launched the Whole Earth Catalog — one of the cornerstones of the American counterculture. The evening program of The Whole Earth Catalog 50th Anniversary Celebration was held on October 13, 02018, and featured conversations between Whole Earth Catalog contributors and contemporary wave-makers as they discussed the legacy of the Catalog and what the next 50 years might hold. **Speakers included:** **Stewart Brand** is co-founder of Revive & Restore, of The Long Now Foundation, of The WELL, of Global Business Network, and founder/editor of the _Whole Earth Catalog_. His books include _Whole Earth Discipline, The Clock of the Long Now, How Buildings Learn,_ and _The Media Lab_. He was trained as a biologist at Stanford and served as an Infantry officer in the US Army. **Ryan Phelan** is the Executive Director of Revive & Restore, whose mission is to enhance biodiversity through the genetic rescue of endangered and extinct species. After working at _CoEvolution_ in 1976, she launched her entrepreneurial career working in both the not-for-profit and business sector in health care and software technology. **Danica Remy** joined the WELL as a user in 1987, she ran the WELL from 1994-1996 and has served since 1995 as President of Point Foundation, the publisher of Whole Earth publications. Remy is currently President of B612 Foundation, co-founder of Asteroid Day. Previously Chief Operations Officer for Tides and held senior roles in internet companies and helped create Global Business Network. **Rusty Schweickart** was frequent contributor to _CoEvolution_ and _Whole Earth_. In 1969, Apollo 9 astronaut Schweickart was the first to fly the Lunar Module. He served as Chair of California’s Energy Commision and co-founded the Association of Space Explorers (1985) and the B612 Foundation (2002), dedicated to defending the Earth from asteroid impacts. **Kevin Kelly** was publisher and editor of the _Whole Earth Review_ from 1984-1990. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers Conference and was involved with the launch of the WELL. Kelly co-founded _Wired_ in 1993 and served as its Executive Editor for its first seven years. He is also founding editor and co-publisher of the popular Cool Tools website, which has been reviewing tools daily since 2003. **Simone Giertz** is a Swedish inventor, YouTuber and robotics enthusiast. She is world-renowned for her useless machines and has risen to the very top of the field, mainly because the field is very tiny and not of interest to the general populace. **Howard Rheingold** was editor of the _Whole Earth Review_ (1990-94) and the _Millennium Whole Earth Catalog_ (1994), author of a dozen books (including _The Virtual Community_ , 1993, inspired by the WELL). He has taught courses on digital journalism, social media issues and social media literacies at UC Berkeley and Stanford. **Chip Conley** is a hospitality entrepreneur and New York Times bestselling author. Chip served as Airbnb’s Head of Global Hospitality and Strategy for four years and today acts as the company’s Strategic Advisor for Hospitality and Leadership. His five books have made him a leading authority at the intersection of psychology and business. **Stephanie Mills** , a longtime bioregionalist, was assistant editor and editor at _CoEvolution Quarterly_ from 1980 to 1982. She moved to Northwest Lower Michigan in 1984 where she joined the counterculture, helped build her house, started a local currency and produced seven books. **Stephanie Feldstein** is the Population and Sustainability Director at the Center for Biological Diversity, where she leads the Center’s work to highlight and address threats to endangered species and wild places from runaway human population growth and overconsumption. She is the author of _The Animal Lover’s Guide to Changing the World_ , and her work has been featured in _The Huffington Post_ , NPR, _Salon, The Guardian_ , and _Washington Post_. **Sal Khan** is the founder and director of Khan Academy, whose 6,500 free instructional videos on YouTube have been viewed 1.4 billion times by 4.3 million subscribers and are now available in many languages. They have been credited with revolutionizing and democratizing education.

Fred Lyon: San Francisco Time: The Photography of Fred Lyon

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 12 Feb 2020 09:55:56 -0800

[Fred Lyon](http://www.fredlyon.com/) is a time traveler with a camera and tales to tell. At 94-years-old, this former LIFE magazine photographer and fourth generation San Franciscan has an eye for the city and stories to match. We showed photos from Fred's books [_San Francisco, Portrait of a City: 1940-1960_](https://www.papress.com/html/product.details.dna?isbn=9781616892661 "San Francisco, Portrait of a City 1940-1960") and [_San Francisco Noir_](https://www.papress.com/html/product.details.dna?isbn=9781616896515 "San Francisco Noir"), and images spanning his diverse career. In conversation he discusses his art, work, and life; recollections of old friends like Herb Caen and Trader Vic Bergeron; and more, sharing his unique perspective after nearly a century in San Francisco. Fred Lyon's career began in the early 01940's and has spanned news, architecture, advertising, wine and food photography. In the golden years of magazine publishing his picture credits were everywhere from LIFE to VOGUE and beyond. These days find him combing his picture files for galleries, publishers and print collectors. He has been called _San Francisco's Brassa i_. He's also been compared to Cartier Bresson, Atget and Andre Kertez, but all with a San Francisco twist. That's fine with this lifelong native who happily admits his debt to those icons.

Nicola Twilley: Exploring the Artificial Cryosphere

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 23 Aug 2019 10:17:02 -0700

The invisible backbone of our food system is a man-made, distributed, and perpetual winter of refrigeration we've built for our food to live in. It has remade our entire relationship with food, for better and in some ways for worse. The time has come for us all to explore the mysteries of the artificial cryosphere. We need to understand refrigeration's scope and impact in order to take stock of what’s at stake and make sure that the many benefits of our network of thermal control outweigh the enormous costs. Nicola Twilley is writing the first comprehensive look at the global cold chain, due out in 02019. [Nicola Twilley](https://twitter.com/nicolatwilley) is a frequent contributor to [The New Yorker magazine](https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/nicola-twilley) and a co-host of the podcast "[Gastropod](https://gastropod.com)." She is at work on two books: one about refrigeration and the other on quarantine. She blogs at [EdibleGeography.com](http://www.ediblegeography.com).

Julia Galef: Soldiers and Scouts: Why our minds weren't built for truth, and how we can change that

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 19 Sep 2018 16:28:57 -0700

An expert on rationality, judgement, and strategy, Julia Galef notes that "our capacity for reason evolved to serve two very different purposes that are often at odds with each other. On the one hand, reason helps us figure out what’s true; on the other hand, it also helps us defend ideas that are false-but-strategically-useful. I’ll explore these two different modes of thought — I call them “the scout” and “the soldier” — and what determines which mode we default to. Finally, I’ll argue that modern humans would be better off with more scout mode and less soldier mode, and I’ll share some thoughts on how to make that happen.” Galef is founder of the Update Project and hosts the podcast [_Rationally Speaking_](http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/).

Caroline Winterer: The Art and Science of Deep Time: Conceiving the Inconceivable in the 19th Century

The Long Now Foundation — Thu, 06 Feb 2020 12:52:24 -0800

The ambition to think on the scale of thousands, millions, even billion of years emerged in the 19th century. Historian and author [Caroline Winterer](https://history.stanford.edu/people/caroline-winterer) chronicles how the concept of “deep time” has inspired and puzzled thinkers in cognitive science, art, geology (and elsewhere) to become one of the most influential ideas of the modern era. [Caroline Winterer](https://history.stanford.edu/people/caroline-winterer) is Anthony P. Meier Family Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Stanford Humanities Center. She is an American historian, with special expertise in American thought and culture. Her most recent book is _American Enlightenments: Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason_. Other books include _The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750-1900_ , and _The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780-1910_. She has received fellowships from among others the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Humanities Center. Her writing appears in numerous publications and academic journals. For mapping the social network of Benjamin Franklin she received an American Ingenuity Award from the Smithsonian Institution.

Kelly Wanser: Is Reflecting Sunlight from the Atmosphere a Bridge to the Future?

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 14 Jan 2020 21:42:06 -0800

Recent data shows damage from climate change rapidly increasing. There are many scientifically proposed methods (from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the U.K. Royal Society, and the American Geophysical Union among others) for directly reducing atmospheric heat. Yet to date there are still no formal research programs or capabilities to further explore these geoengineering ideas. What are the potential risks and benefits? How do we balance this effort vs. emissions reduction and restoring the natural system? Kelly Wanser of [SilverLining](https://www.silverlining.ngo) discusses her work advocating, educating and coordinating research on this important effort to combat climate change. Kelly Wanser, as Executive Director of [SilverLining](https://www.silverlining.ngo), helps drive research that will ensure safe pathways for climate for people and ecosystems within the coming decade. She works to accelerate adoption of technologies that help us understand and manage climate as a complex systems problem. Ms. Wanser works closely with leading scientists, engineers, technologists and government leaders on efforts to increase research and accelerate progress on reducing atmospheric heat. She testified before the U.S. House Space, Science and Technology Committee as part of a panel on "Geoengineering: Innovation, Research, and Technology." She serves as Board Director for BioCarbon Engineering, who use drone and AI technology to help restore ecosystems, and is a Senior Advisor to BlackBirch, whose hyper-local data helps companies manage weather risk.

Juan Benet: Long Term Info-structure

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 15 Aug 2018 16:10:18 -0700

"We live in a spectacular time,” says Juan Benet. "We're a century into our computing phase transition. The latest stages have created astonishing powers for individuals, groups, and our species as a whole. We are also faced with accumulating dangers -- the capabilities to end the whole humanity experiment are growing and are ever more accessible. In light of the promethean fire that is computing, we must prevent bad outcomes and lock in good ones to build robust foundations for our knowledge, and a safe future. There is much we can do in the short-term to secure the long-term." "I come from the front lines of computing platform design to share a number of new super-powers at our disposal, some old challenges that are now soluble, and some new open problems. In this next decade, we’ll need to leverage peer-to-peer networks, crypto-economics, blockchains, Open Source, Open Services, decentralization, incentive-structure engineering, and so much more to ensure short-term safety and the long-term flourishing of humanity.” Juan Benet is the inventor of the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS)—a new protocol which uses content-addressing to make the web faster, safer, and more open—and the creator of Filecoin, a cryptocurrency-incentivized storage market.

Brian Behlendorf: A Foundation of Trust: Building a Blockchain Future

The Long Now Foundation — Thu, 06 Jun 2019 22:32:40 -0700

An Open Source pioneer, [Brian Behlendorf](https://twitter.com/brianbehlendorf) now leads the effort to build the infrastructure for trust as a service. In the past he helped build the foundations of the Web with [the Apache Foundation](http://www.apache.org/) and brought Open Source to the enterprise with Collab.net. At The Interval he’ll discuss his current work leading [Hyperledger](https://www.hyperledger.org/) at the [Linux Foundation](http://linuxfoundation.org/) to unlock blockchain’s potential beyond cryptocurrency. [Brian Behlendorf](https://twitter.com/brianbehlendorf) is Executive Director for [Hyperledger](https://hyperledger.org), a project of the Linux Foundation. Hyperledger is an open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies. Previously he was the primary developer of the Apache Web server, the most popular web server software on the Internet, and a founding member of the Apache Software Foundation. He was the founding CTO of CollabNet and CTO of the World Economic Forum. Most recently, Behlendorf was a managing director at Mithril Capital Management LLC, a global technology investment firm. He is a long-serving board member of the Mozilla Foundation and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Esther Dyson: The Short Now: What Addiction, Day Trading, and Most of Society’s Ills Have in Common

The Long Now Foundation — Thu, 09 Jan 2020 09:18:32 -0800

Long Now board member Esther Dyson shares her ongoing work to move communities away from short-term thinking and into health. In conversation with previous Interval speaker [Kara Platoni](http://www.karaplatoni.com/), she discusses how short-term desire is addiction, affecting not just individuals but institutions and culture. Dyson’s founded the 10-year [Wellville](http://wellville.net) project, now underway in five communities across the US, to tap into people’s natural resilience and build long-term desire: purpose. [Esther Dyson](http://www.edventure.com/) is a Long Now Board member, founder of [Wellville](http://www.wellville.net/), and chairman of EDventure Holdings. She is an active angel investor, best-selling author, board member and advisor concentrating on emerging markets and technologies, new space and health. She sits on the boards of 23andMe and is an investor in Crohnology, Eligible API, Keas, Omada Health, Sleepio, and StartUp Health, among others. For 6 months in 02008-02009, Esther lived outside Moscow, Russia, training as a backup cosmonaut. [Kara Platoni](http://www.karaplatoni.com/) is a science reporter who has traveled around the world interviewing scientists and biohackers. She is lecturer and assistant dean for students at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. She has spoken twice at The Interval: [once about her book](https://theinterval.org/salon-talks/02016/mar/01/transforming-perception-one-sense-time) _We Have the Technology_ and also as part of our [Scurvy Salon event](https://theinterval.org/salon-talks/02017/may/16/scurvy-still-us).

George P. Shultz: Perspective

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 01 Aug 2018 17:27:20 -0700

Perspective? No one has a longer or better-informed view of world affairs and America's role than George Shultz, now 97. (Henry Kissinger is only 95.) Secretary Shultz was a US Marine Captain in World War II. After becoming an economics professor at MIT and the University of Chicago he served the Nixon administration as Secretary of Labor, then director of the Office of Management and Budget, then Secretary of the Treasury. Back in private life by 1974, he led Bechtel Group as executive vice president and president. He was appointed by President Reagan as Secretary of State in 1982, where he helped finesse Reagan’s relationship with Gorbachev that wound down the Cold War. Still active in public policy after leaving government in 1989, Shultz has been an advocate for legalizing recreational drugs, for ending the Cuban embargo, for a world totally free of nuclear weapons, and for a revenue-neutral carbon tax. Secretary Shultz was interviewed on stage by Peter Schwartz, head of strategy for Salesforce and a founding board member of Long Now, formerly the CEO of Global Business Network and author of _The Art of the Long View_ (01991). This SALT talk was arranged in partnership with the [Asia Society of Northern California](https://asiasociety.org/northern-california). **The Long Now Foundation** and **Asia Society Northern California** are partnering on a series of talks in Long Now's _Seminars About Long-term Thinking_ series. With the Asia Pacific region being vital to long term thinking for the planet, and especially for those on the Pacific coast, we believe that there is a fruitful collaboration to explore for both of our memberships and the wider public. The Asia Society's depth of knowledge about critical issues, key leaders and cultural perspectives coming out of Asia can inform the topics, people and conversations featured in the long-running Seminar series curated and hosted by Long Now's president Stewart Brand. Public access to the recorded talks broadens the reach of this in-depth collaboration.

Hannu Rajaniemi: The Spirit Singularity: Science and the Afterlife at the Turn of the 20th Century

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 10 Apr 2019 10:05:36 -0700

Scifi author, scientist, and entrepreneur Hannu Rajaniemi discusses the real life late Victorian attempts to map the afterlife which inspired _Summerland_ , his latest novel. Rajaniemi introduces us to scientists, inventors, misfits, revolutionaries, plus a tour of obscure ideas and bizarre inventions: spirit-powered sewing machines, aetheric knots, the four-dimensional geometry of Lenin’s tomb... What do these actual Victorian obsessions tell us about today’s fascination with intelligent machines and immortality? Hannu Rajaniemi was born in Finland, obtained his PhD in string theory at the University of Edinburgh and now works as a co-founder and CTO of HelixNano, a synthetic biology startup based in the Bay Area. He is the author of four novels including [The _Quantum Thief_ trilogy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quantum_Thief) and _Summerland_.

Shahzeen Attari: Facts, Feelings and Stories: How to Motivate Action on Climate Change

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 15 Aug 2018 12:22:49 -0700

An environmental researcher examines perceptions of energy use & conservation and asks how we can inspire behavioral change and policy support in individuals and the public at large. With a background in environmental engineering and training in cognitive science, Dr. Attari searches for the narratives that can help us improve our environmental decision-making. [Shahzeen Attari](https://www.szattari.com/) works on environmental decision-making at the individual level, looking at biases that shape people’s judgments and decisions about resource use, especially use of energy and water. She is an [Associate Professor at the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University](https://spea.indiana.edu/faculty-research/directory/profiles/faculty/full-time/attari-shahzeen.html). She holds a joint PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering & Engineering and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon, as well as a BS in Engineering Physics from the [University of Illinois](http://illinois.edu/). She was a postdoctoral fellow at the [Earth Institute and the Center for Research on Environmental Decisions (CRED)](http://cred.columbia.edu/) at Columbia University. Dr Attari is a 02017-18 Fellow at the [Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences](http://casbs.stanford.edu/) (CASBS) at Stanford University (co-producers of this talk) and a 02018 Andrew Carnegie Fellow.

Chris D. Thomas: Are We Initiating The Great Anthropocene Speciation Event?

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 26 Jun 2018 15:05:14 -0700

The bad news (not news to most): Many wild species are under severe duress. The good news (total news to most): “Nature is thriving in an age of extinction.” Ecologist and evolutionary biologist Chris Thomas has examined a little-noticed phenomenon around the world, that as an unintentional byproduct of massive human impact, _biodiversity is increasing in pretty much every region of the world_. Evolution has sped up. Wild populations are on the move, sometimes in response to climate change, often hitch-hiking on us. Hybridization is rampant, leading at times to whole new species. The Anthropocene, evidently, is a mass speciation event. An ardent conservationist, Thomas makes the case that conservation efforts are far more effective when we acknowledge—and study— what nature is really up to, and work with it. Chris Thomas is a professor in the Department of Biology at the University of York in England and author of _Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction_ (02017).

Benjamin Grant: Overview: Earth and Civilization in the Macroscope

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 30 May 2018 10:24:17 -0700

Civilization is both astonishing and astonishingly various when viewed from slightly above. Not so far above as to be lost in planetary context, but just high enough to see a fascinating thing whole, entire, intensely peculiar and informative. The glory is in the high-resolution details, in the perpetually surprising god’s-eye perspective, and in the shocking patterns that we arrange things in without even knowing it. Revel in a host of such images and the understanding that emerges from them with collector/curator Benjamin Grant, author of the book _Overview_ and host of the Instagram project “[Daily Overview](https://www.instagram.com/dailyoverview/).”

Annalee Newitz: Science Needs Fiction

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 13 Jul 2020 17:24:59 -0700

Science fiction does more than predict future inventions. Stories are a testbed for exploring the unexpected ways people could incorporate technology into their cultures. Science journalist and novelist [Annalee Newitz](http://techsploitation.com) discusses how scientists, innovators, and the rest of us benefit from the crucible of imaginative fictions. Annalee is the author of the bestselling novel _[Autonomous](https://www.amazon.com/Autonomous-Novel-Annalee-Newitz/dp/0765392070)_. Her nonfiction book _[Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction](https://www.amazon.com/Scatter-Adapt-Remember-Survive-Extinction/dp/0307949427/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8)_ was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize in science. She is the founding editor of io9.com, and formerly the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo. Currently she is editor-at-large for Ars Technica. Her work has appeared in New York Times, The New Yorker, Atlantic, Wired, Washington Post, Technology Review, 2600, and many other publications. Formerly she was a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a lecturer in American Studies at UC Berkeley. She received a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship from MIT, and has a Ph.D. in English and American Studies from UC Berkeley.

Kishore Mahbubani: Has the West Lost It? Can Asia Save It?

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 30 Apr 2018 22:17:55 -0700

In Kishore Mahbubani’s view, global power is shifting from the West to the Rest—from Europe and North America to Asia and Africa. He argues that changes will be required both in the West and the Rest to manage the shift gracefully for long-term stability. The rest of the world has learned a great deal from the West. Now it is the West’s turn to learn and to dispel some of its myths about the new world order. Singaporean diplomat and scholar Kishore Mahbubani served as his nation’s Ambassador to the United Nations and as President of the UN Security Council. He is a Professor in the Practice of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore where he was Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy from 2004 to 2017. His books include _Has the West Lost It?: A Provocation_ (2018); _The ASEAN Miracle_ (2017); _The Great Convergence_ (2013); and _The New Asian Hemisphere_ (2008). **The Long Now Foundation** and **Asia Society Northern California** are partnering on a series of talks in Long Now's Seminars About Long-term Thinking series. With the Asia Pacific region being vital to long term thinking for the planet, and especially for those on the Pacific coast, we believe that there is a fruitful collaboration to explore for both of our memberships and the wider public. The Asia Society's depth of knowledge about critical issues, key leaders and cultural perspectives coming out of Asia can inform the topics, people and conversations featured in the long-running Seminar series curated and hosted by Long Now's president Stewart Brand. Public access to the recorded talks broadens the reach of this in-depth collaboration.

Jennifer Granick: Modern Surveillance: Why You Should Care and What You Can Do

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 04 May 2020 09:24:52 -0700

The future of privacy begins with the current state of surveillance. The 21st century practices of US intelligence agencies push the technological, legal and political limits of lawful surveillance. Jennifer Granick is a civil liberties and privacy law expert with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) who is the perfect guide to how the system works and the technological and political means we have to defend our privacy. Jennifer Granick fights for civil liberties in an age of massive surveillance and powerful digital technology. As surveillance and cybersecurity counsel with the ACLU Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, she litigates, speaks, and writes about privacy, security, technology, and constitutional rights. She is the former Executive Director of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society and also former Civil Liberties Director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Her book _American Spies: Modern Surveillance, Why You Should Care, and What To Do About It_ won the 02016 Palmer Civil Liberties Prize for scholarship exploring the tension between civil liberties and national security in contemporary American society. An experienced litigator and criminal defense attorney, she has taught subjects like surveillance law, cybersecurity, and encryption policy at Stanford Law School.

Renée DiResta: Disinformation Technology: How Online Propaganda Campaigns Are Influencing Us

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 06 Apr 2020 12:32:17 -0700

Clandestine influence campaigns are rampant on social media. Whether pushing Russian agitprop or lies about vaccines, they can impact policy and make us question what is true. A technologist, Wall Street veteran, and citizen advisor to Congress, DiResta told us how bad it is and some things we can do. [Renée DiResta](http://www.reneediresta.com/) studies narrative manipulation as the Director of Research at New Knowledge. She is a Mozilla Foundation fellow on Media, Misinformation and Trust, and is affiliated with the Berkman-Klein Center at Harvard and the Data Science Institute at Columbia University. Renee is a WIRED Ideas contributor, writing about discourse and the internet. In past lives she has been on the founding team of supply chain logistics startup Haven, a venture capitalist at OATV, and a trader at Jane Street.

Judy Wajcman: Time Poverty Amidst Digital Abundance

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 21 May 2019 02:14:16 -0700

Technology’s promise is to “save” time. Its track record in real and psychological terms is often the opposite. A sociologist of science and technology, Judy Wajcman continues her examinations of time pressure and acceleration in the digital age. Her latest work considers how calendar software interacts with the existing anxieties of our digitally driven lives. Judy Wajcman is the Anthony Giddens Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics. Professor Wajcman was one of the founding contributors to the field of the social study of Science and Technology, as well as to studies of gender, work and organizations. Her latest books, _Pressed for Time_ and _The Sociology of Speed_ , argue for a sociomaterial approach to the study of time. She was a 02017-18 fellow at the [Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences](https://casbs.stanford.edu) (CASBS) at Stanford, co-sponsors of this talk.

Steven Pinker: A New Enlightenment

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 19 Mar 2018 18:03:32 -0700

## Making the world better **Much of Pinker’s talk** was devoted to showing how most of the things than humans care about (except climate) have been getting drastically better over the last few centuries and decades. The roster includes length of life, health, food, prosperity, education, human rights, freedom from violence and accidents, leisure, and happiness—world wide. That good news is surprising to many and unwelcome to some, who fear it could foster complacent optimism. “While pessimists sound like they’re trying to help you,“ Pinker noted, “optimists sound like they’re trying to sell you something.” So Pinker explored the specific causes of progress in each domain and what it will take to keep the progress going over the coming decades and centuries despite inevitable setbacks and new threats. The main roots of continual advance Pinker sees as the values pushed by the 18th Century Enlightenment—reason, science, humanism, and progress. Those values can’t be taken for granted because they are far from universal. From the 18th Century to this day, they are opposed and sometimes defeated by authority, tradition, faith, mysticism, intuition, ideology, romanticism, and exclusion. Human nature doesn’t change much, but progress can proceed anyway thanks to benign institutions such as democracy, markets, a free press, schools and universities, scientific societies, declarations of rights, and global organizations for cooperation. Their job is to apply knowledge and sympathy to enhance human flourishing. It is no accident that “Secular liberal democracies are the happiest and healthiest places on Earth.” What is the program for continued progress? Don’t treat every problem as a sign that we should burn down our institutions and hope for something better to rise out of the ashes. Nor should we treat progress as a mystical force guaranteed to lift us ever upward. Progress is the result of human effort, guided by an _idea_ : that if we apply reason and science to make a better world, we can gradually succeed. If we continue to embrace that idea, Pinker concluded, it’s reasonable to expect progress to continue. If we don’t, it may not.

Michael Frachetti: Open Source Civilization and the Unexpected Origins of the Silk Road

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 09 Mar 2018 13:16:01 -0800

Travel the ancient Silk Road with an archaeologist researching a revolutionary idea. Nomadic pastoralists, far from being irrelevant outliers, may have helped shape civilizations at continental scale. Drawing on his exciting field work, Michael Frachetti shows how alternative ways of conceptualizing the very essence of the word “civilization” helps us to recast our understanding of regional political economies through time and discover the unexpected roots and formation of one of the world’s most extensive and long-standing social and economic networks – the Silk Road that connected Asia to Europe. Archaeologist Michael Frachetti is an Associate Professor with the Department of Anthropology, Washington University in St. Louis and author of _Pastoralist Landscapes and Social Interaction in Bronze Age Eurasia_ (02008).

Charles C. Mann: The Wizard and the Prophet

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 29 Jan 2018 14:47:38 -0800

## Two ways to save humanity **Mann titled his talk “The Edge of the Petri Dish.”** He explained, “If you drop a couple protozoa in a Petri dish filled with nutrient goo, they will multiply until they run out of resources or drown in their own wastes.” Humans in the world Petri dish appear to be similarly doomed, judging by our exponential increases in population, energy use, water use, income, and greenhouse gases. How to save humanity? Opposing grand approaches emerged from two remarkable scientists in the mid-20th century who fought each other their entire lives. Their solutions were so persuasive that their impassioned argument continues 70 years later to dominate how we think about dealing with the still-exacerbating exponential impacts. Norman Borlaug, the one Mann calls “the Wizard,” was a farm kid trained as a forester. In 1944 he found himself in impoverished Mexico with an impossible task—solve the ancient fungal killer of wheat, rust. First he invented high-volume crossbreeding, then shuttle breeding (between winter wheat and spring wheat), and then semi-dwarf wheat. The resulting package of hybrid seeds, synthetic fertilizer, and irrigation became the Green Revolution that ended most of hunger throughout the world for the first time in history. There were costs. The diversity of crops went down. Excess fertilizer became a pollutant. Agriculture industrialized at increasing scale, and displaced smallhold farmers fled to urban slums. William Vogt, who Mann calls “the Prophet,” was a poor city kid who followed his interest in birds to become an isolated researcher on the revolting guano islands of Peru. He discovered that periodic massive bird die-offs on the islands were caused by the El Niño cycle pushing the Humboldt Current with its huge load of anchovetas away from the coast and starving the birds. The birds were, Vogt declared, subject to an inescapable “carrying capacity.“ That became the foundational idea of the environmental movement, later expressed in terms such as “limits to growth,” “ecological overshoot,” and “planetary boundaries.” Vogt spelled out the worldview in his powerful 1948 book, _The Road to Survival_. The Prophets-versus-Wizards debate keeps on raging—artisanal organic farming versus factory-like mega-farms; distributed solar energy versus centralized fossil fuel refineries and nuclear power plants; dealing with climate change by planting a zillion trees versus geoengineering with aerosols in the stratosphere. The question continues: How do we best manage our world Petri dish? Restraint? Or innovation? Can humanity change its behavior at planet scale? Mann ended by pointing out that in 1800 slavery was universal in the world and had been throughout history. Then it ended. How? Prophets say that morally committed abolitionists did it. Wizards say that clever labor-saving machinery did it. Maybe it was the combination.

Tim O'Reilly: What’s The Future? It’s Up to Us.

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 03 Mar 2021 20:49:29 -0800

Based on four decades in technology and media, constantly in the eye of innovation, O’Reilly is starting vital conversations about our future. Be ready for keen details on how we got here, a frank assessment of emerging challenges, and a bold call to action for the sake of the generations on the horizon. Tim O’Reilly is founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Inc. If you’ve heard the term “open source software” or “web 2.0” or “the Maker movement” or “government as a platform” or “the WTF economy,” he’s had a hand in framing each of those big ideas. With these and many other efforts over the years, Tim has helped the tech industry better understand itself and its influence beyond innovation for innovation's sake. His leadership and insight continue to be invaluable as he now highlights the responsibility that goes along with that influence. [He spoke in Long Now's Seminars About Long-term Thinking series in 02012](https://longnow.org/seminars/02012/sep/05/birth-global-mind/).

Nathaniel Persily: Can Democracy Survive the Internet?

The Long Now Foundation — Thu, 07 Dec 2017 11:19:28 -0800

The Internet was once seen as a democratizing force, but today social media platforms have become exploitable intermediaries of political discourse. How should governments, institutions and tech companies respond? In the wake of an Internet-mediated and norm-breaking election, we've asked one of the United States' premier election law experts to speak for us about what comes next. Author and Stanford Law professor Nathaniel Persily focuses on the law of democracy, addressing issues such as voting rights, political parties, campaign finance and redistricting. A sought-after nonpartisan voice in voting rights, he has served as a court-appointed expert to draw legislative districting plans for Georgia, Maryland and New York and as special master for the redistricting of Connecticut’s congressional districts. His other principal area of scholarly interest concerns American public opinion toward various constitutional controversies. Persily designed the Constitutional Attitudes Survey, a national public opinion poll executed in both 02009 and 02010. The survey includes an array of questions concerning attitudes toward the Supreme Court, constitutional interpretation and specific constitutional controversies. He also served on the Presidential Commission on Election Administration, a bipartisan commission created by President Obama to deal with the long lines at the polling place and other administrative problems witnessed in the 02012 election.

Elena Bennett: Seeds of a Good Anthropocene

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 29 Dec 2017 13:11:36 -0800

As humans increasingly dominate Earth’s natural systems over the coming centuries (“the Anthropocene”), how can we ensure that it becomes a “good Anthopocene”—a world in which nature and humanity prosper together? Ecosystem ecologist Elena Bennett believes that discovering the most effective paths to such a future is a bottom-up process, as countless projects all over the world are exploring how nature and humans can best collaborate. She has collected 500 such examples and assembled them into a hopeful narrative pointing toward an Anthropocene Epoch in which all life thrives. Instances of the good Anthropocene are already here. They just need to be examined, distributed, and connected up to a working whole.

Renee Wegrzyn: Engineering Gene Safety

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 20 Nov 2017 13:55:42 -0800

Genome editing technologies provide the unprecedented ability to modify genetic material in a manner that is targeted, rapid, adaptable, and broadly accessible. Advances in genome editing form the foundation for new transformative applications across all of biology, ranging from highly personalized therapeutics to control of mosquito populations in the wild to reduce vector borne diseases. Extension of these technologies to gene drives and germline editing, which can alter the outcomes of inheritance, brings into focus the potential use of these tools in real clinical or ecological settings. While the potential for societal benefit from these technologies is immense, longer-term ramifications, such as the potential for these tools to impact large populations of organisms and ecosystems over many generations, must also be considered. Therefore, to support the safe and responsible use of gene editors, it is imperative that we innovate and build-in biosafety and biosecurity technologies early for future applications, including strategies to control, counter, and remediate the outcomes of gene editing. Co-development of safety measures ensures the continued rapid pace of technological progress, helps realize the potential of gene editors, and, importantly, enables novel applications to be accessible to the broadest and most impactful possible range of communities for public benefit. Dr. Renee Wegrzyn is a Program Manager at DARPA working to apply the tools of synthetic biology to support biosecurity and outpace infectious disease. Dr. Wegrzyn holds Doctor of Philosophy and Bachelor of Science degrees in Applied Biology from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Margaret Levi: The Organized Pursuit of Knowledge

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 18 Apr 2018 10:16:19 -0700

The human quest to understand our world continues. The Director of Stanford’s [Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS)](http://casbs.stanford.edu/) discusses how academics and researchers have organized the study of human action, society, and institutions over time, how they share their findings, and what transformations we need for the future. [Margaret Levi](https://casbs.stanford.edu/margaret-levi) is Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and the Sara Miller McCune Director of CASBS. She is Jere L. Bacharach Professor Emerita of International Studies in the Department of Political Science at the University of Washington. She became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow in 2002, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2015.

David Grinspoon: Earth in Human Hands

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 19 Sep 2017 19:10:25 -0700

## Cognitive planet **Thanks to the growing human domination** of natural systems on Earth, people say we are entering an Anthropocene Epoch, Grinspoon began, but what if the term “epoch” understates the consequence of what is going on? Astrobiologists recently learned that planet formation is the norm in the universe, and now they’re trying to find out if life formation is also the norm. They won’t look for signs of mere geological epochs on other planets; they’re looking for eon-scale transitions like the three that Earth has gone through in its 4.8 billion years, all caused by life. About 4 billion years ago the Archean Eon began with the origin of simple life. Then 2.5 billions years ago the Proterozoic Eon unleashed “the Great Oxygenation Event” caused by cyanobacteria adopting solar energy (photosynthesis). “That’s when life took over the planet,” said Grinspoon. Everything accelerated further 542 million years ago with the Cambrian Explosion of complex life of plants and animals—the Phanerozoic Eon. Which we’re still in. Or are we? Alien astrobiologists could have noticed the Proterozoic transition by detecting the dramatic destabilization of Earth’s atmosphere. The Phanerozoic transition would have been apparent from forest fires glowing on Earth’s night side, indicating combustible plant material. What would outside observers make of our current night side, blazing with dazzling cities? Or of bits of Earth firing off purposefully to orbit other planets and moons in the Solar System? “Potentially,” Grinspoon suggested,”we’re at another eon boundary now, with an equally profound transition in the relationship between life and the planet, when cognitive processes become planetary processes. Is intelligence a planetary property, like life? Can it become a self-sustaining property, like life? Is civilization adaptive, or will it be a dead end?” We can ask, what do humans have that similarly cataclysmic cyanobacteria did not have? Awareness, intention, collaboration, and maybe a sense of responsibility. “The Anthropocene dilemma,” Grinspoon said, “is that we have global influence without global control. So far we’re acting like adolescent planet vandals.” He concluded, “In order to choose a constructive role rather than a destructive role, we have to see ourselves in the very long time scale. Our deep history shows that humanity is unique in its capacity for self-reinvention. If we can develop a mature, long-term, healthy relationship with world-changing technology and if we proceed with a careful combination of innovation and restraint, our planet could become Terra Sapiens—Wise Earth.” (Bonus point: When asked why people seem to be more worried about engineers hacking genetic code than hacking digital code, Grinspoon said, “Maybe it’s because the monsters we can imagine are scarier than the monsters we can’t imagine.” He added, “We tend to learn things through exploration, not through imagination.”)

Scott Kildall: Art Thinking + Technology: A Personal Journey of Expanding Space and Time

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 25 Sep 2020 16:08:17 -0700

What place is there for art in the 21st century world of technology, business, and science? Everywhere. Award-winning cross-disciplinary artist and current [SETI artist-in-residence](http://air.seti.org/) Scott Kildall discusses collaborating with scientists, technologists, and others. He shared [his work](http://kildall.com/projects/) and explained the vital role for Art Thinking as a tool that offers perspective in a dynamic, fast-moving world. [Scott Kildall](http://kildall.com/ "Scott Kildall") is a cross-disciplinary artist whose work includes writing algorithms that transform datasets into 3D sculptures and installations. His art often invites public participation through direct interaction. He has been an artist in residence with [the SETI Institute](https://www.seti.org/ "SETI AIR") and [Autodesk](https://www.autodesk.com/pier-9/residency/home "The Pier 9 Residency Program"); and his work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the New York Hall of Science, Transmediale, the Venice Biennale and the San Jose Museum of Art. Besides many other fellowships, residencies, and honors.

Nicky Case: Seeing Whole Systems

The Long Now Foundation — Thu, 17 Aug 2017 14:32:43 -0700

### How to finesse complexity **HE BEGAN, “Hi, I’m Nicky Case, and I explain complex systems in a visual, tangible, and playful way.”** He did exactly that with 207 brilliant slides and clear terminology. What system engineers call “negative feedback,” for example, Case calls “balancing loops.” They maintain a value. Likewise “positive feedback” he calls “reinforcing loops.” They increase a value Using examples and stories such as the viciousness of the board game Monopoly and the miracle of self-organizing starlings, Case laid out the visual basics of finessing complex systems. A reinforcing loop is like a ball on the top of a hill, ready to accelerate downhill when set in motion. A balancing loop is like a ball in a valley, always returning to the bottom of the valley when perturbed. Now consider how to deal with a situation where you have an “attractor” (a deep valley) that attracts a system toward failure: [![](https://media.longnow.org/files/2/CaseSlide2.png)](https://media.longnow.org/files/2/CaseSlide2.png) The situation is precarious for the ball because it is near a hilltop that is a reinforcing loop. If the ball is nudged over the top, it will plummet to the bottom of the balancing-loop valley and be stuck there. It would take enormous effort raise the ball out of such an attractor—which might be financial collapse or civil war. Case’s solution is not to try to move the ball, MOVE THE HILLS—identify the balancing and reinforcing loops in the system and weaken or strengthen _them_ as needed to reconfigure the whole system so that the desired condition becomes the dominant attractor. Now add two more characteristics of the real world—dense networks and chaos (randomness). They make possible the phenomena of emergence (a whole that is different than the sum of its parts) and evolution. Evolution is made of selection (managed by reinforcing and balancing loops) plus variation (unleashed by dense networks and chaos). You cannot control evolution and should not try--that way lies totalitarianism. Our ever popular over-emphasis on selection can lead to paralyzed systems—top-down autocratic governments and frozen businesses. Case urges attention to variation, harnessing networks and chaos from the bottom up via connecting various people from various fields, experimenting with lots of solutions, and welcoming a certain amount of randomness and play. “Design _for_ evolution,” Case says, “and the system will surprise you with solutions you never thought of.” To do that, “Make chaos your friend.”

Carolyn Porco: Searching for Life in the Solar System

The Long Now Foundation — Thu, 10 Aug 2017 16:43:48 -0700

## Life nearby **If we find, anywhere in the universe, one more instance of life** besides what evolved on Earth, then we are bound to conclude that life is common throughout the vastness of this galaxy and the 200 billion other galaxies. The discovery would change how we think about everything. Most of the search for life beyond Earth, Porco explained, is the search for habitats. They don’t have to look comfy, since we know that our own extremophile organisms can survive temperatures up to 250°F, total desiccation, and fiercely high radiation, high pressure, high acidity, high alkalinity, and high salinity. In our own Solar System there are four promising candidate habitats—Mars, Europa (a moon of Jupiter), Titan (a moon of Saturn), and Enceladus (“en-SELL-ah-duss,” another moon of Saturn). They are the best nearby candidates because they have or have had liquids, they have bio-usable energy (solar or chemical), they have existed long enough to sustain evolution, and they are accessible for gathering samples. On Mars water once flowed copiously. It still makes frost and ice, but present conditions on Mars are so hostile to life that most of the search there now is focussed on finding signs of life far in the past. Europa, about the size of Earth’s Moon, has a salty ocean below an icy surface, but it is subject to intense radiation. Photos from the Hubble Space Telescope revealed that occasional plumes of material are ejected through Europa's ice, so future missions to Jupiter will attempt to fly by and analyze them for possible chemical signatures of life. The two interesting moons of Saturn are Titan, somewhat larger and much denser than our Moon, and tiny Enceladus, one-seventh the diameter of our Moon. Both have been closely studied by the Cassini Mission since 2004. Titan’s hazy atmosphere is full of organic methane, and its surface has features like dunes and liquid-methane lakes “that look like the coast of Maine.” But it is so cold, at 300°F below zero, that the chemical reactions needed for life may be too difficult. Enceladus looks the most promising. Cassini has sampled the plumes of material that keep geysering out of the south pole. The material apparently comes from an interior water ocean about as salty as our ocean, and silica particles may indicate hydrothermal vents like ours. “I hope you’re gettin excited now,” Porco told the audience, “because we were.” The hydrothermal vents in Earth’s oceans are rich with life. Enceladus has all the ingredients of a habitat for life—liquid water, organics, chemical energy, salts, and nitrogen-bearing compounds. We need to look closer. A future mission (arriving perhaps by the 2030’s) could orbit Enceladus and continually sample the plumes with instruments designed to detect signs of life such as complexity in the molecules and abundance patterns of carbon in amino acids that could indicate no biology, or Earth-like biology, or quite different biology. You could even look for intact organisms. Nearly all of the material in the plumes falls back to the surface. Suppose you had a lander there. “It’s always snowing at the south pole of Enceladus,” Porco said. “Could it be snowing microbes?” (A by-the-way from the Q&A;: Voyager, which was launched 40 years ago in 1977, led the way to the outer planets and moons of our Solar System, and five years ago, Porco pointed out, “It went beyond the magnetic bubble of the Sun and redefined us as an interstellar species.”)

Michael Mikel: The Five Ages of Burning Man

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 23 Mar 2020 13:08:52 -0700

Burning Man co-founder Michael Mikel (aka [ Danger Ranger](https://twitter.com/danger_ranger)), who serves as Director of Advanced Social Systems for the Burning Man Project discussed the history of the event. Outlining the five eras of Burning Man, he explained how over time the event and organization have evolved and been molded by external and internal forces.

Miles Traer: The Geological Reveal: How the Rock Record Shows Our Relationship to the Natural World

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 18 Dec 2020 14:50:24 -0800

Before us, after us, and without our realizing it: geology, ecology, and biology uniquely record human activity. Geoscientist Miles Traer, co-host of the podcast _[Generation Anthropocene](http://www.genanthro.com)_ uncovers the many “natures" of the San Francisco Bay Area that exist beneath our feet.

James Gleick: Time Travel

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 26 Jun 2017 15:32:20 -0700

## Time travel is time research **Gleick began with H.G. Wells’s 1895 book _The Time Machine_** , which created the idea of time travel. It soon became a hugely popular genre that shows no sign of abating more than a century later. “Science fiction is a way of working out ideas,” Gleick said. Wells thought of himself as a futurist, and like many at the end of the 19th century he was riveted by the idea of progress, so his fictional traveler headed toward the far future. Other authors soon explored travel to the past and countless paradoxes ranging from squashed butterflies that change later elections to advising one’s younger self. Gleick invited audience members to query themselves: If you could travel in time, would you go to the future or to the past? When exactly, and where exactly? And why. And what is your second choice? (Try it, reader.) “We’re still trying to figure out what time is,” Gleick said. Time travel stories apparently help us. The inventor of the time machine in Wells’s book explains archly that time is merely a fourth dimension. Ten years later in 1905 Albert Einstein made that statement real. In 1941 Jorge Luis Borges wrote the celebrated short story, “The Garden of Forking Paths.” In 1955 physicist Hugh Everett introduced the quantum-based idea of forking universes, which itself has become a staple of science fiction. “Time,” Richard Feynman once joked, “is what happens when nothing else happens.” Gleick suggests, “Things change, and time is how we keep track.” Virginia Woolf wrote, “What more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment? That we survive the shock at all is only possible because the past shelters us on one side, the future on another.” To answer the last question of the evening, about how his views about time changed during the course of writing _Time Travel_ , Gleick said: > I thought I would conclude that the main thing to understand is: Enjoy the present. Don’t waste your brain cells agonizing about lost opportunities or worrying about what the future will bring. As I was working on the book I suddenly realized that that’s terrible advice. A potted plant lives in the now. The idea of the ‘long now’ embraces the past and the future and asks us to think about the whole stretch of time. That’s what I think time travel is good for. That’s what makes us human—the ability to live in the past and live in the future at the same time.

Geoffrey B West: The Universal Laws of Growth and Pace

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 23 May 2017 19:30:00 -0700

## Why cities live forever **West focussed on cities** in his discussion of the newly discovered exponential scaling laws that govern everything alive. “We live,” he said, “in an exponentially expanding socio-economic universe.” Global urbanization has reached the point that there are a million new people arriving in cities every week, and that rate is expected to continue to midcentury. What is the attraction? One reason for constant urban growth is that the bigger the city, the more efficient it is, because of economies of scale. With each doubling of a city’s size, the numbers of gas stations and power lines and water lines, etc. increase at a rate a little less than double. In other words, with every size increase there is a 15% improvement in energy efficiency. “That‘s why New York is the greenest city in America,” West said. The same dynamics of networks explain how what is called “power-law scaling“ works in biology. The bigger the animal, the slower and more efficient its metabolism is, at a rate lower than 1-to-1 (“sublinear” in West’s terminology). This leads to some remarkable constants. Shrews weigh 2 grams, and in their 14-month life their heart beats a billion times. Blue whales weigh 200 million grams, and in their 100-year life, their heart beats the same billion times. Ditto for all mammals (except humans, who have achieved a lifetime average of 2 billion heartbeats, presumably for cultural reasons.) In _physical_ terms, cities are like organisms, enjoying sublinear economies of scale with each increase in size. But when you look at cities in terms of their _social-economic_ networks, an astonishing finding emerges. Once again there is power-law scaling if you count patents, wages, tax receipts, crimes, restaurants, even the pace of walking, but _instead of slowing down with increasing size, cities speed up with increasing size_. Their increase is greater that 1:1. It is superlinear. “Bigger cities are better,” said West. Each time they increase in size, they are 15% more innovative socio-economically at the same time they are 15% more efficient in terms of energy and materials. Furthermore, they apparently live forever. They create most of civilization’s problems, but they are capable of solving problems even faster than they create them. However, when you compare companies with cities, companies have similar metabolic efficiencies of scale as they grow, but their innovation rate, instead of increasing with size, _slows down_ as they get ever bigger. And they are mortal. The average lifespan of a publicly traded companies is 10 years. They can grow prodigiously, but their net income, sales, profits, and assets can’t quite keep up—they are sublinear. Successful new companies start off like cities, full of innovation, but over time the nature of corporate growth leads them to focus ever more solely on exploiting their success, and eventually they taper off and die like animals. The city feeds on their corpses and creates new companies.

Scurvy Salon: The History & Science of a Persistent Malady

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 29 Jan 2021 10:19:47 -0800

A special night of short talks about the long history and scientific background behind a most persistent malady. And the drinks that can help keep it at bay. Featuring returning Interval speakers James Holland Jones (Stanford), James Nestor (Deep), Kara Platoni (We Have the Technology), The Interval’s Beverage Director: Jennifer Colliau, and more.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Adapting to Sea Level Rise: The Science of New York 2140

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 17 Jul 2020 16:51:12 -0700

Legendary science fiction author [Kim Stanley Robinson](http://www.kimstanleyrobinson.info/) returns to The Interval to discuss his just released novel New York 2140. Robinson discussed how starting from the most up to date climate science available to him, he derived a portrait of New York City as "super-Venice" and the resilient civilization that inhabits it in his novel. In 02016 Robinson spoke at The Interval about [the economic ideas that inform _New York 2140_](http://theinterval.org/salon-talks/02017/may/10/adapting-sea-level-rise-science-new-york-2140). He was joined by futurist [Peter Schwartz](https://longnow.org/people/board/schwartz11/) in conversation after his talk. [Kim Stanley Robinson](http://www.kimstanleyrobinson.info/) is an American novelist, widely recognized as one of the foremost living writers of science fiction. His work has been described as "humanist science fiction" and "literary science fiction." He has published more than 20 novels including his much honored "[Mars trilogy](http://www.kimstanleyrobinson.info/content/mars-trilogy)", [_New York 2140_](https://www.amazon.com/New-York-2140-Stanley-Robinson/dp/031626234X) (02017), and [_Red Moon_](https://www.amazon.com/Red-Moon-Kim-Stanley-Robinson/dp/0316262374/) due out in October 02018. Robinson has a B.A. in Literature from UC San Diego and an M.A. in English from Boston University. He earned a Ph.D. in literature from UCSD with a dissertation on the works of Philip K. Dick.

Frank Ostaseski: What the Dying Teach the Living

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 10 Apr 2017 19:30:00 -0700

## Death’s Honesty **In one of Long Now’s most moving talks** , Ostaseski began: “I’m not romantic about dying. This is the hardest work you will ever do. It is tough. It’s sad and it’s messy and it’s cruel and it’s beautiful sometimes and mysterious, but above all that, it’s normal. It’s a boat we’re all in. It’s inevitable and intimate.“ He said that people think it will be unbearable, but they find they have the resources to deal with it, and “they regularly—not always--develop insights into their lives in the time of dying that make them emerge as a much larger, more expansive, more real person than the small, separate self they’d taken themselves to be.” That is one message that dying gives to living. “Reflection on death,” he said, “causes us to be more responsible—in our relationships, with ourselves, with the planet, with our future.” Ostaseski summarized the insights he’s learned from the dying as “five invitations to be present.” 1) Don’t wait. 2) Welcome everything, push away nothing. 3) Bring your whole self to the experience. 4) Find a place of rest in the middle of things. 5) Cultivate don’t-know mind. For 2), Ostaseski quoted James Baldwin: “Not everything that can be faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed that is not faced.” An example of 4): a woman who was panicking at her difficulty breathing was encouraged to try resting in the moment _between_ breaths, and there she found the handle on her panic and relaxed into the situation. Ostaseski ended with a story. One day at Zen Hospice in San Francisco he was in the kitchen reading a book called _Japanese Death Poems_. A tough old lady from the streets named Sono, who was there to die, asked him about the book, and he explained the tradition of Japanese monks to write on the day of their death a poem expressing the essential truth discovered in their life. He read her a few. Sono said she’d like to write hers, and did, and asked that it be pinned to her bedclothes when she died and cremated with her. She wrote: > Don’t just stand there with your hair turning gray, > soon enough the seas will sink your little island. > So while there is still the illusion of time, > set out for another shore. > No sense packing a bag. > You won’t be able to lift it into your boat. > Give away all your collections. > Take only new seeds and an old stick. > Send out some prayers on the wind before you sail. > Don’t be afraid. > Someone knows you’re coming. > An extra fish has been salted. > \--Mona (Sono) Santacroce (1928 - 1995)

Bjorn Lomborg: From Feel-Good to High-Yield Good: How to Improve Philanthropy and Aid

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 13 Mar 2017 19:30:00 -0700

## Doing Good Better [![](https://media.longnow.org/files/2/lomborghaiti520w.jpg)](https://media.longnow.org/files/2/lomborghaiti.jpg) **Lomborg opened with a photo from Haiti** , showing a young girl dressed for school wading through the muck and garbage of a slum, with pigs in the muck right behind her. Lomborg was just back from working with the government of Haiti and the Canadian Development Agency to prioritize aid projects there. He sympathized that when people see that photo they instantly want to donate to urban sanitation in Haiti, but that is not the most effective good that can be done for the girl. There is a limited amount of aid money that can be spent in Haiti, and in the world. (Total world aid is $200 billion a year.) It helps to look at what are the greatest multiples of good you can get for each dollar spent—the benefit-cost ratio (BCR). For urban sanitation, when you do the math on the costs of building and maintaining pit latrines and compare it with the benefits (measured in dollars) of deaths and diseases avoided, of productivity and education gains, etc., for each dollar spent, you get only about 77 cents of benefit. How does that benefit-cost ratio (BCR) of less than 1 compare with other forms of aid such as, say, cleaner cook stoves? Indoor air pollution from traditional cooking kills 4.3 million people a year in the developing world. According to Lomborg and his Copenhagen Consensus colleagues, when you substitute cleaner fuel, you get a BCR of 15—each dollar spent yields $15 of benefit, with drastically fewer deaths, and a far better home to grow up in. Not all problems have such direct solutions though. Poverty is hard to fix directly, and so is corrupt government, but working in areas that do have known solutions can affect them indirectly. Better education helps everything, and the form of education that has far the highest yield is tripling preschool in Africa (BCR = 33!). But what helps education more than anything is making sure that there’s good nutrition for infants up to two years old, which gives them better brains, making them better and happier students (BCR = 45), and follow-up research shows that they have far better lives. The worst infectious disease that can be treated easily is tuberculosis, which kills 1.5 million people a year. Good treatment gives a huge BCR of 43. From 1995 to 2010, 37 million lives were saved with ever-improving TB treatment. And so it goes across the spectrum of aid. Lomborg noted that the way the $200 billion of annual aid is currently spent gives a BCR of about 7. That’s $1.4 trillion of good. But if spent for highest effectiveness, it could give a BCR of 32--- $6.4 trillion of good, an extra $5 trillion of benefit each year. Returning to the young girl in Haiti, Lomborg said that prioritizing aid intelligently would focus on helping provide her with: better nutrition; better school; better health; safer births; higher income; less violence in her society; less air pollution in her home; more energy; and more rights as a person. The photo evokes none of those things. Her life would.

Larry Brilliant: Sometimes Brilliant: in Conversation with Stewart Brand

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 29 Jun 2020 15:45:41 -0700

After sitting at the feet of Martin Luther King at the University of Michigan in 1962, Larry Brilliant was swept up into the civil rights movement, marching and protesting across America and Europe. As a radical young doctor he followed the hippie trail from London over the Khyber Pass with his wife Girija, Wavy Gravy and the Hog Farm commune to India. Then one of India’s greatest spiritual teachers, Neem Karoli Baba, told him his destiny was to work for the World Health Organization to help eradicate smallpox. He became a key player in eliminating that 10,000-year-old disease that killed half a billion people in the 20th century alone. Larry and Stewart have a freewheeling conversation and bring the audience in as well, including Wavy Gravy and his wife Jahanara who are on the front row. A really special night where the past is present, and a reminder that we will all make the future.

Jennifer Pahlka: Fixing Government: Bottom Up and Outside In

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 01 Feb 2017 18:30:00 -0800

## Toward agile government Pahlka quoted: “Efficiency in government is a matter of social justice.” (Mayor John Norquist) It is at the often maddening interface with government that the inefficiency and injustice play out. Two examples (both now fixed)… At the Veterans Affairs website, you needed to fill out the application for health benefits, but the file wouldn’t even open unless you had a particular version of Internet Explorer and a particular version of Adobe Reader. Nothing else worked. In California, the online application for food stamps is 50 screens long and takes 50 minutes to complete. How did such grotesquely bad software design become the norm? Pahlka points to laws such as the “comically misnamed” Paperwork Reduction Act of 01980, which requires six months to get any public form approved, and the 775-page Federal Acquisition Regulation book, which requires that all software be vastly over-specified in advance. “That’s not how good software is built!” Pahlka said. “Good software is user-centered, iterative, and data driven.” You build small at first, try it on users, observe what doesn’t work, fix it, build afresh, try it again, and so on persistently until you’ve got something that really works—and is easy to keep updating as needed. Pahlka’s organization, Code for America, did that with the 50-minute California food stamp application and pared the whole process down to 8 minutes. These are not small matters. 19% of the US gross national product is spent on social programs—social security, medicare, food assistance, housing assistance, unemployment, etc. Frustration with those systems makes people want to just blow the whole thing up. Pahlka quotes Tom Steinberg (mySociety founder): “You can no longer run a country properly if the elites don’t understand technology in the same way they grasp economics or ideology or propaganda.” Government drastically needs more tech talent, Pahlka urged, and the user-centered iterative approach could have a broader effect: “It's not so much that we need new laws to govern technology,” she said. “It's that we need better tech practices that teaches how to make better laws. The status quo isn’t worth fighting for. Fight for something better, something we haven’t seen yet, something you have to invent.” She concluded: “Decisions are made by those who show up.”

Steven Johnson: Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 04 Jan 2017 18:30:00 -0800

## Inventing toward delight Humanity has been inventing toward delight for a long time. Johnson began with a slide of shell beads found in Morocco that indicate human interest in personal adornment going back 80,000 years. He showed 50,000-year-old bone flutes found in modern Slovenia that were tuned to musical intervals we would still recognize. Beads and flutes had nothing to do with survival. They were art, conforming to Brian Eno’s definition: “Art is everything you don’t have to do.” It looks frivolous, but Johnson proposed that the pursuit of delight is one of the prime movers of history—of globalization, innovation, and democratization. Consider spices, a seemingly trivial ornament to food. In the Babylon of 1700 BCE—3,700 years ago—there were cloves that came all the way from Indonesia, 5,000 miles away. Importing eastern spices become so essential that eventually the trade routes defined the map of Islam. Another story from Islamic history: when Baghdad was at its height as one of the world’s most cultured cities around 800 CE, its “House of Wisdom” produced a remarkable text titled “The Book of Ingenious Devices.” In it were beautiful schematic drawings of machines years ahead of anything in Europe—clocks, hydraulic instruments, even a water-powered organ with swappable pin-cylinders that was effectively programmable. Everything in the book was neither tool nor weapon: _they were all toys_. Consider what happened when cotton arrived in London from India in the late 1600s. Besides being more comfortable than itchy British wool, cotton fabric (called calico) could easily be dyed and patterned, and the democratization of fashion took off, along with a massive global trade in cotton and cotton goods. Soon there was an annual new look to keep up with. And steam-powered looms drove the Industrial Revolution, including the original invention of programmable machinery for Jacquard looms. Consider the role of public spaces designed for leisure—taverns, coffee shops, parks. Political movements from the American Revolution (Boston’s Green Dragon Tavern) to Gay Rights (Black Cat Tavern in Los Angeles) were fomented in bars. Whole genres of business and finance came out of the coffee shops of London. And once “Nature” was invented by Romantics in the late 1800s, nature-like parks in cities brought delight to urban life, and wilderness became something to protect. Play invites us to invent freely.

Douglas Coupland: The Extreme Present

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 01 Nov 2016 19:30:00 -0700

### Future now **“The present and the future** now coexist at the same time,” Coupland began. “It’s why time doesn’t feel like time any more. We’re inside the future.” He wondered if the constant acceleration of acceleration that we experience might lead to some kind of “collective cracking point” for humanity. As an installation artist Coupland said he was highly impressed by the short truisms of the New York artist Jenny Holzer, such as “MUCH WAS DECIDED BEFORE YOU WERE BORN.” And so he began a “slogan project” of sayings that “make perfect sense now but would make no sense if you saw them 20 years ago.” Examples included: I MISS MY PRE-INTERNET BRAIN HOARD ANYTHING YOU CAN’T DOWNLOAD LIVES ARE NO LONGER FEELING LIKE STORIES (“I call this process ‘de-narration.’”) WE’VE NEVER BEEN SMARTER. WE’VE NEVER FELT STUPIDER. THINKING ABOUT THE FUTURE MEANS YOU WANT SOMETHING DEMOCRACY SEEMS INADEQUATE TO DEAL WITH THE PRESENT For an installation in Shanghai, Coupland created some “slogans for the 22d Century:” MONEY WAS OVERRATED ANYWAY DON’T MENTION THE CLOUD YOUR BORDER IS YOUR BRAND Coupland ended with what he considers the three leading questions of our time: “Does the need to be remembered eclipse the right to be forgotten?” “Will the internet favor the individual over the group?” “Will the internet favor secularity or religion?” At the end of the evening, Coupland looked at the camera and said, “Hello posterity. What are we doing right now that is scaring the crap out of you?”

David Eagleman: The Brain and The Now

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 04 Oct 2016 19:30:00 -0700

### The Brain’s Now Our perception of time raises all sorts of questions, Eagleman began. “Why does time seem to slow down when you’re scared? And why does it seem to speed up as you get older?” With an onscreen demonstration, Eagleman showed that “Time is actively constructed by the brain.“ His research has shown that there’s at least a 1/10-of-a-second lag between physical time and our subjective time, and the brain doesn’t guess ahead, _it fills in behind_. “Our perception of an event depends on what happens next.” In whole-body terms, we live a half-second in the past, which means that something which kills you quickly (like a sniper bullet to the head), you’ll never notice. In order to manage a realistic sense of causality, the brain has to calibrate the rate of different signals coming into it. When that system malfunctions, you can get “credit misattribution”—the sense that “I didn’t do that!” It may explain why some schizophrenics think that their normal internal conversation is voices coming from somewhere else, and it might be curable by training their brain to manage signal lags better. Is “now” expandable? Why do you seem to experience time in slow motion in a sudden emergency, like an accident? Eagleman’s (terrifying) experiments show that in fact you don’t perceive more densely, the amygdala cuts in and _records the experience_ more densely, so when the brain looks back at that dense record, it thinks that time must have subjectively slowed down, but it didn’t. “Time and memory are inseparable.” This also explains why time seems to speed up as you age. A child experiences endless novelty, and each summer feels like it lasted forever. But you learn to automatize everything as you age, and novelty is reduced accordingly, apparently speeding time up. All you have to do to feel like you‘re living longer, with a life as rich as a child’s, is to never stop introducing novelty in your life.

Jonathan Rose: The Well Tempered City

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 20 Sep 2016 19:30:00 -0700

### Coherent cities What holds a city together? Rose noted that the earliest cities were built around a temple and the spirituality it embodied. As the early communities became larger and more diverse and complex, their economic activity intensified. To be effective in trade they had to specialize, monetizing their regional opportunities. One city became known for shipping, another for serving caravans. One as a source of metal, another as a source of grain. To cope with their growing complexity the cities had to develop varying control systems for everything—irrigation, food storage, accounting, building codes. The Code of Hammurabi was written in 1754 BCE explicitly “to further the well-being of mankind.” (One of its building-code provisions declared, “If your building falls down and kills somebody, we kill you.”) Modern cities need to create their own “circular economy,” Rose stressed, not just of services and goods, but of greener waste treatment, of water recycling, of food creation (such as“vertical gardens”,) and especially of what he called "communities of opportunity”—where low-income groups such as immigrants get a chance to create prosperity for themselves and the city. In his own many real-estate projects, Rose focusses on increasing urban density with low-income housing in combination with improved mass transit, local parks, better schools, and the greenest of building standards. But for such innovations to be copied, he pointed out, they have to be profitable. Cities are systems, Rose concluded: “When a system is optimized, then all of its components do well. Cities that focus on the optimization of the whole for everybody are the ones that thrive the best.”

Seth Lloyd: Quantum Computer Reality

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 09 Aug 2016 19:30:00 -0700

### Quantum Computer Reality The 15th-century Renaissance was triggered, Lloyd began, by a flood of new information which changed how people thought about everything, and the same thing is happening now. All of us have had to shift, just in the last couple decades, from hungry hunters and gatherers of information to overwhelmed information filter-feeders. Information is physical. A bit can be represented by an electron _here_ to signify 0, and _there_ to signify 1. Information processing is moving electrons from here to there. But for a “qubit" in a quantum computer, an electron is both _here_ and _there_ at the same time, thanks to "wave-particle duality.” Thus with “quantum parallelism” you can do massively more computation than in classical computers. It’s like the difference between the simple notes of plainsong and all that a symphony can do—a huge multitude of instruments interacting simultaneously, playing arrays of sharps and flats and complex chords. Quantum computers can solve important problems like enormous equations and factoring--cracking formerly uncrackable public-key cryptography, the basis of all online commerce. With their ability to do “oodles of things at once," quantum computers can also simulate the behavior of larger quantum systems, opening new frontiers of science, as Richard Feynman pointed out in the 1980s. Simple quantum computers have been built since 1995, by Lloyd and ever more others. Mechanisms tried so far include: electrons within electric fields; nuclear spin (clockwise and counter); atoms in ground state and excited state simultaneously; photons polarized both horizontally and vertically; and super-conducting loops going clockwise and counter-clockwise at the same time; and many more. To get the qubits to perform operations—to compute—you can use an optical lattice or atoms in whole molecules or integrated circuits, and more to come. The more qubits, the more interesting the computation. Starting with 2 qubits back in 1996, some systems are now up to several dozen qubits. Over the next 5-10 years we should go from 50 qubits to 5,000 qubits, first in special-purpose systems but eventually in general-purpose computers. Lloyd added, “And there’s also the fascinating field of using funky quantum effects such as coherence and entanglement to make much more accurate sensors, imagers, and detectors.” Like, a hundred thousand to a million times more accurate. GPS could locate things to the nearest micron instead of the nearest meter. Even with small quantum computers we will be able to expand the capability of machine learning by sifting vast collections of data to detect patterns and move on from supervised-learning (“That squiggle is a 7”) toward unsupervised-learning—systems that learn to learn. The universe is a quantum computer, Lloyd concluded. Biological life is all about extracting meaningful information from a sea of bits. For instance, photosynthesis uses quantum mechanics in a very sophisticated way to increase its efficiency. Human life is expanding on what life has always been—an exercise in machine learning.

Rose McDermott: Ideology in our Genes: The Biological Basis for Political Traits

The Long Now Foundation — Thu, 30 Nov 2017 23:15:07 -0800

While traditionally social factors have been considered to have primary influence on political behaviors and preferences, more recent research shows that there's also a strong heritable component to ideological attitudes. Rose McDermott, professor of International Relations at Brown University and a 02015-16 Stanford CASBS fellow, discussed her research on the influence of genetic contributions to political and social behavior. McDermott studies the biological influences which interact with environmental factors to shape ideology across the political spectrum in cultures around the world. McDermott has described her work as intended to offer an _interdisciplinary approach to the interaction of psychological processes and political outcomes._ Her research has included conducting embedded experiments on attitudes toward gender equality in numerous countries including Lebanon, Jordan, Uganda, Indonesia, Mongolia and India. She is the author of _Political Psychology in International Relations_ and co-editor of _Man Is by Nature a Political Animal_. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 02013. Dr. Rose McDermott is the David and Mariana Fisher University Professor of International Relations at Brown University and a Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She received her Ph.D.(Political Science) and M.A. (Experimental Social Psychology) from Stanford University and has taught at Cornell, UCSB and Harvard. She has held numerous fellowships, including the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies and the Women and Public Policy Program, all at Harvard University. She is a two-time fellow at the Stanford Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences.

Kevin Kelly: The Next 30 Digital Years

The Long Now Foundation — Thu, 14 Jul 2016 19:30:00 -0700

## Digital is just getting started In Kevin Kelly’s view, a dozen “inevitable” trends will drive the next 30 years of digital progress. Artificial smartnesses, for example, will be added to everything, all quite different from human intelligence and from each other. We will tap into them like we do into electricity to become cyber-centaurs -- co-dependent humans and AIs. All of us will need to perpetually upgrade just to stay in the game. Every possible display surface will become a display, and study its watchers. Everything we encounter, “if it cannot interact, it is broken.” Virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR) will become the next platform after smartphones, conveying a profound sense of experience (and shared experience), transforming education (“it burns different circuits in your brain”), and making us intimately trackable. “Everything that can be tracked will be tracked,” and people will go along with it because “vanity trumps privacy,” as already proved on Facebook. “Wherever attention flows, money will follow.” Access replaces ownership for suppliers as well as consumers. Uber owns no cars; AirBnB owns no real estate. On-demand rules. Sharing rules. Unbundling rules. Makers multiply. “In thirty years the city will look like it does now. We will have rearranged the flows, not the atoms. We will have a different idea of what a city is, and who we are, and how we relate to other people.” In the Q&A;, Kelly was asked what worried him. “Cyberwar,” he said. “We have no rules. Is it okay to take out an adversary’s banking system? Disasters may have to occur before we get rules. We’re at the point that any other civilization in the galaxy would have a world government. I have no idea how to do that.” Kelly concluded: “We are at the beginning of the beginning—the first hour of day one. There have never been more opportunities. The greatest products of the next 25 years have not been invented yet.” “You are not late.”

Brian Christian: Algorithms to Live By

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 20 Jun 2016 19:30:00 -0700

### Solving hard decisions Deciding when to stop your quest for the ideal apartment, or ideal spouse, depends entirely on how long you expect to be looking, says Brian Christian. The first one you check will be the best you’ve seen, but it’s unlikely to be the best you’ll ever see. So you keep looking and keep finding new bests, though ever less frequently, and you start to wonder if maybe you refused the very best you’ll ever find. And the search is wearing you down. When should you take the leap and look no further? The answer from computer science is precise: 37% of the way through your search period. If you’re spending a month looking for an apartment, you should calibrate (and be sorely tempted) for 11 days, and then you should grab the next best-of-all you find. Likewise with the search for a mate. If you’re looking from, say, age 18 to 40, the time to shift from browsing and having fun to getting serious and proposing is at age 26.1. (However, if you’re getting lots of refusals, “propose early and often” from age 23.5. Or, if you can always go back to an earlier prospect, you could carry on exploring to age 34.4.) This “Optimal Stopping” is one of twelve subjects examined in Christian’s (and co-author Tom Griffiths’) book, _Algorithms to Live By_. (The other subjects are: Explore/Exploit; Sorting; Caching; Scheduling; Bayes’ Rule; Overfitting; Relaxation; Randomness; Networking; Game Theory; and Computational Kindness. An instance of Bayes’ Rule, called the Copernican Principle, lets you predict how long something of unknown lifespan will last into the future by assuming you’re looking at the middle of its duration—hence the USA, now 241 years old, might be expected to last through 2257.) Christian went into detail on the Explore/Exploit problem. Optimism minimizes regret. You’ve found some restaurants you really like. How often should you exploit that knowledge for a guaranteed good meal, and how often should you optimistically take a chance and explore new places to eat? The answer, again, depends partly on the interval of time involved. When you’re new in town, explore like mad. If you’re about to leave a city, stick with the known favorites. Infants with 80 years ahead are pure exploration— they try tasting everything. Old people, drawing on 70 years of experience, have every reason to pare the friends they want to spend time with down to a favored few. The joy of the young is discovering. The joy of the old is relishing.

Mike Kuniavsky: Our Future in Algorithm Farming

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 28 Feb 2018 23:46:07 -0800

Everything will be connected to the network, even things that shouldn’t be. From automobiles to egg timers, Kuniavsky explains all these devices will try to get our attention and prove their value. They’ll also attempt to predict the future—at least the immediate future of our desires. But they won’t be very good at that for a while. In fact, for every 100 connected devices that are guessing your needs, if they were all right an impressive 99% of the time, there would always be one that’s wrong. The range of human-machine interactions goes from the person making all the decisions to full automation (like the fuel injection inside a car engine). In between is tricky terrain, tasks that we aren’t sure if we trust computers to run themselves. When automation needs to be approved step-by-step or human judgement otherwise needs to be on call, then the "cognitive load” on the attendant can flip the equation. A poorly conceived labor saving device can turn an internet appliance worse than useless: a labor creating device. How will ‘adaptive’ objects tell us that they are changing? Will we ever accept a fully automated airplane? Do you actually need a smart toaster if it’s only going to spam you? At the intersection of The Internet of Things, Machine Learning, and User Experience Design we should proceed with some caution as the stakes can be high or conversely benefits may be minimal. We are destined for a period of more gadgets than tools, as consumer & social standards evolve over time and myriad algorithms slowly amass learnings. But Kuniavsky points out there is already a long history of smart thinking about these challenges, starting as early as the cyberneticists of the 01940s. The ongoing work of designers and engineers, such as Tom Sheridan and Bill Verplank in the 01970s, offers wisdom to keep in mind as things speed up. “I’m neither a fan of or a critic of these technologies. I think they are actually too complex to be reduced in that way” says Kuniavsky. But after surveying a bit of the history and the state of “smart things” today, he offers up suggestions for the inevitable years ahead. Humans will need sober strategies to tame the menagerie of well-meaning bots, all trying to predict our needs in an unprecedentedly entangled world. “We are at the beginning of this thing.”

Kim Stanley Robinson: How Climate Will Evolve Government and Society

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 01 Aug 2017 00:00:00 -0700

Humanity’s adaptation to climate change will require novel, global cooperation and societal evolution. The award-winning science fiction author of _2312_ , the _Mars_ Trilogy, and _Aurora_ shares his vision for how the world must change in advance of his 02017 novel _New York 2140_. Hosted by Stewart Brand. From May 02016. [Kim Stanley Robinson](http://www.kimstanleyrobinson.info/) is an American novelist, widely recognized as one of the foremost living writers of science fiction. His work has been described as "humanist science fiction" and "literary science fiction." He has published more than 20 novels including his much honored "[Mars trilogy](http://www.kimstanleyrobinson.info/content/mars-trilogy)", [_New York 2140_](https://www.amazon.com/New-York-2140-Stanley-Robinson/dp/031626234X) (02017), and [_Red Moon_](https://www.amazon.com/Red-Moon-Kim-Stanley-Robinson/dp/0316262374/) due out in October 02018. Robinson has a B.A. in Literature from UC San Diego and an M.A. in English from Boston University. He earned a Ph.D. in literature from UCSD with a dissertation on the works of Philip K. Dick.

Walter Mischel: The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 02 May 2016 19:30:00 -0700

### Thinking hot and cool **In the 1960s, Mischel** and colleagues at Stanford launched a series of delayed-gratification experiments with young children using a method that later came to be known as “the marshmallow test.” A researcher whom the child knew and trusted, after playing some fun games together, suggested playing a “waiting game.” The researcher explained that the child could have either one or two of the highly attractive treats the child had chosen and was facing (marshmallows, cookies, pretzels)--depending on how long the child waited for them after the researcher left the room. The game was: at any time the child could ring a bell, and the researcher would come back immediately and the child could have _one_ treat. To practice, the researcher left the room, the child rang the bell and the researcher came right back, saying, “You see, you brought me back. Now if you wait for me to come back by myself without ringing the bell or starting to eat a treat you can have _both_ of them!!” The wait might be as long as 15 or 20 minutes. (About one third made it that far.) The kids varied widely in how long they could stand it before ringing the bell. Mischel emphasizes that the focus of the research was to identify the specific cognitive strategies and mental mechanisms, as well as the developmental changes, that make delay of gratification possible--not to “test” or pigeonhole children. Between the ages of 4 and 6 years, for example, the older kids could delay their gratification longer, apparently as the impulse-overriding “executive function” of their maturing brains kicked in. And in some conditions it was easy for the children to wait, while under other conditions it was very difficult. The research sought to identify the cognitive skills that underlie willpower and long-term thinking and how they can be enhanced. Longitudinal studies of the tested children suggested that something profound was going on. By the time they were adolescents, the kids who had been able to hold out longer for the bigger reward in some conditions were also likelier to have higher SAT scores, to function better socially, and to manage temptation and stress better. On into their adulthood, they were less likely to show extreme aggression, less likely to over-react if they became anxious about social rejection, and less likely to become obese. For the kids who did not hold out well and took the quick reward, Mischel said the findings suggested that “the inability to delay gratification can have quite serious potential negative effects.” (Mischel cautions that the longitudinal results are only correlations that describe group findings and do not allow accurate predictions for individual children.) Can “delay ability” be trained? Mischel thinks it can, if we understand how our mind works. He and colleagues postulated a “Hot System” and a “Cool System” in the brain. (They are similar to Daniel Kahneman’s “System 1” and “System 2” in his book _Thinking Fast and Slow_.) The Hot System (Go!) is: emotional, simple, reflexive, fast, and centered in the amygdala. It develops early in the child and is exacerbated by stress. The Cool System (Know), on the other hand, is: cognitive rather than emotional, complex, reflective, slow, and centered in the frontal lobes and hippocampus. It develops later in the child and is made weaker by stress. In the Hot System the stimulus controls us; in the Cool System we control the stimulus. You can chill a hot object of desire by representing it to yourself in Cool, abstract terms. Don’t think of the marshmallow as _yummy and chewy_ ; imagine it as _round and white_ like a cotton ball. One little girl became patient by pretending she was looking at a picture of a marshmallow and “put a frame around it” in her head. “You can’t eat a picture,” she explained. (Girls were better handling temptation than boys.) While coolly defusing a temptation, you can also make Hot the delayed consequences of yielding to it. Mischel was a three-pack-a-day smoker ignoring all warnings about cancer until one day he saw a man on a gurney in Stanford Hospital. “His head was shaved, with little green X’s, and his chest was bare, with little green X’s.” A nurse told him the X’s were for where the radiation would be targeted. “I couldn’t shake the image. It made hot the delayed consequences of my smoking.” Mischel kept that image alive in his mind while reframing his cigarettes as sources of poison instead of relief, and he quit. “If you don’t know how to delay gratification,” he said, “you don’t have a choice. If you do know how, you have a choice.”

Priyamvada Natarajan: Solving Dark Matter and Dark Energy

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 11 Apr 2016 19:30:00 -0700

## The darkness of dark matter and dark energy ALL THAT WE KNOW of the universe we get from observing photons, Natarajan pointed out. But dark matter, which makes up 90 percent of the total mass in the universe, is called dark because it neither emits nor reflects photons — and because of our ignorance of what it is. It is conjectured to be made up of still-unidentified exotic _collisionless_ particles which might weigh about six times more than an electron. Though some challenge whether dark matter even exists, Natarajan is persuaded that it does because of her research on “the heaviest objects in the universe“ — galaxy clusters of more than 1,000 galaxies. First of all, the rotation of stars within galaxies does not look Keplerian — the outermost stars move far too quickly, as discovered in the 1970s. Their rapid rate of motion only makes sense if there is a vast “halo” of dark matter enclosing each galaxy. And galaxy clusters have so much mass (90 percent of it dark) that their gravitation bends light, “lenses” it. A galaxy perfectly aligned on the far side of a galaxy cluster appears to us — via the Hubble Space Telescope — as a set of multiple arc-shaped (distorted) galaxy images. Studying the precise geometry of those images can reveal some of the nature of dark matter, such as that it appears to be “clumpy.” With the next generation of space telescopes — the James Webb Space Telescope that comes online in 2018 and the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope a few years afterward — much more will be learned. There are also instruments on Earth trying to detect dark-matter particles directly, so far without success. As for dark energy — the _accelerating_ expansion of the universe — its shocking discovery came from two independent teams in 1998–99. Dark energy is now understood to constitute 72 percent of the entire contents of the universe. (Of the remainder, dark matter is 23 percent, and atoms — the part that we know — makes up just 4.6 percent.) When the universe was 380,000 years old (13.7 billion years ago), there was no dark energy. But now “the universe is expanding at a pretty fast clip.” Natarajan hopes to use galaxy-cluster lensing as a tool “to trace the geometry of space-time which encodes dark energy.” These days, she said, data is coming in from the universe faster than theory can keep up with it.” We are in a golden age of cosmology.”

Abby Smith Rumsey: How Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future

The Long Now Foundation — Thu, 08 Jun 2017 21:40:00 -0700

Memory technologies from papyrus to print have given humans a unique survival advantage: allowing us to accumulate knowledge. These technologies shape our perception of history, time, and personal and cultural identity. The capacity of our brains to remember lags far behind our capacity to generate information. Digital technology gives us an abundance of information, but creates a scarcity of attention that makes it hard for us to grasp what is important before it slips away. Unless we learn how to preserve memory in the digital age, we risk losing the traces of the past that are vital for building a future true to our commitment to democratic access to information.

Jane Langdale: Radical Ag: C4 Rice and Beyond

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 14 Mar 2016 19:30:00 -0700

## Revolutionary rice Feeding the world (and saving nature) in this populous century, Jane Langdale began, depends entirely on agricultural efficiency—the ability to turn a given amount of land and sunlight into ever more food. And that depends on three forms of efficiency in each crop plant: 1) interception efficiency (collecting sunlight); 2) conversion efficiency (turning sunlight into sugars and starch); and 3) partitioning efficiency (maximizing the edible part). Of these, after centuries of plant breeding, only conversion efficiency is far short of the theoretical maximum. Most photosynthesis (called “C3“) is low-grade, poisoning its own process by reacting with oxygen instead of carbon dioxide when environmental conditions are hot and dry. But some plants, such as corn and sugar cane, have a brilliant workaround. They separate the photosynthetic process into two adjoining cells. The outer cell creates a special four-carbon compound (hence “C4“) that is delivered to the oxygen-protected inner cell. In the inner cell, carbon dioxide is released from the C4 compound, enabling drastically more efficient photosynthesis to take place because carbon dioxide is at a much higher concentration than oxygen. Rice is a C3 plant--which happens to be the staple food for half the world. If it can be converted to C4 photosynthesis, its yield would increase by _50%_ while using _half_ the water. It would also be drought-resistant and need far less fertilizer. Langdale noted that C4 plants have evolved naturally 60 times in a variety of plant families, all of which provide models of the transition. “How difficult could it be?” she deadpanned. The engineering begins with reverse-engineering. For instance, the main leaves in corn are C4, but the husk leaves are C3-like, so the genes that affect the two forms of development can be studied. Langdale’s research suggests that the needed structural change in rice can be managed with about 12 engineered genes, and previous research by others indicates that the biochemical changes can be achieved with perhaps 10 genes. How much is needed for the eventual fine tuning will emerge later. When is later? The C4 Rice project began in 2006 at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The research is on schedule, and engineering should begin in 2019, with the expectation that breeding of delicious, fiercely efficient C4 rice could be complete by 2039. It is the kind of thing that highly focussed multi-generation science can accomplish.

Kara Platoni: Transforming Perception, One Sense at a Time

The Long Now Foundation — Sun, 02 Jul 2017 17:03:21 -0700

Kara Platoni, author and journalism professor at UC-Berkeley, set out to find the sensory pioneers who are changing the way we experience the world. Her boot-strapped and crowd-sourced quest led her to laboratories and workshops around the world. In her book _[We Have The Technology](http://www.amazon.com/Have-Technology-Biohackers-Physicians-Transforming/dp/0465089976)_ she reports back from the intersection of curiosity, science and technology. Her book goes beyond the five basic senses to examine more complex perceptual amalgams: time, pain and emotion. After that she explores technological extensions like virtual and augemented reality. And finally her book looks at those who are searching for new or latent human senses; adventurous members of our species possessed by a kind of manifest destiny of perception. As we humans have narrowed the places to explore on our planet, it turns out there is still more mysteries to probe within ourselves. In her Interval talk Platoni discussed the search for a sixth basic taste (the current five are: sweetness, sourness, bitterness, saltiness, and umami). A variety of theories exist as to what other taste has that primary nature, and she gave our audience a chance to try one candidate on their own tongues when she passed around strips of fat for all to sample. Exploring the extremes, she closed her talk discussing new senses, an area that borders on the transhuman and includes surgically embedding magnets and other devices which may give human additional capabilities. During a lively Q&A;, Kara also tells us about her Virtual Reality research. She spent time in US Army and Stanford University VR Labs where she had some beyond human experiences. So the night ended with the suggestion that empathy, applying our senses to the experience of others, was an additional frontier that is being explored.

The Refugee Reality: Thinking Long-term About the Evolving Global Challenge

The Long Now Foundation — Sat, 30 Sep 2017 22:52:27 -0700

With a complex and truly global problem like this, we can only scratch the surface in an hour. But we hoped to reframe some aspects and include perspectives not always heard. What's certain is this is a long-term problem that has been ongoing and looks likely to worsen due to both environmental and political displacements. Our speakers and guests in order of appearance: * Hugh Bosely: executive director, ReBootKamp (rebootkamp.org) * Beverly Crawford: professor emerita of political science, UC Berkeley * Natasha Iskander: associate professor of public policy NYU / CASBS at Stanford * Sergio Medina: Refugee and Immigrant Services (RISE) (rise-int.org) * Peter Transburg: Inter-agency Network for Education in Emergencies (ineesite.org) * Raman Osman: Kurdish musician, speaks and performs on the tanbur "Refugee" is a recent term with legal distinctions, while those displaced within their own countries are often left out of the accounting. With a long-term view we look at ancient Athens and 19th century Manhattan for a bigger picture on a broader timescale of people moving within and across borders. We also get first-hand reports from Turkey and perspective on other migration realities besides those fleeing Syria. Finally Raman, a Kurdish refugee from Syria, tells his story and plays some of his original music on tanbur.

Stephen Pyne: Fire Slow, Fire Fast, Fire Deep

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 09 Feb 2016 18:30:00 -0800

### Ecological wildfire “We are uniquely fire creatures,” Pyne began, “on a uniquely fire planet.” Life itself is a form of slow metabolic combustion—which eventually created oxygen and burnable vegetation that allowed fast combustion, ignited by lightning. Humans came along and mastered fire for warmth, food preparation, and managing the landscape, and that made us a keystone species. Humanity’s ecological signature on the world is fire. Then we made fire the all-purpose catalyst for craft (clay, glass, metal) and eventually industry, shifting to the vast geological resource of fossil fuels. That “pyric transition” made humans dominant on the earth, even to the point of affecting climate. We used fire to clear much of the world’s forest for agriculture. Then came a century of misdirection about wildfire. The forests of Europe are mostly too wet to burn, but by the late 19th century the leading foresters in world came from there and taught their ignorance to foresters in North America and India, where the land depends on seasonal fire for ecological health. National governments set about suppressing all wildfire, with catastrophic success. In the absence of the usual occasional local fires, massive fuel loads built up, and destructive megafires became the norm. There was an alternative theory of a “restoration strategy” to manage wildfire in way that would emulate how lightning and native American burning kept the landscape ecologically healthy, but it has been applied haltingly and fractionally, and megafires still rule. “The real argument for fire is that it does ecological work that nothing else does,” Pyne concluded. “Charismatic megaflora” like redwoods need fire. An ecologically rich mosaic of forest, savannah, and meadows needs fire. Healthy prairie needs fire or it gets taken over by invasive woody plants. People trained only as foresters are blind to all that. Wildfire practice now works best when it is guided by wildlife biologists who insist that red cockaded woodpeckers need fire-dependent longleaf pines, that grizzly bears need the berries that grow in recent burns, that pheasants need grassland burned free of invasive eastern red cedar. The techniques for prescribed burns for a bioabundant natural landscape are now well honed. They need to be applied much more widely. When in doubt how to proceed, ask the ecologists, who will ask the animals.

Louis Hyman: The New Deal You Don't Know

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 01 Jan 2018 20:39:27 -0800

Historian Louis Hyman's work focuses on the history of American capitalism. In his book _[Borrow: The American Way of Debt](https://www.amazon.com/Borrow-American-Debt-Vintage-Original/dp/0307741680/)_ , he examines in detail how the evolution of personal debt has not only changed the economics of this country but the culture itself. Capitalism in the short term appears dominant and inevitable. The machinations of markets and capitalist fortunes seem like they always have been; but that's very much not the case. Before examining a forgotten stumble of capitalism during the New Deal Era, Hyman gave us a multi-millennial economic viewpoint to put things in context. In fact capitalism is an anomaly in the history of civilization: for millennia our world was accurately characterized by the idea of Malthusian Stasis: world GDP per capita essentially did not change in the pre-industrial age. Only these few centuries has the dynamism of capitalism spiked the hockey stick of economic growth. As such, maybe it's not surprising that a relatively young system like capitalism will stumble every few decades as happened in the Great Depression. And as Hyman says is happening again today. Capitalism stalls when capitalists hold on to their money rather than putting it to work. And when banks and businesses are not being brave, not risking their money to make more money, the government can play a key role and fiscally encourage that potentially high-reward "risky" investment. Discussing the New Deal era, Hyman introduces us to key figures behind the scenes and to agencies, three-letter acronyms that you may not have learned about in US History class, that played pivotal roles in invigorating the economy during those years. He also draws comparisons with the current economic situation. One missed lesson goes back to Hyman's area of expertise: consumer debt. Today's banks have loaned much more money to individuals than to businesses. Securitized consumer debt has become their main business rather than loaning money to new, risky, high reward businesses. As Hyman explains, "Those are supposed to be flip-flopped. That's how economies grow. They don't grow through consumer debt." The banks' money is sitting in the vault; it isn't out working in the world. $2.4 trillion is sitting in US banks that could be funding businesses. There are also lessons to be learned from post-Depression technology investment. Specifically we need to find a new leading sector and break out of a technologically incrementalist era which Hyman says has gone on now for decades. He calls for crazy ideas--tech that sounds as far out as a self-driving car did a decade ago. Space elevators and “rocket boots” are what we need to jumpstart capitalism, get the money flowing, and move that graph further up and to the right.

Eric Cline: 1177 B.C.: When Civilization Collapsed

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 11 Jan 2016 18:30:00 -0800

### When chaos overwhelmed civilization Archaeologist Cline began by declaring that the time he would most like to be transported to is the Late Bronze Age in the Mediterranean—the five centuries between 1700 and 1200 B.C. In those centuries eight advanced societies were densely connected—Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Canaanites, Hittites, Cypriots, Minoans, and Mycenaeans. They grew to power over two millennia, but they collapsed simultaneously almost overnight. What happened? The density of their connection can be learned from trade goods found in shipwrecks, from Egyptian hieroglyphs and wall paintings, and from countless well-preserved clay-tablet letters written between the states. The tin required for all that bronze (tin was the equivalent of oil today) came from Afghanistan 1,800 miles to the east. It was one of history’s most globalized times. In the 12th Century B.C. everything fell apart. For Cline the defining moment was the battle in 1177 B.C. (8th Year of Ramses III) when Egypt barely defeated a mysterious army of “Sea Peoples.” Who were they? Do they really explain the general collapse, as historians long assumed? Cline thinks the failure was systemic, made of a series of cascading calamities in a highly interdependent world. There were indeed invasions—they might have been soldiers, or refugees, or civil war, or all three. But the violence was probably set in motion by extensive drought and famine reported in tablet letters from the time. Voices in the letters: “There is famine in our house. We will all die of hunger.” “Our city is sacked. May you know it!” In some regions there were also devastating earthquakes. The interlinked collapses played out over a century as central administrations failed, elites disappeared, economies collapsed, and whole populations died back or moved elsewhere. In the dark centuries that followed the end of the Bronze Age, romantic myths grew of how wondrous the world had once been. Homer sang of Achilles, Troy, and Odysseus. Those myths inspired the Classical Age that eventually emerged. Cline wonders, could the equivalent of the Bronze Age collapse happen in our current Age?

Philip Tetlock: Superforecasting

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 23 Nov 2015 18:30:00 -0800

### All it takes to improve forecasting is KEEP SCORE Will Syria’s President Assad still be in power at the end of next year? Will Russia and China hold joint naval exercises in the Mediterranean in the next six months? Will the Oil Volatility Index fall below 25 in 2016? Will the Arctic sea ice mass be lower next summer than it was last summer? Five hundred such questions of geopolitical import were posed in tournament mode to thousands of amateur forecasters by IARPA—the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity--between 2011 and 2015. (Tetlock mentioned that senior US intelligence officials opposed the project, but younger-generation staff were able to push it through.) Extremely careful score was kept, and before long the most adept amateur “superforecasters” were doing 30 percent better than professional intelligence officers with access to classified information. They were also better than prediction markets and drastically better than famous pundits and politicians, who Tetlock described as engaging in deliberately vague “ideological kabuki dance." What made the amateurs so powerful was Tetlock’s insistence that they score geopolitical predictions the way meteorologists score weather predictions and then learn how to improve their scores accordingly. Meteorologists predict in percentages—“there is a 70 percent chance of rain on Thursday.” It takes time and statistics to find out how good a particular meteorologist is. If 7 out of 10 such times it in fact rained, the meteorologist gets a high score for calibration (the right percentage) and for resolution (it mostly did rain). Superforecasters, remarkably, assigned probability estimates of 72-76 percent to things that happened and 24-28 percent to things that didn’t. How did they do that? They learned, Tetlock said, to avoid falling for the “gambler’s fallacy”—detecting nonexistent patterns. They learned objectivity—the aggressive open-mindedness it takes to set aside personal theories of public events. They learned to not overcompensate for previous mistakes—the way American intelligence professionals overcompensated for the false negative of 9/11 with the false positive of mass weapons in Saddam’s Iraq. They learned to analyze from the outside in—Assad is a dictator; most dictators stay in office a very long time; consider any current news out of Syria in that light. And they learned to balance between over-adjustment to new evidence (“This changes everything”) and under-adjustment (“This is just a blip”), and between overconfidence ("100 percent!”) and over-timidity (“Um, 50 percent”). “You only win a forecasting tournament,” Tetlock said, “by being decisive—justifiably decisive." Much of the best forecasting came from teams that learned to collaborate adroitly. Diversity on the teams helped. One important trick was to give extra weight to the best individual forecasters. Another was to “extremize” to compensate for the conservatism of aggregate forecasts—if everyone says the chances are around 66 percent, then the real chances are probably higher. In the Q & A following his talk Tetlock was asked if the US intelligence community would incorporate the lessons of its forecasting tournament. He said he is cautiously optimistic. Pressed for a number, he declared, “Ten years from now I would offer the probability of .7 that there will be ten times more numerical probability estimates in national intelligence estimates than there were in 2005.” Asked about long-term forecasting, he replied, “Here’s my long-term prediction for Long Now. When the Long Now audience of 2515 looks back on the audience of 2015, their level of contempt for how we go about judging political debate will be roughly comparable to the level of contempt we have for the 1692 Salem witch trials."

Andy Weir: The Red Planet for Real

The Long Now Foundation — Thu, 08 Jun 2017 21:45:00 -0700

Before Andy Weir's self-published novel _The Martian_ became a _New York Times_ bestseller and a blockbuster film, it began as a series of blog posts. Those posts, and the online conversation they sparked, reflect Andy's lifelong love of space and his detailed research into how humans could survive a journey to the fourth planet in our Solar System. In October of 02015, in his talk at The Interval, Andy skipped the fiction and discussed the details of how a real world mission to colonize Mars would work. Hosted by Long Now's Peter Schwartz.

James Fallows: Civilization's Infrastructure

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 06 Oct 2015 19:30:00 -0700

### Infrastructure investment tricks All societies under-invest in their infrastructure—in the systems that allow them to thrive. There is hardware infrastructure: clean water, paved roads, sewer systems, airports, broadband; and, Fallows suggested, software infrastructure: organizational and cultural practices such as education, safe driving, good accounting, a widening circle of trust. China, for example, is having an orgy of hard infrastructure construction. It recently built a hundred airports while America built zero. But it is lagging in soft infrastructure such as safe driving and political transition. Infrastructure always looks unattractive to investors because the benefits: 1) are uncertain; 2) are delayed; and 3) go to others—the public, in the future. And the act of building infrastructure can be highly disruptive in the present. America for the last forty years has starved its infrastructure, but in our history some highly controversial remarkable infrastructure decisions got through, each apparently by a miracle—the Louisiana Purchase, the Erie Canal, the Gadsden Purchase, the Alaska Purchase, National Parks, Land Grant colleges, the GI Bill that created our middle class after World War II, and the Interstate highway system. In Fallows’ view, the miracle that enabled the right decision each time was either an _emergency_ (such as World War II or the Depression), _stealth_ (such as all the works that quietly go forward within the military budget or the medical-industrial complex), or a _story_ (such as Manifest Destiny and the Space Race). Lately, Fallows notes, there is a little noticed infrastructure renaissance going in some mid-sized American cities, where the political process is nonpoisonous and pragmatic compared to the current national-level dysfunction. By neglecting the long view, Fallows concluded, we overimagine problems with infrastructure projects and underimagine the benefits. But with the long view, with the new wealth and optimism of our tech successes, and expanding on the innovations in many of our cities, there is compelling story to be told. It might build on the unfolding emergency with climate change or on the new excitement about space exploration. Responding to need or to opportunity, we can tell a tale that inspires us to reinvent and build anew the systems that make our society flourish.

Saul Griffith: Infrastructure and Climate Change

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 21 Sep 2015 19:30:00 -0700

## Green infrastructure Griffith began with an eyeroll at the first round of responses in the US to reducing greenhouse gases, a program he calls “peak Al Gore.” Some activities feel virtuous —becoming vegetarian, installing LED lights, avoiding bottled water, reading news online, using cold water detergent, and “showering less in a smaller, colder house”—but they demand constant attention and they don’t really add up to what is needed. Griffith’s view is that we deal best with greenhouse gases by arranging our infrastructure so we don’t have to think about climate and energy issues every minute. Huge energy savings can come from designing our buildings and cars better, and some would result from replacing a lot of air travel with “video conferencing that doesn’t suck.“ Clean energy will mostly come from solar, wind, biofuels (better ones than present), and nuclear. Solar could be on every roof. The most fuel-efficient travel is on bicycles, which can be encouraged far more. Electric cars are very efficient, and when most become self-driving they can be lighter and even more efficient because “autonomous vehicles don’t run into each other.” Sixty percent of our energy goes to waste heat; with improved design that can be reduced radically to 20 percent. Taking the infrastructure approach, in a few decades the US could reduce its total energy use by 40 percent, while eliminating all coal and most oil and natural gas burning, with no need to shower less.

Sara Seager: Other Earths. Other Life.

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 10 Aug 2015 19:30:00 -0700

## To find living exoplanets Thanks to recent exoplanet research, Seager began, we now know that nearly all of our galaxy’s 300 billion stars are accompanied by planets, and a unexpectedly high number of them are rocky like Earth, and many of those orbit in a “habitable” range—meaning that they could harbor liquid water and perhaps life. How can we detect that life? (To learn about the 4,700-plus planets so far discovered, Seager recommended an exciting dynamic map and encyclopedia from NASA called “[Eyes on Exoplanets](http://eyes.jpl.nasa.gov/eyes-on-exoplanets.html).” Seager predicts that “If an Earth 2.0 exists, we have the capability to find and identify it by the 2020s.”) The way to discover life from a distance is to search for spectrographic evidence of “biosignature gases” such as oxygen or methane in the planetary atmosphere. To do that we have to acquire direct imaging of the rocky planets, but we can’t because our telescopes are blinded by the brilliance of the planet’s star, a billion times brighter than the planet. “It’s like looking for a firefly next to a searchlight, from thousands of miles away,” Seager said. Even the next planet-discovery telescope, called TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), which is coming in 2018, will not be able to study exoplanet atmospheres. The solution that Seager has been working on is called [Starshade](http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/video/15). To perfectly occult a star with a perfectly dark, hard-edged shadow, it will be deployed tens of thousands of kilometers from its telescope. It will be a disk 15 to 20 meters in diameter, with a perimeter of exotically shaped “petals” to defeat the effect of light diffracting around the edges of the disk. The edges have to be geometrically exact and machined to razor sharpness. The Starshade would fly in formation with a telescope located at the stable Lagrange point called L2, a million miles from Earth in the direction away from the Sun. The cost, including launch, will be about $650 million—not currently budgeted by NASA. Now that we know planets are extremely common, one of the profoundest questions is whether life is also common in our galaxy, or is it extremely rare? Seager thinks that life abounds out there, and we will be able to point to examples in this century.

Ramez Naam: Enhancing Humans, Advancing Humanity

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 22 Jul 2015 19:30:00 -0700

### Enhancing humans and humanity Beginning with the accelerating pace of biotech tools for human health and enhancement, Naam noted that health issues such as disease prevention will be drastically easier to implement than enhancement. Preventing some hereditary diseases can be done with a single gene adjustment, whereas enhancement of traits like intelligence or longevity entails the fine tuning of hundreds of genes. He favors moving ahead with human germline engineering to totally eliminate some of our most horrific diseases. Over time he expects that human gene editing will lead in the opposite direction from the enforced conformity depicted in _Brave New World_ and the film “Gattaca.” Instead people will relish exploring variety, and the plummeting costs of the technology will mean that the poor will benefit as well as the rich. Naam’s brain discussion began with the Sergey Brin quote, “We want Google to be the third half of your brain.” Brain interface tools are proliferating. There are already 200,000 successful cochlear implants which feed sound directly into the nervous system. There is a digital eye that feeds pretty good visual data directly to the brain via a jack in the side of the user’s head. There is a hippocampus chip that can restore brain function in a rat. Rat brains have been linked so that what one rat learns, the other rat knows. The paper on that work was titled “Meta-organism of Two Rats on the Internet.” Humans also have been linked brain to brain at a distance to share function. Zebrafish have been lit up to show all their neurons firing in real time. Coming soon is the deployment of “neural dust” that can provide ultrasonic communications with tens of thousands of neurons at a time. How profound are the ethical issues? Naam observed that we already have many of the attributes of telepathy in our cell phones and smart phones. They came so rapidly and cheaply that they erased most of the concerns about a “digital divide.” Half of the world is now on the Internet, with the rest coming fast. And rather than a divider, the technology proved to be an equalizer and a connector, fostering economic growth and the rapid spread and sifting of ideas. Digital connectivity, he argued, is widening everyone’s “circle of empathy.” A viral video started the Arab Spring. Viral videos are changing how everyone thinks about race in America. These technologies, he concluded, are making humans more humane. One question from the audience inquired about the origin of so much reference in the Nexus series to group meditation as the epitome of mind sharing. Naam noted that Buddhists, including the Dalai Lama, are highly interested in brain science, and his own experiences of the ecstacy of mind sharing were at a rave at Burning Man and a ten-day Vipassana Meditation Retreat in Thailand. I asked if he agreed with the current round of panic about superintelligent artificial intelligence posing an existential threat to humanity. He said no. The dark scenarios imagine an AI so smart it implements new and grotesquely harmful pathways to solve a poorly contextualized problem. Naam pointed out that “Software almost never does anything well by accident.” (A flock of Tweets burst from the theater with that line.) And the dark scenarios imagine an isolated rogue super-capable AI. In reality nothing really capable is developed in isolation.

Rick Prelinger: Bay Area Telecommunications Infrastructure History

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 19 Jan 2021 16:10:17 -0800

Rick Prelinger uncovers the diverse histories of Bay Area telecommunications infrastructure: telephone, radio, television, data, image and sound. A tour of technologies, dead and flourishing, that overlay, underlay and penetrate us all.

Neil Gaiman: How Stories Last

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 09 Jun 2015 19:30:00 -0700

## How stories last Stories are alive. The ones that last, Gaiman said, outcompete other stories by changing over time. They make it from medium to medium—from oral to written to film and beyond. They lose uninteresting elements but hold on to the most compelling bits or even add some. The most popular version of the Cinderella story (which may have originated long ago in China) has kept the gloriously unlikely _glass_ slipper introduced by a careless French telling. “Stories,” Gaiman said, “teach us how the world is put together and the rules of living in the world, and they come in an attractive enough package that we take pleasure from them and want to help them propagate.” Northwest coast native Americans have a tale about a beautiful woman and young man whose forbidden love was punished by the earth shaking, and black ash on snow, and finally fire coming from a mountain, killing many people. It stopped only when the beautiful woman was thrown into the burning mountain. That is important information-- solid-seeming mountains can suddenly erupt, and early warnings of that are earthquakes and ash. As pure information it won’t last beyond three generations. But add in beauty and forbidden love and tragic death, and the story will be told as long as people live in the mountains. The first emperor of China died 2,300 years ago. He was so powerful that he was able to totally conceal the location of his tomb, and all that was left was stories about the fabulous treasures buried with him. There was said to a whole army of terracotta warriors and ships floating on lakes of mercury. A few years ago a terracotta warrior was dug up in a field in China, and then a whole army of them. Archaeologists figured out where the emperor’s mausoleum must be buried, but first they did something not normally done at archeological digs. They checked if there might be any incredibly poisonous mercury around. There is. Gaiman said he learned something important about stories from his cousin Helen Fagin, a Holocaust survivor who taught class in a Polish ghetto during the Nazi occupation. Books were forbidden on pain of death, but Helen had a Polish translation of _Gone With the Wind_ she read at night, and she told its story to her entranced students by day. “The magic of escapist fiction,” Gaiman said, “is that it can offer you escape from an otherwise intolerable situation, and it can furnish you with armor, knowledge, weapons, and other tools you can take back into your life to make it better.” “‘Once upon a time,’ Gaiman said, “is code for ‘I’m lying to you.’ We experience stories as lies and truth at the same time. We learn to empathize with real people via made-up people. The most important thing that fiction does is it lets us look out through other eyes, and that teaches us empathy—that behind every pair of eyes is somebody like us.“ Stories have their own form of life, Gaiman concluded. “You can view people as this peculiar byproduct that stories use for breeding and transmission. They are symbiotic with us. They are the thing that we have used since the dawn of humanity to become more than just one person.“

Neal Stephenson: Seveneves at The Interval

The Long Now Foundation — Thu, 08 Jun 2017 21:30:00 -0700

Author Neal Stephenson has had a long though informal connection with Long Now. Before the foundation was formed, soon after Danny Hillis began to consider designing a 10,000 year Clock, he asked a circle of friends to give input on the idea. Neal drew up his own imaginative Clock Designs and sent them along. Years later those ideas and sketches stuck with him and became the foundation for his book Anathem. He launched that book as a Long Now event in 02008. And more recently he asked Stewart Brand for some input about his 02015 book SEVENEVES. It is not a spoiler to say that Earth's moon explodes in SEVENEVES, because that happens in the very first sentence. Stephenson starts his intro by explaining that this novel is a "Space Ark" book, which it was his goal to write. But crafting a narrative where humans have time to build giant crafts to lift them off their planet is not trivial. It takes a particular kind of slowing ticking disaster, as he explains. In Neal's commentary we are treated to a quote of Bruce Sterling's definition of the "thriller" genre (which I won't spoil); Neal's own neo-acronym for a flavor fast-breaking Internet outrage, and an in-depth anecdote of German medical history--a footnote to his SEVENEVES research which didn't really figure in the book The lively discussion with Stewart and the audience brought out questions about Stephenson's work habits, back catalog, and his next book (of which he had already written hundreds of pages though he was just starting his SEVENEVES book tour). He is as precise and detailed-driven in these conversations as he is on the page; and likewise his sense of humor also shines through. This event took place in May 02015, days before the 1-year anniversary of the first event at The Interval (which was [Adam Rogers' talk](http://theinterval.org/salon-talks/02014/may/27/proof-science-booze)). It was Stephenson's first visit to Long Now's newly renovated bar/cafe and headquarters. In addition to being a friend of the organization and a vital contemplator of our future (near and far), Neal is one of just over 1,000 people who donated to building campaign for The Interval. It was the perfect way to mark one year, and our 30th event, for him to share his latest work in the space his support helped us build.

Beth Shapiro: How to Clone a Mammoth

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 11 May 2015 19:30:00 -0700

## De-extinction science When people hear about “ancient DNA” in fossils, Shapiro began, the first question always is “Can we clone a dinosaur?” Dinosaurs died out so many millions of years ago, their fossils are nothing but rock (and by the way, there’s no workaround with mosquitoes in amber because amber totally destroys DNA). With no DNA, there’s no chance of cloning a dinosaur. (Sorry.) The fossils of woolly mammoths, though, are not rock. They died out only thousands of years ago, and their remains are pretty well preserved in frozen tundra, which means there is recoverable DNA. So, Plan A, can we clone a mammoth? It would be like Dolly-the-sheep, where you take nuclear DNA from somewhere in the preserved mammoth body, inject it into the egg of a closely related species (Asian elephant), plant the mammoth embryo in a surrogate mother, and in two years, a newborn woolly mammoth! But as soon as any animal dies, unless it is cyropreserved with great care, all the DNA is attacked by gut bacteria, by water, by temperature change, and soon you have nothing but tiny fragments. Nobody has found any intact cells or intact DNA in frozen mammoth mummies, and probably they never will. So, you can’t clone a mammoth. (Sorry.) Okay, Plan B, can you _sequence_ a mammoth—reconstruct the entire genome through digital analysis and then rebuild it chemically and plant that in an elephant egg? Ancient DNA, even from the best specimens, is so badly fragmented and contaminated it’s hard to tell what bits are mammoth and how they go together. Using the elephant genome for comparison, though, you can do a pretty good job of approximating the original. Just last week the successful sequencing and assembly of the full woolly mammoth genome—4 billion base pairs—was announced. But all sequencing is incomplete, including the human genome, and maybe important elements got left out. A genome rebuilt from scratch won’t be functional, and you can’t create a mammoth with it. (Sorry.) Alright, Plan C, can you _engineer_ a mammoth? Take a living elephant genome and cut and paste important mammoth genes into it so you get all the mammoth traits you want. There is an incredibly powerful new tool for genome editing called CRISPR Cas 9 that can indeed swap synthetic mammoth genes into an elephant genome, and this has been done by George Church and his team at Harvard. They swapped in 14 genes governing mammoth traits for long hair, extra fat, and special cold-adapted blood cells. _If_ you can figure out the right genes to swap, _and_ you get them all working in an elephant genome, _and_ you manage the difficult process of cross-species cloning and cross-species parenthood, _then_ you may get mammoth-like Asian elephants capable of living in the cold. (During the Q & A, Shapiro pointed out that with birds the process is different than with mammals. Instead of cloning, you take the edited genome and inject it into primordial germ cells of the embryo of a closely related bird. If all goes well, when the embryo grows up, it has the gonads of the extinct bird and will lay some eggs carrying the traits of the extinct animal.) Why bring back extinct animals? Certainly not to live in zoos. But in the wild they could restore missing ecological interactions. Shapiro described Sergey Zimov’s “Pleistocene Park” in northern Siberia, where he proved that a dense herd of large herbivores can turn tundra into grassland—”the animals create and maintain their own grazing environment.” The woolly mammoth was a very large herbivore. Its return to the Arctic could provide new habitat for endangered species, help temper climate change, increase the population of elephants in the world, and bring excitement and a reframed sense of what is possible to conservation. Furthermore, Shapiro concluded, the technology of de-extinction can be applied to endangered species. Revive & Restore is working on the black-footed ferret, which has inbreeding problems and extreme vulnerability to a disease called sylvatic plague. Gene variants that are now absent in the population might be recovered from the DNA of specimens in museums, and the living ferrets could get a booster shot from their ancestors.

D. Fox Harrell: Coding Ourselves/Coding Others

The Long Now Foundation — Thu, 11 Jun 2020 15:32:59 -0700

Through building and analyzing systems, [D. Fox Harrell](http://foxharrell.com)'s research investigates how the computer can be used to express cultural meanings through data-structures and algorithms. In his talk he showed that identities are complicated by their intersection with technologies like social networking, gaming, and virtual worlds. Data-structures and algorithms in video games and social media can perpetuate persistent issues of class, gender, sex, race, and ethnicity. They also create dynamic constructions of social categories, metaphorical thought, body language, and fashion. He showed work from his team at the [Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory](http://groups.csail.mit.edu/icelab/) (ICE Lab) at MIT which provides alternatives that can evolve those industry norms. Dr. Harrell is an associate professor of digital media in the Comparative Media Studies Program and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT. He holds a PhD in computer science and cognitive science from the University of California, San Diego. In 02010 he was awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award for his project "Computing for Advanced Identity Representation." He was a 02014-15 fellow at the [Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences](https://casbs.stanford.edu) (CASBS) at Stanford, co-sponsors of this talk.

Michael Shermer: The Long Arc of Moral Progress

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 14 Apr 2015 19:30:00 -0700

## Moral Progress Shermer began with Martin Luther King’s statement in Selma, March 1965: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” What if we look at that arc in terms of trendlines instead of headlines? In the mid-19th century there were almost no democracies. Now there are 118, out of a total of 196 nations. Women’s suffrage only began to take off in the early 20th century (led in the US by Inez Milholland on her white stallion) and by the end of the century nearly all nations had adopted it (even Saudi Arabia may catch up this year). Gay rights are gaining legal and popular support in this very decade, with the transition in popular opinion about same-sex marriage arriving in 2011. Shermer noted that research shows that support is greatest in younger generations and in people associated with no religion, and that pattern is standard with most forms of moral progress. Animal rights, Shermer said, is just now taking off in earnest, inspired by the 18th-century Enlightenment social reformer, Jeremy Bentham, who wrote, “The question is not Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but Can they _suffer_?” The Enlightenment brought the power of abstract reasoning and science to social and moral problems and provided the tools to defy the unreasoning demands of strict ideologies and religions. Voltaire declared, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” Shermer ended with Martin Luther King’s observation that “we were made for the stars, created for the everlasting, born for eternity,” and that stardust—us--can come to embody morality is the long arc of moral progress.

Jonathon Keats: Envisioning Deep Time

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 07 Apr 2015 18:22:00 -0700

Philosophical inquiry and scientific absurdism meet in the conceptual precision and ice dry wit of Jonathon Keats. In his talk at The Interval, Keats discussed his forays into very long-term photography and other deep time projects. He also announced a site-speciific collaboration with The Long Now Foundation that will create a long-term art work on our Mt. Washington property in Eastern Nevada. As an experimental philosopher and conceptual artist, Jonathon Keats has applied general relativity to time management, personalized the metric system, sold real estate in the higher dimensions of spacetime, and epigenetically resurrected historical figures including George Washington and Jesus Christ. Those are some of the projects he touches on in this talk. Currently Keats is [building pinhole cameras](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/03/experimental_philosopher_jonathon_keats_millennium_camera_experiment.html) of his own design with exposure times of 100 and 1,000 years to document long-term change in cities from San Francisco to Berlin. The Berlin century cameras debuted in 02014. Each person who secretly installed one will eventually inform a child of its location. In 02114 that child is responsible for retrieving the finished photo and returning the camera to the gallery. Where they can get their deposit back. [The first millennium camera](https://asunow.asu.edu/content/asu-art-museum-document-tempe-historys-slowest-photograph) was installed recently at the Arizona State University Art Museum. But his next time art project is five times as ambitious. Keats reveals for the first time in this talk a project to turn bristlecone pines into calendars--living calendars. Bristlecones live up to 5000 years, so they are unique in the duraton they track time through dendrochronology. The artist needed to find a place where these ancient trees are already growing that would work with him to create this project. And happily we at Long Now could do just that. The story of the Centuries of Bristlecone will be a long time in telling. But stay tuned.

Paul Saffo: The Creator Economy

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 31 Mar 2015 19:30:00 -0700

### The Creator Economy Media innovations drive economic shifts, Saffo began. “We invent new technology and then use it to reinvent ourselves.” 1\. The Industrial/producer Economy. At the beginning of the 20th century the leading scarcity was _stuff_ , and so manufacture was systematized. By 1914 one of Ford’s workers could buy a Model T car with four month’s salary. Production efficiency won the Second World War for the allies. In 1944 the US was producing 8 aircraft carriers a month, a plane every five minutes, and 50 merchant ships a day. The process became so efficient that its success ended the dominance of that economy. That always happens. “Every new abundance creates an adjacent scarcity.“ 2\. The Consumer Economy. The new scarcity was _desire_. 1958 brought the first credit card. The CEOs of leading companies shifted from heads of production to heads of marketing. Container ships doubled global trade. 3\. The Creator Economy. In 1971 Herbert Simon predicted, “A wealth of information creates a poverty of _attention_ and a need to allocate that attention efficiently.” The new scarcity turned out to be _engagement_. The mass media television channels that had dominated the Consumer Economy were overwhelmed by personal media--YouTube, eBay, Facebook, Wikipedia, Twitter, Google, Etsy. Hollywood was overwhelmed by video games. (The blockbuster movie “Avatar“ opened in 2009 with a $73 million weekend. The previous month, the game “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2” sold $310 million in 24 hours.) Mass participation became the new normal. Stuff is cheap; status comes from creation. Value is created by engagement---from Wikipedia entries to Google queries to Mechanical Turk services to Airbnb to Uber to Kaggle analyses. Burning Man sets the standard of “no spectators.” Makers insist that “If you can’t open it, you don’t own it.” Saffo advised recalling four warnings for revolutionaries. 1) There are winners and losers. 2) Don’t confuse early results with long-term outcomes. 3) Successful insurgents become over-powerful incumbents. 4) Technologies of freedom become technologies of control. If we want privacy now, we have to pay extra for it. As with our smart phones, we will subscribe to self-driving cars, not own them. With our every move tracked, we are like radio-collared bears. Our jobs are being atomized, with ever more parts taken over by robots. We trade freedom for convenience. Over the 30 or so years remaining in the Creator Economy, Saffo figures that we will redefine freedom in terms of interdependence, and he closed with Richard Brautigan’s poem about a “cybernetic ecology” where we “are all watched over by machines of loving grace.”

Jason Scott: The Web In An Eye Blink

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 01 Nov 2017 11:27:16 -0700

Jason Scott is an activist archiver who preserves artifacts of digital culture for the future. Users today have many ways to create content online, but they often lack the skills, tools or guidance to preserve the media they make. As startups fail, platforms disappear, and technology companies take the short term view, Jason and his cohorts at the [Internet Archive](http://archive.org) and [Archive Team](http://archiveteam.org) are being good ancestors for everyone in the future networked world. In 02009 Jason founded the Archive Team: a loose collective that launches “Distributed Preservation of Service Attacks" to rescue content endangered by "shutdowns, shutoffs, mergers, and plain old deletions" that happen all too often in the tech industry. They've saved user-created content on Friendster, GeoCities, and Google Reader before they went to the virtual graveyard. Since 02011 Jason has been Free-Range Archivist & Software Curator at the Internet Archive. He is tasked with adding to and maintaining the largest vintage and historical software library in the world. It contains millions of programs from Shareware CD-Roms to open source software and vintage arcade games. Under Jason's direction, archive.org has now made hundreds of games playable in the browser--including those created for now-defunct operating systems, proprietary hardware, and arcade cabinets thanks to the modern miracle of emulation.

David Keith: Patient Geoengineering

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 17 Feb 2015 18:30:00 -0800

## Practical geoengineering “Temporary, moderate, and responsive” should be the guidelines of responsible geoengineering, in David Keith’s view. For slowing global warming, and giving humanity time to bring greenhouse gas emissions down to zero (and eventually past zero with carbon capture), he favors the form of “solar radiation management” that reflects sunlight the way volcanoes occasionally do—with sulfate particles in the stratosphere. The common worry about geoengineering is that because it is so cheap ($1 billion a year) and easy, civilization would become “addicted“ and have to continue it forever, while giving up on the expensive and difficult process of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, thus making the long-term problem far worse. Keith’s solution is to design the geoengineering program as _temporary_ from start to finish. “Temporary“ means shut it down by 2200. (Keith also likes the term “patient” for this approach.) By “ _moderate_ ” he means there is no attempt to completely offset the warming caused by us, but just cut the rate of climate change in half. That would give the highest benefit at lowest risk—minimal harmful effect on ozone and rainfall patterns, and the fewest unwelcome surprises, while providing enough time (and plenty of incentive) for societies to manage their carbon dioxide mitigation and orderly adaptation. Geoengineering’s leverage is very high—one gram of particles in the stratosphere prevents the warming caused by a ton of carbon dioxide. “ _Responsive_ ” means careful, gradual, and closely monitored, with the expectation there will be many adjustments along the way, along with the ability to back off entirely if needed. Though climate-change models keep improving, we still do not completely understand how climate works, and that raises the very good question: “How do you engineer a system whose behavior you don’t understand?” Keith’s answer is “feedback. We engineer and control many chaotic systems, such as high-performance aircraft, through precise feedback.” The same goes for governance of geoengineering. It is a complex system that will require sophisticated control by a global set of governing bodies, but we already do that for the far more complex system of global finance. Keith’s specific program would begin with balloon tests in the lower stratosphere (8 miles up) releasing just 100 grams of sulfuric acid—about the amount of particles in a few minutes of normal jet contrail. “If those studies confirm safety and effectiveness,” Keith said, “then we could begin gradual deployment as early as 2020 with three business jets re-engineered for high altitude. By 2030 you could have about ten aircraft delivering a quarter million tons of sulfur per year at a cost of $700 million.“ The amount of sulfur being released might be up to a million tons by 2070, but that would still be only one-eighth of what went into the stratosphere from the Mt. Pinatubo volcanic eruption in 1991, and _one-fiftieth_ of what enters the lower atmosphere from our current burning of fossil fuels. By then we may have developed more sophisticated particles than sulfate. It could be diamond dust, or alumina, or even something like a nanoscale “photophoretic” particle designed by Keith that would levitate itself above the stratosphere. This is no quick fix. It is not quick, and it doesn’t try to be a complete fix. It has to be matched with total reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to zero _and_ with effective capture of carbon, because the overload of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere will stay there for a very long time unless removed. Keith asked, “Is it plausible that we will not figure out how to pull, say, five gigatons of carbon per year out of the air by 2075? I don’t buy it.“ Keith ended by proposing that goal should not be just 350 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. (It’s rising past 400 ppm now.) We can shoot for the pre-industrial level of the 1770s. Take carbon dioxide down to 270 ppm.

Jeffrey McGrew: Talking with Robots about Architecture

The Long Now Foundation — Thu, 08 Jun 2017 21:55:00 -0700

The co-founder of Because We Can, the architecture/design firm that designed The Interval at Long Now, discusses the future of building: automation, communication, and whether "robots" will change everything. An informed and realistic overview of how architects and builders use automation today and how they may use it tomorrow. From February 02015.

Paul Saffo & Stewart Brand: Pace Layers Thinking

The Long Now Foundation — Thu, 08 Jun 2017 21:35:00 -0700

In 1999 “Pace Layers” made its debut in the book [The Clock of Long Now](http://www.amazon.com/Clock-Long-Now-Responsibility-Computer/dp/0465007805/lono0a20) by Stewart Brand. It appeared as a deceptively simple diagram with the caption: "The order of civilization. The fast layers innovate; the slow layers stabilize. The whole combines learning with continuity." The six Pace Layer levels in descending order from the highest & fastest to the lowest & slowest are **Fashion, Commerce, Infrastructure, Governance, Culture, Nature**. Stewart’s initial point was to give insight into how a healthy society works. But fifteen years later, this idea about interacting layers that change at different speeds has been useful in ways he never expected. Prominent designers and tech company executives have cited the _Clock_ book and Pace Layers and told how it has changed their thinking. Many others have applied the idea to their work in design, management, engineering, and numerous other areas. “This is a data free document,” Stewart quipped in response to an audience question about the Pace Layers illustration. That may reveal one reason for its longevity. Proposed initially as a way to view society, it has survived as a framework. It’s not tied to “facts” which may turn out to have expiration dates. Pace Layers travels well and ports easily to other systems. "Quite a lot of people decided it was about software and systems and systems design," chuckled Stewart; he wasn't familiar with the term "full stack design" before learning that Pace Layers had been endorsed as a good metaphor for it. [Paul Saffo](https://longnow.org/people/board/paul10/) and a few others who use and teach Pace Layers spoke about what makes it a useful tool for analyzing our past, present and future. Paul, a founding Long Now board member and futurist, finds the concept invaluable for his own work, including teaching forecasting at Stanford. Here’s how Stewart introduced the idea back in 1999: > I propose six significant levels of pace and size in the working structure of a robust and adaptable civilization. [...] In a healthy society each level is allowed to operate at its own pace, safely sustained by the slower levels below and kept invigorated by the livelier levels above. Stewart has credited Freeman Dyson and Brian Eno, amongst others, for helping him form the concept. In this talk he went deeper into Pace Layers’ origins. "Like all good things this was stolen," he began, then paid tribute to architect Frank Duffy's concept of the nested “Shearing Layers” of a building. Stewart wrote about Duffy's work in his 1994 book [How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built](http://www.amazon.com/How-Buildings-Learn-Happens-Theyre/dp/0140139966). The presentation included an amazing artifact: a preliminary sketch of the Pace Layers diagram from December 1996, hand-drawn by Stewart after a talk with Brian Eno. That conversation helped finalize the idea: after Eno’s input he changed the top layer’s name to “Fashion” from “Art” and the layer labeled “Government” became “Governance.” If there are only six words, they have to be the right words. Relationships between layers are key to the health of the system. More specifically, as both Stewart and Paul pointed out, conflicts caused by layers moving at different speeds actually keep things balanced and resilient. Paul called this “constructive turbulence.” Innovation challenges orthodoxy. Wisdom repels destabilizing change, but also takes useful novelty onboard. Stewart, as much as anyone, has been an intellectual participant across some of our society’s most remarkable decades. As an agitator and as a bulwark. He has been the firebrand and now the grey beard. Pace Layers has proven itself low, slow, and here to stay. It’s fitting that the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog has given us access to a tool that’s so simple and enduringly useful.

Jesse Ausubel: Nature is Rebounding

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 13 Jan 2015 18:30:00 -0800

### Why nature is rebounding Over the last 40 years, in nearly every field, human productivity has _decoupled_ from resource use, Ausubel began. Even though our prosperity and population continue to increase, the trends show _decreasing_ use of energy, water, land, material resources, and impact on natural systems (except the ocean). As a result we are seeing the beginnings of a global restoration of nature. America tends to be the leader in such trends, and the “American use of almost everything except information seems to be peaking, not because the resources are exhausted but because consumers changed consumption and producers changed production.“ Start with agriculture, which “has always been the greatest raper of nature.” Since 1940 yield has decoupled from acreage, and yet the rising yields have not required increasing inputs such as fertilizer, pesticides, or water. The yield from corn has become spectacular, and it is overwhelmingly our leading crop, but most of it is fed to cars and livestock rather than people. Corn acreage the size of Iowa is wasted on biofuels. An even greater proportion goes to cows and pigs for conversion to meat. The animals vary hugely in their efficiency at producing meat. If they were vehicles, we would say that “a steer gets about 12 miles per gallon, a pig 40, and a chicken 60.“ (In that scale a farmed fish gets 80 miles per gallon.) Since 1975 beef and pork consumption have leveled off while chicken consumption has soared. “The USA and the world are at _peak farmland,_ “ Ausubel declared, “not because of exhaustion of arable land, but because farmers are wildly successful in producing protein and calories.” Much more can be done. Ausubel pointed out that just reducing the one-third of the world’s food that is wasted, rolling out the highest-yield techniques worldwide, and abandoning biofuels would free up an area the size of India (1.2 million square miles) to return to nature. As for forests, nation after nation is going through the “forest transition” from decreasing forest area to increasing. France was the first in 1830. Since then their forests have doubled while their population also doubled. The US transitioned around 1950. A great boon is tree plantations, which have a yield five to ten times greater than logging wild forest. “In recent times,” Ausubel said, “about a third of wood production comes from plantations. If that were to increase to 75 percent, the logged area of natural forests could drop in half.” Meanwhile the consumption of all wood has leveled off---for fuel, buildings, and, finally, paper. We are at _peak timber._ One byproduct of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the longer temperate-zone growing seasons accompanying global warming is greater plant growth. “Global Greening,“ Ausubel said, “is the most important ecological trend on Earth today. The biosphere on land is getting bigger, year by year, by two billion tons or even more.” Other trendlines show that world population is at _peak children,_ and in the US we are _peak car travel_ and may even be at _peak car._ The most efficient form of travel, which Ausubel promotes, is maglev trains such as the “Hyperloop“ proposed by Elon Musk. Statistically, horses, trains, cars, and jets all require about one ton of vehicle per passenger. A maglev system would require only one-third of that. In the ocean, though, trends remain troubling. Unlike on land, we have not yet replaced hunting wild animals with farming. Once refrigeration came along, “the democratization of sushi changed everything for sea life. Fish biomass in intensively exploited fisheries appears to be about one‐tenth the level of the fish in those seas a few decades or hundred years ago.“ One fifth of the meat we eat comes from fish, and about 40 percent of that fifth is now grown in fish farms, but too many of the farmed fish are fed with small fish caught at sea. Ausubel recommends vegetarian fish such as tilapia and “persuading salmon and other carnivores to eat tofu,” which has already been done with the Caribbean kingfish. “With smart aquaculture,“ Ausubel said, “life in the oceans can rebound while feeding humanity.” When nature rebounds, the wild animals return. Traversing through abandoned farmlands in Europe, wolves, lynx, and brown bears are repopulating lands that haven’t seen them for centuries, and they are being welcomed. Ten thousand foxes roam London. Salmon are back in the Thames, the Seine, and the Rhine. Whales have recovered and returned even to the waters off New York. Ausubel concluded with a photo showing a humpback whale breaching, right in line with the Empire State Building in the background.

Kevin Kelly: Technium Unbound

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 12 Nov 2014 18:30:00 -0800

## Holos Rising When Kevin Kelly looked up the definition of “superorganism” on Wikipedia, he found this: “A collection of agents which can act in concert to produce phenomena governed by the collective.” The source cited was Kevin Kelly, in his 01994 book, Out of Control. His 02014 perspective is that humanity has come to dwell in a superorganism of our own making on which our lives now depend. The technological numbers keep powering up and connecting with each other. Their aggregate is becoming formidable, rich with emergent behavior, and yet it is still so new to us that it remains unnamed and scarcely considered. Kelly clicked through some current tallies: one quintillion transistors; fifty-five trillion links; one hundred billion web clicks per day; one thousand communication satellites. Only a quarter of all the energy we use goes to humans; the rest drives Earth’s “very large machine.” Kelly calls it “the Technium” and spelled out what it is not. Not H.G. Wells’ “World Brain,” which was only a vision of what the Web now is. Not Teilhard de Chardin’s “Noosphere,” which was only humanity’s collective consciousness. Not “the Singularity,” which anticipates a technological event horizon that Kelly says will never occur as an event—”the Singularity will always be near.” The Technium may best be considered a new organism with which we are symbiotic, as we are symbiotic with the aggregate of Earth’s life, sometimes called “Gaia.” There are pace differences, with Gaia slow, humanity faster, and the Technium really fast. They are not replacing each other but building on each other, and the meta-organism of their combining is so far nameless. Kelly shrugged, “Call it ‘Holos.’ Here are five frontiers I think that Holos implies for us…” 1) Big math of “zillionics” ---beyond yotta (10 to the 24th) to, some say, “lotta” and “hella.” 2) New economics of the massive one-big-market, capable of surprise flash crashes and imperceptible tectonic shifts. 3) New biology of our superorganism with its own large phobias, compulsions, and oscillations. 4) New minds, which will emerge from a proliferation of auto-enhancing AI’s that augment rather than replace human intelligence. 5) New governance. One world government is inevitable. Some of it will be non-democratic—”I don’t get to vote who’s on the World Bank.“ To deal with planet-scale issues like geoengineering and climate change, “we will have to work through the recursive dilemma of who decides who decides?” We have no rules for cyberwar yet. We have no backup to the Internet yet, and it needs an immune system. There is lots to work out, but lots to work it out with, and inventiveness abounds and converges. “We are,” Kelly said, “at just the beginning of the beginning.”

Larry Harvey: Why The Man Keeps Burning

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 20 Oct 2014 19:30:00 -0700

## The Hundred Year Burn "Burning Man is like one of those birthday candles you can’t blow out,” observed Burning Man’s primary founder and Chief Philosophical Officer. Indeed, Burning Man has thrived in the face of Burners and skeptics alike declaring it dead after each of its first 25 years. Too big, too fashionable, too many rich people, too hard to get in: each year the rationale changes, and Burning Man continues to thrive. Half of the secret is simplicity. Consider the Man. Before anything exists on the playa, Burning Man begins with a single stake pounded into the ground marking the spot where the Man will stand. This is the axis mundi of Burning Man, the point on which everything converges, from the radiating streets to the final ritual of the burn. The stake itself is the object of a spontaneous ritual: as it is placed each year, each crew-member gives the stake a few hammer-blows to drive it in. The other half of Burning Man’s secret is transformation. “Just when you are done with one existential challenge, then you encounter another.” For example, in recent years, forty percent of Burning Man’s population are newcomers. “I am pretty comfortable with that – it is new energy that keeps things very much alive,” observed Harvey. Burning Man is now setting on a course to thrive for another 75 years. Its [Ten Principles](http://www.burningman.com/whatisburningman/about_burningman/principles.html) are the compass and the newly established Philosophical Center is the think tank and “collective memory and conscience” helping guide Burning Man on this 100-year journey. Harvey observed that, “Corporations have a remarkably short life-span, while cities have a remarkably long life-span – drop an atom bomb on it and it comes right back. We will find our way. It always looks dubious when we set out because we are setting out in the dark. But your faith always guides you.” Our advice: mark your calendar for the last Monday of August 02090 and sign up early; the tickets are certain to sell out fast.

James Nestor: Humanity and the Deep Ocean

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 31 Jan 2018 23:00:00 -0800

In _[DEEP: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells us about Ourselves](https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Freediving-Renegade-Science-Ourselves/dp/0547985525)_ James Nestor follows extreme athletes, adventurers, and scientists as they plumb the limits of the ocean's depths and uncover startling discoveries that, in many cases, redefine our understanding of the ocean and ourselves. Freedivers dive without scuba gear, holding their breath longer than had been thought humanly possible, and thus confirming the legendary feats of Japanese pearl divers. Nestor explains that the human body actually adapts in real time as it reaches depths where we’d expect it to be crushed. For experienced freedivers a “master switch” flips and they are able to handle the pressure and their body automatically ration oxygen to safely extend their time below. But free diving is only the beginning. Nestor explains how citizen scientist freedivers interact with sperm whales and other sea life in ways that are not possible using other technologies. They can swim within feet of these giant mammals. And the whales amazingly reorient themselves as if to start a conversation. In fact they send clicks (recordings of which Nestor plays onstage) which are used for communication, not geolocation. When you realize how developed the brains of these creatures are, it’s not surprising that they would have something to say. And considering the possibilities of communicating with dolphins and whales is something that Nestor feels strongly about (as he mentioned in [an Ignite Talk he gave for us](https://youtu.be/KrjyevcdNVg) in 02016). There’s even more in this talk including evidence of how some humans use extra-sensory capabilities that are employed by sharks and whales: magnetic sensitivity and echolocation. In languages that feature cardinal directions rather than relative ones, native speakers always orient themselves correctly in numerous studies--no compass needed. Humans can teach themselves echolocation, and in fact he introduces us to a group of young blind man who uses clicks to enable him to ride a bike through the city and tell one object from another. Overall Nestor's talk shows us that the wonders of the ocean may be more accessible and relatable than we’d ever imagined them to be.

Drew Endy: The iGEM Revolution

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 16 Sep 2014 19:30:00 -0700

## Massively collaborative synthetic biology Natural genomes are nearly impossible to figure out, Endy began, because they were evolved, not designed. Everything is context dependent, tangled, and often unique. So most biotech efforts become herculean. It cost $25 million to develop a way to biosynthesize the malaria drug artemisinin, for example. Yet the field has so much promise that most of what biotechnology can do hasn’t even been imagined yet. How could the nearly-impossible be made easy? Could biology become programmable? Endy asked Lynn Conway, the legendary inventor of efficient chip design and manufacturing, how to proceed. She said, “Go meta.” If the recrafting of DNA is viewed from a meta perspective, the standard engineering cycle---Design, Build, Test, Design better, etc.—requires a framework of DNA Synthesis, using Standards, understood with Abstraction, leading to better Synthesis, etc. “In 2003 at MIT,” Endy said, “we didn’t know how to teach it, but we thought that maybe working with students we could figure out how to learn it.” It would be learning-by-building. So began a student project to engineer a biological oscillator—a genetic blinker—which led next year to several teams creating new life forms, which led to the burgeoning iGEM phenomenon. Tom Knight came up with the idea of standard genetic parts, like Lego blocks, now called BioBricks. Randy Rettberg declared that cooperation had to be the essence of the work, both within teams (which would compete) and among all the participants to develop the vast collaborative enterprise that became the iGEM universe—students creating new BioBricks (now 10,000+) and meeting at the annual Jamboree in Boston (this year there are 2,500 competitors from 32 countries). “iGEM” stands for International Genetically Engineered Machine. Playfulness helps, Endy said. Homo faber needs homo ludens—man-the-player makes a better man-the-maker. In 2009 ten teenagers with $25,000 in sixteen weeks developed the ability to create _E. coli_ in a variety of colors. They called it _E. chromi_. What could you do with pigmented intestinal microbes? “The students were nerding out.” They talked to designers and came up with the idea of using colors in poop for diagnosis. By 2049, they proposed, there could be a “Scatalog” for color matching of various ailments such as colon cancer. “It would be more pleasant than colonoscopy.” The rationale for BioBricks is that “standardization enables coordination of labor among parties and over time.” For the system to work well depends on total access to the tools. “I want free-to-use language for programming life,” said Endy. The stated goal of the iGEM revolutionaries is “to benefit all people and the planet.” After ten years there are now over 20,000 of them all over the world guiding the leading edges of biotechnology in that direction. During the Q&A;, Endy told a story from his graduate engineering seminar at Dartmouth. The students were excited that the famed engineer and scientist Arthur Kantrowitz was going to lead a session on sustainability. They were shocked when he told them, “‘Sustainability‘ is the most dangerous thing I’ve ever encountered. My job today is to explain two things to you. One, pessimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Two, optimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Anne Neuberger: Inside the NSA

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 06 Aug 2014 19:30:00 -0700

## The NSA reaches out Of her eight great-grandparents, seven were murdered at Auschwitz. “So my family’s history burned into me a fear of what occurs when the power of a state is turned against its people or other people.” Seeking freedom from threats like that brought her parents from Hungary to America. By 1976 they had saved up to take their first flight abroad. Their return flight from Tel Aviv was high-jacked by terrorists and landed at Entebbe Airport in Uganda. Non-Jewish passengers were released and the rest held hostage. The night before the terrorists were to begin shooting the hostages, a raid by Israeli commandos saved most of the passengers. Anne Neuberger was just a baby in 1976. “My life would have looked very different had a military operation not brought my parents home. It gives me a perspective on the threats of organized terror and the role of intelligence and counterterrorism.” When she later entered government service, she sought out intelligence, where she is now the principal advisor to the Director for managing NSA’s work with the private sector. The NSA, Neuberger said, has suffered a particularly “long and challenging year” dealing with the public loss of trust following the Snowden revelations. The agency is reviewing all of its activities to determine how to regain that trust. One change is more open engagement with the public. “This presentation is a starting point." “My family history,” she said, "instilled in me almost parallel value systems – fear of potential for overreach by government, and belief that sometimes only government, with its military and intelligence, can keep civilians safe. Those tensions shape the way I approach my work each day. I fully believe that the two seemingly contradictory factors can be held in balance. And with your help I think we can define a future where they are.” The National Security Agency, she pointed out, actively fosters the growth of valuable new communication and computing technology and at the same time “needs the ability to detect, hopefully deter, and if necessary disable lethal threats.” To maintain those abilities over decades and foster a new social contract with the public, Neuberger suggested contemplating 5 tensions, 3 scenarios, and 3 challenges. The tensions are… 1) Cyber Interdependencies (our growing digital infrastructure is both essential and vulnerable); 2) Intelligence Legitimacy Paradox (to regain trust, the NSA needs publicly understood powers to protect and checks on that power); 3) Talent Leverage (“the current surveillance debates have cast NSA in a horrible light, which will further hamper our recruiting efforts”); 4) Personal Data Norms (the growing Internet-of-things—Target was attacked through its _air-conditioning network_ —opens vast new opportunities for tracking individual behavior by the private as well as public sector); 5) Evolving Internet Governance (the so-far relatively free and unpoliticized Internet could devolve into competing national nets). Some thirty-year scenarios… 1) Intelligence Debilitated (with no new social contract of trust and thus the loss of new talent, the government cannot keep up with advancing technology and loses the ability to manage its hazards); 2) Withering Nation (privacy obsession hampers commercial activity and government oversight, and nations develop their own conflicting Internets); 3) Intelligent America (new social contract with agreed privacy norms and ongoing security assurance). Initiatives under way from NSA… 1) Rebuild US Trust (move on from “quiet professionals” stance and actively engage the public); 2) Rebuild Foreign Trust (“extend privacy protections previously limited to US citizens to individuals overseas”); 3) Embrace Collective Oversight (reform bulk collection programs in response to the President’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board). As technology keeps advancing rapidly, the US needs to stay at the forefront in terms of inventing the leading technical tools to provide public services and maintain public security, plus the policy tools to balance civil liberties with protection against ever-evolving threats. “My call to action for everyone in this audience is get our innovative minds focussed on the full set of problems.” A flood of **QUESTION CARDS** came to the stage, only a few of which we could deal with live. Anne Neuberger wanted to take all the questions with her to share with NSA colleagues, so Laura Welcher at Long Now typed them up. I figure that since the questioners wanted their questions aired on the stage to the live and video audience, they would like to have them aired here as well. And it would be in keeping with the NSA’s new openness to public discourse. Ms. Neuberger agreed… > I have a general (unfocused) question about transparency – which hasn’t been mentioned thus far. What is the NSA’s rationale around hiding its activities from the American people? What can you tell us about the issue of transparency going forward? > What are the key questions NSA is discussing following the Snowden releases? And what is the NSA doing to address these issues? > Germany is very, very upset. What could we have done, and what should we do in the future, to fulfill our many responsibilities while also respecting our most valuable international relationships? > How can we work toward a new social contract when the intelligence agency directors repeatedly lie to the Congress and to the public? > Is it true you can still find one-star generals playing Magic the Gathering in the NSA canteen during lunch hour? > The failures of 9-11 were not technical failures, but failures of individuals and organizations to work together toward a common goal. What concrete steps can you describe in the intelligence community that have been taken to remedy this? > What is the NSA doing to make the scope of its data collection efforts as transparent as possible, while still achieving its goals w.r.t. national security? > Is it an acceptable outcome that NSA fails at securing us in the service of privacy considerations? > If the Snowden incident hadn’t happened, would the NSA have hired the civil liberties expert? What structural changes will make this role actually effective? > Has the real tension been between the NSA needing to protect its own systems while ensuring that everybody else’s are vulnerable? Is this inevitable? > Do you believe the mission of the NSA can be accomplished without building a record of all worldwide communications and activities? Why? > Is the NSA embedding backdoor or surveillance capability in any commercial integrated circuits? > If you want to address the damage to public trust, and improve the social contract, why not applaud the work Edward Snowden has done to demonstrate how your agency has gone astray? > Do you consider the NSA’s role in weakening the RSA random number generator to be a violation of the NSA’s existing social contract? How do you think about its exploitability by criminal elements? > What do you tell American corporate tech leaders who are concerned about lowered trust and security of their services and products? Lack of trust based on national security letters, for example, or weaknesses introduced into RSA crypto by the NSA? > What is the best mechanism for an intelligence agency to prevent themselves from using “national security secrecy” to cover up an embarrassment? Is there something better than whistleblowers? > Secure information and privacy need to be balanced – please give an example of when you feel the NSA worked at its best in this balancing act. Please be specific :-) > How much is your presentation a reflection of NSA or your personal views? > Should the NSA play a role in devising the new rules for cyberwar? (Since the old rules for war don’t work in the digital universe.) How do we citizens participate? > Do you personally feel that the leaks of the last year have revealed serious overreach by your agency? Or, do you feel as though the NSA has simply been unfairly painted and that the leaks have been damaging? > Privacy is, logically, implied (4th, and 5th and 10th Amendments). Should it be an explicit right? If so, how should it be architected? > Amnesty for Snowden? > When Russia invaded Ukraine, it seemed to take us by surprise. Have Snowden’s revelations damaged our ability to anticipate sudden moves by rivals and adversaries? > How can the NSA build an effective social contract when it destroys evidence in an active case and when its decisions are made in a secret court without public scrutiny? > How can the public make informed decisions if NSA keeps secret what it is doing from its public rulers viz the abuses exposed by Snowden? > Can you give an example of a credible “cyber threat” thwarted by the NSA? > Why did NSA dissolve its Chief Scientist Office? So too FBI. This Office funded the disk drive and speech recognition. > How do you reconcile your stated goal of improving the security of private sector products with NSA’s documented practice of intentionally weakening encryption standards and adding backdoors to exported network devices that facilitate billions of dollars of e-commerce? > How does surveillance directed towards the United States’s closest allies help deter terrorist threats, and how does the damage of our relationship with Germany and other allies offset the benefits of conducting such surveillance? > I am an American, legally, politically, culturally, economically. I was born in Pakistan and am a young male. My demographics are the prime target of the NSA. I have no recourse if the NSA sees that I have visited the “wrong” links. I am afraid that the NSA deems me a suspect. Your response? > Balancing the needs of ‘security, society and business’ leaves most of us with 1 vote in 3. Given the shared interest in big data by security agencies and business, how do the rest of us keep from getting outvoted 2-to-1 every time? > Your fears seem to be based on a highly competitive scarcity-based economy. What is your role in a post-scarcity society? > In what ways do public, crowdsourced prediction markets help to resolve the tension between public trust and the need for sophisticated intel? > Does the government have either a duty or a need to be open and honest in its communication with the public? > How does the NSA approach biological data? Synthetic biology applications? > You never use the word law. > How many more leaks would it take to make your mission impossible? Personally I look forward to this particular point in time. > Please share your thoughts on: Re: ‘talent leverage’ impact on world stage. We are all one family on spaceship earth, and we have grave system failures in the ship. If the U.S. gov’t can shift from empire to universal economic empowerment, based on natural carrying capacity of each ecosystem. Then, trust can be restored that this is not a gov’t of and for the military-industrial complex, and the most powerful corporations. > What are three basic reasons that make the NSA assume that it doesn’t need to obey the law? > Surveillance and security are mutually contradictory goals. Shouldn’t these functions of the NSA be split into different agencies? > Was Snowden a hero or a damaging rogue? Did he catalyze changes to keep NSA from being the “KGB”? > Do we live in a democracy when there are no checks and balances in the intelligence community? --> CIA/Senate, --> Snowden/NSA? > You described the importance of a social contract in determining the appropriate balance between privacy and intelligence gathering. But contracts require all parties to be well-informed and to trust each other. How can the American public trust the intelligence community when all of the reforms you mentioned only occurred because a concerned patriot chose to blow the whistle (and now faces prosecution)? > How are we to maintain the creative outliers and risk takers (things that have been known to create growth and brilliance) if we are keeping / tracking ‘norms’ as acceptable – or the things we accept. – How will we know if we are wrong? > Can or does the NSA influence or seek to influence immigration policy so that the US could retain foreign workers here on expiring H1Bs? > What does the NSA see as some of the greatest emerging technologies (quantum decryption for example) that can create the future “Intelligent America”? > What are the factors that determines whether the NSA ‘quietly assists’ improving a company’s product security, or it weakens or promotes weaker crypto standards / algorithms / tech? > Please talk about the recent large scale hacking from Russia. > Why frame this as “how can laws keep up with technology” instead of “how do we keep the NSA from exceeding the law?” > 1) Was NSA interdiction of a sovereign leader’s aircraft a violation of international law? 2) Does NSA believe they can mill and drill a database to find potential terrorists? > The NSA paid a private security form, RSA, to introduce a weakness into its security software. Spying is one matter. But making our defenses weaker is another. How do you defend this? > What is your biggest fear about NSA overreaching in its power [?] > How many real, proven terrorist threats to the U.S. have been uncovered by NSA surveillance of email / cell phone activity of private citizens in the last few years (4-8)? > Your list of tensions omitted any mention of corporate or otherwise economic fallout that may result or have resulted from the Snowden revelations. What relief mechanism do you foresee maintaining corporate trust in the American government? > You mentioned doing during slide 14 that the Director of the NSA is declassifying more information to promote “tranparency”. Can you please elaborate on how we might find these recently declassified documents? > Long ago we created a “privilege” for priests, doctors and lawyers, fearing we could not use them without it. Today, our computers know us better than our priests, but they have no privilege and can betray us to surveillance. How do we fix that? > What systems are in place to prevent further leaks? > 1) Is it ok for a foreign entity to collect and intercept President Obama’s communications without our knowledge? 2) Do you think William Binney and Thomas Drake are heroes? > How do we build a world of transparency, while also enabling security for our broader society? > As we grow more connected, the sense of distance embodied in national patriotism and the otherness of the world shrinks. How is a larger NSA a reasonable response in terms of a social contract? > Describe the culture that says it’s ok to monitor and read US citizens’ email (pre-revelation) [?] > How can the NSA enable more due process during the review of approvals of modern “wire taps” (i.e. translating big data searches to individuals)? > In the next 10 years there will be breakthroughs in math creating radical changes in data mining. What are the social risks of that being dominated by NGO’s vs. government? > Has the NSA performed criminally illegal wiretapping? If so, when will those responsible be prosecuted? > Can you define what unlocking Big Data responsibly really means and give examples? Can NSA regulate Facebook in terms of privacy and ownership of users’ data? > How do other governments deal with similar problems? > What prevents NSA from trusting “Intelligent America” revealing that linking information but not the content was broadly collected could have been understood and well presented. Funded [?] “Intelligent Ingestion of Information” ...[?] DARPA 1991-1995. > Please address the spying upon and the filing of criminal charges against US Senators and their staff by the USA, particularly in the case of Senator Diane Feinstein of California. > Does the NSA’s legitimacy depend more on the safety of citizens or ensuring the continuity of the Constitutional system? > Can you shed any light on why Pres. Obama has indicted more whistleblowers than all previous presidents combined? > When will Snowden be recognized as a hero? When will Clapper go to jail for perjury? Actions speak louder than buzz words. > Does NSA make available the algorithms for natural language processing used by the data analysis systems? > In the long term view, it would seem freedom is a higher priority value than safety so why is safety the highest value here? Why isn’t the USA working primarily to ensure our continued freedom? > How do you protect sources and methods while forging the new social contract? > How can any company trust cybercommand when the same chief runs NSA where the focus is attack? How can we trust the Utah Data Center after such blatant lies of “targeted surveillance?” > Now that the mass surveillance programs have to some extent been revealed, can we see some verifiable examples of their worth? If not, will NSA turn back towards strengthening security instead of undermining it? > The terrorist attacks of 9/11 encouraged our govt. leaders to adopt aggressive surveillance laws and regulations and demands from the intelligence communities. How do we reverse these policies adopted under duress?

Adrian Hon: A History of the Future in 100 Objects

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 16 Jul 2014 19:30:00 -0700

### Future artifacts Speaking from 02082, Hon described 5 (of 100) objects and events from this century’s history he felt most strongly evoked the astonishing trends that have transformed humanity in the past 8 decades. Not all developments proved to be positive. One such was _Locked Simulation Interrogation_. In 02019 in Washington DC, frustrated by a series of 5 unsolved bombings, the FBI combined an unremovable top quality virtual reality (VR) rig with detailed real-time brain scanning to run a suspect through a cascade of 572 intense simulations designed to draw out everything the suspect knew about the bombings. As a result the 6th bombing was averted, and the technique of adaptive VR became a standard law enforcement tool. But over time it was found to be unreliable and often harmful, and in 02033 the Supreme Court declared it to be unconstitutional. By the 02040s people’s comfort with mood drugs and discomfort with lives that felt meaningless (mass automation had replaced many forms of work) led to the _Fourth Great Awakening_. In 02044 a religious entrepreneur found a way to transform human nature and acquire converts to the “Christian Consummation Movement” with a combination of one eyedropper, 18 pills, and an “induction course of targeted viruses and magstim.” Inductees were made more empathic, generous, trusting, and disciplined. The movement grew to 20 million Americans by the 02070s before it leveled off. The world learned what could be done with desire modification. A lasting monument to humanity’s progress off planet was _Alto Firenze_ , the first space station designed for elegance. Constructed in 02036, it progressed through a series of beautifications and uses from hotel to conference center and art museum to eventually being declared a World Heritage Site. In 2052 it was moved to L5 and thus escaped the cascade of debris collisions that completely emptied the over-crowded low-Earth orbit later that year. Perhaps it was the steady increase of older people, along with continuing trends in self-quantification and “gamification,” that led to the _Micromort Detector_ in 02032. “What if you could have a number that told you exactly how risky an action, any action, was going to be?“ The Lifeline bracelet measured the wearer’s exact health condition along with the environment and the action being contemplated and displayed how risky it would be in “micromorts”—a unit representing one chance in a million of death. Go canoeing—10 micromorts. Two glasses of wine—1 micromort. The bracelets became tremendously popular, though they were found to increase anxiety badly in some users. Later spinoffs included the Microfun Detector and Micromorals Detector. Signs of ancient life were found on Mars in 2028, on Europa in 2048. “By the time extrasolar alien life was first imaged in 2055, celebrations were considerably smaller, the wonder and excitement having been eroded by the slow drip of discoveries. By then, everyone had simply assumed that life was out there, everywhere.“ One planet now discovered to have signs of intelligent life is 328 light years away. Thus the _Armstrong Expedition_ , using an antimatter-fueled lighthugger craft bearing only artificial intelligences set out to make contact in 02079. “This century,” Hon summarized, “we learned what it means to be human.”

Stefan Kröpelin: Civilization’s Mysterious Desert Cradle

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 10 Jun 2014 19:30:00 -0700

### The Sahara and civilization “Almost everything breaks in the desert,” Kröpelin began. He showed trucks mired in sand, one vehicle blown up by a land mine, and a Unimog with an impossibly, hopelessly broken axle. (Using the attached backhoe, it hunched its way 50 miles back to civilization.) The eastern Sahara remains one of the least explored places on Earth, and it is full of wonders. Every year for 40 years Kröpelin has made multi-month expeditions to figure out the paleoclimatological changes and human saga in the region over the last 17,000 years. There are no guides, no roads. When you find something—astonishing rock art (there are thousands of sites), an amazing geological feature—you know you’re the first human to see it in thousands of years. A great river, 7 miles wide, 650 miles long, once flowed into the Nile from the desert. Now called Wadi Howar, its rich, still unstudied archeological sites show it used to be a thoroughfare from the deep desert. A vast spectacular plateau called the Ennedi Highlands, as big as Switzerland, has exquisite rock art detailing pastoral herds of cattle and even dress and hair styles. Mouflon (wild sheep) and crocodiles still survive there. Most remarkable of all are the remote Ounianga Lakes, some of them kept charged with ancient deep-aquifer fresh water because of the draw of intense evaporation from a hypersaline central lake. In 1999 Kröpelin began a stratigraphic study of another lake’s sediment, eventually collecting a treasure for climate study---a 52-foot core sample which shows every season for the last 11,000 years. For Kröpelin, many strands of evidence spell out the sequence of events in the eastern Sahara. From 17,000 to 10,500 BP (before the present), there were only a few human settlements along the Nile. But the Sahara was gradually getting wetter in the period 10,500 to 9,000 BP, and people moved up from the south. The peak of the African Humid Period, when the Sahara was green and widely occupied, was 9,000 to 7,300 years ago. Then a gradual desiccation from 7,300 to 5,500 BP drove people to the Nile, and the first farms appeared there. From 5,500 BP on, the Nile’s pharaonic civilization got going and lasted 3,000 years. Unique artifacts such black-rimmed pots and asymmetric stone knives, once used in the far desert, turn up in the settlements that created Egypt. Kröpelin concluded: “Egypt was a gift of the Nile, but it was also a gift of the desert.” And of climate change.

Adam Rogers: Proof: The Science of Booze

The Long Now Foundation — Thu, 08 Jun 2017 21:50:00 -0700

The first salon talk took place before The Interval was officially opened, when the back bar and much of our signature decor weren’t fully installed. It was an opportunity that couldn’t be missed: the launch of the first book by Adam Rogers, articles editor at Wired; Proof: The Science of Booze is the 10,000 year history of alcohol. And so, as William Faulkner says: 'Civilization begins with distillation.' The subject was perfect for our new Long Now bar; but the talk was even more fitting because Adam had been instrumental in helping realized our vision for The Interval. He connected Long Now with both Jennifer Colliau (our Beverage Director and the mastermind of our cocktail menu) and Lance Winters of St George Spirits (whose artful distillations fill the bottles of our "bottlekeep" ceiling). You will hear both of those stories in detail during this talk, as well as the tale of picking wild juniper on Nevada’s Mount Washington to use in the gin Lance crafted for The Interval. Adam’s presentation also includes his close encounter with the 10,000 year-old “Mother Eve” of booze and a remarkable anecdote about a Japanese chemist who nearly changed history by applying sake techniques to American whiskey in the 19th Century, in the process he filed some of the first biotech patents ever. So the launch of Proof made for the perfect premiere to our “Conversations at The Interval” lecture series. Yet another reason to thank Adam Rogers. If you’ve been to The Interval (or just watched our other videos), you can see how early it was—not only is the Otto chalkboard nowhere to be seen, the back bar has yet to be built. Jennifer led our very first bartending team that night, though she also stepped on stage to tell the audience a bit about our gin. For an organization that is all about time, this event encapsulated a remarkable moment in our history: as the lively project we call The Interval became manifest. Cheers to you, Adam! Thanks for a great talk, and everything else.

Sylvia Earle & Tierney Thys: Oceanic

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 20 May 2014 19:30:00 -0700

### Oceans alive Neither of them eats fish. Both marine biologists applaud the improved regulation of American fishing and the resulting recovery of important fisheries, but they note that 90% of our seafood is imported, and one-third of that is caught illegally. Two-thirds of global fisheries are overfished. Eating a tuna, Earle points out, is like eating a wolf or a tiger. It is a magnificent predator often decades in age. We no longer commercially harvest wildlife on land. Why do we do it in the sea? Noting that 15% of land has become protected in the last 100 years, the speakers said we have just started on protecting the ocean. About 3% is now protected, in 8,000 Marine Protected Areas. The goal is 20% by 2020. One hero of the movement is Palau’s president Tommy Remengesau, who this year declared that commercial fishing would be banned in its entire ocean economic zone—230,000 square miles. Likewise New Caledonia just created a 500,000 square mile “Natural Park of the Coral Sea.” Ocean science keeps yielding profound discoveries. A sea-going photosynthetic bacteria named Prochlorococcus was identified as recently as 1986, yet it may be the most abundant photosynthetic species on Earth, responsible for 5-10% of all the oxygen in the atmosphere. Without their ancestors we wouldn't exist. Deep-diving Earle noted that daylight only reaches about 1,000 feet down in the ocean. Most of the world’s life therefore lives in total darkness, and “bioluminescence is the most common form of communication on Earth.” Thys observed that the greatest need is for coordinated, consistent remote-sensing in the ocean, and that is increasingly being provided by small robots that travel on their own on and under the surface, sending their data to satellites as well as cabled observatories. Small satellites also are multiplying, providing daily, detailed information from above. Citizen science is growing along with the Maker movement. “Life came from the ocean,” Thys concluded. “And the life in it continues to nurture life everywhere. We owe the ocean some nurture back.”

Tony Hsieh: Helping Revitalize a City

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 22 Apr 2014 19:30:00 -0700

### The downtown company The business advice that Tony Hsieh most took to heart came from an ad executive: “A great brand is a story that never stops unfolding.” With his own company, Zappos, he determined that “brand equals culture,” and made quality of culture the top corporate priority, followed by customer service, and then selling shoes and clothing. The formula worked so well that Zappos outgrew its collection of buildings in suburban Las Vegas. Time to build a campus. Other suburban corporate campuses—Google, Nike, Apple—struck him as isolated and insular. He wondered if a company could be like New York University, embedded in downtown Manhattan, with all of its buildings and no end of urban amenities within a five-minute walk. Edward Glaeser’s book _The Triumph of the City_ described how cities unfold forever, driven by density and intense variety, while companies all eventually go stagnant and die. Maybe immersion in a downtown could help keep his company unfolding, and maybe bringing company start-up culture to a decaying urban core could restart its vitality. Zappos bet the company on the idea. They took over the abandoned city hall in the dead-end part of Las Vegas known as Fremont East and spent $200 million buying up nearby properties, $50 million on local small businesses, $50 million on tech start-ups, and $50 million on education, arts, and culture. Hsieh’s strategy is to increase: “Collisions” (serendipitous encounters); “Co-learning” (a community teaching itself); and “Connectedness” (density, diversity, and reasons to engage). They built a Shipping Container Park with three stories of shops, amusements, and tech start-ups wrapped around a courtyard for food, play, and hanging out. They planted Burning Man mega-art on corners throughout the neighborhood “to keep you walking one more block.” Inspired by TED, the Summit Series, and especially SXSW (the South by Southwest festival in Austin), they built a theater for frequent talks and organized an annual “Life is Beautiful” music festival attracting 60,000. Hsieh figures that “collisionability” can be quantified and designed for. He thinks that street-level interaction can be made so rich that it compensates for the lower density of low-rise buildings, with 100 residents/acre. Thus he blocked off the skyway from Zappos’s parking lot to its headquarters in the city hall. Use the street. Make street activities really attractive. Active residents, he calculates, will experience 1,000 collisionable hours a year (3.6 hours/day, 7 days/week, 40 weeks/year). Ditto for “purposeful visitors” (12 hours/day, 7 days/week, 12 weeks/year)—you are invited to be one. If Zappos helps foster an urban “culture of openness, collaboration, creativity, and optimism,” Hsieh says, then the city can prosper, and the company with it, and both can keep unfolding their stories indefinitely.

Mariana Mazzucato: The Entrepreneurial State

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 24 Mar 2014 19:30:00 -0700

### Government as radical, patient VC The iPhone, Mazzucato pointed out, is held up as a classic example of world-changing innovation coming from business. Yet every feature of the iPhone was created, originally, by multi-decade government-funded research. From DARPA came the microchip, the Internet, the micro hard drive, the DRAM cache, and Siri. From the Department of Defense came GPS, cellular technology, signal compression, and parts of the liquid crystal display and multi-touch screen (joining funding from the CIA, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Energy, which, by the way, developed the lithium-ion battery.) CERN in Europe created the Web. Steve Jobs’ contribution was to integrate all of them beautifully. Venture Capitalists (VCs) in business expect a return in 3 to 5 years, and they count on no more than one in ten companies to succeed. The time frame for government research and investment embraces a whole innovation cycle of 15 to 20 years, supporting the full chain from basic research through to viable companies. That means they can develop entire new fields such as space technology, aviation technology, nanotechnology, and, hopefully, Green technology. But compare the reward structure. Government takes the greater risk with no prospect of great reward, while VCs and businesses take less risk and can reap enormous rewards. “We socialize the risks and privatize the rewards.” Mazzucato proposes mechanisms for the eventual rewards of deep innovation to cycle back into a government “innovation fund”---perhaps by owning equity in the advantaged companies, or retaining a controlling “golden share” of intellectual property rights, or through income-contingent loans (such as are made to students). “After Google made billions in profits, shouldn’t a small percentage have gone back to fund the public agency (National Science Foundation) that funded its algorithm?” In Brazil, China, and Germany, state development banks get direct returns from their investments. The standard narrative about government in the US is that it stifles innovation, whereas the truth is that it enables innovation at a depth that business cannot reach, and the entire society, including business, gains as a result. “We have to change the way we think about the state,” Mazzucato concludes.

Danny Hillis & Brian Eno: The Long Now, now

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 21 Jan 2014 18:30:00 -0800

### Make the next legal U-turn "Bitching Betty," they call the robotic voice of the car’s GPS guidance system. Eno and Hillis, on their road trips, always become so engrossed in conversation that they get lost—one time, driving to Monterey they wound up in Sacramento, 200 miles wrong. So they turn on GPS, and Betty joins the conversation with helpful advice about U-turns. Hillis observed, "The GPS is very good at giving you instructions to get someplace. But Brian and I have no idea where we’re going; we just want some time together. What usually happens for us after a couple days of frustratingly looking at the tiny GPS map is that we stop and buy a big paper map. And the moment we open a map of Nevada or Arizona, it feels like we’re in a much bigger world. The big maps are not that useful to navigate by, but there’s a sense of relief of seeing the bigger context and all the possibilities of where we might go. That’s exactly what The Long Now Foundation is for." Culture is a long conversation, Eno proposed. "When I talk about the practice of art I often use the word "conversation" because I think that you never see a piece of art on its own. You look at a painting in relation to the whole conversation of paintings. Some things are completely meaningless outside of that kind of context. if you think about Kazimir Malevich’s "White on White" painting, it’s hardly a picture actually, but it’s an important picture in the history of painting up to that point." Hillis replied, "My plan for painting is to have my bones removed and replaced with titanium, and then I grind up my bones to make white pigment." Eno: "That’s very old-fashioned." Hillis talked about the long-term stories we live by and how our expectations of the future shape the future, such as our hopes about space travel. Eno said that Mars is too difficult to live on, so what’s the point, and Hillis said, "That’s short-term thinking. There are three big game-changers going on: globalization, computers, and synthetic biology. (If I were a grad student now, I wouldn’t study computer science, I’d study synthetic biology.) I probably wouldn’t want to live on Mars in this body, but I could imagine adapting myself so I would want to live on Mars. To me it’s pretty inevitable that Earth is just our starting point." Eno remarked, "Sex, drugs, art, and religion—those are all activities in which you deliberately lose yourself. You stop being you and you let yourself become part of something else. You surrender control. I think surrendering is a great gift that human beings have. One of the experiences of art is relearning and rehearsing surrender properly. And one of the values perhaps of immersing yourself in very long periods of time is losing the sense of yourself as a single focus of the universe and seeing yourself as one small dot on this long line reaching out to the edges of time in each direction." Hillis described some elements of surrender designed in to the visitor experience of the 10,000-year Clock being built in the mountains of west Texas. "You’ll be away from your usual environment for days to travel to the remote site. Because of where it is on the mountain, you have to wake up before dawn, and there’s the physical exertion of climbing up the mountain. As you climb, there’s some points of confusion, where you’re not sure if you’re in the right place. "For example, in the total darkness inside the mountain, as you go up the spiral stairs surrounding the Clock mechanism for hundreds of feet, you think you know where you’re going because there’s light at the top of the shaft that you’re climbing toward, but as you get up there, the stairs keep becoming narrower, and you see they’re tapering off to smaller than you could possibly walk on. And you realize, ‘My plan isn’t going to work.’ "You have to get away from the idea of direct progress and surrender that kind of control in order to find your way."

Richard Kurin: American History in 101 Objects

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 18 Nov 2013 18:30:00 -0800

### American objects Figuratively holding up one museum item after another, Kurin spun tales from them. (The Smithsonian has 137 million objects; he displayed just thirty or so.) The Burgess Shale shows fossilized soft-tissue creatures ("very early North Americans") from 500 million years ago. The Smithsonian’s Giant Magellan Telescope being built in Chile will, when it is completed in 2020, look farther into the universe, and thus farther into the past than any previous telescope---12.8 billion years. Kurin showed two versions of a portrait of Pocahontas, one later than the other. "You’re always interrogating the objects," he noted. In the early image Pocahontas looks dark and Indian; in the later one she looks white and English. George Washington’s uniform is elegant and impressive. He designed it himself to give exactly that impression, so the British would know they were fighting equals. Benjamin Franklin’s walking stick was given to him by the French, who adored his fur cap because it seemed to embody how Americans lived close to nature. The gold top of the stick depicted his fur cap as a "cap of liberty." Kurin observed, "There you have the spirit of America coded in an object." In 1831 the first locomotive in America, the "John Bull," was assembled from parts sent from England and took up service from New York to Philadelphia at 15 miles per hour. In 1981, the Smithsonian fired up the John Bull and ran it again along old Georgetown rails. It is viewed by 5 million visitors a year at the American History Museum on the Mall. The Morse-Vail Telegraph from 1844 originally printed the Morse code messages on paper, but that was abandoned when operators realized they could decode the dots and dashes by ear. In the 1840s Secretary of the Smithsonian Joseph Henry collected weather data by telegraph from 600 "citizen scientists" to create: 1) the first weather maps, 2) the first storm warning system, 3) the first use of crowd-sourcing. The National Weather Service resulted. Abraham Lincoln was 6 foot 4 inches. His stylish top hat made him a target on battlefields. It had a black band as a permanent sign of mourning for his son Willie, dead at 11. He wore the hat to Ford’s Theater on April 14, 1865. When you hold the hat, Kurin said, "you feel the man." In 1886 the Smithsonian’s taxidermist William Temple Hornaday brought one of the few remaining American bison back from Montana to a lawn by the Mall and began a breeding program that eventually grew into The National Zoo. His book, _The Extermination of the American Bison_ , is "considered today the first important book of the American conservation movement." Dorothy’s magic slippers in _The Wizard of Oz_ are silver in the book but were ruby in the movie (and at the museum) to show off the brand-new Technicolor. The Smithsonian chronicles the advance of technology and also employs it. The next Smithsonian building to open in Washington, near the White House, will feature digital-projection walls, so that every few minutes it is a museum of something else.

Adam Steltzner: Beyond Mars, Earth

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 15 Oct 2013 19:30:00 -0700

### Mighty daring on Mars Engineer Steltzner took his rapt audience striding with him through the wrong solutions for landing a one-ton rover on Mars that his team worked through a decade ago. Previous rovers had weighed 50 pounds, 385 pounds. This traveling “Mars Science Laboratory” would weigh 1,984 pounds. The old airbag trick wouldn’t work this time, nor would a palette, or legs. After exhausting everything that looked reasonable but could not work, the team settled on a mini-rocket “sky crane” approach that might be able to work, but there was nothing reasonable-looking about it. Selling the concept, Steltzner invoked arguments such as: “Great works and great follies may be indistinguishable at the outset,” while reminding himself that “Sometimes what looks crazy is crazy.” To make things worse, the idea could not be tested on Earth, because our atmosphere and gravity situation is so different from Mars, “and simulations only answer things you know to worry about.” Furthermore, the landing had to occur within a tiny target ellipse only 4 by 12 miles in the Gale Crater at the base of Mount Sharp, which stands 15,000 feet about the crater floor. To “kiss the Martian surface” at that spot, the landing system had to go through multiple stages (the “seven minutes of terror”) totally on its own, decelerating violently from 10,000 miles per hour to a gentle 0 mph without a single flaw at any stage. On August 6, 2012, with the whole world watching, the system performed perfectly, and Steltzner’s team at JPL exploded with high-fives and tears on the world’s screens. After showing the video, Steltzner asked, “Why do it, why spend the $2.5 billion the mission cost?” One eternal question about Mars is whether life is there, or was there. This rover has already determined that Mars once had sufficient amounts of the right kind of water that life could have managed there. “It would have been something bacterial, pond-scummy.” He is now at work on a conjectural series of three missions to bring samples of Martian material back to Earth. The first mission would collect and cache the samples; the second would launch the cache to Mars orbit; the third would return it to Earth. Later projects should explore the ice-covered ocean of Jupiter’s moon Europa and the methane lakes of Saturn’s moon Titan. “With this kind of exploration,“ Steltzner said, “we’re really asking questions about ourselves. How great is our reach? How grand are we? Exploration of this kind is not practical, but it is essential.” He quoted Theodore Roosevelt: “Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those timid spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.” Steltzner reminded the audience of the relative inhospitability of Mars and the intense inhospitability of space. “Outside of the magnetic field of this planet that shelters us from the streaming radiation of the Sun, it’s a really nasty place. It’s inconceivably cold or indescribably hot, bathed in radiation.” To contemplate terraforming Mars or building colonies in space, he said, makes solving the problems here on Earth of maintaining this planet’s exquisite balance for life seem so obvious and doable. In the harsh lifelessness of space we discover how precious is life on Earth.

Peter Schwartz: The Starships ARE Coming

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 17 Sep 2013 19:30:00 -0700

### Starship destiny We now know, Schwartz began, that nearly all of the billions of stars in our galaxy have planets. If we can master interstellar travel, "there’s someplace to go." Our own solar system is pretty boring---one planet is habitable, the rest are "like Antarctica without ice" or worse. So this last year a number of researchers and visionaries have begun formal investigation into the practicalities of getting beyond our own solar system. It is an extremely hard problem, for two primary reasons---the enormous energy required to drive far and fast, and the vast amount of time it takes to get anywhere even at high speed. The energy required can be thought of in three ways. 1) Impossible---what most scientists think. 2) Slow. 3) Faster than light (FTL). Chemical rockets won’t do at all. Nuclear fission rockets may suffice for visiting local planets, but it would take at least fusion to get to the planets of other stars. Schwartz showed Adam Crowl’s scheme for a Bussard Ramjet using interstellar ions for a fusion drive. James Benford (co-author of the book on all this, _Starship Century_) makes the case for sail ships powered by lasers based in our Solar System. As for faster-than-light, that requires "reinventing physics." Physics does keep doing that (as with the recent discovery of "dark energy"). NASA has one researcher, Harold White, investigating the potential of microscopic wormholes for superluminal travel. Standard-physics travel will require extremely long voyages, much longer than a human lifetime. Schwartz suggested four options. 1) Generational ships---whole mini-societies commit to voyages that only their descendents will complete. 2) Sleep ships---like in the movie "Avatar," travelers go into hibernation. 3) Relativistic ships---at near the speed of light, time compresses, so that travelers may experience only 10 years while 100 years pass back on Earth. 4) Download ships---"Suppose we learn how to copy human consciousness into some machine-like device. Such ‘iPersons’ would be able to control an avatar that could function in environments inhospitable to biological humans. They would not be limited to Earthlike planets." Freeman Dyson has added an important idea, that interstellar space may be full of objects---comets and planets and other things unattached to stars. They could be used for fuel, water, even food. "Some of the objects may be alive." Dyson notes that, thanks to island-hopping, Polynesians explored the Pacific long before Europeans crossed the Atlantic. We might get to the stars by steps. Futurist Schwartz laid out four scenarios of the potential for star travel in the next 300 years, building on three population scenarios. By 2300 there could be 36 billion people, if religious faith drives large families. Or, vast wealth might make small families and long life so much the norm that there are only 2.3 billion people on Earth. One harsh scenario has 9 billion people using up the Earth. Thus his four starship scenarios... 1) "Stuck in the Mud"---we can’t or won’t muster the ability to travel far. 2) "God’s Galaxy"---the faithful deploy their discipline to mount interstellar missions to carry the Word to the stars; they could handle generational ships. 3) "Escape from a Dying Planet"---to get lots of people to new worlds and new hope would probably require sleep ships. 4) "Trillionaires in Space"---the future likes of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson will have the means and desire to push the envelope all the way, employing relativistic and download ships or even faster-than-light travel. Schwartz concluded that there are apparently many paths that can get us to the stars. In other words, "Galactic civilization is almost inevitable."

Daniel Kahneman: Thinking Fast and Slow

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 13 Aug 2013 19:30:00 -0700

### On taking thought Before a packed house, Kahneman began with the distinction between what he calls mental “System 1”---fast thinking, intuition---and “System 2”---slow thinking, careful consideration and calculation. System 1 operates on the illusory principle: _What you see is all there is_. System 2 studies the larger context. System 1 works fast (hence its value) but it is unaware of its own process. Conclusions come to you without any awareness of how they were arrived at. System 2 processes are self-aware, but they are lazy and would prefer to defer to the quick convenience of System 1. “Fast thinking,” he said, “is something that happens to you. Slow thinking is something you do.“ System 2 is effortful The self-control it requires can be depleted by fatigue. Research has shown that when you are tired it is much harder to perform a task such as keeping seven digits in mind while solving a mental puzzle, and you are more impulsive (I’ll have some chocolate cake!). You are readier to default to System 1. “The world in System 1 is a lot simpler than the real world,” Kahneman said, because it craves coherence and builds simplistic stories. “If you don’t like Obama’s politics, you think he has big ears.” System 1 is blind to statistics and focuses on the particular rather than the general: “People are more afraid of dying in a terrorist incident than they are of dying.” When faced with a hard question such as, “Should I hire this person?” we convert it to an easier question: “Do I like this person?“ (System 1 is good at predicting likeability.) The suggested answer pops up, we endorse it, and believe it. And we wind up with someone affable and wrong for the job. The needed trick is knowing when to distrust the easy first answer and bear down on serious research and thought. Organizations can manage that trick by requiring certain protocols and checklists that invoke System 2 analysis. Individual professionals (athletes, firefighters, pilots) often use training to make their System 1 intuition extremely expert in acting swiftly on a wider range of signals and options than amateurs can handle. It is a case of System 2 training System 1 to act in restricted circumstances with System 2 thoroughness at System 1 speed. It takes years to do well. Technology can help, the way a heads-up display makes it possible for pilots to notice what is most important for them to act on even in an emergency. The Web can help, Kahneman suggested in answer to a question from the audience, because it makes research so easy. “Looking things up exposes you to alternatives. This is a profound change.”

Craig Childs: Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Everending Earth

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 29 Jul 2013 19:30:00 -0700

### How the world keeps ending “This Earth is a story teller,” Childs began. “And it is not a stable place to live. It is always ending. We think of endings as sudden, but it is always a process.” For his book _Apocalyptic Planet_ he sought out some of the world’s most terminal-feeling places, where everything is reduced to fundamental elements in total upheaval or total stasis, and a visitor is overwhelmed by the scale and power of a planet going about its planetary business. In Yosemite Valley, where Childs was the day before he spoke in San Francisco, everyone is awed by the results of massive glacial action. In a sense Yosemite is the future of where he had been the previous week--- a part of Alaska where the ice is 1,000 feet thick, with mountain peaks just visible above the glacial carving. Still further in the past is a classic end-of-the-world---an Ice Age. Childs sampled what that is like with an extended stay on the Greenland ice cap, where all there is for hundreds of miles is ice, sky, and wind. And numbing cold. The ice is 5,000 feet thick, moving under his camp at 1 foot a day, eventually calving off into enormous icebergs. He was in Greenland with a chaos scientist studying climate change, who noted that complex systems like climate sometimes change suddenly, and that’s when you can’t predict what will happen next. “I would like to backpack on Mars,” said Childs. For the local equivalent he hiked across the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, where it never rains. It’s been a desert for 150 million years. You walk across nothing but salt so hard it pings like steel. The sun blasts you all day and at night the water in your pack freezes solid. “You walk for days and you don’t see a single living thing, you’re on a dead planet, and then it gets really strange because pink flamingoes come flying in over your head. They’re there to strain brine shrimp out of water sources. You’re at the end of the world and there are flamingoes! You think, 'Yeah, that’s what this planet is about.'” To experience a world without biodiversity he hiked for days in cornfields in Iowa, where 90 percent of the state is monocrop corn and soybeans. Yet it took just two years for tallgrass prairie to be re-established in a site where corn growing was stopped. In the lava fields of Hawaii he got a sense of planetary beginnings when the magma escapes, flowing like liquid incandescent metal, and everything starts over. Life is reseeded from what are called kipukas, bits of forest missed by the lava. Plunging into some new forest densely regrown on recent lava, he was instantly lost, buried in an orgy of jungle vegetation, no animals yet, and he realized that “The force of the living is more cunning than any devastation, ready to explode on whatever it touches.”

Ed Lu: Anthropocene Astronomy: Thwarting Dangerous Asteroids Begins with Finding Them

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 19:30:00 -0700

### The last killer asteroid Kevin Kelly wrote the following about Ed Lu’s Seminar About Long-term Thinking (SALT) titled “Anthropocene Astronomy: Thwarting Dangerous Asteroids Begins with Finding Them”... Last night's SALT talk was one of the most important ones we ever hosted. For several reasons: 1. Nine years ago, SALT hosted Rusty Schweickart's talk on the long term asteroid problem, wherein he presented the problem and challenge. Now nine years later, Ed Lu presented a very workable solution. There's an arc of thinking big over a span of time that we participated in. 2. While most SALT talks focus on problems, last night's was extremely focused on a solution. 3. The solution itself is a (workable) long term project, that has a delayed gratification. 4. The problem being solved is neither trivial nor superficial but complicated and existential. It's a big deal. 5. If B612 was not already doing this, it would make a perfect Long Now project. \--KK I agree. Consider this summary a pitch to donate to the cause. I’ll end with a link to B612’s website. Lu began by noting that deflecting lethal asteroids is the easy part. We know how to do it and already have the needed technology. Years before a threatening asteroid converges with Earth, we can ram it from behind with a rocket with the precise amount of energy needed to speed it up just enough to miss our planet and keep on missing us in the future. Funding such a mission will be straightforward. Once you know when (and even where) a catastrophic impact will occur, there will be abundant motivation to pay for heading it off. With good sky reconnaissance, we’ll have years of warning. But that reconnaissance doesn’t exist yet. Detection of asteroids is the hard part. There are about a million near-Earth objects (NEOs) of dangerous size (over 50 meters), but only one percent of them---10,000---have been located so far. The best way to locate the rest is with an infrared-detecting telescope following Venus in its orbit around the Sun, looking outward to Earth’s orbit. With the intense radiation of the Sun behind it, the telescope can detect the infrared glow of asteroids and precisely gauge their size and orbits, building a detailed threat map good for centuries. What are we looking for? Asteroids that Lu calls “city killers” are about the size of a theater---an airburst of one could destroy the whole San Francisco Bay Area. “In our children’s lifetime the chance of impact from one of these is about 30 percent.” In the same period there is a 1 percent chance of an asteroid impact equivalent to all the bombs in World War II times 5; it could kill 100 million people. “We buy fire insurance against risk with lower probability than that.” Then there’s a kilometer-size asteroid, which would destroy all of humanity permanently. The chance of collision with one in our children’s lifetime---.001 percent. No government has stepped up to detecting asteroids in the detail needed, so astronauts Rusty Schweickart and Ed Lu and their B612 Foundation set about doing it with non-government money and non-government efficiency. The cost and schedule for getting a superb telescope designed, built, and in the orbit of Venus is $200 million, 5 years. The telescope, called Sentinel, has been designed by the world’s best space telescope crafters. Coordination with (highly enthusiastic) NASA has been worked out. Launch is planned for 2018. Now it’s a matter of funding. The current milestone goal is $20 million. For perspective, Lu reminded his San Francisco audience that the refit of the city’s Museum of Modern Art, now underway, is expected to cost $500 million and be good for about 50 years. At half the cost of a refreshed museum (a worthy cause), the funders of Sentinel can save the whole world, permanently. B612’s website is [here](http://b612foundation.org/).

Stewart Brand: Reviving Extinct Species

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 21 May 2013 19:30:00 -0700

### De-extinction begins The new tools of synthetic biology, I began, are about to liberate conservation in a spectacular way. It is becoming possible to bring some extinct species back to life. A project within Long Now called “Revive & Restore” is pushing to make de-extinction a reality, starting with the fabled passenger pigeon and moving on to the woolly mammoth. The project’s director, Ryan Phelan, organized a series of three conferences bringing together molecular biologists and conservation biologists to see if “resurrection biology” is becoming a field and how it might proceed responsibly. (The most viewable of the conferences was “[TEDxDeExtinction](https://longnow.org/revive/tedxdeextinction/)” in Washington DC this March.) At those conferences we heard about cloning efforts that are already partially successful. Alberto Fernández Arias in Spain temporarily brought back an extinct ibex called the bucardo. Michael Archer, from Australia, reported reviving an early stage embryo of the extinct gastric brooding frog. Using traditional back-breeding, Henri Kerkdijk-Otten, is rebuilding the European aurochs (extinct in 1627) from a variety its descendent modern cattle. William Powell is showing how the nearly extinct beloved American chestnut tree is being brought back by a combination of back-breeding and sophisticated genetic engineering. Robert Lanza (Advanced Cell Technology), Oliver Ryder (The Frozen Zoo), and Michael McGrew (Roslin Institute) showed miracles that can now be accomplished with advanced cloning and induced pluripotent stem cells. Beth Shapiro (UC Santa Cruz) and Hendrik Poinar (McMaster University) explained how complete genomes are being read from the “ancient DNA” of fossils and museum specimens. George Church (Harvard) spelled out his allele replacement technique that will allow editing the genes from an extinct species into the genome of its closest living relative---from the passenger pigeon into the band-tailed pigeon, for example---thereby bringing back to life the extinct animal. Ben Novak is working full-time for Revive & Restore on the passenger pigeon and is now in the thick of sequencing work and comparative genomics in Beth Shapiro’s ancient-DNA lab at UC Santa Cruz. Conservation biologists like Stanley Temple, Kent Redford, and Frans Vera regard de-extinction as “a game-changer for conservation.” On the one hand, it dilutes the stark message “Extinction is forever!” while on the other hand it offers a message of hope that conservation can build on. I concluded, “The fact is, humans have made a huge hole in nature over the last 10,000 years. But now we have the ability to repair some of the damage. We’ll do most of the repair by expanding and protecting wild areas and by expanding and protecting the populations of endangered species. “Some species that we killed off totally, we might consider bringing back to a world that misses them.”

Nicholas Negroponte: Beyond Digital

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 19:30:00 -0700

### A world of convergence In education, Negroponte explained, there’s a fundamental distinction between "instructionism" and "constructionism." "Constructionism is learning by discovery, by doing, by making. Instructionism is learning by being told." Negroponte’s lifelong friend Seymour Papert noted early on that debugging computer code is a form of "learning about learning" and taught it to young children. Thus in 2000 when Negroponte left the Media Lab he had founded in 1985, he set out upon the ultimate constructionist project, called "One Laptop per Child." His target is the world’s 100 million kids who are not in school because no school is available. Three million of his laptops and tablets are now loose in the world. One experiment in an Ethiopian village showed that illiterate kids can take unexplained tablets, figure them out on their own, and begin to learn to read and even program. In the "markets versus mission" perspective, Negroponte praised working through nonprofits because they are clearer and it is easier to partner widely with people and other organizations. He added that "start-up businesses are sucking people out of big thinking. So many minds that used to think big are now thinking small because their VCs tell them to ‘focus.’" As the world goes digital, Negroponte noted, you see pathologies of left over "atoms thinking." Thus newspapers imagine that paper is part of their essence, telecoms imagine that distance should cost more, and nations imagine that their physical boundaries matter. "Nationalism is the biggest disease on the planet," Negroponte said. "Nations have the wrong granularity. They’re too small to be global and too big to be local, and all they can think about is competing." He predicted that the world is well on the way to having one language, English. Negroponte reflected on a recent visit to a start-up called Modern Meadow, where they print meat. "You get just the steak---no hooves and ears involved, using one percent of the water and half a percent of the land needed to get the steak from a cow." In every field we obsess on the distinction between synthetic and natural, but in a hundred years "there will be no difference between them."

George Dyson: No Time Is There

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 19:30:00 -0700

### The digital big bang When the digital universe began, in 1951 in New Jersey, it was just 5 kilobytes in size. "That's just half a second of MP3 audio now," said Dyson. The place was the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. The builder was engineer Julian Bigelow. The instigator was mathematician John von Neumann. The purpose was to design hydrogen bombs. Bigelow had helped develop signal processing and feedback (cybernetics) with Norbert Wiener. Von Neumann was applying ideas from Alan Turing and Kurt Gödel, along with his own. They were inventing and/or gates, addresses, shift registers, rapid-access memory, stored programs, a serial architecture—all the basics of the modern computer world, all without thought of patents. While recuperating from brain surgery, Stanislaw Ulam invented the Monte Carlo method of analysis as a shortcut to understanding solitaire. Shortly Von Neumann's wife Klári was employing it to model the behavior of neutrons in a fission explosion. By 1953, Nils Barricelli was modeling life itself in the machine—virtual digital beings competed and evolved freely in their 5-kilobyte world. "In the few years they ran that machine, from 1951 to 1957, they worked on the most difficult problems of their time, five main problems that are on very different time scales—26 orders of magnitude in time—from the lifetime of a neutron in a bomb's chain reaction measured in billionths of a second, to the behavior of shock waves on the scale of seconds, to weather prediction on a scale of days, to biological evolution on the scale of centuries, to the evolution of stars and galaxies over billions of years. And our lives, measured in days and years, is right in the middle of the scale of time. I still haven't figured that out." Julian Bigelow was frustrated that the serial, address-constrained, clock-driven architecture of computers became standard because it is so inefficient. He thought that templates (recognition devices) would work better than addresses. The machine he had built for von Neumann ran on sequences rather than a clock. In 1999 Bigelow told George Dyson, "Sequence is different from time. No time is there." That's why the digital world keeps accelerating in relation to our analog world, which is based on time, and why from the perspective of the computational world, our world keeps slowing down. The acceleration is reflected in the self-replication of computers, Dyson noted: "By now five or six trillion transistors per second are being added to the digital universe, and they're all connected." Dyson is a kayak builder, emulating the wood-scarce Arctic natives to work with minimum frame inside a skin craft. But in the tropics, where there is a surplus of wood, natives make dugout canoes, formed by removing wood. "We're now surrounded by so much information," Dyson concluded, "we have to become dugout canoe builders. The buzzword of last year was 'big data.' Here's my definition of the situation: Big data is what happened when the cost of storing information became less than the cost of making the decision to throw it away."

Chris Anderson: The Makers Revolution

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 18:30:00 -0800

### Desktop manufacturing changes world We’re now entering the third industrial revolution, Anderson said. The first one, which began with the spinning jenny in 01776, doubled the human life span and set population soaring. From the demographic perspective, "it’s as if nothing happened before the Industrial Revolution." The next revolution was digital. Formerly industrial processes like printing were democratized with desktop publishing. The "cognitive surplus" of formerly passive consumers was released into an endless variety of personal creativity. Then distribution was democratized by the Web, which is "scale agnostic and credentials agnostic." Anyone can potentially reach 7 billion people. The third revolution is digital manufacturing, which combines the gains of the first two revolutions. Factory robots, which anyone can hire, have become general purpose and extremely fast. They allow "lights-out manufacturing," that goes all night and all weekend. "This will reverse the arrow of globalization," Anderson said. "The centuries of quest for cheaper labor is over. Labor arbitrage no longer drives trade." The advantages of speed and flexibility give the advantage to "locavore" manufacturing because "Closer is faster." Innovation is released from the dead weight of large-batch commitments. Designers now can sit next to the robots building their designs and make adjustments in real time. Thus the Makers Movement. Since 02006, Maker Faires, Hackerspaces, and TechShops (equipped with laser cutters, 3D printers, and CAD design software) have proliferated in the US and around the world. Anderson said he got chills when, with the free CAD program Autodesk 123D, he finished designing an object and moused up to click the button that used to say "Print." This one said "Make." A 3D printer commenced building his design. Playing with Minecraft, "kids are becoming fluent in polygons." With programs like 123D Catch you can take a series of photos with your iPhone of any object, and the software will create a computer model of it. "There is no copyright on physical stuff," Anderson pointed out. The slogan that liberated music was "Rip. Mix. Burn." The new slogan is "Rip. Mod. Make." I asked Anderson, "But isn’t this Makers thing kind of trivial, just trailing-edge innovation?" "That’s why it’s so powerful," Anderson said. "Remember how trivial the first personal computers seemed?"

Terry Hunt & Carl Lipo: The Statues Walked -- What Really Happened on Easter Island

The Long Now Foundation — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 18:30:00 -0800

### Easter Island reconsidered In the most isolated place on Earth a tiny society built world-class monuments. Easter Island (Rapa Nui) is 1,000 miles from the nearest Pacific island, 3,000 miles from the nearest continent. It is just six by ten miles in size, with no running streams, terrible soil, occasional droughts, and a relatively barren ocean. Yet there are 900 of the famous statues (moai), weighing up to 75 tons and 40 feet high. Four hundred of them were moved many miles from where they were quarried to massive platforms along the shores. Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo began their archeological work on Easter Island in 2001 expecting to do no more than add details to the standard morality tale of the collapse of the island’s ecology and society---Polynesians discovered Rapa Nui around 400-800AD and soon overpopulated the place (30,000 people on an island the size of San Francisco); competing elites cut down the last trees to move hundreds of enormous statues; after excesses of “moai madness” the elites descend into warfare and cannibalism, and the ecology collapses; Europeans show up in 1722. The obvious lesson is that Easter Island, “the clearest example of a society that destroyed itself“ (Jared Diamond), is a warning of what could happen to Earth unless we learn to live with limits. A completely different story emerged from Hunt and Lipo’s archaeology. Polynesians first arrived as late as 1200AD. There are no signs of violence---none of the fortifications common on other Pacific islands, no weapons, no traumatized skeletons. The palm trees that originally covered the island succumbed mainly to rats that arrived with the Polynesians and ate all the nuts. The natives burned what remained to enrich the poor soil and then engineered the whole island with small rocks (“lithic mulch”) to grow taro and sweet potatoes. The population stabilized around 4,000 and kept itself in balance with its resources for 500 years until it was totally destroyed in the 18th century by European diseases and enslavement. (It wasn’t _Collapse_ ; it was _Guns, Germs, and Steel_.) What was up with the statues? How were they moved? Did they have a role in the sustainable balance the islanders achieved? Hunt and Lipo closely studied the statues found along the moai roads from the quarry. They had D-shaped beveled bottoms (unlike the flat bottoms of the platform statues) angled 14 ° forward. The ones on down slopes had fallen on their face; on up slopes they were on their back. The archeologists concluded they must have been moved upright---”walked,” just as Rapa Nuians long had said. No tree logs were required. Standard Polynesian skill with ropes would suffice. “Nova” and National Geographic insisted on a demonstration, so a 5-ton, 10-foot-high “starter moai” replica was made and shipped to Hawaii. After some fumbling around, 18 unskilled people secured three ropes around the top of the statue---one to each side for rocking the statue, one in the rear to keep it leaning forward without falling. “Heave! Ho! Heave! Ho!” they cry in the video, the statue rocks, dancing lightly forward, and the audience at Cowell Theater erupts with applause. Progress was fast, even hard to stop---100 yards in 40 minutes. A family could move one. Stone statues to ancestors are common throughout Polynesia, but the enormous, numerous moai of Easter Island are unique in the world. Were they part of the peaceful population control and conservative agriculture regime that helped the society “optimize long-term stability over immediate returns” in a nearly impossible place to live? During the Q & A, Hunt and Lipo were asked how their new theory of Easter Island history was playing on the island itself. Shame at being the self-destructive dopes of history has been replaced by pride, they said. Moai races are being planned. Polynesians were the space explorers of the Pacific. They completed discovering every island in the huge ocean by the end of the 13th century, colonized the ones they could, and then stopped. Easter Island is not Earth. It is Mars.

Peter Warshall: Enchanted by the Sun

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 18:30:00 -0800

### Light and beauty “The naturalist’s task,” Warshall began, “is to observe without human-centered thoughts and human-centered agendas, to observe with a Gaian perspective and with the perspective of the organisms you’re watching. The naturalist considers all species in space/time as equally beautiful.” There’s a connection between art and science---between the poetic organization of thought and the pragmatic organization of thought. Light operates at a distance. That inspires anticipation, which becomes yearning, which becomes desire, which becomes hope, which generates transcendence. When an image becomes transcendent for you, it becomes part of how you perceive. “The Sun is the initiator of all sugars.” Starting 250 million years ago, life rebelled and began generating its own light. There are 40 different kinds of bioluminescence, used for mate attraction, for baiting prey, for deceit. “Danger and beauty always go together. Deceit---not truth---is beauty. A term some art critics use is ‘abject beauty.’” Humans began the second light rebellion by harnessing fire a million years ago. Then came electric lights in the 1880s, and we transformed the light regime and hence behavior of many species. Artists like James Turrell shifted art from reflected light to emitted light, and that is increasingly the norm as we spend our days with screens radiating information into our eyes. Our eyes are pockets of ocean that let us perceive only a portion of the Sun’s spectrum of light. Bees, with their crystal eyes, see in the ultraviolet. Snakes perceive infrared, and so do some insects that can detect the heat of a forest fire from 40 miles away. Bowerbird males create elaborate art galleries, even devising forced perspective, to impress females. Young male bowerbirds watch the process for four years to learn the art. Throughout nature, watch for bold patterns of white, black, and red, which usually signal danger. Every day there is a brief time without danger. At twilight---as daylight shifts to night---all life pauses. “That moment has a contemplative beauty that we cherish. It is a moment of Gaian aesthetic.” Warshall’s talk, and his life, have been a convergence of art and science. Asked about how scientists could learn more about art, Warshall suggested they go to an art class and learn how to draw. As for how artists can learn more of science, he had two words: “Outdoors. Look.”

Lazar Kunstmann & Jon Lackman: Preservation without Permission

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 18:30:00 -0800

### Preservation Without Permission Their video showed clandestine urban “infiltration” (trespassing) at its most creative. Paris’s Urban Experiment group (UX), now in their fourth decade, have a restoration branch called Untergunther. They evade authorities to carry out secret preservation projects on what they call “nonvisible heritage.” Being clandestine, they do not reveal their activities except for instances that become publicized in the media; then they reveal everything to set the record straight (and embarrass the media along with the authorities). In the video presented by Untergunther member Lazar Kunstmann and translator Jon Lackman, we see a hidden underground screening room and bar beneath the Trocadero in Paris’s Latin Quarter. When police discover it and shut it down, the equipment is surreptitiously removed to a site deeper in the city’s vast network of underground passages, where film showings continue to this day. One year the group’s annual film festival was staged and performed overnight in one of Paris’s great monuments, the Panthéon, built in 1790. In the video (excerpt [here](http://ugwk.org/2010-10-28_Pantheon_users_guide_Trailer.html)) we see a small boy slipping through newly crafted underground passageways, picking a lock, opening the cupboard with all the Panthéon‘s keys, and gliding on his skateboard beneath the great dome across the ornate marble floors by Foucault’s original pendulum as film enthusiasts set up a temporary theater and have a clandestine film festival---gone without a trace by dawn. Elsewhere in the Panthéon the explorers found a neglected old clock displaying stopped time to the public. In 2005 they decided to repair it. They converted an abandoned room high in the monument into a clock shop and hangout. With clockmaker (and UX member) Jean-Baptiste Viot they spent a year completely reconditioning the 1850 works of the clock. Now that it worked again, they thought it should keep time and chime proudly, but someone needed to wind it. They approached the Director of the Panthéon, Bernard Jeannot, who didn’t even know that the monument had a clock. At first dumbfounded, Jeannot publicly embraced the project and applauded Untergunther. Jeannot’s superiors at the Centre des Monuments Nationaux accordingly fired him (early retirement) and brought suit against Untergunther. The court determined that fixing clocks is not a crime, and in France trespassing on public property is, in itself, not a crime. Case dismissed. Spitefully, the new Director of the Panthéon has made sure the clock remains unwound, and he disabled it by removing an essential part. Lazar Kunstmann explained (through Jon Lackman) Untergunther’s perspective on cultural heritage, particularly “minor” heritage---the countless objects that embody cultural continuity but don’t attract institutions to protect them. Who is responsible for such “nonvisible” heritage? The protectors should be local, self-appointed, and nonvisible themselves, because exposure of the value of the objects attracts destructive tourists. Preservation without permission works best without visibility. Since 2005, Untergunther’s new precautions against discovery have successfully kept its ongoing preservation projects hidden. As for the Panthéon clock, that essential part the Director removed to disable it has been purloined to safekeeping with Untergunther. Someday authorities may allow the clock to tick again. In the meantime it is in good repair.

Steven Pinker: The Decline of Violence

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 19:30:00 -0700

### The Long Peace “Nothing can be more gentle than man in his primitive state,” declared Rousseau in the 18th century. A century earlier, Thomas Hobbes wrote, “In the state of nature the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The evidence shows that Rousseau was wrong and Hobbes was right, said Pinker. Forensic archaeology (“CSI Paleolithic”) reveals that 15 percent of prehistoric skeletons show signs of violent trauma. Ethnographic vital statistics of surviving non-state societies and pockets of anarchy show, on average, 524 war deaths per 100,000 people per year. Germany in the 20th century, wracked by two world wars, had 144 war deaths per 100,000 per year. Russia had 135. Japan had 27. The US in the 20th century had 5.7. In this 21st century the whole world has a war death rate of 0.3 per 100,000 people per year. In primitive societies 15 percent of people died violently; now 0.03 percent do. Violence is 1/500th of what it used to be. The change came by stages, each with a different dynamic. Pinker identified: 1) The Pacification Process brought about by the rise and expansion of states, which monopolized violence to keep their citizens from killing each other. 2) The Humanizing Process. States consolidated, enforcing “the king’s justice.” With improving infrastructure, commerce grew, and the zero-sum game of plunder was replaced by the positive-sum game of trade. 3) The Humanitarian Revolution. Following ideas of The Enlightenment, the expansion of literacy, and growing cosmopolitanism, reason guided people to reject slavery, reduce capital crimes toward zero, and challenge superstitious demonizing of witches, Jews, etc. Voltaire wrote: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” 4) The Long Peace. Since 1945 there has been zero use of nuclear weapons, zero combat between the Cold War superpowers, just one war between great powers (US and China in Korea, ending 1953), zero wars in western Europe (there used to be two new wars a year there, for 600 years), and zero wars between developed countries or expansion of their borders by conquest. 5) The New Peace is the spreading of the Long Peace to the rest of the world, largely through the decline of ideology, and the spread of democracy, trade, and international organizations such as the UN. Colonial wars ended; civil wars did flare up. 6) The Rights Revolution, increasingly powerful worldwide, insists on protection from injustice for blacks, women, children, gays, and animals. Even domestic violence is down. Such a powerful long-term trend is the result of human ingenuity bearing down on the problem of violence the same way it has on hunger and plague. Something psychologists call the “circle of empathy” has expanded steadily from family to village to clan to tribe to nation to other races to other species. In addition, “humanitarian reforms are often preceded by new technologies for spreading ideas.” It is sometimes fashionable to despise modernity. A more appropriate response is gratitude. In the Q & A, one questioner noted that violence is clearly down, but fear of violence is still way up. Social psychologist Pinker observed that we base our fears irrationally on anecdotes instead of statistics---one terrorist attack here, one child abduction there. In a world of 7 billion what is the actual risk for any individual? It is approaching zero. That trend is so solid we can count on it and take it further still.

Tim O'Reilly: Birth of the Global Mind

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 19:30:00 -0700

### The global mind is us, augmented As a student of the classics at Harvard in the 1970s, O’Reilly was impressed by a book titled _The Discovery of the Mind: In Greek Philosophy and Literature_ , by Bruno Snell. In the four centuries between Homer and classical Athens, wrote Snell, the Greeks invented the modern human mind, with its sense of free will and agency. (In Homer, for example, no one makes a decision.) O’Reilly sees a parallel with the emerging of a global mind in this century. Global consciousness was a recurrent idea in the 1970s---from Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere and Omega point (“the Singularity of its day”) to “New Age mumbo-jumbo” such as the Harmonic Convergence. O’Reilly noted that the term “singularity” for technology acceleration was first used in 1958 by John von Neumann. In 1960 J.C.R. Licklider wrote an influential paper titled “Human-computer Symbiosis.” O’Reilly predicted that “exploring the possibility space of human-computer symbiosis is one of the fascinating frontiers of the next decades and possibly century.” Echoing Dale Dougherty, he says the Web has become the leading platform for harnessing collective intelligence. Wikipedia is a virtual city. Connected smart phones have become our “outboard brain.” Through device automation, Apple has imbued retail clerks with superpowers in its stores. Watson, the AI that beat human champions at “Jeopardy,” is now being deployed to advise doctors in real time, having read ALL the scientific papers. YouTube has mastered the attention economy. Humanity has a shared memory in the cloud. Data scientists rule. The global mind is not an artificial intelligence. It’s us, connected and augmented. What keeps driving it is the generosity and joy we take in creating and sharing. The global mind is built on the gift culture of every medium of connectedness since the invention of language. You gain status by what you give away, by the value you create, not the value you take.

Elaine Pagels: The Truth About the Book of Revelations

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 19:30:00 -0700

### War in heaven "The _Book of Revelation_ is war literature," Pagels explained. John of Patmos was a war refugee, writing sixty years after the death of Jesus and twenty years after 60,000 Roman troops crushed the Jewish rebellion in Judea and destroyed Jerusalem. In the nightmarish visions of John’s prophecy, Rome is Babylon, the embodiment of monstrous power and decadence. That power was expressed by Rome as religious. John would have seen in nearby Ephesus massive propaganda sculptures depicting the contemporary emperors as gods slaughtering female slaves identified as Rome’s subject nations. And so in the prophecy the ascending violence reaches a crescendo of war in heaven. Finally, summarized Pagels, "Jesus judges the whole world; and all who have worshipped other gods, committed murder, magic, or illicit sexual acts are thrown down to be tormented forever in a lake of fire, while God’s faithful are invited to enter a new city of Jerusalem that descends from heaven, where Christ and his people reign in triumph for 1000 years." Just one among the dozens of revelations of the time (Ezra’s, Zostrianos’, Peter’s, a different John’s), the vision of John of Patmos became popular among the oppressed of Rome. Three centuries later, in 367CE, Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria confirmed it as the concluding book in the Christian canon that became the _New Testament_. As a tale of conflict where one side is wholly righteous and the other wholly evil, the _Book of Revelation_ keeps being evoked century after century. Martin Luther declared the Pope to be the Whore of Babylon. Both sides of the American Civil War declared the opposing cause to be Bestial, though the North had the better music---"He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword." African-American slaves echoed John’s lament: "_How long_ before you judge and avenge our blood on the inhabitants of the earth?" But like many Christians through the years, Pagels wishes that John’s divisive vision had not become part of the Biblical canon. Among the better choices from that time, she quoted from the so-called "Secret Revelation of John": "Jesus says to John, ‘The souls of everyone will live in the pure light, because if you did not have God’s spirit, you could not even stand up.’ "The other revelations are universal, instead of being about the saved versus the damned."

Cory Doctorow: The Coming Century of War Against Your Computer

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 19:30:00 -0700

### Who governs digital trust? Doctorow framed the question this way: "Computers are everywhere. They are now something we put our whole bodies into---airplanes, cars---and something we put into our bodies---pacemakers, cochlear implants. They HAVE to be trustworthy." Sometimes humans are not so trustworthy, and programs may override you: "I can’t let you do that, Dave." (Reference to the self-protective insane computer Hal in Kubrick’s film "2001." That time the human was more trustworthy than the computer.) Who decides who can override whom? The core issues for Doctorow come down to Human Rights versus Property Rights, Lockdown versus Certainty, and Owners versus mere Users. Apple computers such as the iPhone are locked down---it lets you run only what Apple trusts. Android phones let you run only what you trust. Doctorow has changed his mind in favor of a foundational computer device called the "Trusted Platform Module" (TPM) which provides secure crypto, remote attestation, and sealed storage. He sees it as a crucial "nub of secure certainty" in your machine---but only to the extent that it is implemented to allow owners to choose what they trust---not vendors or governments. If it’s your machine, you rule it. It‘s a Human Right: your computer should not be overridable. And a Property Right: "you own what you buy, even if it what you do with it pisses off the vendor." That’s clear when the Owner and the User are the same person. What about when they’re not? There are systems where there is a credible argument for the authorities to rule---airplanes, nuclear reactors, probably self-driving cars ("as a species we are terrible drivers.")---but at least in the case of cars, and possibly in the other two, it will not make us safer; it will make us less safe. The firmware in those machines should be inviolable by users and outside attackers. But the power of Owners over Users can be deeply troubling, such as in matters of surveillance. There are powers that want full data on what Users are up to---governments, companies, schools, parents. Behind your company computer is the IT department and the people they report to. They want to know all about your email and your web activities, and there is reason for that. But we need to contemplate the "total and terrifying power of Owners over Users." Recognizing that we are necessarily transitory Users of many systems, such as everything involving Cloud computing or storage, Doctorow favors keeping your own box with its own processors and storage. He strongly favors the democratization and wide distribution of expertise. As a Fellow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (who co-sponsored the talk) he supports public defense of freedom in every sort of digital rights issue. "The potential for abuse in the computer world is large," Doctorow concluded. "It will keep getting larger."

Benjamin Barber: If Mayors Ruled the World

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 19:30:00 -0700

### City-based global governance Sovereign nation states have conspicuously failed to cooperate well enough to deal with increasingly global problems such as climate change, environmental degradation, and organized crime, Barber said. Nations focus on their borders, which are seen as competitive zero-sum games. “But if we shift our gaze, in thinking about global governance, from nation states to cities, things suddenly become possible that seemed impossible. Cities are apart from one another, separated by wide spaces. Their relationships are based on communication, trade, transportation, and culture. They are relational, not in a zero-sum game with one another.” Cities are inherently pragmatic rather than ideological. “They collect garbage and collect art rather than collecting votes or collecting allies. They put up buildings and run buses rather than putting up flags and running political parties. They secure the flow of water rather than the flow of arms. They foster education and culture in place of national defense and patriotism. They promote collaboration, not exceptionalism.” An honoring of all that practicality is shown by polling results of confidence in various levels of government. Only 18 percent of Americans have confidence in the US Congress (“the lowest in a long time”). The Presidency gets 44 percent. Americans have 65 percent confidence in their mayors. They can see clearly that city governments are less distorted by party politics, less responsive to massive lobbying. They see mayors getting things done. New York City’s “hyperactive” mayor Michael Bloomberg says, “I don’t listen to Washington very much. The difference between my level of government and other levels of government is that action takes place at the city level. While national government at this time is just unable to do anything, the mayors of this country have to deal with the real world.” After 9/11, New York’s police chief sent his best people to Homeland Security to learn about dealing with terrorism threats. After 18 months they reported, “We’re learning nothing in Washington.” They were sent then to twelve other cities---Singapore, Hong Kong, Paris, Frankfurt, Rio---and built their own highly effective intelligence network city to city, not through Washington or Interpol. Last year following the meeting in Mexico City on climate, where little progress was made by the national delegations, representatives from 207 cities signed a Global Cities Climate Pact pledging to pursue “strategies and actions aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.” The cities did what the nations could not. There are many existing bodies of robust cooperation among cities---the International Union of Local Authorities, the World Association of Major Metropolises, the American League of Cities, the Local Governments for Sustainability, the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, the United Cities and Local Governments at the UN, the New Hanseatic League, the Megacities Foundation---200 such networking organizations. “They are dull sounding, but they are fashioning global processes that work.” Global governance needs no great edifice with unitary rulers. It can be voluntary, informal, bottom-up. Barber recommends forming a global parliament of cities, because nation states will not govern globally. Cities can. They already are.

Susan Freinkel: Eternal Plastic

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 22 May 2012 19:30:00 -0700

### Making plastic even better Plastic is so new, Freinkel began, that among all the objects preserved in the sunken _Titanic_ , none are synthetic plastic, because there was hardly any available in 1912. Natural plastic, however, was a familiar material. Amber was popular. Rubber was essential (all plant cellulose is made of long-chain polymers). Ivory for everything from billiard balls to piano keys was in such high demand that an 1867 paper warned about the looming extinction of elephants. The first synthetic plastic---celluoid---was developed as a substitute for ivory, and the elephants survived. Bakelite was invented in 1907 to replace the beetle excretion called shellac ("It took 16,000 beetles six months to make a pound of shellac."), and was first used to insulate electrical wiring. Soon there were sturdy Bakelite radios, telephones, ashtrays, and a thousand other things. The technology democratized consumption, because mass production made former luxury items cheap and attractive. The 1920s and ‘30s were a golden age of plastic innovation, with companies like Dow Chemical, DuPont, and I. G. Farben creating hundreds of new varieties of plastic for thrilled consumers. Cellophane became a cult. Nylons became a cult. A plastics _trade_ show in 1946 had 87,000 members of the public lining up to view the wonders. New fabrics came along---Orlon and Dacron---as colorful as the deluge of plastic toys---Barbie, the Frisbee, Hula hoops, and Silly Putty. Looking for new markets, the marketers discovered disposability---disposable cups for drink vending machines, disposable diapers ("Said to be responsible for the baby boom"), Bic lighters, soda bottles, medical syringes, and the infinite market of packaging. Americans consume 300 pounds of plastic a year. The variety of plastics we use are a problem for recycling, because they have to be sorted by hand. They all biodegrade eventually, but at varying rates. New bio-based polymers like "corn plastic" and "plant bottles" have less of a carbon footprint, but they biodegrade poorly. Meanwhile, thanks to the efficiencies of fracking, the price of natural gas feedstock is plummeting, and so is the price of plastic manufacture. Some plastics have some chemicals like bisphenol A and phthalates that are toxic. American manufacturers don’t have to list the materials in their products, and there’s no hope of testing every one of the 80,000 industrialized chemicals loose in the world. Freinkel recommends greatly expanding the practice of “green chemistry,” so that every process and product of manufacturing is safe and sustainable from the ground up. She would like to see a stronger regulatory environment and the building of a fully systemic recycling infrastructure. In the Q & A Freinkel recommended a book by Elizabeth Grossman, _Chasing Molecules: Poisonous Products, Human Health, and the Promise of Green Chemistry_.

Charles C. Mann: Living in the Homogenocene

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 19:30:00 -0700

### Bio-blender Earth Tumultuous effects resulted and continue to result from the massive mixing of the world’s biota when European ships reconnected the American continent to the rest of the world. Mann traced several of the cascading consequences of "the biggest ecological convulsion since the death of the dinosaurs." The first momentous change came from microbial exchange---20 lethal diseases came from Europe to the Americas while only one (syphilis) went the other way. North America, which had been largely cleared by natives with fire and agriculture, reforested when two-thirds to 95% of the native inhabitants died from European diseases---"the greatest demographic catastrophe in human history." That huge reforesting drew down atmospheric carbon dioxide and Europe’s "Little Ice Age" (1550-1800) apparently resulted. Meanwhile the mountain of silver at Potosí, Bolivia, vastly enriched Europe, which "went shopping" worldwide. Trading ships coursed the world’s oceans. One artifact picked up from Peru was the potato---a single variety of the 6,000 available. When potatoes in Europe turned out to provide four times the amount of food per acre as wheat, the previously routine famines came to an end, population soared, governments became more stable, and they began building global empires. After 1843 guano shipped by the ton from coastal Peru for fertilizer introduced high-input agriculture. In Ireland 40% of the exploding population ate only potatoes. Around 1844 a potato blight arrived from Mexico, and a million Irish died in the Great Famine and a million more emigrated. In China, which has no large lakes and only two major rivers, agriculture had been limited to two wet regions where rice could be grown. Two imports from America---maize and sweet potato---could be farmed in dry lands. As in Europe, population went up. Vast areas were terraced as Han farmers pushed westward as far as the Mongolian desert. In heavy rains the terraces melted into the streams, and silt built up in the lowlands, elevating the rivers as much as 40 feet above the surrounding terrain, so when they flooded, millions died. "A Katrina per month for 100 years," as one Chinese meteorologist described it. The constant calamities weakened the government, and China became ripe for foreign colonial takeover. In America two imported diseases---malaria and yellow fever---were selective in who they killed. Europeans died in huge numbers, but Africans were one-tenth as susceptible, and so slavery replaced traditional indentured servitude in all the warm regions that favored mosquito-borne diseases. As one result, four times as many Africans as Europeans crossed the Atlantic and began mixing with the remaining native Americans, giving rise to an endless variety of racial blends and accompanying vitality throughout the Americas. During the Q & A, Mann described a potential fresh eco-convulsion-in-waiting. "There is an area in southeast Asia roughly the size of Great Britain that is a single giant rubber plantation." Where rubber trees originally came from in the Amazon there is now a rubber tree leaf-blight that is starting to spread in Asia. "You could lose all the rubber trees in three to six months. It would be the biggest deforestation in a long time." The entire auto industry, he added, depends on just-in-time delivery of rubber.

Edward O. Wilson: The Social Conquest of Earth

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 19:30:00 -0700

### The real creation story “History makes no sense without prehistory,“ Wilson declared, “and prehistory makes no sense without biology.” He began by noting that every religion has a different creation story, all of them necessarily based on ignorance of what really happened in the past. Religions thus can’t give valid answers on the meaning of life---Gauguin’s questions: “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?” Philosophy gave up on the questions long ago. The task was left to science, and from science a valid, shareable creation story is now emerging. For the last 65 million years Earth has been dominated by eusocial animals. Ants, termites, and bees in some areas make up half of all biomass. Yet only a few of the million known insect species made the jump to eusociality. One variety of mammal, a tiny set of primates, made a similar jump. Once they began to use their eusocial skills to fan out from Africa 60 thousand years ago, they gradually became far more dominant even than the social insects. “The term ‘eusocial,’“ Wilson said, “means a society based in part on a division of labor, in which individuals act altruistically, that covers two or more generations, and that cares for young cooperatively.” That eusociality is so rare suggests how difficult it is for altruistic traits to evolve. The powerful evolutionary force to make individuals that successfully reproduce has to be overcome by some form of selective pressure which generates altruistic individuals who yield their interests to the interests of the group. How does that occur? Examining near-eusocial species like African wild dogs and snapping shrimp along with primitively eusocial species like sweat bees shows that a crucial step appears to be made when multiple generations linger to defend a constructed nest with valuable access to food. That step can be made with a simple change to a single behavioral gene, silencing the trait for normal dispersal of young to carry out their own independent reproduction. When the young linger to defend the nest and begin to provide for the next generation of young, eusociality begins. All eusocial species appear to have arisen from multi-generational nest defense. Two million years ago our ancestors began using fire for campsites and cooking. At the same time hominid brain size began expanding dramatically. Social traits emerged that have characterized humanity ever since. We love joining groups, and we became geniuses at reading the intentions of each other, a skill we fine-tune incessantly with our enjoyment of gossip. In another distinctively human trait, like ants, we became highly adept at collaborative warfare. Wilson had long been a proponent of William Hamilton’s theory of “kin selection” as an explanation for how altruistic traits could evolve. But as a naturalist he found it did not explain phenomena that he and others were discovering in eusocial species, and he began to favor “group selection” instead---a process where the “target” of evolution was sacrificially collaborative traits, because highly cooperative groups beat poorly cooperative groups, and the “units” of evolution (genes) adjusted accordingly. It is successful groups, more than successful families, that are being selected for. In 2010 Wilson, along with mathematician Martin Nowak and Corina Tarnita formally challenged kin selection with a peer-reviewed paper in Nature. There was, as Wilson put it, “considerable blowback” from kin selection theorists and supporters. Wilson’s alternative he calls “multi-level selection,” where individual selection and group selection proceed together (with kin selection a continuing bit player). In our eusocial species, that mix of traits makes us “permanently unstable, permanently conflicted” between selfish impulses and cooperative impulses. We negotiate these conflicts endlessly within ourselves and with each other. Wilson sees inherent adaptive value in that constant negotiation. Our vibrant cultural life may be driven in part by it. In response to a question about what the next stages of human eusociality might be, Wilson said he hoped for a fading of interest in end-state ideologies and end-time religious creation stories because they so fervently deny negotiation.

Mark Lynas: The Nine Planetary Boundaries

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 18:30:00 -0800

### The Quantified Planet “About 74,000 years ago,” Lynas began, “a volcanic event nearly wiped out humanity. We were down to just a thousand or so embattled breeding pairs. We’ve made a bit of a comeback since then. We’re over seven billion strong. In half a million years we’ve gone from prodding anthills with sticks to building a worldwide digital communications network. Well done! But... there’s a small problem. In doing this we’ve had to capture between a quarter and a third of the entire photosynthetic production of the planet. We’ve raised the temperature of the Earth system, reduced the alkalinity of the oceans, altered the chemistry of the atmosphere, changed the reflectivity of the planet, hugely affected the distribution of freshwater, and killed off many of the species that share the planet with us. Welcome to the Anthropocene, our very uniquely human geological era.” Some of those global alterations made by humans may be approaching tipping points---thresholds---that could destabilize the whole Earth system. Drawing on a landmark paper in Nature in 2009 (“[A Safe Operating Space for Humanity](http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol14/iss2/art32/main.html),” by Johan Rockström et al.) Lynas outlined the nine boundaries we should stay within, starting with three we’ve already crossed. 1. Loss of biodiversity reduces every form of ecological resilience. The boundary is 10 species going extinct per million per year. Currently we lose over 100 species per million per year. 2. Global warming is the most overwhelming boundary. Long-term stability requires 350 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; we’re currently at 391 ppm and rising fast. “The entire human economy must become carbon neutral by 2050 and carbon negative thereafter.” 3. Nitrogen pollution. With the invention a century ago of the Haber-Bosch process for creating nitrogen fertilizer, we doubled the terrestrial nitrogen cycle. We need to reduce the amount of atmospheric nitrogen we fix per year to 35 million tons; we’re currently at 121 million tons. Other quantifiable boundaries have yet to be exceeded, but we’re close. 4. Land use. Every bit of natural landscape lost threatens ecosystem services like clean water and air and atmospheric carbon balance. “Already 85% of the Earth’s ice-free land is fragmented or substantially affected by human activity.” The danger point is 15% of land being used for row crops; we’re currently at 12%. 5. Fresh water scarcity. Increasing droughts from global warming will make the problem ever worse. In the world’s rivers, “the blue arteries of the living planet,” there are 800,000 dams with two new large ones built every day. The numeric limit is thought to be 4,000 cubic kilometers of runoff water consumed per year; the current number is 2,600. 6. Ocean acidification from excess atmospheric carbon dioxide is increasingly lethal to ocean life such as coral reefs. The measure here is “aragonite saturation level.” Before the industrial revolution it was 3.44; the limit is 2.75; we’re already down to 2.90. 7. The ozone layer protects the Earth from ultraviolet radiation. One man (Thomas Midgley) invented the chlorofluorocarbon coolant that rapidly reduced stratospheric ozone, and one remarkable agreement (Montreal Protocol, 1987) cut back on CFCs and began restoring the ozone layer. (In Dobson units the limit is 276; before Midgley it was 290; we’re now back up to 283.) Two boundaries are so far unquantifiable. 8. Chemical pollution. Rachel Carson was right. Human toxics are showing up everywhere and causing harm. Coal-fired power plants are one of the worst offenders in this category. (Lynas added that nuclear waste belongs in this category but “the supposedly unsolved problem of nuclear waste hasn’t so far harmed a single living thing.” 9. Atmospheric aerosols---airborne dust and smoke. It kills hundreds of thousands of people annually, the soot causes ice to melt faster, and everyone wants to get rid of it. But one beneficial effect it has is cooling, so Lynas proposes “we could move this pollution from the troposphere where people have to breathe it up to the stratosphere where it can still cool the Earth and no one has to breathe it. That’s called geoengineering.” Lynas proposed that the goal for the future should be to get the whole world out of poverty by 2050 while staying within the planetary boundaries. Among the solutions he proposed are: clean cookstoves for the poor (they cause 1.6 million deaths a year); better GM crops for nitrogen efficiency and concentrated land use; integral fast reactors which run on nuclear waste (a recent calculation shows the UK could get 500 years of clean energy from its present waste, and the resulting IFR waste is a problem for 300 years, not for thousands of years); international treaties, which are crucial for dealing with global problems; carbon capture (everything from clean coal to biochar); and ongoing “dematerialization,” doing ever more with ever less, including more intense farming on less land. “Peak consumption,” Lynas noted, has already arrived in much of the developed world.

Jim Richardson: Heirlooms

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:30:00 -0800

### Save Agricultural Biodiversity Humanity’s agricultural legacy is on a par with any of our great cultural legacies, Richardson said, but preserving it is not just a matter of honoring the history and richness of our most fundamental civilization-enabling technology. For the health of future crops and livestock we need the deep genetic reservoir of all those millennia of sophisticated breeding. A million people died in the Irish Potato Famine because the whole nation depended on just two varieties of potato. In Peru, where potatoes originally came from, Richardson visited a field at 14,000 feet where 400 varieties of potato (with names like “Ashes of the Soul” and “Puma Paw”) are grown in just two acres. The local 1,300 varieties of potato are managed by a “Guardian of the Potatoes,” whose job it is in the community to know the story and uses of all the potatoes. The accumulated wisdom in the crops and livestock is profound. We’ve been breeding cattle for 10,000 years, goats for 9,000 years, dogs for 12,000 years, chickens for 8,000 years, llamas for 6,500 years, horses for 6,000 years, camels for 4,000 years. All those millennia we have been in deep partnership with the animals. All of our staple foods are ancient. Wheat has been bred for 11,000 years, corn for 8,000 years, rice for 8,000 years, potatoes for 7,000 years, soybeans for 5,000 years “For 9,900 years,” Richardson said, “we’ve been building up variety in domesticated crops and livestock---this whole wealth of specific solutions to specific problems. For the last 100 years we’ve been throwing it away.” 95% is gone. In the US in 1903 there were 497 varieties of lettuce; by 1983 there were only 36 varieties. (Also changed from 1903 to 1983: sweet corn from 307 varieties to 13; peas from 408 to 25; tomatoes from 408 to 79; cabbage from 544 to 28.) Seed banks have been one way to slow the rate of loss. The famous seed vault at Svalbard serves as backup for the some 1,300 seed banks around the world. The great limitation is that seeds don’t remain viable for long. They have to be grown out every 7 to 20 years, and the new seeds returned to storage. Even with living heirlooms, the rule is Use It Or Lose It. Devotees of exotic cattle say “You have to eat them to save them.” With dramatic photos Richardson compared the livestock shows in Wales with the livestock markets in Ethiopia. You see children adoring the young animals and breeders obsessing on details of excellence and uniqueness. “One guy says, ‘You see that sheep with the heart-shaped spot on his left shoulder? I’ll bet you I can move it to his rump in four generations.’” There’s a sheep called the North Ronaldsay that is bred to live solely on seaweed on the coast. Ethiopia has some specialists, like the Sheko cattle that are resistant to tsetse flies, but unlike in Europe, most of their breeds have to be generalists capable of providing meat, milk, labor (such pulling plows), and warmth in the winter. Helping preserve agricultural biodiversity is open to anyone. The [Seed Savers Exchange](http://www.seedsavers.org) in Decorah, Iowa, has 13,000 members. Their catalog is a cornucopia of heirloom garden delights, and members learn how to produce and store their own seeds and then share them. “It’s a wonderful example of citizens participating in the process.” And we can always acquire a new taste for old foods. Teff! Quinoa! Amaranth! Randall Lineback cows! You have to eat them to save them. PS: Jim Richardson’s beautiful heirloom photos and article may be found [here](http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/07/food-ark/siebert-text).

Lawrence Lessig: How Money Corrupts Congress and a Plan to Stop It

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 18:30:00 -0800

### Public Funding for Public Elections Larry Lessig gave a rousing performance for the 100th Seminar About Long-Term Thinking. In a lawyerly fashion he laid out evidence of a new type of corruption that is disrupting the American republic, and he offered a remedy for that corruption. Lessig has a very distinctive visual style of using slides that punctuates, word for word, the clear logic of his argument. He said the type of corruption rampant in the US Congress is not the old type of bribery, where congressional representatives had safes in their offices to hold the cash they received for voting in certain directions. That is now illegal and eliminated. This new type of corruption is more subtle, indirect and harder to outlaw. Corporations legally donate money to the election campaigns of legislators, who in turn tend to vote in favor of the interests of those corporations. Non-profits like [Maplight](http://maplight.org/) can graph the evidence that a representative voting in favor of a particular corporate-friendly law will receive 6 or 10 or 13 times the funding than someone who opposes the law. He cited studies that showed the ROI (return on investment) of lobbying to be 1,000%. It was one of the sanest expenses for a corporation. But the distortion is not just one sided. The issue that Congress spent the most time on in 2011 -- a year when US was waging two wars, dealing with a near economic depression, and revamping health care -- was the bank swipe fee. Who should pay the credit card use fee -- the banks or the stores? There were corporations on both sides of this minor argument, but each side was promising campaign funds, so this was the issue that got all the attention of the officials. But the real money to be made in Congress is the relative fortune to be made as a lobbyist after leaving office. The differential in wages between a staff member and a lobbyist has escalated a hundred fold in the past 40 years. Now 43% of staff go on to become lobbyists. The promise of a well-paying job working for corporate interests later is enough to warp voting now. None of this is illegal, but Lessig argues that we have a constitutional argument for eliminating it. The Constitution talks about the republic being "dependent on the people alone." But now it is dependent on corporate funders, and more and more JUST on corporate funders. His solution is to return the republic to being dependent on the people alone. His solution is an innovative kind of campaign finance reform. Give every voter a $50 campaign voucher. The $50 comes from the tax pool. It can be given to any candidate who accepts only money from the vouchers (and maybe a limit of an optional voluntary $100 per single voter). Thus all campaign money would come in very small amounts from The People. Lessig calculates that the total amount of money raised this public way would be 3 times the amount raised by private means in the last election cycles, and therefore more than adequate. But it would break the grip of corporate influence over what is voted up. The result would not be harmonious utopia, but the usual give-and-take compromises of politics -- which the US has not seen in decades. The issues that people cared about would return to the agenda. Lessig spent the remaining time and some of the question and answers talking about the real-politic necessary to pass this reform. A similar public financing scheme works in places like Sweden, where one elected legislator told Lessig he had never had to worry about where his funding came from. But the US has a fierce free-speech component not found elsewhere, and ironically, since spending money is viewed as a type of free speech, this complicates reform. As a free-speech advocate himself, and a constitutional lawyer, Lessig talked candidly about the difficulties of reform. He ended by saying that it would probably be a generational task. Overcoming institutional racism and sexism took more than one generation, and returning the republic to the "people alone" could take just as long, although in this case, the republic might not last that long without reform.

Rick Prelinger: Lost Landscapes of San Francisco, 6

The Long Now Foundation — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 18:30:00 -0800

Held at the historic Castro Theater, almost 1,400 enthusiastic San Francisco history buffs packed in to partake of guerrilla archivist Rick Prelinger’s annual ritual. The audience learned from, laughed at, quizzed and heckled the lovingly curated footage of their city’s past. New material this year (presented for the first time in HD) included San Francisco's lost cemeteries in color, unique drive-through footage of the Produce Market (now Embarcadero Center and Golden Gateway), rides along the now destroyed Embarcadero Freeway, back streets in working-class North Beach, the sand-swept Sunset before its dunes were covered, wild automobile rides through downtown in the 1920s, newly-rediscovered Kodachrome Cinemascope footage of Playland and the Sky Tram, and much more.

Brewster Kahle: Universal Access to All Knowledge

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 18:30:00 -0800

### All knowledge, to all people, for all time, for free Universal access to all knowledge, Kahle declared, will be one of humanity's greatest achievements. We are already well on the way. "We're building the Library of Alexandria, version 2. We can one-up the Greeks!" Start with what the ancient library had---books. The [Internet Library](http://www.archive.org/) already has 3 million books digitized. With its Scribe Book Scanner robots---29 of them around the world---they're churning out a thousand books a day digitized into every handy ebook format, including robot-audio for the blind and dyslexic. Even modern heavily copyrighted books are being made available for free as lending-library ebooks you can borrow from [physical libraries](http://www.archive.org/)\---100,000 such books so far. (Kahle announced that every citizen of California is now eligible to borrow online from the Oakland Library's "[ePort](http://oakland.lib.overdrive.com/B5827532-F62F-49BC-8C8E-8BF0DDBD600A/10/644/en/Default.htm).") As for music, Kahle noted that the 2-3 million records ever made are intensely litigated, so the Internet Archive offered music makers free unlimited storage of their works forever, and the music poured in. The [Archive audio collection](http://www.archive.org/details/etree) has 100,000 concerts so far (including all the Grateful Dead) and a million recordings, with three new bands every day uploading. Moving images. The 150,000 commercial movies ever made are tightly controlled, but 2 million other films are readily available and fascinating---600,000 of them are accessible in the [Archive](http://www.archive.org/details/movies) already. In the year 2000, without asking anyone's permission, the Internet Archive started recording 20 channels of TV all day, every day. When 9/11 happened, they were able to assemble an [online archive of TV news](http://www.archive.org/details/911) coverage all that week from around the world ("TV comes with a point of view!") and make it available just a month after the event on Oct. 11, 2001. The Web itself. When the Internet Archive began in 1996, there were just 30 million web pages. Now the [Wayback Machine](http://www.archive.org/web/web.php) copies every page of every website every two months and makes them time-searchable from its 6-petabyte database of 150 billion pages. It has 500,000 users a day making 6,000 queries a second. "What is the Library of Alexandria most famous for?" Kahle asked. "For burning! It's all gone!" To maintain digital archives, they have to be used and loved, with every byte migrated forward into new media every five years. For backup, the whole Internet Archive is mirrored at the new [Bibliotheca Alexandrina](http://www.bibalex.org/Home/Default_EN.aspx) in Egypt and in Amsterdam. ("So our earthquake zone archive is backed up in the turbulent Mideast and a flood zone. I won't sleep well until there are five or six backup sites.") Speaking of institutional longevity, Kahle noted during the Q & A that nonprofits demonstrably live much longer than businesses. It might be it's because they have softer edges, he surmised, or that they're free of the grow-or-die demands of commercial competition. Whatever the cause, they are proliferating.

Laura Cunningham: Ten Millennia of California Ecology

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 19:30:00 -0700

### Eco-continuity in California California ecology used to be much more driven by floods and fires, Cunningham said, showing with her paintings how the Great Valley would become a vast inland sea, like a huge vernal pool progressing each year from navigable water to intense flower displays to elk-grazed grassland. Lake Merritt in Oakland was a salt water inlet. On the Albany mudflats grizzly bears would tunnel into a beached humpback whale for food, joined by California condors. Every fall at the Carquinez Strait a million four-foot-long Chinook salmon headed inland to spawn. Only 300 years ago the whole Bay Area was grasslands, routinely burned by the local Indians. There were oaks in the valleys, redwoods in the Berkeley Hills, and extensive oak savannahs inland. The hills were greener more of the year than now, with fire-freshened grass attracting elk, and native perennial grasses drawing moisture with their deep roots. Cunningham researched the ancient landscapes using old maps, photos, paintings, scientific reports, sundry local experts, and 30 years of fieldwork. She witnessed the last wild condors feeding on a calf carcass, chasing off a golden eagle. (The condors are now back in the wild, spotted as far north as Mt. Hamilton.) To learn about the behavior and ecological effects of wolves and grizzly bears, she studied them in Yellowstone Park. (The California golden bear was enormous, up to 2,200 pounds.) Along the Pacific shore there used to be 10-ton Steller's sea cows (extinct in 1768), a giant petrel with an 8-foot wingspan, and a flightless diving goose that ate mussels. Further back, in the Ice Ages before 12,000 years ago, the ocean was lower, and San Francisco Bay was a savannah occupied by huge bison (6 feet at the shoulder), a native full-sized horse similar to the African quagga (Cunningham shows it with quagga-like stripes), Columbian mammoths, and the giant short-faced bear (10 feet tall standing up). For current Californians Cunningham encourages local restoration of old ecosystems, perhaps learning to live with more flood and fire. With her multi-millennial perspective, she's pretty relaxed about climate change. As much as long-term ecology is about continuity, it is about change.

Timothy Ferriss: Accelerated Learning in Accelerated Times

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 19:30:00 -0700

### Learning to learn fast To acquire "the meta-skill of acquiring skills," Ferriss recommends approaching any subject with some contrarian analysis: "What if I try the opposite of best practices?" Some conventional wisdom---"children learn languages faster than adults" (no they don't)---can be discarded. Some conventional techniques can be accelerated radically. For instance, don't study Italian in class for a year before your big Italy trip; just book your flight a week early and spend that week cramming the language where it's spoken. You can be fluent in any language with mastery of just 1,200 words. That's what Ferriss calls the "minimum effective dose" for learning a language. The equivalent with any skill or goal is worth identifying. A regular 5 minutes of kettlebell swinging can tone the body rapidly; 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking makes your slow-carb diet effective; just 20,000 "early evangelists" for your book in its first 2 weeks guarantees it becomes a best seller. With any skill, "solve for extremes and anomalies." Look at who's best and how they do it, but especially look for those who are surprisingly good---the wispy girl who can deadlift 405 pounds---because they're doing it with technique rather than genes, and technique is learnable. How do you manage the self-discipline to bear down on learning a skill? Ferriss suggests you begin by treating your new regime as a trial (vowing permanence can be discouraging)--- give it 2 weeks or 5 serious sessions. By that point early rewards from the discipline will keep you going. You have to measure to detect the rewards ("What gets measured gets managed"--Peter Drucker), and score-keeping lets you make your progress a competitive game with others---which becomes its own motivation. Make public bets about your specific goals, where you'll pay painfully if you fail. "Loss aversion" is a surprisingly powerful incentive. You can get profound effects in an amazingly short time, Ferriss concluded. "Doing the unthinkable is easier than you think." PS: [ A collection of all of these summaries of the SALT talks](http://www.amazon.com/Summaries-Condensed-Long-term-Thinking-ebook/dp/B005I57M4O/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1316213727&sr=1-1) is available on the Kindle for $3. Foreword by Brian Eno.

Geoffrey B West: Why Cities Keep on Growing, Corporations Always Die, and Life Gets Faster

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 19:30:00 -0700

### Superlinear Cities "It's hard to kill a city," West began, "but easy to kill a company." The mean life of companies is 10 years. Cities routinely survive even nuclear bombs. And "cities are the crucible of civilization." They are the major source of innovation and wealth creation. Currently they are growing exponentially. "Every week from now until 2050, one million new people are being added to our cities." "We need," West said, "a grand unified theory of sustainability--- a coarse-grained quantitative, predictive theory of cities." Such a theory already exists in biology, and you can build on that. Working with macroecologist James Brown and others, West explored the fact that living systems such as individual organisms show a shocking consistency of scalability. (The theory they elucidated has long been known in biology as Kleiber's Law.) Animals, for example, range in size over ten orders of magnitude from a shrew to a blue whale. If you plot their metabolic rate against their mass on a log-log graph, you get an absolutely straight line. From mouse to human to elephant, each increase in size requires a proportional increase in energy to maintain it. But the proportion is not linear. Quadrupling in size does not require a quadrupling in energy use. Only a tripling in energy use is needed. It's sublinear; the ratio is 3/4 instead of 4/4. Humans enjoy an economy of scale over mice, as elephants do over us. With each increase in animal size there is a slowing of the pace of life. A shrew's heart beats 1,000 times a minute, a human's 70 times, and an elephant heart beats only 28 times a minute. The lifespans are proportional; shrew life is intense but brief, elephant life long and contemplative. Each animal, independent of size, gets about a billion heartbeats per life. (West added that human bodies run on 100 watts---2,000 calories of food a day. But our civilizational energy use adds up 11,000 watts per person. We're like blue whales walking around.) Does such scalability apply to cities? If you plot, say, the number of gas stations against the size of population of metropolitan areas on a log-log scale, it turns out you get another straight line. Ditto with the length of electrical lines, carbon footprint, etc. Per capita, big city dwellers use less energy than small town dwellers. As with animals, there is greater efficiency with size, this time at a 9/10 ratio. Energy use is sublinear. But unlike animals, cities do not slow down as they get bigger. They speed up with size! The bigger the city, the faster people walk and the faster they innovate. All the productivity-related numbers increase with size---wages, patents, colleges, crimes, AIDS cases---and their ratio is superlinear. It's 1.15/1. With each increase in size, cities get a value-added of 15 percent. Agglomerating people, evidently, increases their efficiency and productivity. Does that go on forever? Cities create problems as they grow, but they create solutions to those problems even faster, so their growth and potential lifespan is in theory unbounded. (West pointed out that there is a bit of variability between cities worth noticing. On the plot of crimes/population, Tokyo has slightly fewer crimes for its size, and Osaka has slightly more. In the U.S., the most patents per capita come from Corvalis, Oregon, and the least from Abiline, Texas. Such variations tend to remain constant over decades, despite everyone's efforts to adjust them. "Exciting cities stay exciting, and boring cities stay boring.") Are corporations more like animals or more like cities? They want to be like cities, with ever increasing productivity as they grow and potentially unbounded lifespans. Unfortunately, West et al.'s research on 22,000 companies shows that as they increase in size from 100 to 1,000,000 employees, their net income and assets (and 23 other metrics) per person increase only at a 4/5 ratio. Like animals and cities they do grow more efficient with size, but unlike cities, their innovation cannot keep pace as their systems gradually decay, requiring ever more costly repair until a fluctuation sinks them. Like animals, companies are sublinear and doomed to die. What is the actual mechanism of difference? Research on that continues. "Cities tolerate crazy people," West observed, "Companies don't."

Peter Kareiva: Conservation in the Real World

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 19:30:00 -0700

### Environmentalism for THIS Century Kareiva began by recalling the environmental "golden decade" of 1965-75, set in motion by the scientist Rachel Carson. In quick succession Congress created the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act---which passed the Senate unanimously. Green influence has been dwindling ever since. A series of polls in the US asked how many agreed with the statement, "Most environmentalists are extremists, not reasonable people." In 1996, 32% agreed. In 2004, 43% agreed. Now it's over 50% who think environmentalists are unreasonable. Kareiva noted that as the world is urbanizing, ever fewer people grow up in contact with nature---current college freshman have less than a tenth of the childhood experience of nature as previous generations. And there's a demographic shift toward multiethnicity, with whites already a minority in California and soon to be a minority in the whole country. Asked to describe a typical environmentalist, current grade school students say it's a girl, white, with money, preachy about recycling, nice but uptight, not sought as a friend. In general, environmentalist have earned the reputation of being "misanthropic, anti-technology, anti-growth, dogmatic, purist, zealous, exclusive pastoralists." Kareiva gave several examples of how that reputation was earned. In Green rhetoric, everything in nature is described as "fragile!"---rivers, forests, the whole planet. It's manifestly untrue. America's eastern forest lost two of its most dominant species---the American chestnut and the passenger pigeon---and never faltered. Bikini Atoll was vaporized in an H-bomb test that boiled the ocean. When National Geographic sent a research team there recently, they found 25% more coral than was ever there before. The Deepwater Horizon oil disaster last year caused dramatically less harm to salt marshes and fisheries than expected, apparently because ocean bacteria ate most of the 5 million barrels of oil. The problem with the fragility illusion is that it encourages a misplaced purism, leaving no room for compromise or negotiation, and it leads to "fortress conservation"---the idea that the only way to protect "fragile" ecosystems is to exclude all people. In Uganda, when a national park was established to protect biodiversity, 5,000 families were forced out of the area. After a change in government, those families returned in anger. To make sure they were never forced out again, they slaughtered all the local wildlife. In the 1980s, Kareiva was a witness in Seattle for protecting old growth forest (and spotted owls). At the courtroom loggers carried signs reading: "You care about owls more than my children." That jarred him. When genetically engineered crops (GMOs) came along, environmentalists responded with "knee-jerk anti-technology religiosity," Kareiva said. How to feed the world was not a consideration. Lessening the overwhelming impact of agriculture on natural systems was not a consideration. Instead, the usual apocalyptic fears were deployed in the usual terms: EVERYTHING'S GOING TO BE DEAD TOMORROW! When Kareiva was working on protecting salmon, he saw the same kind of language employed in a 1999 New York Times full-page ad about dams in the Snake River: TIMELINE TO EXTINCTION! He knew it wasn't true. Salmon are a weedy species, and the re-engineered dams were letting the fish through. The Nature Conservancy---where Kareiva is chief scientist working with the organization's 600 scientists, 4,000 staff, and one million members in 37 countries---promotes a realistic approach to conservation. Instead of demonizing corporations, they collaborate actively with them. They've decided to do the same with farmers, starting an agriculture initiative within the Conservancy. For the growing cities they emphasize the economic value of conservation in terms of valuable clean water and air. They started a program taking inner-city kids out to their field conservation projects not to play but to work on research and restoration. An astonishing 30% of those kids go on to major in science. Kareiva sees conservation in this century as a profoundly social, cooperative undertaking that has to include everyone. New social networking tools can be in the thick of it. For instance, people could use their smartphones to photograph (and geotag, timestamp, and broadcast) the northernmost occurrence of bird species, and the aggregate data could be graphed in real time, showing the increasing effects of global warming on the natural world. When everyone makes science like that, everyone owns it. They've invested.

Carl Zimmer: Viral Time

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 19:30:00 -0700

### What's time to a virus? "Everything about viruses is extreme," Zimmer began. The number of viruses on Earth is estimated to be 1 followed by 31 zeroes. Small as they are, if you stacked them all up, the stack would reach 100 million light years. They are the planet's most abundant organism by far. They're fast. We take decades to reproduce. A flu virus can generate billions of itself in us within hours. And they evolve 10,000 times faster than us, because they're creatively sloppy about making copies of their genomes, and they readily combine genes among varieties when jointly infecting a cell. Each of us has four trillion viruses on board, in 1,500 all-too-fungible varieties. Yet they can also be "time stealthy." You may have a bout of childhood chickenpox that is over in days, but the viruses may hide in your nervous system and emerge decades later as shingles. HIV spreads inexorably because of the lag of months or years between infection and visible symptoms. The earliest record of a virus in human history is the smallpox marks you can see on the mummified face of Ramses V, who died in 1145 BCE. Viruses leave no fossils, but in a sense they ARE fossils, with the ancient gene sequences of retroviruses buried in the genomes of every creature they've infected over the ages. About 8 percent of our genome---some 100,000 elements---comes from viruses, and some of those genes now work for us (enabling the mammalian placenta, for instance). One French scientist revived from our genome a functioning 2-million-year-extinct virus just by deducing the original code from the current variety in that stretch of DNA. For billions of years the planet's life consisted solely of bacteria and their viruses, the bacteriophages. They became a planet force, and remain so today, determining the makeup of the atmosphere, among other things. Every day half of all the bacteria in the oceans are killed by phages. Some of the carbon from the bodies sinks to the bottom, some is freed up to fertilize other life. Ocean viruses cart around and transmit genes for photosynthesis to previously incapable microbes---10 percent of oceanic photosynthesis happens that way. If some day we have to geoengineer the atmosphere to manage climate change, we may want to employ the viruses that are already doing it. Virology will be revolutionizing science for decades to come. One body of investigation suggests that the so-called giant viruses may be a whole fourth domain of life (added to bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes). As the ultimate parasite, viruses were assumed to come along after life evolved, but they might an instrument of that evolution. One hypothesis is that viruses took primordial RNA and generated DNA to better protect the genes. They might have created life as we know it, a long time ago.

Tim Flannery: Here on Earth

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 03 May 2011 19:30:00 -0700

### Wallace beats Darwin The great insight of natural selection was published simultaneously by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace in 1858, Flannery pointed out, but their interpretations of the insight then diverged. Darwin's harsh view of "survival of the fittest" led too easily to social Darwinism, eugenics societies, neo-classical economics, and an overly reductionist focus on the "selfish gene." Wallace, by contrast, focussed on the tendency of evolution to generate a world of complex co-dependence, and he became an activist for social justice. At the age of 80 in 1904 Wallace published a book titled _Man's Place in the Universe_ , which proposed that Earth was the only living planet in the Solar System. Flannery regards it as "the foundation text of astrobiology" and, with its view that the atmosphere is an instrument of life, a direct precursor of James Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis and Earth System Science. The study of Earth systems, in turn, revealed that the atmosphere is 99 percent an artifact of life (minus only the noble gases), that the makeup of the oceans is life-driven (toxic heavy metals were concentrated into ore bodies), and that the whole, in Flannery's terms, constitutes a "commonwealth of virtue," using "geo-pheromones" such ozone, methane, atmospheric dust, and dimethyl sulfide from algae to regulate the stability of a livable planet. It acts like a loosely connected superorganism. The first tightly connected superorganism came 100 million years ago when cockroaches invented agriculture and the division of labor and became termites, building complex skyscrapers with air-conditioning, highways, and garbage dumps. Only 10,000 years ago, humans did the same, inventing agriculture and the division of labor in cities, becoming the most potent superorganism yet. One cause of that, Flannery opined, may be our astonishing genetic uniformity, caused by a near-extinction 70,000 years ago, when only 1,000 to 10,000 breeding pairs of humans survived. The 7 billion of us now alive have less genetic diversity than any random sample of 50 chimpanzees in West Africa. Flannery finds cause for hope in the increasing pace of global agreements to manage the global commons. There was the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1996, the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants in 2001, and worthy of an annual holiday on September 16, the 1987 signing of the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer. Flannery, who now works full time on climate issues, even takes hope from the last-minute Copenhagen Accord that emerged from the UN climate meeting in 2009, because it brought developing nations into the global project to reduce greenhouse gases. In Flannery's view, Gaia is an infant still. Even if it is the only Gaian planet in the galaxy, with growing skills and rudimentary space travel, it could invest the whole galaxy with life in just 5 to 50 million years---an instant in light of Earth's 4.5 billion years and the universe's 14 billion years. Tim Flannery is the author of _[Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet](http://www.amazon.com/Here-Earth-Natural-History-Planet/dp/080211976X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1304535603&sr=8-1)_.

Ian Morris: Why the West Rules - For Now

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 19:30:00 -0700

### Geographical determinism Historians and others who try to explain the world dominance by the West since the 18th century usually put it down to long-term lock-in or short-term accidents, said Morris. The lock-in theories are belied by the dominance of the East from 550 to 1750 CE. The accidents approach is undermined by clear patterns that emerge when you look for them in a rigorous way. Morris has devised a quantitative "social development index" based on evaluating a civilization's energy capture, organization (size of largest cities), information management, and war-making capability. (The details of his method are online here.) When you graph human progress since the last ice age 15,000 years ago, the results show that the West led for all the millennia up till the 6th century CE, fell behind for 1,200 years, then leapt ahead again up to the present day. (The "West" for Morris is the civilizational core that developed agriculture and then cities and empires in the eastern Mediterranean, later spreading across Europe and North America. The "East" is China.) Geography determines how and when regions develop, but new societal capabilities keep redefining what geography means. At first agriculture was limited to regions with reliable rainfall, but once societies grew able to manage large-scale irrigation, the empires of parched regions like Mesopotamia and Egypt could take off, and their rivers became trade routes. The vast steppes of north-central Asia long separated Western and Eastern empires, but once their riches became worth plundering, mounted nomads from the steppes invaded repeatedly, defeating the agrarian armies and carrying germs that unleashed waves of epidemics. The West had the advantage of a trade highway in the Mediterranean that wasn't matched in the East until the 6th century, when the Sui emperors built the Grand Canal 1,500 miles long linking north and south China. Everything then changed with the invention of ocean-going ships and guns in the 13th and 14th centuries. (The gun innovation took only 40 years to spread from China to Europe.) Suddenly the most important geographic fact was the differing sizes of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Europeans had only 3,000 miles to travel to conquer the Americas; the Chinese (who had capable ships) faced a 6,000 mile barrier. Atlantic trade gave Europe the wealth and science to start the industrial revolution, and with that the West unleashed a global economy, within which players in the East are now flourishing rapidly. Extending the story to the rest of this century, Morris says that if present trends merely continue, the East will retake leadership by the end of the century. But the accelerating pace of social development may make geography irrelevant. By his index, societies have risen to an index value of 900 during the past fifteen millennia. They are likely to be at a level of 5,000 by century's end, meaning there will be five times as much progress (or catastrophe) in this 100 years as in the past 15,000 years. Books about the future, Morris noted, nearly always portray the future as much like the present. "That," he said, "won't happen." Ian Morris is the author of [_Why the West Rules - For Now_](http://www.amazon.com/Why-West-Rules-Now-Patterns/dp/0374290024).

Alexander Rose: Millennial Precedent

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 19:30:00 -0700

Alexander Rose, Long Now Executive Director and project manager for the Clock of the Long Now, discussed lessons learned in multi-millennial site design. Rose covers his trip to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault as well as other sites and precedents like the Mormon Genealogical Vault and the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste site.

Matt Ridley: Deep Optimism

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 19:30:00 -0700

### Undeniable Progress Hominids had upright walking, stone tools, fire, even language but still remained in profound stasis. What led to humanity's global takeoff, Ridley argues, was the invention of exchange about 120,000 years ago. "That's ten times older than agriculture." The beginnings of trade encouraged specialization and innovation, which encouraged further innovation, specialization, and trade, and the unending virtuous cycle of progress was set in motion. The quality and speed of the progress depends on the size of the population doing the exchanging. "It's not how clever we are but how much in contact we are with each other." Thus the 5,000 Australians who became isolated on Tasmania 10,000 years ago didn't just stop progressing, they forgot how to make and use bone tools and even how to clothe themselves against cold weather. Their individual brains were fine, "but there was something wrong with their collective brains." What really is being exchanged is ideas. The Pill-cam (for shooting video of your gut) was invented, Ridley points out, when a gastroenterologist had a conversation with guided missile designer. The acceleration of progress can be measured in objective terms such as the amount of labor it takes to earn an hour of reading light. In 1997, with CF bulbs, it was half a second. In 1950, with incandescent bulbs, eight seconds. In 1880, with kerosene lamps, fifteen minutes. In 1800, with candles, six hours. In every decade various intellectuals keep saying that progress has stopped or is about to stop, but Ridley showed chart after chart chronicling constant improvement in everything we care about. Life expectancy is increasing by five hours a day. IQ keeps going up by three points a decade. Agriculture gets ever more productive, leaving more land to remain wild. Even economic inequality is decreasing, with poor countries getting rich faster than rich countries are getting richer. On the subject of climate change, Ridley has a similar set of detailed charts showing that sea level has been rising slowly for a long time, but it is not accelerating. The same with the retreat of glaciers. Overall global warming is proceeding slower than was predicted. Humanity has been decarbonizing its energy supply steadily for 150 years as we progressed from wood to coal to oil to natural gas. A few years ago it was thought that only 25 years of natural gas was left, but with the invention of hydrofracking shale gas, the supply is suddenly 250 years worth, and it is a hugely cleaner source than coal. (Among nuclear innovations, Ridley is particularly intrigued by thorium reactors.) "The story of history is of more for less." Paul Ehrlich's formula (I=PAT--- environmental Impact equals Population times Affluence times Technology) is better stated as I=P/AT--- Impact equals Population divided by Affluence times Technology. As affluence and technology increase, and population levels off, environmental impact can go ever down. An historian once wrote, 'On what principle is it that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?" That was English historian Thomas Babington Macaulay in 1830, before the industrial revolution had really had much effect on living standards.

Mary Catherine Bateson: Live Longer, Think Longer

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 18:30:00 -0800

### Parenting Earth The birth of a first child is the most intense disruption that most adults experience. Suddenly the new parents have no sleep, no social life, no sex, and they have to keep up with a child that changes from week to week. "Two ignorant adults learn from the newborn how to be decent parents." Everything now has to be planned ahead, and the realization sinks in that it will go on that way for twenty years. More than with any other animal, human childhood dependency is enormously prolonged. That's a burden on parents and the species, but that long childhood is what makes us so adaptive, so capable of hope and love, so able to think ahead. It makes us the time-binding species. Lately there's been a new development in the human lifecycle---extended adulthood. In the twentieth century human lifespan got thirty years longer. "Increased longevity," Bateson proposed, "may make a difference for the human species as momentous as our long dependent childhood." A whole new stage of life has emerged---what Bateson calls Adulthood II. In the old days a child would be lucky to have one living grandparent. These days kids have seven or eight grandparents of various sorts, and their laps are not available because the oldsters have gone back to school, or eloped with somebody, or started new careers, or are off cruising the world. They say, "I don't feel 60!" That's because they internalized stereotypes of "60" that no longer apply. A lot of cultural baggage about age now has to be thrown out, just as with previous liberation movements---civil rights, women's rights, gay rights. With each new equality comes new participation. Women who fought for the right to work, for example, get insulted afresh by the idea of mandatory retirement. So our elders will be active, but will they be wise? It's not a given. "Experience is the best teacher only if you do your homework, which is reflection," Bateson said. Adulthood II offers most people the time to reflect for the first time in their lives. That reflection, and the actions that are taken based on it, is the payoff for humanity of extended adulthood. Herself reflecting on parenthood, Bateson proposed that the metaphor of "mother Earth" is no longer accurate or helpful. Human impact on nature is now so complete and irreversible that we're better off thinking of the planet as if it were our first child. It will be here after us. Its future is unknown and uncontrollable. We are forced to plan ahead for it. Our first obligation is to keep it from harm. We are learning from it how to be decent parents.

Philip K. Howard: Fixing Broken Government

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 18:30:00 -0800

### Government 4.0 Americans have made major adjustments to our government before, Howard declared. At the beginning of the 20th century a Progressive era ended strict laissez-faire. The New Deal in the 1930s provided social safety nets. In the 1960s Civil Rights came to the fore. Now we need a fourth big change, because our government has managed to paralyze itself with the accretion of decades of excessively detailed laws. In the Eisenhower era the entire Interstate Highway system was installed in about 15 years. That couldn't happen now. Getting permission to build one offshore wind farm near Cape Cod took a decade while 17 agencies studied it, and 18 lawsuits now pending will delay the project another decade. The Interstate Highway Act was 29 pages long. Our new Health Care bill is 2,700 pages. The news laws obsess over methods instead of focussing primarily on goals and responsible institutions. They disable the power of office holders to decide and act because they try to prevent bad choices, and thus they disable the power to make good choices. Liberals want to head off game-playing corporations, and conservatives want to keep government officials from having too much power. The result is broken government and a citizenry maddened by a system that defies common sense. Only real people make things happen, Howard said, not laws alone. We need a framework that enables real people to take responsibility, to have the authority to say "Do it," to say "You're fired," to be accountable and to require accountability. To get there, Howard proposes three modifications of our government's operating system. One, a spring cleaning of all budgetary law. Three-quarters of most budgets are now locked in, so present decision makers have no flexibility and they wind up taking money from schools and parks. We need to create an omnibus sunset law, so all budgetary laws have a requirement to be discarded or revised every ten or fifteen years. Two, laws have to be radically simplified. They must be understandable and revisable. They have to enable the people executing the laws to use their judgement. That means focussing primarily on goals. Three, public employees have to be accountable. Which means: if they fail to perform, they can lose their job. Under the present system government worker unions have captured the apparatus that employs them and made much of it work primarily for them rather than primarily for the public. The system will not fix itself. It is up to the public---us---to mobilize and demand this kind of overhaul, to find leaders who will demand it, and support them.

Rick Prelinger: Lost Landscapes of San Francisco, 5

The Long Now Foundation — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 18:30:00 -0800

### Lives of San Francisco "You are the soundtrack," Prelinger told the capacity audience at the Herbst Theater, and they responded to his mostly silent archival films by calling out locations, questions, comments, and jokes. They saw footage of a 1941 Market Street parade of allies---floats representing Malta, Russia, France, Britain---and Kezar Stadium hosting a ferocious mock battle/demonstration of Army cannon, troops, and tanks in 1942 and huge naval ships parked at the waterfront piers in 1945. Sailors cruised the Barbary Coast in 1914 and amateurs piloted gliders from the vast beach dunes of the Sunset district in 1918 (looking just like the hang-gliders of 90 years later). There was a sky tram at the Cliff House and four sets of streetcar tracks busy on Market Street. Impromptu hula dancers drew a crowd on Market in one decade, and flower stands adorned it in another. Artists filled the Montgomery Building. All of Treasure Island could be seen burning, and no one present could remember when it was or what caused it or what happened afterward. "Fictional narratives push out actual narratives," Prelinger said. We remember stories, and what isn't in them, we forget. It takes large archives like his, diligently collected and made public, to free us from selective memory. Constantly reunderstanding the past goes best when grounded in the true strangeness of what used to go on.

Rachel Sussman: The World's Oldest Living Organisms

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 18:30:00 -0800

### The Missing Science of Biological Longevity Creative photographer Sussman showed beautiful slides of very elderly organisms. The captions were as crucial as the images---naming the species, the place, and the approximate age. You can see many of them here: http://rachelsussman.com/portfolios/OLTW/main.html The series began with the only animal---an eighteen-foot brain coral in the waters of Tobago, thought to be 2,000 years old. An enormous baobob in South Africa might be 2,000 years old. Then there is the astounding welwitschia mirabilis of the Namibian desert, a conifer that feeds on mist, with the longest leaves in the plant kingdom. After 2,000 years it looks like this: ![](https://media.longnow.org/files/2/sussmanr_image.jpg) Of course there was a redwood in our Sequoia National Park dated precisely to 2,150 years in age. On a remote Japan island, a two-day hike was needed to track down a gorgeous cedar somewhere between 2,000 and 7,000 years old. In Perthshire, Scotland, a churchyard was long ago build around huge yew tree that now is between 2,000 and 5,000 years old. In Chile the Patagonian cypress gets up to 2,200 years old, and a chestnut tree on the island of Sicily has been there for 3,000 years. On Crete there's an olive tree that might be the oldest in the world---3,000 years. It still bears olives. It may well have been preserved because its hollow trunk served for generations as a chicken coop. Lichen in Greenland grows 1 centimeter every 100 years. So a large specimen could be dated to 3,000 years. In the Atacama Desert at 15,000 feet in Chile, a shrub called La Llareta grows only 1.5 centimeters a year and is so dense you can stand on its leaf structure. They get to 3,000 years old. The bristlecone pines much beloved at Long Now have been dated up to 5,000 years old. Send in the clones. Cloned forests are basically one individual that sends up a multitude of stems from a single extensive, very long-lived root system. Sussman found a clonal forest of spruce in Sweden that is 9,550 years old; box huckleberry in Pennsylvania 13,000 years old; aspens in Utah 80,000 years old; and clonal sea grass off of Spain that is 100,000 years old. So far the age champion is an actinobacteria that lives in Siberian permafrost---alive for 400 to 600,000 years---half a million years. Sussman found all these creatures with the guidance of remarkable field biologists who have never met each other, because biological longevity is not yet a science. Artist Sussman is startled to be its first practitioner. She has two more years to go on this project. Long Now would love to see a conference mustered at the end of her project to bring together all the scientists she's gotten to know, to see what aggregating their knowledge might conjure up. If sponsors are interested, Long Now would be glad to organize the event. Thanks to Tom Lowe for the use of his short film [Timescapes](http://www.timescapes.org/)

Lera Boroditsky: How Language Shapes Thought

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 19:30:00 -0700

### Languages are Parallel Universes "To have a second language is to have a second soul," said Charlemagne around 800 AD. "Each language has its own cognitive toolkit," said psychologist/linguist Lera Boroditsky in 2010 AD. Different languages handle verbs, distinctions, gender, time, space, metaphor, and agency differently, and those differences, her research shows, make people think and act differently. Take a sentence such as "Sarah Palin read Chomsky's latest book." In Russian, the verb would have to indicate whether the whole book was read or not. In Turkish the verb would signify whether the speaker saw the event personally, or it was reported, or it was inferred. Russians have two words for blue, and when those words are present in their mind, they can distinguish finer gradations of the color than English speakers can. Gender runs deep in some languages, affecting nouns (including number words and days of the week), adjective endings, pronouns and possessives, and verb endings. And that affects how people think about every named thing. In German the Sun is female and the Moon male; it's the reverse in Spanish. In French, "liberty" and "justice" are each female, and thus the Statue of Liberty is a female, and so is the blindfolded lady of justice in American courtrooms. "'Time' is the most common noun in the English language," said Boroditsky. (Followed by "person," "year," "way," and "day.") Time is often expressed as travel in space: "We're coming up on Christmas." But some languages put the future in front of us, and others put it behind us. For Aborigines that Boroditsky studied in north Australia, time and sequence gets blended into their profound orientation to the cardinal directions. They don't use relative terms like "left" and "right," but absolute compass terms ("There's an ant on your southwest leg"), and they have extraordinary orientation skills. When Boroditsky asked these aborigines to place a sequence of photos (a progressively eaten apple) in sequential order, they did not do it like English speakers (left to right) or Hebrew and Arabic speakers (right to left), they did it by the compass: from east to west. "These are not differences of degree," said Boroditsky, "but a parallel universe." Different languages assign blame (agency) differently. English is uncommonly agentive, and so Dick Cheney had difficulty distancing himself from the fact that he shot his friend in a hunting accident: "Ultimately I'm the guy who pulled the trigger that fired the shot that hit Harry." In Spanish, accidents are expressed in terms such as "The vase broke" rather than "John broke the vase." Political distancing language such as "Mistakes were made" doesn't sound awkward in Spanish. Fate looms larger. Thus, "learning new languages can change the way you think," said Boroditsky. Multilingual speakers have more mind.

Jane McGonigal & Stewart Brand: Long Conversation 19 of 19

The Long Now Foundation — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 20:44:00 -0700

**This is one conversation out of the 19 that took place as part of the Long Conversation.[Media links for the other Conversations are available here.](https://longnow.org/seminars/02010/oct/16/long-conversation/)** Long Conversation, an epic relay of one-to-one conversations among some of the Bay Area's most interesting minds, took place over 6 hours in San Francisco on Saturday October 16, 02010. Interpreting the Long Conversation in real time was a data visualization performance by Sosolimited; an art and technology studio out of M.I.T. Long Conversation was presented with a live performance of 1,000 minutes of composer Jem Finer's [Longplayer](https://longnow.org/longplayer/).

Jane McGonigal & Tiffany Shlain: Long Conversation 18 of 19

The Long Now Foundation — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 20:25:00 -0700

Paul Hawken & Tiffany Shlain: Long Conversation 17 of 19

The Long Now Foundation — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 20:06:00 -0700

Paul Hawken & Katherine Fulton: Long Conversation 16 of 19

The Long Now Foundation — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 19:47:00 -0700

Katherine Fulton & Stuart Candy: Long Conversation 15 of 19

The Long Now Foundation — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 19:28:00 -0700

Danese Cooper & Stuart Candy: Long Conversation 14 of 19

The Long Now Foundation — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 19:09:00 -0700

Danese Cooper & Peter Schwartz: Long Conversation 13 of 19

The Long Now Foundation — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 18:50:00 -0700

Pete Worden & Peter Schwartz: Long Conversation 12 of 19

The Long Now Foundation — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 18:31:00 -0700

Ken Foster & Pete Worden: Long Conversation 11 of 19

The Long Now Foundation — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 18:12:00 -0700

Melissa Alexander & Ken Foster: Long Conversation 10 of 19

The Long Now Foundation — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 17:53:00 -0700

Melissa Alexander & Ken Wilson: Long Conversation 9 of 19

The Long Now Foundation — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 17:34:00 -0700

John Perry Barlow & Ken Wilson: Long Conversation 8 of 19

The Long Now Foundation — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 17:15:00 -0700

John Perry Barlow & Violet Blue: Long Conversation 7 of 19

The Long Now Foundation — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 16:57:00 -0700

Violet Blue & Robin Sloan: Long Conversation 6 of 19

The Long Now Foundation — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 16:38:00 -0700

Jill Tarter & Robin Sloan: Long Conversation 5 of 19

The Long Now Foundation — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 16:19:00 -0700

Emily Levine & Jill Tarter: Long Conversation 4 of 19

The Long Now Foundation — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 16:00:00 -0700

Saul Griffith & Emily Levine: Long Conversation 3 of 19

The Long Now Foundation — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 15:41:00 -0700

Jem Finer & Saul Griffith: Long Conversation 2 of 19

The Long Now Foundation — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 15:22:00 -0700

Jem Finer & Stewart Brand: Long Conversation 1 of 19

The Long Now Foundation — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 15:03:00 -0700

Martin Rees: Life's Future in the Cosmos

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 19:30:00 -0700

### Cosmic Life The pace of astronomic discovery, said the Astronomer Royal, keeps increasing with the constant improvement in our sensing technology. The recent discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe (dark energy) revolutionized cosmology, and with the launch of the Kepler Telescope in 2009, we are beginning to detect and study Earth-sized planets around distant stars. Since the Moon landings, humans in space have done little of scientific interest, but unmanned probes have delivered revelations from the planets and moons of the solar system, with much more to come. The best prospects for finding life elsewhere in our solar system appear to be on Mars, on Saturn's moon Titan, or on Jupiter's moon Europa. (Human space exploration is best pushed by private individuals such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson, rather than governments, Rees feels. Governments aren't allowed to be realistic about the dangers of space travel.) "We are the nuclear waste of stellar fusion," Rees noted, the ash from long-dead stars all over the galaxy exchanging their gases in a complex ecology, and the galaxies show a mega-structure of density contrasts generated by gravity. Poised midway in scale between atoms and stars, biological life appears to be the peak of complexity in the universe---a flea is more complicated than a star. Since we don't know how our own life emerged and haven't discovered any elsewhere, we still have no idea whether life is common in the universe or if we are unique. We can be certain that we are not the culmination of life forms here, because we are less than halfway through the Sun's lifespan. In the six billion years to come, there are likely to be creatures as far beyond humans as we are beyond microbes, and science as far beyond our present understanding as quantum theory is remote to a chimpanzee. Now that we are stewards of this planet, we are responsible for maintaining life's possibilities in this cosmic neighborhood.

Jesse Schell: Visions of the Gamepocalypse

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 19:30:00 -0700

### Gaming the World In a glee-filled evening, Schell declared that games and real life are reaching out to each other with such force that we might come to a condition of "gamepocalypse---where every second of your life you're playing a game in some way. He expects smart toothbrushes and buses that give us good-behavior points, and eye-tracking sensors that reward us for noticing ads, and subtle tests that confirm whether product placement in our dreams has worked. The reason games are so inviting is that they offer: clear feedback, a sense of progress, the possibility of success, mental and physical exercise, a chance to satisfy curiosity, a chance to solve problems, and a great feeling of freedom. Accelerating technology has made some people give up on predicting the future, Schell said, but in fact it should make us much better predictors, because we get so much practice in finding out so quickly whether our predictions are right or wrong. He feels confident in predicting a number of driving forces that will make games subsume all other media and occupy ever more of real life. They are: * Nooks & crannies---new niches for games in people's time, in specialty groups, in various world cultures. * Microtransactions---which will really take off when they blend with social networking. * New sensors---tilty smart phones are a glimpse of what disposable sensors everywhere might bring. * New screens---live displays on everything. * REM-tainment---lucid dreams as a play field. * AdverGaming---commercialization money drives powerful innovation. * Beauty---everything is getting gorgeous. * Customization---you can already get personalized M&Ms. * Eye and face tracking---universal face recognition is coming, and so is having your avatar reflect your real-face expressions. * The curious will win---games so reward curiosity and fast learning that the incurious will be left behind. * Authenticity---"real" constantly pushes toward real. * Social networking---Facebook! * Transmedia worlds---Pokemon showed the way, embracing a game, TV, cards, and toys. * Speech recognition---soon you will have to persuade a computer character to do something. * Geotracking---the real world becomes the screen. * Sharing---Wikipedia showed its power. * Quantitative design---detailed real-time analysis of what works in games drives exquisite adaptation. * Extrinsic rewards---gold stars everywhere, but Schell recommends the book Punished by Rewards and believes that intrinsic rewards are better to promote because they last. * Whole life tracking---the endpoint is immersion. Hopefully in what James Carse calls "the infinite game"---where the point is not in winning but in always improving the game. Asked in the Q&A about short versus long games, Schell noted that massive multiplayer games have such scale and scope and offer such endless new goals and progress along with their social intensity that World of Warcraft now has 10 million players. We may well be passing our avatars on to our children and grandchildren.

Frank Gavin: Five Ways to Use History Well

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 19:30:00 -0700

### History-savvy Policy Why do policy makers and historians shun each other? Gavin observed that policy people want actionable information, certainty, and simple explanations. Meanwhile historians revel in nuance, distrust simple explanations and also distrust power and those who seek it. Thus historians keep themselves irrelevant, and policy makers keep their process ignorant. Gavin proposed five key concepts from history that can inform understanding and improve policy dramatically... **Vertical History.** What are the deep causative patterns behind a current situation? For example, America's deep involvement in the Mideast appears to be caused by concern about oil and terrorism and by support of Israel. But none of those elements applied in the mid-60s when we dove into the Mideast. Britain was Israel's keeper in those days and in financial trouble, the US was overextended in Vietnam and in financial trouble, and Soviet influence was the main threat in the Mideast. After the profound shock of the Six-Day War in 1967, Britain withdrew and America took over on the cheap with its "Pillar Strategy"---we would support Israel, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. That arrangement drives everything today, and policy people have almost zero memory of its origins. **Horizontal History.** The interconnecting events of a particular moment---all the things simultaneously on the plate of a decision maker---profoundly affect decisions. For example, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson in the 60s were obsessed with America's balance of payments deficit and had to draw down our troop commitment in Germany, but Europe was obsessed with keeping Germany from building nuclear weapons, and so the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty was invented as a workaround. That situational artifact leads US policy 40 years later. **Chronological Proportionality.** "The New York Times always gets it wrong, and they're the best of the media," Gavin noted. Dramatic events take our attention away from what's really going on. For example, the Vietnam War dominated American attention in the 1960s and still looms large in every policy discussion. But the war was of no real geopolitical consequence, particularly when compared with the huge consequences from other little-noted 60s events---the Six-Day War, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, growing stability in Central Europe, and the thaw in relations between China and America. That raises the question: what is Afghanistan distracting us from these days? **Unintended Consequences.** Suppose America had won in Vietnam? We would have had to commit huge resources to Southeast Asia indefinitely, and China and the USSR would have had to ally in the face of our military presence there. With our humiliating defeat, China and the Soviets split permanently, China and the US became friendly, and America profoundly reassessed and improved its own policies and institutions. So it goes in real life: things turn out differently than we expect. **Policy Insignificance.** What policy people do is often not the main event at all. For example, in the mid-70s policy makers in Washington were trying to fix an America they saw in a steep decline and locked in an endless Cold War. They paid no attention to three events going on in California. Apple's computer in 1976 signaled a coming American dominance in computer and information technology. Also in 1976 a California wine (Stag's Leap) defeated the best French wines in a blind-taste contest, signaling our competitiveness in high culture internationally. And in 1977 "Star Wars" became the highest-grossing film ever, signaling American dominance of world pop culture. America's greatest economic and cultural boom took off, totally without Washington's involvement or even awareness. During the Q&A Galvin noted that Kennedy got the Cuban Missile Crisis right by locking all the dangerous heavy-hitters in a small room for thirteen days while he applied his own "historic sensibility" to finding a back-channel way to defuse the crisis rather than exacerbate it. These days, Gavin observed, policy people are worrying excessively about terrorism and nuclear weapons proliferation when in fact nuclear weapons are on the wane everywhere and have been for decades. Historians, he said, can bring a well supported, authoritative, helpful message to the public discourse and to policy makers at such times: "Don't freak out."

Ed Moses: Clean Fusion Power This Decade

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 19:30:00 -0700

### Imminent fusion power All the light we see from the sky, Moses pointed out, comes from fusion power burning hydrogen, the commonest element in the universe---3/4 of all mass. A byproduct of the cosmic fusion is the star-stuff that we and the Earth are made of. On Earth, 4 billion years of life accumulated geological hydrocarbons, which civilization is now burning at a rate of 10 million years' worth per year. In 1900, 98% of the world's energy came from burning carbon. By 1970, that was down to 90%, but it has not decreased since. It has to decrease some time, because there is only so much coal, oil, and gas. During this century every single existing power plant (except some hydro) will age and have to be replaced, and world energy demand is expected to triple by 2100. To head off climate change, fossil fuel combustion has to end by about 2050. The crucial period for conversion to something better is between 2030 and 2050. The ideal new power source would be: affordable; clean; non-geopolitical; using inexhaustible fuel and existing infrastructure; capable of rapid development and evolution. Moses' candidate is the "laser inertial fusion engine"---acronym LIFE---being developed at Lawrence Livermore. The question, Moses said, is "Can we build a miniature Sun on Earth?" The recipe involves a peppercorn-size target of hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium heated to 200 million degrees Fahrenheit for a couple billionths of a second. To get that micro-blast of heat, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) uses lasers---coherent light---at a massive scale. Laser engineer Moses notes that photons are perfect for the job: "no mass, no charge, just energy." Moses ran a dramatic video showing how a shot at the NIF works. 20-foot-long slugs of amplified coherent light (10 nanoseconds) travel 1,500 yards and converge simultaneously through 192 beams on the tiny target, compressing and heating it to fusion ignition, with a yield of energy 10 to 100 times of what goes into it. Successful early test shots suggest that the NIF will achieve the first ignition within the next few months, and that shot will be heard round the world. To get a working prototype of a fusion power plant may take 10 years. It will require an engine that runs at about 600 rpm---like an idling car. Targets need to be fired at a rate of 10 per second into the laser flashes. The energy is collected by molten salt at 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit and then heats the usual steam-turbine tea kettle to generate electricity. The engine could operate at the scale of a standard 1-gigawatt coal or nuclear plant, or it could be scaled down to 250 megawatts or up to 3 gigawatts. The supply of several million targets a year can be manufactured for under 50 cents apiece with the volume and precision that Lego blocks currently are. Moses said that 1 liter of heavy water will yield the energy of 2 million gallons of gas. Fusion power, like nuclear fission power, would cost less per kilowatt hour than wind (and far less than solar), yet would be less capital intensive than fission. For the constant baseload power no carbon is involved, no waste stream, no possibility of meltdown or weaponization, and there is no such thing as peak hydrogen.

Nils Gilman: Deviant Globalization

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 03 May 2010 19:30:00 -0700

### The anti-state economy Gilman described deviant globalization as "the unpleasant underside of transnational integration." There's nice tourism, and then sex tourism, such as in Thailand and Switzerland. The vast pharmacology industry is matched by a vast traffic in illegal drugs. The underside of waste disposal is the criminal dumping in the developing world of toxic wastes from the developed world. Military activities worldwide are fed by a huge gray market in weapons. Internet communications are undermined by floods of malware doubling every year. Among the commodities shipped around the world are exotic hardwoods, endangered species, blood diamonds, and stolen art worth billions in ransom. Illegitimate health care includes the provision of human organs from poor people---you can get a new kidney with no waiting for $150,000 in places like Brazil, the Philippines, Istanbul, and South Africa. Far overwhelming legal immigration are torrents of illegal immigrants who pay large sums to get across borders. And money laundering accounts for 4-12% of world GDP---$1.5 to 5 trillion dollars a year. These are not marginal, "informal" activities. These are enormous, complex businesses straight out of the Harvard Business Review. The drug business in Mexico, for example, employs 400,000 people. A thousand-dollar kilo of cocaine grows in value by 1400-percent when it crosses into the US---nice profit margin there. The whole phenomenon is driven by state regulators acting on ethical taboos. When we outlaw or tax certain goods and services, we reduce supply while demand increases, and that provides an irresistible opportunity for risk-taking entrepreneurs. Also, historian Gilman points out, international development practices are partially to blame. From 1949 to 1989 the Cold War was played out with the US and USSR trying to create new states like themselves. It mostly failed, and it ended with the end of international Communism. Then came the neoliberal "Washington Consensus" theory of structural adjustment---governments in developing countries must "stabilize, privatize, and liberalize." That sort of worked, but it hollowed out the governments and dismantled their regulatory capacity. People in those countries realized they were on their own, forced to "survival entrepreneurship." In some places like Eastern Europe criminals took over the economy. There is a certain Robin Hood effect on the large scale. Serious money is moving from the rich global north to the poor global south and enriching some people there. Politically, the deviant entrepreneurs don't want to take over the state, just undermine it. For their own communities they often provide state-like services of infrastructure, health care, and even education. They are "post-modern, post-revolutionary, and post-progressive." They resort to violence against the state only when the state suddenly attacks them---as is playing out in Mexico now. What to do? If you try to shut down the deviant economy, you just make the profit margins greater and exacerbate the problem. If you shrug and legalize everything, you condone hateful practices like child sex slavery and the total deforestation of tropical hardwoods. We are left with making judicious choices about which deviant practices to take most seriously, and then dealing with them patiently in a non-sudden way, realizing that the unsavory economy will never be fully eradicated.

David Eagleman: Six Easy Steps to Avert the Collapse of Civilization

The Long Now Foundation — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 19:30:00 -0700

### Averting Collapse Civilizations always think they're immortal, Eagleman noted, but they nearly always perish, leaving "nothing but ruins and scattered genetics." It takes luck and new technology to survive. We may be particularly lucky to have Internet technology to help manage the six requirements of a durable civilization: 1\. "Try not to cough on one another." More humans have died from epidemics than from all famines and wars. Disease precipitated the fall of Greece, Rome, and the civilizations of the Americas. People used to bunch up around the infected, which pushed local disease into universal plague. Now we can head that off with Net telepresence, telemedicine, and medical alert networks. All businesses should develop a work-from-home capability for their workforce. 2\. "Don't lose things." As proved by the destruction of the Alexandria Library and of the literature of Mayans and Minoans, "knowledge is hard won but easily lost." Plumbing disappeared for a thousand years when Rome fell. Inoculation was invented in China and India 700 years before Europeans rediscovered it. These days Michelangelo's David has been safely digitized in detail. Eagleman has direct access to all the literature he needs via [PubMed](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed), [JSTOR](http://www.jstor.org/), and [Google Books](http://books.google.com/). "Distribute, don't reinvent." 3\. "Tell each other faster." Don't let natural disasters cascade. The Minoans perished for lack of the kind of tsunami alert system we now have. Countless Haitians in the recent earthquake were saved by [Ushahidi.com](http://www.ushahidi.com/), which aggregated cellphone field reports in real time. 4\. "Mitigate tyranny." The USSR's collapse was made inevitable by state-controlled media and state-mandated mistakes such as Lysenkoism, which forced a wrong theory of wheat farming on 13 time zones, and starved millions. Now crowd-sourced cellphone users can sleuth out vote tampering. We should reward companies that stand up against censorship, as Google has done in China. 5\. "Get more brains involved in solving problems." Undertapping human capital endangers the future. Open courseware from colleges is making higher education universally accessible. Crowd-sourced problem solving is being advanced by sites such as [PatientsLikeMe](http://www.patientslikeme.com/), [Foldit](http://fold.it/portal/) (protein folding), and [Cstart](http://cstart.org/) (moon exploration). Perhaps the next step is "society sourcing." 6\. "Try not to run out of energy." When energy expenditure outweighs energy return, collapse ensues. Email saves trees and trucking. Online shopping is a net energy gain, with UPS optimizing delivery routes and never turning left. We need to expand the ability to hold meetings and conferences online. But if the Net is so crucial, what happens if the Net goes down? It may have to go down a few times before we learn how to defend it properly, before we catch on that civilization depends on it for survival.

Beth Noveck: Transparent Government

The Long Now Foundation — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 18:30:00 -0800

### Dot.Gov Noveck began with the example of patents, first devised in Renaissance Florence and Venice to protect techniques such as glass manufacture. In England, conferring a monopoly on a tool or technique became a prerogative of the king. In contemporary America, the process of getting a 20-year monopoly on your invention from the US Patent Office is mired in a morass of litigation costs, a huge backlog, insufficient reviewers with insufficient science education, and what Noveck calls "an outmoded conception of expertise." Her revolutionary approach is to "reengineer institutions to bring in expertise from outside." Thus she developed Peer-to-Patent, which publishes patent applications to the Internet. The online community researches prior art, organizes the most excellent reviewers that emerge, and greatly accelerates and refines the patent review process. A pilot program proved the concept, and it is now being institutionalized at the Patent Office. Noveck describes the methodology as "focussed collaboration" and as a way to move power "downwards and outwards." On President Obama's first day in office he signed a memorandum on Open Government, committing all the departments and agencies to "transparency, participation, and collaboration." They were asked to begin by identifying high-value datasets that could be put online in downloadable form immediately. The result was [Data.gov](http://www.data.gov/), which went public in May 2009 and quickly had 64 million hits for its raw data files. An [IT Dashboard](http://it.usaspending.gov/) of the government's information technology spending got 86 million hits. The White House made its [visitor logs](http://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/disclosures/visitor-records) public. Noveck said the government is replacing its reflex "there's a form for that" habits with "there's an app for that," and a panoply of cloud-based apps, including 165 social media platforms, are on offer at [Apps.gov](https://apps.gov/cloud/advantage/main start_page.do). Just within the Department of Defense, the entire department has adopted (Long Now co-founder) Danny Hillis's [Aristotle](http://www.whitehouse.gov/open/innovations/Dod-Aristotle) software to link all military expertise; the [Army field manuals](http://www.whitehouse.gov/open/innovations/wikifiedArmy) are being wikified---collaboratively updated by soldiers in the field; and troops are encouraged to learn and use social media. The formidable Code of Federal Regulations used to cost $17,000. Now the price is zero for the "[e-CFR](http://ecfr.gpoaccess.gov/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=ecfr&tpl=%2Findex.tpl)." "Loved data lives longer," Noveck declared. She encourages citizens to "adopt a dataset," and to demand ever wider release of government data troves. (One audience member requested that all the aerial photographs ever made by the US Geological Survey be digitized and published.) The Obama administration is finding that the whole process of opening up government digitally doesn't have to wait for perfection. It can move ahead swiftly on the Internet standard of "rough consensus and running code." PS. As a government employee, Noveck is not allowed to plug her book, [_Wiki Government_](http://www.amazon.com/Wiki-Government-Technology-Democracy-Stronger/dp/0815702752/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1267818242&sr=1-1). But I can.

Alan Weisman: World Without Us, World With Us

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 18:30:00 -0800

### Humanity's impact, nature's resilience Weisman's book, _The World Without Us_ , grew out of two questions, he said. One was, "How can I write a best-seller about the environment?" The answer to that was the second question: "How would the rest of nature behave without the constant pressure we put on it?" On the border of Ukraine and Belarus is a small intact remnant---500,000 acres---of the primordial forest that once covered Europe from Siberia to Ireland. In the Puszcza Bialowieska, with its towering ash and linden trees and dense growth, Weisman felt he was in the forest of Grimm's tales. "It felt primally familiar. It felt like being home. I realized that people really want that back." Buildings and cities without us around don't last long, his research showed. Water gets into every building, followed by rot, birds, and trees, and pretty soon all that's left is the bathroom tiles. The same with cities. New York is built on top of 40 streams. To keep the subways functioning, 13 million gallons of water have to be pumped out every day. If the water returns, it won't be long before the tall buildings lose their footing and topple. Maintenance people emerged as the heroes of the book, Weisman said. Without their vigilance and toil, everything collapses. They are the bedrock of civilization. At the New York Botanical Garden Weisman found that the 40-acre preserve of carefully protected original forest has transformed itself over the years into a new woods dominated by alien plants such as ailanthus and cork trees. The garden's curator told him something radical: "Maintaining biodiversity is less important than maintaining a functioning ecosystem. What matters is that soil is protected, that water gets cleaned, that trees filter the air, that a canopy generates new seedlings to keep nutrients from draining away into the Bronx River." Plastic, Weisman discovered, is astonishingly durable, gradually accumulating in continent-sized gyres of floating garbage in the oceans. Instead of dissolving, the plastic just gets smaller in size and is ingested harmfully by every scale of animal all the way down to zooplankton. Weisman's message is one of reconciliation. Wherever humanity backs its impact off even a little, nature comes swarming back. From the new part-wolf coyotes taking up residence in New England to the rare and exquisite red-crowned cranes prospering in Korea's Demilitarized Zone, accommodating nature always rewards humans.

Alexander Rose, Brian Eno, & Stewart Brand: Long Finance: The Enduring Value Conference

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 11:00:00 -0800

### Enduring Value In February 02010, [Brian Eno](../../../../people/board/prospect4/), [Stewart Brand](../../../../people/board/sb1/), and [Alexander Rose](../../../../people/staff/zander/) spoke at the [Long Finance conference](http://www.zyen.com/index.php/long-finance/long-finance-events/633.html) hosted by [Gresham College](http://www.gresham.ac.uk/text.asp?PageId=3) in London. The conversation was moderated by [Faisal Islam](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faisal_Islam), an economics correspondent with Channel 4 news in the UK. [Long Finance](http://www.zyen.com/long-finance.html) is an initiative begun by Professor Michael Mainelli in 02007 to establish a World Centre Of Thinking On Long-Term Finance. The aim of the Long Finance Institute is "to improve society's understanding and use of finance over the long-term".

Wade Davis: The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 18:30:00 -0800

### Native guidance What does it mean to be human and alive? The thousands of different cultures and languages on Earth have compellingly different answers to that question. "We are a wildly imaginative and creative species," Davis declared, and then proved it with his accounts and photographs of humanity plumbing the soul of culture, of psyche, and of landscape. He began with Polynesians, the wayfinders who mastered the Pacific ocean in the world's largest diaspora. Without writing or chronometers they learned 220 stars by name, learned to read the subtle influence of distant islands on wave patterns and clouds, and navigated the open sea by a sheer act of integrative memory. For the duration of an ocean passage "navigators do not sleep." In the Amazon, which used to be thought of as a "green hell" or "counterfeit paradise," living remnants may be found of complex forest civilizations that transformed 20 percent of the land into arable soil. The Anaconda peoples carry out five-day rituals with 250 people in vast longhouses, and live by stringent rules such as requiring that everyone must marry outside their language. Their mastery of botany let them find exactly the right combination of subspecies of plants to concoct ayahuasca, a drug so potent that one ethnobotantist described the effect of having it blown up your nose by a shaman as "like being shot out of a rifle barrel lined with Baroque paintings and landing in a sea of electricity." In the Andes the Incas built 8,500 miles of roads over impossibly vertical country in a hundred years, and their descendents still run the mountains on intense ritual pilgrimages, grounding their culture in every detail of the landscape. In Haiti, during the four years Davis spent discovering the chemical used to make real-life zombies, he saw intact African religion alive in the practice of voodoo. "The dead must serve the living by becoming manifest" in those possessed. It was his first experience in "the power of culture to create new realities." The threat to cultures is often ideological, Davis noted, such as when Mao whispered in the ear of the Dalai Lama that "all religion is poison," set about destroying Tibetan culture. The genius of culture is the ability to survive in impossible conditions, Davis concluded. We cannot afford to lose any of that variety of skills, because we are not only impoverished without it, we are vulnerable without it. PS. Wade Davis' SALT talk was based on his five Massey Lectures in Canada in 02009, which are collected in a book, [_The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World_](http://www.anansi.ca/titles.cfm?pub_id=1359).

Rick Prelinger: Lost Landscapes of San Francisco 4

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 18:30:00 -0800

### Gas Stations, Not Flowers The fourth incarnation of _Lost Landscapes of San Francisco_ played to a sold out house at the Herbst Theater with the chanteuse Suzanne Ramsey opening the evening with a selection of historical San Francisco songs including the 01926 gem [Masculine Women Feminine Men](http://www.heptune.com/masculin.html). Rick Prelinger prefaced the footage with a brief introduction to his archive, process, and most of all a request to go into your mother's attic to pull out any films that feature San Francisco or the Bay Area. The archive needs your footage. Prelinger then queued up over seventy minutes of historic San Francisco footage starting with a heart stopping landing by an auto-gyro in City Hall Plaza. As always the audience was encouraged to participate by shouting both questions and answers posed by each segment. This year they were also bolstered by a trio of San Francisco city history buffs: [Gray Brechin](http://www.graybrechin.com/), [Ed Holmes](http://laughingsquid.com/31st-annual-saint-stupids-day-parade-on-april-1st-in-san-francisco/) and [Woody LaBounty](http://www.carville-book.com/author.php), each with a particular angle on the city. New to the collection this year was wonderful multi-generational family footage from the Gee family who were also in the audience. In the question period at the end Stewart Brand asked what we should be doing now for the archivists of the future, Ricks answer, "shoot gas stations not flowers". Most archives and libraries put up access barriers in response to copyright laws. In contrast Rick has attacked the vast amount of work that is either out of copyright, or left in the ambiguous gray zones, like home movies. We have always been told that there is no economic case for archives, the [Prelinger Archive](http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger) and [Library](http://www.prelingerlibrary.org/) not only upends that notion, but proves that access is the key, not protection. Rick Prelinger's archive contains hundreds of historical films showing San Francisco and Northern California history, the history of technology and industry, and everyday life. For future Lost Landscapes programs, he's looking for films and footage showing San Francisco and Northern California history, especially home movies and material shot by hobbyists or amateurs. He's interested in material that can become part of his archives, and will consider paying to copy footage of historical interest. He's reachable at rick@well.com.

Sander van der Leeuw: The Archaeology of Innovation

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:30:00 -0800

### History of Innovation The development of human mental ability can be tracked through the progressive crafting of stone tools, Van der Leeuw explained. First we learned to shape an edge---a line---then the surface, then the whole volume of the tool, then the sophisticated sequence required to make a superb spear point. It took 2 million years. But by 300,000 years ago the human brain had developed a sufficiently complex short-term working memory to keep 7 (plus-or-minus 2) considerations in mind at once. We could handle problems of multi-dimensionality. The brain has not progressed since then, nor has needed to. The skills of innovation moved on from the biological brain to social constructs and modes of communication and information processing. That bootstrapping process continues to this day. The cave paintings show that cognitive agility reached the point of being able to reduce 3 dimensions to a representative 2 dimensions, for instance. By the Neolithic revolution of 10,000 years ago, we developed the ability to shape voids---the interior of pots, baskets, and houses. Tools could be made by assembling parts instead of just paring down blanks of stone or wood. Problem solving in agriculture began to span time, to be a form of investment. Towns and then cities became humanity's innovation engine. Symbols recorded in material form---tokens, accounting, and writing---spanned time and space. Unruly cities disciplined themselves with laws and administration. Then empires developed the ability to harvest the bounty of far-flung communities in the form of treasure, and that led to overreach. The Roman Empire was the first to degrade its world at the local climate level, and it collapsed. Around 1800, in Europe, energy constraints were finally conquered by the harvesting of fossil fuels. Humans only need 100 watts to survive, but every human now commands 10,000 watts. With that leverage we built a global civilization. The innovative power of urbanity has multiplied yet further with the coming of the Internet. But we have become "disturbance dependent." As our cities and density of communications grow, they create ever more difficult problems, for which we have to innovate ever more sophisticated solutions. Technology is "the biggest Ponzi scheme of all." As we become ever more adept at solving short-term problems, we shift the risk to long-term problems---such as climate change---which do not match the skills we have developed and know how to reward. We are headed into a trap of our own devising. To get out of it, if we can, will require a "battle with ourselves" to wholly redefine our social structures and institutions to master the long term.

Stewart Brand: Rethinking Green

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 19:30:00 -0700

### Globalizing Green Brand built his case for rethinking environmental goals and methods on two major changes going on in the world. The one that most people still don't take into consideration is that power is shifting to the developing world, where 5 out of 6 people live, where the bulk of humanity is getting out of poverty by moving to cities and creating their own jobs and communities (slums, for now). He noted that history has always been driven by the world's largest cities, and these years they are places like Mumbai, Lagos, Dhaka, Sao Paulo, Karachi, and Mexico City, which are growing 3 times faster and 9 times bigger than cities in the currently developed world ever did. The people in those cities are unstoppably moving up the "energy ladder" to high quality grid electricity and up the "food ladder" toward better nutrition, including meat. As soon as they can afford it, everyone in the global South is going to get air conditioning. The second dominant global fact is climate change. Brand emphasized that climate is a severely nonlinear system packed with tipping points and positive feedbacks such as the unpredicted rapid melting of Arctic ice. Warming causes droughts, which lowers carrying capacity for humans, and they fight over the diminishing resources, as in Darfur. It also is melting the glaciers of the Himalayan plateau, which feed the rivers on which 40% of humanity depends for water in the dry season---the Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra, Mekong, Irrawaddy, Yangtze, and Yellow. Global warming has to be slowed by reducing the emission of greenhouse gases from combustion, but cities require dependable baseload electricity, and so far the only carbon-free sources are hydroelectric dams and nuclear power. Brand contrasted nuclear with coal-burning by comparing what happens with their waste products. Nuclear spent fuel is tiny in quantity, and you know exactly where it is, whereas the gigatons of carbon dioxide from coal burning goes into the atmosphere, where it stays for centuries making nothing but trouble. Brand declared that geological sequestering of nuclear waste has been proven practical and safe by the ten years of experience at the WIPP in New Mexico, and he paraded a series of new "microreactor" designs that offer a clean path for distributed micropower, especially in developing countries. Moving to genetically engineered food crops, Brand noted that they are a tremendous success story in agriculture, with Green benefits such as no-till farming, lowered pesticide use, and more land freed up to be wild. The developing world is taking the lead with the technology, designing crops to deal with the specialized problems of tropical agriculture. Meanwhile the new field of synthetic biology is bringing a generation of Green biotech hackers into existence. On the subject of bioengineering (direct intervention in climate), Brand suggested that we will have to follow of the example of beneficial "ecosystem engineers" such as earthworms and beavers and tweak our niche (the planet) toward a continuing life-friendly climate, using methods such a cloud-brightening with atomized seawater and recreating what volcanoes do when they pump sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, cooling the whole world. Green aversion to technologies such as nuclear and genetic engineering resulted from a mistaken notion that they are somehow "unnatural." "What we call natural and what we call human are inseparable," Brand concluded. "We live one life." PS. Long Now likes to include a pointer to related reading. As it happens, the whole ["Recommended Reading"](http://web.me.com/stewartbrand/DISCIPLINE_footnotes/Recommended_Reading.html) section of my book [_Whole Earth Discipline_](http://www.amazon.com/Whole-Earth-Discipline-Ecopragmatist-Manifesto/dp/0670021210/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1255368079&sr=8-1/lono0a-20) is online, with 50 recommendations for books, magazines, and websites, with live links. It's at: [www.sbnotes.com](http://web.me.com/stewartbrand/DISCIPLINE_footnotes/Contents.html) **Interviews and Media** * Stewart Brand and Amory Lovins' debate about Nuclear Power on [NPR's _On Point_](http://onpoint.wbur.org/2009/10/21/brand-vs-lovins-on-nuclear-power) * Stewart Brand on [Newsweek's _Techtonic Shifts_](http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/techtonicshifts/archive/2009/10/21/stewart-brand-an-icon-of-environmentalism-talks-about-embracing-nuclear-power.aspx) * Review of __Whole Earth Discipline__ on [Worldchanging](http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/010701.html) * Interview with Stewart Brand on [Huffington Post](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jesse-kornbluth/what-stewart-brand-creato_b_329851.html)

Arthur Ganson: Machines and the Breath of Time

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 19:30:00 -0700

### Dancing chairs "You follow the feeling of the piece," Ganson explained, "and then wrestle it into physicality." As long as the idea is nonphysical, it is permanent; it becomes temporary as a physical device; and then it becomes permanent again in the mind of the viewer. As Ganson spoke, a tiny chair walked meditatively around and around on a rock on the right side of the stage, projected live onto a video screen. ([Thinking Chair](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-xx-tnxgKM&feature=channel).) No part in any of his kinetic art pieces is superfluous, he pointed out; everything functions. The piece should be crystal clear and also completely ambiguous. That's what allows each viewer to create their own story. He showed a video of "[Machine with Concrete](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5q-BH-tvxEg)." On the left an electric motor drives a worm gear at 212 revolutions a minute. A sequence of twelve 50-to-1 gear reductions slows the rotation so far that the last gear, on the right, is set in concrete. It would take over two trillion years for that gear to rotate. "Intense activity on one end, quiet stillness on the other," Ganson said. "It's a duality I feel in my own being." The next video, "[Cory's Yellow Chair](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFG-Lk9c2CI)," showed a chair exploding into six pieces, which hover at a distance, then gently reassemble, and instantly explode again. Ganson said he wanted the chair pieces to explode at infinite speed, rest in stillness at the extreme, then reassemble gradually. The piece is stab at the question of "when is now?" Now is when the chair coalesces, but it doesn't last. Some of Ganson's machines inspire people to sit and watch them for hours. "[Machine With Oil](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__GhJl_UQg0)" does nothing but drench itself with lubrication all day long. In "[Margot's Other Cat](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6aicIcQJvc)" a soaring chair is set in random motion by an unsuspecting cat. The cat's motion is utterly determined; the chair has its own life. During the Q&A, Alexander Rose asked the full-house audience how many of them of were makers of things. Ninety percent raised their hands in joy.

Wayne Clough: Smithsonian Forever

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 19:30:00 -0700

### The Smithsonian's long now [Note for those who mentally enunciate words while reading: the last name is pronounced "Cluff."] Secretary Clough reminded the audience that we own the Smithsonian, and what that amounts to is 19 museums and galleries containing 137 million objects, plus the National Zoo and 20 libraries. Each year the Smithsonian has 27 million visitors. In addition there are numerous research centers with activities in 88 countries. That's the Smithsonian's short now--it's current profile to fulfill its abiding mission to help society understand and remember itself. The Institution's long now reaches back quite a ways and hopes to reach into the future well beyond the 300 years of national history it represents so far. The greatest temporal reach comes from the one-sixth of all Smithsonian employees who engage in astronomy and astrophysics, operating such tools as the Kepler Telescope launched into orbit last March to discover remote planets that might harbor life and the Giant Magellan Telescope being built in Chile that will have the ten times the resolving power of the Hubble Space Telescope and may be able to examine the earliest remnants of the Big Bang fourteen billion years ago. Much of our understanding of current climate hazards is coming from paleoclimatology. Ice core studies give us 800,000 years of data, but stratigraphic study of leaves is yielding crucial information about what happened 55 million years ago when the Earth warmed drastically and suddenly in what is called the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). Clough described his visit with Smithsonian researcher Scott Wing doing field work in Bighorn Basin, Wyoming, where he saw evidence of palm trees growing in the area when the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was three times what we have now, and the newly evolving horse was the size of cat because hot climates make for smaller animals. Clough sees the long-term role of the Smithsonian as working with the constant tension between the permanent and the ephemeral and the full exploration of what he called "collaborative long-term thinking." He ended with a quote from Smithsonian curator David Shayt: "There's an accurate perception that we are forever…, that we will care for and honor an object eternally. That perception of immortality is very precious to people."

Raoul Adamchak & Pamela Ronald: Organically Grown and Genetically Engineered: The Food of the Future

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 19:30:00 -0700

### Engineered organic Organic farming teacher Raoul began the joint presentation with a checklist for truly sustainable agriculture in a global context. It must: Provide abundant safe and nutritious food…. Reduce environmentally harmful inputs…. Reduce energy use and greenhouse gases…. Foster soil fertility…. Enhance crop genetic diversity…. Maintain the economic viability of farming communities…. Protect biodiversity…. and improve the lives of the poor and malnourished. (He pointed out that 24,000 a day die of malnutrition worldwide, and about 1 billion are undernourished.) Organic agriculture has made a good start on these goals, he said, with its focus on eliminating harmful pesticides, soluble synthetic fertilizers, and soil erosion. Every year in the world 300,000 deaths are caused by the pesticides of conventional agriculture, along with 3 million cases of harm. Organic farmers replace the pesticides with crop rotation, resilient varieties of plants, beneficial insects, and other techniques. But organic has limitations, he said. There are some pests, diseases, and stresses it can't handle. Its yield ranges from 45% to 97% of conventional ag yield. It is often too expensive for low-income customers. At present it is a niche player in US agriculture, representing only 3.5%, with a slow growth rate suggesting it will always be a niche player. Genetically engineered crops could carry organic farming much further toward fulfilling all the goals of sustainable agriculture, Raoul said, but it was prohibited as a technique for organic farmers in the standards and regulations set by the federal government in 2000. At this point plant geneticist Pam took up the argument. What distinguishes genetic engineering (GE) and precision breeding from conventional breeding, she said, is that GE and precision breeding work with just one or a few well-characterized genes, versus the uncertain clumps of genes involved in conventional breeding. And genes from any species can be employed. That transgenic capability is what makes some people nervous about GE causing unintended harm to human or ecological health. One billion acres have been planted so far with GE crops, with no adverse health effects, and numerous studies have showed that GE crops pose no greater risk of environmental damage than conventional crops. Genetic engineering is extremely helpful in solving some agricultural problems, though only some. Pam gave three examples, starting with cotton. About 25% of all pesticide use in the world is used to defeat the cotton bollworm. Bt cotton is engineered to express in the plant the same caterpillar-killing toxin as the common soil bacteria used by organic farmers,_Bacillus thuringiensis_. Bt cotton growers use half the pesticides of conventional growers. With Bt cotton in China, cases of pesticide poisoning went down by 75%. India's cotton yield increased by 80%. Pam pointed out that any too-successful technique used alone encourages pests to evolve around the technique, so the full panoply of "integrated pest management" needs always to be employed. Her second example was papayas in Hawaii, where the entire industry faced extinction from ringspot virus. A local genetic engineer devised way to put a segment of the virus genome into papayas, thereby effectively inoculating the fruit against the disease. The industry was saved, and most of the papayas we eat in California are GE. Rice is Pam's specialty at her lab in Davis. Half the world depends on rice. In flood-prone areas like Bangladesh, 4 million tons of rice a year are lost to flooding--enough to feed 30 million people. She helped engineer a flood-tolerant rice (it can be totally submerged for two weeks) called Sub1. At field trials in Asia farmers are getting three to five times higher yield over conventional rice. The cost of gene sequencing and engineering is dropping rapidly (toward $70 a genome), and our knowledge about how food crops function genetically is growing just as rapidly. That accelerating capability offers a path toward truly sustainable agriculture on a global scale. Returning to the stage, Raoul doubted that certified organic farmers would ever be allowed to use GE plants, and so he proposed a new certification program for "Sustainable Agriculture," that would include GE.

Paul Romer: A Theory of History, with an Application

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 18 May 2009 19:30:00 -0700

### New Cities with New Rules This talk was the first in a series of public discussions of an idea that Romer has been working on for two years. His economic theory of history explains phenomena such as the constant improvement of the human standard of living by looking primarily at just two forms of innovative ideas: technology and rules. Technologies rearrange materials with ingenious recipes and formulas. More people create more technologies, which in turn generates more people. In recent decades technology has enabled the "demographic transition" which lowers birthrates and raises income per person even higher as population levels off. Rules structure the interactions between people. As population density increased, the idea of ownership became an important rule. A supporting rule for managing violations replaced the old idea of deadly vengeance with awarding damages instead: simply shifting value replaced destroying value. For the idea of open science, recognition replaced ownership as the main event, which means that whoever publishes first is most rewarded, and that accelerates science. Rules can amplify or stifle technological progress. China was the world leader in inventing new technologies until about a thousand years ago, when centralized dynastic rules slowed innovation almost to a stop. Romer notes that business keeps evolving as new companies introduce new rule sets. The good ideas are copied, and workers migrate from failing companies to the new and old ones where the new rules are working well. The same goes for countries. Starting about 1970, China took some of the effective rules of Hong Kong (which was managed from afar by England) and set up four special economic zones along the coast operating as imitation Hong Kongs. They worked so well that China rolled out the scheme for the whole country, and its Gross Domestic Product took off. "Hong Kong was the most successful economic development program in history." Romer suggests that we rethink sovereignty (respect borders, but maybe create new systems of administrative control); rethink citizenship (allowing perhaps for voice without residency as well as residency without voice); and rethink scale (instead of focussing on nations, focus on new cities.) If nations are willing to experiment along these lines, they can create new places, places that can give more people access to the kind of rules that they would like to live and work under, and places that can sustain the historical process of entry and innovation in national systems of rules. The idea is getting some traction in the developing world. This summer Romer will launch an institute and website for further exploration and eventual application of the idea. One miracle of cities is that they sometimes renew themselves brilliantly. This could be a whole new form of that.

Michael Pollan: Deep Agriculture

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 05 May 2009 19:30:00 -0700

### Making farmers cool again Farming has become an occupation and cultural force of the past. Michael Pollan's talk promoted the premise - and hope - that farming can become an occupation and force of the future. In the past century American farmers were given the assignment to produce lots of calories cheaply, and they did. They became the most productive humans on earth. A single farmer in Iowa could feed 150 of his neighbors. That is a true modern miracle. "American farmers are incredibly inventive, innovative, and accomplished. They can do whatever we ask them, we just need to give them a new set of requirements." The benefit of a reformed food system, besides better food, better environment and less climate shock, is better health and the savings of trillions of dollars. Four out of five chronic diseases are diet-related. Three quarters of medical spending goes to preventable chronic disease. Pollan says we cannot have a healthy population, without a healthy diet. The news is that we are learning that we cannot have a healthy diet without a healthy agriculture. And right now, farming is sick. Pollan outlined what this recovery for American farmers and food producers should be. First a post-modern food system should be "resolarized." Right now it takes 10 calories of fossil fuel to manufacture 1 calorie of food on average, and 55 calories to produce 1 calorie of beef. If any industry should be solar-based it should be food, which was the "original solar economy." Instead, right now "we are eating oil." Cheap oil and farm policies subsidize the 5 main crops (and only those crops), upon which the rest of our cheap food system is based. These main crops are planted as monocultures, which require cheap pesticides and fertilizers and produce wastes that are all problems in themselves. Pollan's solution is not to dismantle the food system but to redirect it. Because of the long-term planning and learning that stewarding land requires, he believes subsidies of some type are essential for agriculture. Agriculture, he stated, should not be a freemarket. By picking the proper incentives we can re-localize, re-solarize, and revive the healing power of balanced farms and wholesome gardens. Governments should reward farmers for diversifying away from monocultures. Pollan gave a few examples of where this has worked at scale. They should be rewarded for growing cover crops with the benefit of reducing erosion. Rewarded for returning animals to the mix. Rewarded for the amount of carbon they sequester in soil. Rewarded for halting urban sprawl by keeping farmland intact. In fact farmland should find a similar status as wetlands; developers and communities get "credit" for retaining farmland. Farmers should be rewarded for localize food provision. If only 2% of government contracts for food (as in school lunch programs, or government-run hospitals) required that the food be produced within 100 miles, it would transform the food system. How might such change happen? Only if consumers and citizens demand it. One thing that might help is if web cams and images of the actual feed lot, or slaughterhouse, were required to be available for food that flowed through it. Imagine getting a carton of milk that showed not a metaphorical alpine meadow, but the real cages of the real dirty cows that produced that liter of milk. Or put a second calories count on labels, this one showing how many calories of energy it takes to deliver the item to you. The major problem with his vision? He says there are simply not enough farmers. Only 1 million now feed the US and other people of the world. Many more people, many more college educated people, many more innovators and entrepreneurs, and many more backyard gardeners need to produce this new food system. Start in educational programs, such as one promoted by Alice Waters, where kids learn to grow food, cook, and eat smarter. "Make lunch an academic subject." Follow the lead of Michelle Obama and make turning lawns into organic gardens fashionable, respectable. Make farms and farmers cool again.

Gavin Newsom & Stewart Brand: Cities and Time

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 19:30:00 -0700

### Sustainable Cities Mayor Newsom began with how moved he was by hosting the UN's World Environment Day in San Francisco in 2005. For that event, which was called "Green Cities - Plan for the Planet!", he invited 120 mayors from around the world. Days of intense discussion led to the publication of 21 policy principles for building permanently sustainable cities, in the areas of energy, waste, design, nature, transportation, health, and water. Cities, Newsom said, consume 75% of natural resources and are responsible for 75% of pollution. He became determined to help make San Francisco the Greenest city in the world. That can be accomplished only with a plethora of highly specific programs. The city's renewable energy portfolio, for example, includes highly demanding Green building standards (LEED); conversion to biodiesel and the recycling of "fats, oils, and grease;" generous rebates for solar; and plans for collecting energy from tidal-flow turbines below the Golden Gate and wave generators off of Ocean Beach. He wants San Francisco to be the world leader in electric vehicles, starting with plug-in hybrids and moving to fully electric. They have half the moving parts of gas vehicles and much higher efficiency. The batteries can charge in off-peak hours, and gas stations can convert to "switch stations," where you simply swap in charged batteries in less time than it takes to fill up with gas. The way cellphone time is sold in minutes, vehicle charging can be sold in miles. He would like to see parking meters used for charging, and San Francisco is developing congestion-price parking meters that cost more during peak congestion hours, and that sense and can broadcast when they're empty. To encourage urban density, which is inherently Green, the city is building more highrises, and California's coming high-speed rail system will leave from the heart of downtown. Newsom noted with glee that there is now intense competition between cities to out-Green each other. Portland, San Francisco, Manhattan, Amsterdam, Vancouver, Singapore and countless others vie in the quest for Green bragging rights. They borrow ideas and deploy comparative shame: "How can sunless Berlin have more solar power than any American city?"

Daniel Everett: Endangered languages, lost knowledge and the future

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 19:30:00 -0700

### Language Revolution The Piraha tribe in the heart of the Amazon numbers only 360, spread in small groups over 300 miles. An exceptionally cheerful people, they live with a focus on immediacy, empiricism, and physical rigor that has shaped their unique language, claims linguist Daniel Everett. The Piraha language has no numbers or concept of counting (only terms for "relatively small" and "relatively large"); no kinship terms beyond immediate children and parents; no "left" and "right" (only "upriver" and "downriver"); no named distinction of past and future (only near time and far time); no creation stories or myths; and---most important for linguists---no recursion. A recursive sentence like "The boy who was fishing owned the dog" does not occur in the Piraha language. They would say, "The boy was fishing" and "The boy owned the dog." The eminent linguist Noam Chomsky has declared that recursion is an essential part of human language and is innate. Chomsky's former student Everett says that the Piraha language proves otherwise. The resultant controversy is profound. The Piraha language is the simplest in the world. Speaking it and singing it are the same, and it can be hummed or even whistled, yet it can convey enormous richness. Among other things, the wide variety of verb forms are used to account for the directness of evidence for a statement. Everett originally went to the Piraha in 1977 as a Christian missionary. They challenged him to provide evidence for the existence of Jesus, and lost interest when he couldn't. Eventually so did he. The Piraha made him an atheist. And the through him the Piraha revolutionized how we think about language. Some 40 percent of the world's 6,912 known languages are endangered, says Everett, and that endangers science. When we lose a language, we lose a whole way of life, a whole set of solutions to problems, a whole classification system and body of knowledge about the natural world, a whole calendar system, a whole complex of myths, folktales, and songs. Everett spelled out what it takes to preserve a living language that is endangered. The land where the speakers live must be preserved, and their health should be protected. The language needs to be documented in detail. And you could do worse than make a donation to the [Foundation for Endangered Languages](http://www.ogmios.org/home.htm).

Dmitry Orlov: Social Collapse Best Practices

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 18:30:00 -0800

### Managing social collapse With vintage Russian black humor, Orlov described the social collapse he witnessed in Russia in the 1990s and spelled out its practical lessons for the American social collapse he sees as inevitable. The American economy in the 1990s described itself as "Goldilocks"--just the right size--when in fact is was "Tinkerbelle," and one day the clapping stops. As in Russia, the US made itself vulnerable to the decline of crude oil, a trade deficit, military over-reach, and financial over-reach. Russians were able to muddle through the collapse by finding ways to manage 1) food, 2) shelter, 3) transportation, and 4) security. Russian agriculture had long been ruined by collectivization, so people had developed personal kitchen gardens, accessible by public transit. The state felt a time-honored obligation to provide bread, and no one starved. (Orlov noted that women in Russia handled collapse pragmatically, putting on their garden gloves, whereas middle-aged men dissolved into lonely drunks.) Americans are good at gardening and could shift easily to raising their own food, perhaps adopting the Cuban practice of gardens in parking lots and on roofs and balconies. As for shelter, Russians live in apartments from which they cannot be evicted. The buildings are heat-efficient, and the communities are close enough to protect themselves from the increase in crime. Americans, Orlov said, have yet to realize there is no lower limit to real estate value, nor that suburban homes are expensive to maintain and get to. He predicts flight, not to remote log cabins, but to dense urban living. Office buildings, he suggests, can easily be converted to apartments, and college campuses could make instant communities, with all that grass turned into pasture or gardens. There are already plenty of empty buildings in America; the cheapest way to get one is to offer to caretake it. The rule with transportation, he said, is not to strand people in nonsurvivable places. Fuel will be expensive and hoarded. He noted that the most efficient of all vehicles is an old pickup fully loaded with people, driving slowly. He suggested that freight trains be required to provide a few empty boxcars for hoboes. Donkeys, he advised, provide reliable transport, and they dine as comfortably on the Wall Street Journal as they did on Pravda. Security has to take into account that prisons will be emptied (by stages, preferably), overseas troops will be repatriated and released, and cops will go corrupt. You will have a surplus of mentally unstable people skilled with weapons. There will be crime waves and mafias, but you can rent a policeman, hire a soldier. Security becomes a matter of local collaboration. When the formal legal structure breaks down, adaptive improvisation can be pretty efficient. By way of readiness, Orlov urges all to prepare for life without a job, with near-zero burn rate. It takes practice to learn how to be poor well. Those who are already poor have an advantage.

Saul Griffith: Climate Change Recalculated

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 18:30:00 -0800

### The Terawatt World Engineer Griffith said he was going to make the connection between personal actions and global climate change. To do that he's been analyzing his own life in extreme detail to figure out exactly how much energy he uses and what changes might reduce the load. In 2007, when he started, he was consuming about 18,000 watts, like most Americans. The energy budget of the average person in the world is about 2,200 watts. Some 90 percent of the carbon dioxide overload in the atmosphere was put there by the US, USSR (of old), China, Germany, Japan, and Britain. The rich countries have the most work to do. What would it take to level off the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at 450 parts per million (ppm)? That level supposedly would keep global warming just barely manageable at an increase of 2 degrees Celsius. There still would be massive loss of species, 100 million climate refugees, and other major stresses. The carbon dioxide level right now is 385 ppm, rising fast. Before industrialization it was 296 ppm. America's leading climatologist, James Hanson, says we must lower the carbon dioxide level to 350 ppm if we want to keep the world we evolved in. The world currently runs on about 16 terawatts (trillion watts) of energy, most of it burning fossil fuels. To level off at 450 ppm of carbon dioxide, we will have to reduce the fossil fuel burning to 3 terawatts and produce all the rest with renewable energy, and we have to do it in 25 years or it's too late. Currently about half a terawatt comes from clean hydropower and one terawatt from clean nuclear. That leaves 11.5 terawatts to generate from new clean sources. That would mean the following. (Here I'm drawing on notes and extrapolations I've written up previously from discussion with Griffith): "Two terawatts of photovoltaic would require installing 100 square meters of 15-percent-efficient solar cells every second, second after second, for the next 25 years. (That's about 1,200 square miles of solar cells a year, times 25 equals 30,000 square miles of photovoltaic cells.) Two terawatts of solar thermal? If it's 30 percent efficient all told, we'll need 50 square meters of highly reflective mirrors every second. (Some 600 square miles a year, times 25.) Half a terawatt of biofuels? Something like one Olympic swimming pools of genetically engineered algae, installed every second. (About 15,250 square miles a year, times 25.) Two terawatts of wind? That's a 300-foot-diameter wind turbine every 5 minutes. (Install 105,000 turbines a year in good wind locations, times 25.) Two terawatts of geothermal? Build 3 100-megawatt steam turbines every day-1,095 a year, times 25. Three terawatts of new nuclear? That's a 3-reactor, 3-gigawatt plant every week-52 a year, times 25." In other words, the land area dedicated to renewable energy ("Renewistan") would occupy a space about the size of Australia to keep the carbon dioxide level at 450 ppm. To get to Hanson's goal of 350 ppm of carbon dioxide, fossil fuel burning would have to be cut to ZERO, which means another 3 terawatts would have to come from renewables, expanding the size of Renewistan further by 26 percent. Meanwhile for individuals, to stay at the world's energy budget at 16 terawatts, while many of the poorest in the world might raise their standard of living to 2,200 watts, everyone now above that level would have to drop down to it. Griffith determined that most of his energy use was coming from air travel, car travel, and the embodied energy of his stuff, along with his diet. Now he drives the speed limit (and he has passed no one in six months), seldom flies, eats meat only once a week, bikes a lot, and buys almost nothing. He's healthier, eats better, has more time with his family, and the stuff he has he cherishes. Can the world actually build Renewistan? Griffith said it's not like the Manhattan Project, it's like the whole of World War II, only with all the antagonists on the same side this time. It's damn near impossible, but it is necessary. And the world has to decide to do it. Griffith's audience was strangely exhilarated by the prospect.

Rick Prelinger: Lost Landscapes of San Francisco

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 18:30:00 -0800

### Four Dimensional Cities Cities are designed and built in three dimensions. Watching Prelinger's historic footage of San Francisco last night (to a more than overflowing crowd) reminds us however that one of the most compelling dimensions to a city is its fourth dimension - time. The crowd gasped at an incomplete 280 freeway, and watched in amazement as horse and buggies dodged in and out of cable car traffic on Market Street in 01905. We sat silent watching the homeless of the forties, and cheered to see _Playland by the Beach_ and [Laughing Sal](http://museemecaniquesf.com/). Rick reminded us, "The past is not passé, it is prologue." Most archives and libraries put up access barriers in response to copyright laws. In contrast Rick has attacked the vast amount of work that is either out of copyright, or left in the ambiguous gray zones, like home movies. We have always been told that there is no economic case for archives, the [Prelinger Archive](http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger) and [Library](http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger_library) not only upends that notion, but proves that access is the key, not protection. Rick started out in 01982 as an amateur collector of the un-collected. He began by collecting film out-takes, esoteric commercial films, and all the other ephemera that is usually discarded by archives and libraries. Today he is a professional archivist who funds his collections by selling commercial access, AND giving it away. Rick pointed out that his archival sales go up the more he provides free access. The film student who uses a clip in film school often becomes a professional who buys the content later. Most interesting in seeing this historic content was the contrast that it draws to our modern sense of place, and the dramatic increase in documentation now going on. Today's Google Maps Street View shot is tomorrow's "Lost Landscape".

Drew Endy & Jim Thomas: Synthetic Biology Debate

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 18:30:00 -0800

### Terms of Biocontainment "I want to develop tools that make biology easy to engineer," Drew Endy began. The first purpose is better understanding fundamental biological mechanisms through "learning by building." The toolkit of Synthetic Biology starts with DNA construction and ascends through DNA parts, to devices, to standardized systems. An organism's DNA code, and therefore the organism, can be digitally uploaded, stored, distributed, and downloaded. Life forms are programmable. So far 3,500 standard "BioBrick" parts have been developed for free distribution, and the number is growing geometrically. The number of amateur and student bioengineers also is growing geometicallly. "There are 20,000 edible plant species," Endy noted. "At present we eat only 30." Synthetic biology can help diversify agriculture. Or how about engineering a gourd that can grow into a living house? Endy concluded with five questions… Should teenagers practice genetic engineering? (Yes.) Should military weapons involve biotechnology? (No.) Should BioBrick parts be patented or freely shared? (Free.) Will biohackers be good or bad? (Good, if we help.) Should genetic engineers sign their work and publish it? (Yes.) Jim Thomas asked Endy how he would defend against commercial interests locking up Synthetic Biology with patents? Endy said the best hope is building an open-source community that grows faster than businesses and out-innovates them. Thomas began his statement by pointing out that it usually takes a whole generation to understand a new technology, so he urges moving slowly and cautiously, but Synthetic Biology is advancing at breakneck speed, and the window of opportunity to have effective public discussion and control is closing. He cited the history of synthetic chemicals, which began in mid-19th century. The technology quickly became highly concentrated in an oligarchy of monopolistic companies, and then it was easily commandeered by government in wartime. I.G. Farben supplied the poison gas for the death camps. "Powerful technology in an unjust world is likely to exacerbate the injustice." Thomas said he worries when he hears comments like, "Anything that can be made by a plant can be made by a microbe." If that's played out, it means the death knell for everyone who works in agriculture, a vast economic restructuring. There's so much novelty coming so fast from Synthetic Biology, no predictive models or regulatory models can hold them. He recommends these new tools be strictly contained so there is no release of new life forms into the biosphere, and there should be no commercialization of the technology at all. Endy asked Thomas if it's okay to make anything in a bioreactor vat? Thomas said, "Yes, beer." For different reasons, both debaters wanted to see Synthetic Biology kept from domination by commercial patents. For Thomas, it would lead to unjust monopoly answering only to profit. For Endy, it would paralyze open-ended research.

Huey Johnson: Green Planning at Nation Scale

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 19:30:00 -0700

### Green Plans Green Plans, said Johnson, are government-run environmental programs that rise to the scale and longevity of environmental problems. Instead of acting piecemeal, they are comprehensive, systemic, integrated, and accountable. Instead of pursuing an energy policy, an air policy, and a water policy separately, you have to have one policy that covers them all. He singled out three shining examples of how to make Green Plans work--Holland, New Zealand, and California's Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (AB 32). In 1988 Queen Beatrix used her Christmas speech to tell the people of the Netherlands that "the earth is slowly dying," and the nation would disappear back under the sea if it did not solve its own environmental problems and inspire the rest of the world to do the same. The business community led the response, asking the government to set standards. The NGOs (which receive a third of their revenue from government grants) were expected to keep everybody's feet to the fire. The Dutch comprehensive Green Plan basically rewrote the nation's social contract. It took on every problem simultaneously with a trans-generational, trans-border approach. Environmental taxes replaced labor taxes. No waste was allowed to leave the country. The National Environmental Policy Plan is evaluated formally every four years and adjusted. New Zealand in 1987 began research on what would become the biggest reform in its history, the Resource Management Act, which became law in 1991. Under the guiding principle of sustainability, the Act covers everything--air, water, soil, biodiversity, the coasts, and the full gamut of land use planning. The governance principle is "devolution," meaning that most of the action covered by the Act takes place in regional, district, and city councils. California's famous AB 32 is our most important legislation in a century, said Johnson. The goal of taking the state's greenhouse gas emissions back down to the 1990 level by 2020 requires radical action in every sector of the state's economy, including cars, mass transit, shipping, building materials, city design, and a cap-and-trade market for greenhouse gas emissions. The state is coordinating with six other western state and three provinces in Canada under what is called the Western Climate Initiative. In the Q&A Johnson was asked what single action would do the most to improve environmental responsibility from the federal government. "Campaign finance reform," he said. The corruption of elected officials by special interest campaign donations makes them beholden to the wrong people for the wrong goals. Johnson also has a low opinion of term limits. The great co-author of AB 32, Fran Pavley, was termed out after just six years in the State Assembly. If elected officials are always new in the capitol, they are easily manipulated by lobbyists and others who have been in town forever and have it wired.

Peter Diamandis: Long-term X-Prizes

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 19:30:00 -0700

### Beyond Audacious Pursuing the idea of “revolution through competition” via huge-purse prizes was inspired for Peter Diamandis by reading about the Orteig Prize. In 1927 $25,000 was offered to the first person to fly non-stop from New York to Paris. Nine teams spent $400,000 in the competition. A 25-year-old named Lindbergh won the prize. Within 18 months air passengers had multiplied 30-fold from 6,000 to 180,000, the number of aircraft increased four-fold, and aviation stocks soared. A lifelong space nut, Diamandis created out of thin air the Ansari X Prize. $10 million would go to the first team to make a 3-person reusable space vehicle that could reach 100 kilometers in altitude twice in two weeks. From 7 countries 26 teams competed, spending $100 million on the project. The success in 2004 of SpaceShipOne (now in the Smithsonian) launched a space tourism industry. With the help of Google, the X Prize became a foundation to generate a series of competitions for “audacious and achievable goals.” The attributes for a good Prize competition are: very large cash prize; clear objective and simple rules; a defined problem rather than defined solution; a target that had become stuck; something that attracts maverick thinkers; something whose success will change people’s sense of what is possible. Currently operative X Prizes include one for extremely cheap genome sequencing and one for a race of 100-mile-per-gallon cars. An example of how the prize process is learning is the Google Lunar X Prize to launch, land, and operate a rover on the Moon’s surface. Diamandis wants the event to have time duration, not just be a flash in the pan, because duration is what persuades people that something new is real. And he wants more mechanisms that help create an industry in the wake of the event. Thus the $30 million purse for this prize will be divided—$20 million to the first-place winner, $5 million to second place, and $5 million each for bonus goals such as photographing man-made objects on the Moon, surviving a lunar night, and detecting ice in a crater. So far the race has 15 registered teams competing. X Prizes in the past have been for goals that could be achieved in a 3 to 8 year time frame. Now Diamandis wants to reach further in time and further into the realm of the seemingly impossible. He noted that only a short while ago a number of things were understood by everybody to be impossible: heavier-than-air flight; instant communications at a distance; transplanting a heart; space travel; cloning of a mammal; eradicating smallpox. What things are in that category now? And what would it take to get things moving in their direction? Diamandis calls them Mega-X Prizes. They would have a purse of $100 million to $1 billion. (Not implausible; there are 1,200 billionaires in the world now.) As an example of how the economics could make sense, Diamandis points out that the current cost of AIDS is $80 billion a year, $800 billion a decade. A successful $1 billion X Prize for a cure for AIDS would be a hugely efficient economic event as well as a massive humanitarian breakthrough. To conclude the evening, Diamandis offered the audience a list of 35 potential Mega-X Prize goals. Circle your top three choices, he said, and we’ll tally the results. Rather than tell you what that particular audience chose, I’ll pass on the list to you. What are your top three choices? What would you add to the list?… * First (private) Human on Mars * Faster-than-light Communications * Organ Replacement * First Baby Born off Earth * Babelfish - Instant universal translator * Flying cars * Artificial Intelligence: Build a machine that passes the Turing Test * Self-replicating (non-biological) machines * Longevity: Double the length of the healthy human lifespan * Cancer: Be able to detect any cancer at the 100-cell stage and Zap-it * Predict Earth Quakes with >1 hour / >1 day notice * Cure for AIDS * Identify extra-solar life-bearing planet: Any type of replicating life from, single cell or greater * SETI - Proof of extra-terrestrial intelligence * NY to Paris in 30 min * Private, fully-reusable, Orbital Spaceship * Human to orbit for <$100,000 * Apollo 8: Privately fly 1 person around the moon and safely back to Earth. * Robot Sports: (1) beat Tiger; (2) beat a championship soccer team; (3) beat a Formula-1 team * Humans in Deep Ocean: 3 people to ocean bottom twice in 3 days. * Image 100% of the Ocean Floor * Backup the Biosphere: Create a data backup of the Internet and the top 10,000 species on Earth * Replicator: create out of energy and raw materials anything. * Energy Extraction - e.g. ZeroPoint; Cold Fusion * Hot Fusion -- Sustained, net-energy positive * Vision Restoration: Wire up a false eye for a blind person to gain 20:20 vision * First brain transplant: full functioning of memory and motorfunction and lives > 1 day * Download brain to a computer with all memory intact * Brain to brain communication that are more than 10x the speed of audio conversations * Develop real-time collective consciousness for a group of over 100 people * Eradicate Hunger for > 90% of the human population * Eradicate poverty for > 90% of the human population * Carbon Sequestration: Create an economic device to extract/sequester carbon from the atmosphere * Create an AI that can engage and educate children to their highest potential * Develop a teaching system that allows an increase learning rates by an order of magnitude.

Neal Stephenson: ANATHEM Book Launch Event

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

### _Anathem_ book launch Neal Stephenson's nearly thousand page tome [_Anathem_](https://longnow.org/anathem/) was inspired in part by Long Now's [10,000 Year Clock](https://longnow.org/projects/clock/) project, and so a collaboration on the launch event was a natural fit. With over 900 in attendance the evening began with a performance of the [elaborate math based chanting](https://longnow.org/shop/longnow-merch/) created for the book by composer David Stutz. Neal Stephenson then took the stage to read the first few pages of _Anathem_ , and afterward he was joined on stage by Stewart Brand and Danny Hillis for a discussion about the book and Long Now. Stephenson has been a friend of Long Now since its inception, even contributing some [early ideas](https://longnow.org/clock/other-ideas/) for the Clock itself. He has travelled to both Clock sites with Stewart Brand, Danny Hillis and Alexander Rose to get as much back story on the project as possible. _Anathem_ takes place in another literary world entirely, but Stephenson does use much of the actual mechanisms that we have designed, and spins out a world in which 10,000 year clocks are not just an idea, but part of the civilizational fabric. Long Now's primary reason for building a monument scale icon to long-term thinking has always been to inspire new myths. Having one of the first of those myths created by Stephenson has not only been an honor, but a real instruction in how such a world might play out. The evening also included a demonstration of "shovel-fu" a new martial arts form invented within the pages of _Anathem_ , as well as a mathematical chanting exercise run by David Stutz at the end of the night. You can read more about the connections between _Anathem_ and Long Now on [our site.](https://longnow.org/anathem/)

Daniel Suarez: Daemon: Bot-mediated Reality

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 19:30:00 -0700

### Bot-dominated Reality [Daniel Suarez, originally published as Leinad Zaurus, delivered a talk on the themes developed in his (originally self published) book __Daemon__. The book is now scheduled to be released in hard cover in January 02009 by Dutton.] Forget about HAL-like robots enslaving humankind a few decades from now, the takeover is already underway. The agents of this unwelcome revolution aren't strong AIs, but "bots"- autonomous programs that have insinuated themselves into the Internet and thus into every corner of our lives. Apply for a mortgage lately? A bot determined your FICA score and thus whether you got the loan. Call 411? A bot gave you the number and connected the call. Highway-bots collect your tolls, read your license plate and report you if you have an outstanding violation. Bots are proliferating because they are so very useful. Businesses rely on them to automate essential processes, and of course bots running on zombie computers are responsible for the tsunami of spam and malware plaguing Internet users worldwide. At current growth rates, bots will be the majority users of the Net by 2010. We are visible to bots even when we are not at our computers. Next time you are on a downtown street, contemplate the bot-controlled video cameras watching you, or the bots tracking your cellphone and sniffing at your Bluetooth-enabled gizmos. We walk through a gauntlet of bot-controlled sensors every time we step into a public space and the sensors are proliferating. Bots are at best narrow AI, nothing that would make a cleric remotely nervous. But they would scare the hell out of epidemiologists who understand that parasites don't need to be smart to be dangerous. Meanwhile, the Internet and the complex of processing, storage and sensors linked to it is growing exponentially, creating a vast new ecology for bots to roam in. Bots aren't evolving on their own -- yet. Left unchecked, bots will trap the human race because the automation they enable will make it possible for a few people to run humanity while the rest of us are unable to make decisions of any consequence. Bots are thus vectors for despotism, with the potential to create a world where only a small group of people understand how society works. In the worst case, the controls over bots disappear -- for example, the only person who knows the password to a corporate bot dies- and the bots become autonomous. We are in a Darwinian struggle with narrow AI, and so far at least the bots are winning. But there is a solution: build a new Internet hard-coded with democratic values. Start with an encrypted Darknet into which only verifiably human users can enter. Create augmented reality tools to identify bots in the physical world. Enlist the aid of a few tame bots to help forge a symbiotic relationship with narrow AI. Stir in some luck, and perhaps we can avoid the fate of the Sorcerer's Apprentice who rashly enchants a broom to do his tedious chores and ends up terrorized by his imperfect creations. We had better succeed, for unlike the fable, there is no Master Sorcerer ready to return to break the spell and save us from our folly.

Edward Burtynsky: The 10,000-year Gallery

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 19:30:00 -0700

### Stone Ink Gallery Photographer Edward Burtynsky made a formal proposal for a permanent art gallery in the chamber that encloses the 10,000-year Clock in its Nevada mountain. The gallery would consist of art in materials as durable as the alloy steel and jade of the Clock itself, and it would be curated slowly over the centuries to reflect changing interests in the rolling present and the accumulating past. Photographs in particular should be in the 10,000-year Gallery, Burtynsky said, "because they tell us more than any previous medium. When we think of our own past, we tend to think in terms of family photos." But photographic prints, especially color prints, degrade badly over time. Burtynsky went on a quest for a technical solution. He thought that automobile paint, which holds up to harsh sunlight, might work if it could be run through an inkjet printer, but that didn't work out. Then he came across a process first discovered in 1855, called "carbon transfer print." It uses magenta, cyan, and yellow inks made of ground stone--the magenta stone can only be found in one mine in Germany--and the black ink is carbon. On the stage Burtynsky showed a large carbon transfer print of one of his ultra-high resolution photographs. The color and detail were perfect. Accelerated studies show that the print could hang in someone's living room for 500 years and show no loss of quality. Kept in the Clock's mountain in archival conditions it would remain unchanged for 10,000 years. He said that making one print takes five days of work, costs $2,000, and only ten artisans in the world have the skill, at locations in Toronto, Seattle, and Cornwall. Superb images can be made on porcelain (or Clock chamber walls), but Burtynsky prefers archival watercolor paper, because the ink bonds deep into the paper, and in the event of temperature changes, the ink and paper would expand and contract together. The rest of the presentation was of beautiful and evocative photographs from three demonstration exhibits for the proposed gallery--"Museum of the Mundane" by Vid Ingelvics; "Observations from a Blue Planet" by Marcus Schubert; and "In the Wake of Progress" by Burtynsky himself. A typical Burtynsky photograph showed a huge open pit copper mine. A tiny, barely discernible black line on one of the levels was pointed out: "That's a whole railroad train." Alberta tar sands excavation tearing up miles of boreal forest. China's Three Gorges Dam. Mine tailing ponds beautiful and terrible. Expired oil fields stretching to the horizon. Michelangelo's marble quarry at Carrera, still working. "This is the sublime of our time," said Burtynsky, "shown straight on, for contemplation." Indeed worth studying for centuries.

Paul Ehrlich: The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 19:30:00 -0700

### Becoming a Benign Dominant To track how humans became Earth's dominant animal, Ehrlich began with a photo of a tarsier in a tree. The little primate had a predator's binocular vision and an insect-grabber's fingers. When (possibly) climate change drove some primates out of the trees, they developed a two-legged stance to get around on the savanna. Then the brain swoll up, and the first major dominance tool emerged--language with syntax. About 2.5 million years ago, the beginnings of human culture became evident with stone tools. "We don't have a Darwin of cultural evolution yet," said Ehrlich. He defined cultural evolution as everything we pass on in a non-genetic way. Human culture developed slowly-the stone tools little changed from millennium to millennium, but it accelerated. There was a big leap about 50,000 years ago, after which culture took over human evolution--our brain hasn't changed in size since then. With agriculture's food surplus, specialization took off. Inuits that Ehrlich once studied had a culture that was totally shared; everyone knew how everything was done. In high civilization, no one grasps a millionth of current cultural knowledge. Physicists can't build a TV set. Writing freed culture from the limitations of memory, and burning old solar energy (coal and oil) empowered vast global population growth. Our dominance was complete. Ehrlich regretted that we followed the competitive practices of chimps instead of bonobos, who resolve all their disputes with genital rubbing. "The human economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Earth's natural systems," said Ehrlich, and when our dominance threatens the ecosystem services we depend on, we have to understand the workings of the cultural evolution that gave us that dominance. The current two greatest threats that Ehrlich sees are climate change (10 percent chance of civilization ending, and rising) and chemical toxification of the biosphere. "Every cubic centimeter of the biosphere has been modified by human activity." The main climate threat he sees is not rising sea levels ("You can outwalk that one") but the melting of the snowpack that drives the world's hydraulic civilizations-- California agriculture totally dependent on the Sierra snowpack, the Andes running much of Latin America, the Himalayan snows in charge of Southeast Asia. With climate in flux, Ehrlich said, we may be facing a millennium of constant change. Already we see the outbreak of resource wars over water and oil. He noted with satisfaction that human population appears to be leveling off at 9 to 10 billion in this century, though the remaining increase puts enormous pressure on ecosystem services. He's not worried about depopulation problems, because "population can always be increased by unskilled laborers who love their work." The major hopeful element he sees is that cultural evolution can move very quickly at times. The Soviet Union disappeared overnight. The liberation of women is a profound cultural shift that occurs in decades. Facing dire times, we need to understand how cultural evolution works in order to shift our dominance away from malignant and toward the benign. In the Q & A, Ehrlich described work he's been doing on cultural evolution. He and a graduate student in her fifties at Stanford have been studying the progress of Polynesian canoe practices as their population fanned out across the Pacific. What was more conserved, they wondered, practical matters or decoration? Did the shape of a canoe paddle change constantly, driven by the survival pressure of greater efficiency, or did the carving and paint on the paddles change more, driven by the cultural need of each group to distinguish itself from the others. Practical won. Once a paddle shape proved really effective, it became a cultural constant.

Iqbal Quadir: Technology Empowers the Poorest

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 21 May 2008 19:30:00 -0700

### Making Money WITH the Poor When Iqbal Quadir applied to US colleges from his home town in Bangladesh he was surprised to discover that not all American universities were found in Washington, DC. That's how it was in Bangladesh, where everything of importance was centralized in the capital city, Dacca. He later realized that Bangladesh was not unique; in most developing countries, the infrastructure is concentrated in one or two cities, leaving the rural areas almost blank. As he acquired degrees and experience in finance, he realized that this centralization is not only a mark of poorer countries, it is probably a cause of their poverty. Quadir presented this broad outline of development in order to give context for his belief that technology can alleviate poverty. He reminded us that 500 years ago, when the western countries were still "developing" their own societies, their political systems were no better, and often worse, than the instable corrupt regimes of many developing countries today. England had a series of kings who were impeached, arrested, ousted, or beheaded for their crimes. It was only after citizens were empowered by economic markets did the balance of power shift from the central king to decentralized citizens. All steps that devolve power away from a central authority -- including laws, trade, and education -- will raise democracy. In Quadir's view, it's not that centralization per se creates poverty. Poverty is the natural beginning state of all societies, east or west. Rather, decentralization is the engine that removes poverty and brings wealth. To the degree that infrastructure, education, and trade can be decentralized, wealth will rise in proportion. To the degree that infrastructure, education and trade are centralized, poverty will remain. Whereas many of us in the west, particularly the digital west, agree with this intuitively, we act contrary to this observation when we give large-scale aid to poor countries. As Quadir's colleague William Easterly argues in his book The Elusive Quest for Growth, the billions and billions of dollars spent on aid for developing countries has not only *not* helped, it has set them back decades. Aid, as we know it, kills development. This harm occurs because almost all previous aid has funneled through a central government or semi-governmental organizations and that official route tightens centrality. Even if the governments were saintly, and they are definitely not, the scale of money flowing through these centralizing nodes prohibits the distribution of resources, infrastructure, trade, and education. The more aid that arrives, the less development can actually happen. Technology is the escape from this quandary. Quadir came to see that "technologies that connect" could liberate productivity. He matched his experience in Bangladesh as a 13-year-old boy having to walk 10 kilometers to get medicine, only to find out the medicine man he sought was not home, and then walking back empty handed, having wasted a day -- all because there was no connection between his home and the pharmacist. Many years later in New York he wasted a day at work when there was no electricity to run phones or computers. Productivity required connectivity. If connectivity could be decentralized then it would lead to increased wealth. Quadir settled on the cell phone as a way to decentralized connectivity. In the early 1990s cell phones were big, dumb, and very expensive. Calls were $3 per minute. Only the rich could afford them. But he wanted the poorest people in the world to get them. How would this be possible? First, he believed in Moore's Law: that the phones would decrease in price and increase in power every year. That seemed inevitable to him. He said he could see "micro-chips marching toward the poor." He was right about that. Second, he piggybacked his hopes on a remarkable invention of another Bangladeshi, Mohammad Yunus, who developed micro-financing (and later won a Nobel prize for this invention). In Yunus' scheme a woman who owned virtually nothing could get a loan of $200 to purchase a cow. She would then sell the surplus milk of the cow to pay back the loan, earn both milk and an income for her family, and maybe buy another cow. Ordinarily, no bank would have lent her this trifling amount because she had no collateral, no education, and the costs of overseeing such a small loan with small gains, would have been prohibitive. Grameen Bank, Yunus' creation, discovered that these illiterate peasants were actually more likely to repay these small loans, and were very happy to pay good interest rates, and so that in aggregate, these micro-loans were more profitable than loaning to large industrial players. Quadir proceeded to ask, what if the women could rent a cell phone instead of a cow? Grameen Bank could make a micro-loan to the poor for the purchase a cell phone, which they then could sell/rent minutes to the rest of the village. The enterprising phone-renter would benefit and more importantly, the entire village would benefit from the connectivity. It did not really matter if the minutes were expensive, because when you have no connection, you are willing to pay dearly for it. Quadir started off his GrameenPhone with 5 cell towers, and eventually GrameenPhone erected 5,000 towers. In 1993 when Quadir began, Bangladesh had one of the lowest penetrations of telephones on the planet -- only one phone for every 500 people. GrameenPhone project unleashed 25 million phones. Today there are 100 times as many phones, or one per 5 people. Just as Quadir had envisioned, this decentralized connectivity has increased productivity. Without connectivity people waste a lot more time on economic errands. With cell connectivity farmers maximize their profits by getting real-time prices at distant markets; shepherds can call a vet, or order medicine. One study concluded that the total lifetime cost of an additional phone (including the cell tower and switching gear) was about $2,000, but that each phone enabled $50,000 of increased productivity. And surprisingly, the poorer the country to begin with, the greater the increase in wealth from connectivity. A lot of myths cloud the good intentions of developmental aid, Quadir says. Myths such as: poor countries have no resources, or that the poor don't have discretionary spending, or aren't concerned with brands, or aren't good credit risks, and so on. All these assumptions have been proven untrue over and over again, and especially so with GrameenPhone. The chief myth it dispelled was that government needs to subsidize technological development, when in fact there is good money to be made enabling the productivity of the poor. As Quadir says, "You don't make money on the poor, but with the poor." At dinner I asked Iqbal what he would have done differently with GrameenPhone. He replied, "Kept more shares." Quadir is now searching for other technologies to decentralize, and thereby become a tool to erase poverty. He is director of the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at MIT, which has been funded with $50 million. He is investigating whether energy can also be dethroned from its current mode of extremely centralized generation. Only 10% of the electricity produced at its source remains at the end of the wires as they reach homes and factories. Perhaps there are ways to decentralize its generation, which would trigger connections at the local level, and in his scheme, elevate wealth and democracy. If it worked, decentralized energy might also work in rich countries, increasing wealth and democracy in our part of the world as well. Throughout his talk, Quadir reiterated: "To raise productivity (and wealth), raise connectivity. It's that simple."

Niall Ferguson & Peter Schwartz: Historian vs. Futurist on Human Progress

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 19:30:00 -0700

### Past vs. Future In what turned out to be a riveting evening, historian Niall Ferguson and futurist Peter Schwartz fire-hosed each other with enough ideas, frames of reference, ripostes, and eloquences to lead to a clear conceptual divergence. At the same time, the two were discovering, live in front of an audience, new ways they might work together on future projects. Ferguson began by pointing out that while we face many futures, there is only one past, and its residents outnumber us--- only 6 percent of all humans are now alive. Historians, he said, "commune with the dead. We re-enact their thoughts, in their context and ours." Historians look for rough regularities, such as he found in his analysis of the wars and hatred played out in the 20th Century. In his book, _The War of the World_ , he describes how the combination of economic volatility, ethnic conflict, and failing empire always led to spirals of lethal violence. The advance of science and technology has not eliminated the possibility of violence but may have made it more powerful than ever. The three causes are still in play. "Our job is to keep them from coinciding again." Ferguson ended with a critique of Schwartz's book on scenario planning, _The Art of the Long View_ , which he thought showed signs of "heuristic bias." When Schwartz asked Ferguson to expand on that idea, Ferguson pointed out there was a whole chapter in the book about "The Global Teenager," which seemed spurious. It merely reflected Schwartz's personal experience: "You were a teenager when teenagers mattered. " Historians also have heuristic biases, Ferguson added, such as their expectation that "great events should have great causes." Historians have much to learn from complexity theory and evolution, he said. His own work with "counter-factual history" helps expose critical moments in history and provides a way to "think about what didn't happen." The counter-factual technique is an application of scenario thinking to the past. In Schwartz's opening remarks, he said that his plans to write a book titled _The Case for Optimism_ were derailed by reading Ferguson's _The War of the World_. He's been grappling with the issues Ferguson raised for 18 months. "You do alternative pasts, I do alternative futures. Where historians commune with the dead, futurists have imaginary friends." Schwartz characterized Ferguson's view of history as basically down, with an upside possibility, whereas his own view was of history as basically up, with always the possibility of getting things wrong. For Schwartz, the second half of the 20th Century showed an upside momentum, with a fraction of the violent deaths---5% of humans killed violently in the first half, 0.2 % in the second half. The Cold War ended quietly. Women were liberated. China took off. Prosperity accelerated. Everything from Wikipedia to cellphones empowered the grassroots. In response, Ferguson noted Schwartz's "faith in technology" and proposed it reflected his training as an engineer. "Aren't you like the pre-1914 people who said that war was impossible because of all the new technology and commerce?" Schwartz agreed that the parallel is worrying. Ferguson said, "I think our difference is that I'm a pessimist and you're an optimist. You're Pangloss and I'm Cassandra." Schwartz noted that since his parents were in slave-labor camps in World War II, and he was born in a displaced-person camp after the war, "It would be churlish not to be an optimist." Ferguson said, "That would make me skeptical about technology. The world leader in science and technology in 1940 was Nazi Germany." Questions from the audience ended with one asking whether optimism or pessimism was a more useful way to think about the future. Schwartz said, "Optimism lets you imagine how you can overcome problems, and those possibilities motivate change." Ferguson said, "You must always focus on worst-case scenarios, and history will teach them to you."

Craig Venter: Joining 3.5 Billion Years of Microbial Invention

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 18:30:00 -0800

### Decoding and recoding life To really read DNA accurately and understand it thoroughly, you need to be able to write it from scratch and make it live, Venter explained. His sequencing the first diploid human genome (with the genes from both parents) last year showed there is much more genetic variation between humans than first thought. His current goal is to fully sequence 10,000 humans and bring the price for each sequence down to $1,000. With that data, his says, "We'll begin to really learn what's nature and what's nurture." "Microbes make up one half of the Earth's biomass." Venter's shotgun sequencing of open-ocean microbial samples revealed that every milliliter of ocean has one million bacteria and archaea and ten million viruses even in supposedly barren waters. Taking samples on a round-the-world sailing trip showed that every 200 miles the genes in the microbes are 85% different. "Microbes dominate evolutionary diversity," Venter said. Some 50,000 major gene families have been discovered. Humans and other complex animals have a small fraction of that in our own genes, but the "microbiome" of our onboard microbes carry the full richness. Only 1/10th of the cells in a human are human; the rest are microbes. There are 1,000 species in our mouths, another 1,000 in our guts, another 500 on our skins, and those with vaginas have yet another 500 species. Analysis has shown that a tenth of the chemicals used in our body come to us via our gut microbes. "We are what we feed our bacteria and what they give us." In an effort to determine what is the minimum gene set for life, Venter's team took a 500-gene bacteria and began knocking out genes. They got the viable set down to 400 and realized that the only way they are going to understand the complexity is by mimicking it. They would need to synthesize a working genome artificially, first on a computer and then with assembled base pairs and "boot it up" in a living cell, making a new, unique species. They devised techniques that repaired errors during synthesis, and they demonstrated that a genome from one kind of bacteria could be implanted in another and come to life there, changing one species into another. "It was true identity theft." "This software builds its own hardware," Venter marveled. He emphasized that synthetic biology does not re-do Genesis, but it does offer a kind of Cambrian explosion, building on 3.5 billion years of evolution to go in an infinity of possible directions. The range of possibilities is indicated by an existing organism that can take 1.75 million rads of radioactivity in 24 hours, which explodes its genome. It can reassemble the shattered genome and live on. It can go dormant for millions of years, and live on. That means life may already have migrated between planets. Venter proposed that our current energy and climate situation requires truly disruptive technology. One project he's working on would use altered microbes to metabolize coal in the ground and generate methane, for a tenfold increase in carbon efficiency. Another project proposes a "4th generation biofuel," where engineered algae directly convert CO2 into hydrogen in bioreactors. "Ten million genes are the design components of the future," Venter concluded. "With combinatorial genomics and casette-based construction, we can make millions of genomes per day." During the Q & A I asked Venter why he spends so much of his time speaking in public, 150 talks a year. He said he sees that as part of his scientific work, to prepare the public for the big changes coming. He wants to avoid repeating the mistakes made with genetically modified crops (GMOs), where there was insufficient transparency and regulation, and irrational opposition by environmentalists, which crippled a crucial field. The public should feel it is included in every stage of genetic science and emerging biotechnology.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The Future Has Always Been Crazier Than We Thought

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 18:30:00 -0800

### Dispatches from Extremistan A "black swan," Taleb explained, is an event which is 1) Hard to predict; 2) Highly consequential; 3) Wrongly retro-predicted. We pretend we know why the big event happened, and so entrench our inability to deal with the next world-changing improbable event. Examples: Viagra, 9/11, Harry Potter, First World War, Beatles, the PC, Google, and the rise of any successful religion. History is dominated by sudden, lasting changes wrought by deeply unexpected events. Part of the problem is that we ignore the "silent evidence" of the nonobserved and nonobservable. We compute probability from the success of survivors. No one writes or reads a book titled "How I Lost a Million Dollars." Another problem is that we revise our own predictions and intentions unconsciously to match what actually happens. We disguise having been wrong by pretending we were right. This is "confirmation bias." There are TWO kinds of randomness, two realms in which events happen… Mediocristan is dominated by the average-- one new observation won't change much. If you are measuring the weight of a large sample of humans, adding the heaviest person in the world won't change the result, whereas measuring the average wealth of a large sample of humans would be transformed by adding the wealthiest person. Mediocristan is the realm of the Law of Large Numbers and of the Gaussian Bell Curve. Extremistan is dominated by extremes. Every year 16,000 novels are published in English. A handful of best-sellers absolutely dominate. This is the realm of the power-law curve and the Long Tail. Extremistan defies prediction. You can say there will be a few monsters and lots of midgets and the world will be changed by the monsters, and that's all you can say. Benoit Mandelbrot convinced Taleb that the main dynamic of Mediocristan is energy, and the main dynamic of Extremistan is information. Anything social is Extremistan. Thus there are two kinds of experts. A souffle chef really is an expert and can be trusted. An economist is a pseudo-expert. "Never take advice from someone wearing a tie." All you get from a Council of Economic Advisors is an illusion of control. Stock market analysts have proved to be worse than nothing. Don't focus on probability. Focus on consequences. Black Swans will come. Prepare against the negative ones; be ready to soar with the positive ones. Pay attentive heed to tradition and old people-- they have experienced more Black Swans. PS… All of the SALT speakers perform for free. Taleb added the further generosity of insisting on paying for his travel and lodging. Extra thanks to him for that.

Paul Saffo: Embracing Uncertainty: the secret to effective forecasting

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 18:30:00 -0800

### Rules of Forecasting Reflecting on his 25 years as a forecaster, Paul Saffo pointed out that a forecaster's job is not to predict outcomes, but to map the "cone of uncertainty" on a subject. Where are the edges of what might happen? (Uncertainty is cone-shaped because it expands as you project further into the future-- next decade has more surprises in store than next week.) Rule: Wild cards sensitize us to surprise, and they push the edges of the cone out further. You can call weird imaginings a wild card and not be ridiculed. Science fiction is brilliant at this, and often predictive, because it plants idea bombs in teenagers, which they make real 15 years later. Rule: Change is never linear. Our expectations are linear, but new technologies come in "S" curves, so we routinely overestimate short-term change and underestimate long-term change. "Never mistake a clear view for a short distance." "Inflection points are tiptoeing past us all the time." He saw one at the DARPA Grand Challenge race for robot cars in the Mojave Desert in 2004 and 2005. In 2004 no cars finished the race, and only four got off the starting line. In 2005, all 23 cars started and five finished. Rule: Look for indicators- things that don't fit. At the same time the robot cars were triumphing in the desert, 108 human-driven cars piled into one another in the fog on a nearby freeway. A survey of owners of Roomba robot vacuum cleaners showed that 2/3 of owners give the machine a personal name, and 1/3 take it with them on vacations. Rule: Look back twice as far. Every decade lately there's a new technology that sets the landscape. In the 1980s, microprocessors made a processing decade that culminated in personal computers. In the 1990s it was the laser that made for communication bandwidth and an access decade culminating in the World Wide Web. In the 2000s cheap sensors are making an interaction decade culminating in a robot takeoff. The Web will soon be made largely of machines communicating with each other. Rule: Cherish failure. Preferably other people's. We fail our way into the future. Silicon Valley is brilliant at this. Since new technologies take 20 years to have an overnight success, for an easy win look for a field that has been failing for 20 years and build on that. Rule: Be indifferent. Don't confuse the desired with the likely. Christian end-time enthusiasts have been wrong for 2,000 years. Rule: Assume you are wrong. And forecast often. Rule: Embrace uncertainty. Saffo ended with a photo he took of a jar by the cash register in a coffee shop in San Francisco. The handwritten note on the jar read, "If you fear change, leave it in here." PS… You can find different rules and a more strait-laced presentation by Saffo in his Harvard Business Review article, "_Six Rules for Effective Forecasting_ ," [here](http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/hbsp/hbr/articles/article.jsp?ml_action=get-article&articleID=R0707K&ml_issueid=BR0707&ml_subscriber=true&pageNumber=1&_requestid=37598).

Joline Blais & Jon Ippolito: At the Edge of Art

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 18:30:00 -0800

### Artibodies Art, like the antibodies in our immune system, creates alien forces in service of the whole. It anticipates threats and models them. It is a diversity agent. Two forms of that process were explained and shown by Ippolito and Blais: perversion, and execution. One example of the perverse is the software called "Shredder" that takes any Web page and turns it inside out, making obvious what is hidden (the code) and small what is large (the surface images). You can try it [here](http://www.potatoland.org/shredder/) \- give it a web page URL. Another example is works of the Yes Men, a group of culture jammers whose art consists of what they call "identity correction." One successful hoax was taking the guise of a Dow Chemical spokesman and announcing on BBC World that Dow was going to liquidate Union Carbide and use the 12 billion dollars to compensate everyone who had been harmed by the Bhopal disaster in India 20 years before. Dow's stock plummeted, and the company had to announce it had no apology or payment to offer for Bhopal. With the coming of code and the Web, art moves beyond being representational to something that can execute, can make things happen. For example, when the algorithm protecting DVDs was reverse engineered and offered publicly, the magazine 2600 was sued by the film industry. The defense that code was a form of speech protected by the First Amendment was unsuccessful in court. But on the Web the descrambling code was distributed in a variety of speech-like forms that may be seen on the "Gallery of CSS Descramblers" [site](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/%7Edst/DeCSS/Gallery/) including a dramatic reading, a haiku, a T-shirt, a tie, a movie, and a version of the DVD logo containing the descrambling code.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter: Enduring Principles for Changing Times

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 18:30:00 -0800

### Principles against panic "Everything looks like a failure in the middle." Any new enterprise, Kanter explained, encounters roadblocks. As the obstacles multiply, the situation looks hopeless. That's when deeply held principles and the long view are most needed to get you past the panic. To characterize America's current winter of discontent she quoted Woody Allen: "One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly." Panic leads to abandoning principles, and that is how successes end. Kanter commends three principles in particular for renewal of the faltering American enterprise… * Open minds. In the clash between orthodoxy and creativity, opt for the spirit of discovery and progress. * Higher purpose and sense of meaning. Kanter noted the emergence of "values-based capitalism." One example she knows from her own consulting work is IBM. Shortly after the new CEO Sam Palmisano took over in 2002, he instituted an online "ValuesJam" with 300,000 employees. The result was a declaration that IBM stands for "Innovation that matters-- for our company and for the world." She has seen that value played out in IBM public service activities such as the World Community Grid, which engages idle CPU time on computers connected to the Internet (740,000 so far) to solve scientific problems in HIV-AIDS, cancer, muscular dystrophy, and human genomics. * Common ground. Inclusiveness and shared responsibility is a particularly American principle first noted and celebrated by Alexis de Tocqueville. It is reflected in Bill Clinton's observation, "Big government is being replaced by big citizens." There's been enough panic and winter in America, Kanter concluded. It's time for some endless summer. Get out and connect with the street, with nature, with the world.

Juan Enriquez: Mapping the Frontier of Knowledge

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 19:30:00 -0700

### Mapping Life "All life is imperfectly transmitted code," Enriquez began, "and it is promiscuous." Thus discoveries like the one last month of an entire bacterial genome inside the DNA of a fruitfly is exploding the old tree-of-life models of evolution. The emerging map replaces gene lineages with gene webs. "There is a whole genomic continent to discover, and we've just mapped part of the coastline so far." Noting that his friend Craig Venter has just transplanted the DNA from one microbe into a different one, and booted it up there, Enriquez said that humans are going to be increasingly designing and controlling the code of life. "We'll do with bacteria what we do with our pets." Likewise new maps of brain function are raising questions such as, "Can we model the brain, can we download it, can we transplant it, can we reboot it?" Prostheses such as robotic arms used to be driven by muscle signals, but now they are being controlled directly from the brain. Enriquez noted that some nations are charging ahead with such technology and the education that drives it while others cripple themselves by holding back. Portugal had colonies throughout the world, he said, but they never respected the natives enough to help educate them, and so left intellectual blight behind them and at home. London and Paris are full of Indian and Chinese restaurants, but there are none in Portugal. He showed a photo of a billboard that read: "Portugal-- We were a world power for about 15 minutes." The new maps of life, he said, will profoundly affect countries, business, religion and ethics. Being alive in the midst a scientific renaissance like this is Christmas every day. During Q&A Enriquez lamented that the pharmacology industry has retreated to doing just marketing now instead of discovery, haven been driven into a defensive crouch by public misapplication of the "Precautionary Principle" that all new technologies are guilty until proven innocent, and innocence is impossible to prove. Thus the potential death of tens is used to head off treatments that could save tens of thousands. I asked him, "What would you call the opposite of the Precautionary Principle?" Kevin Kelly offered from the audience, "How about the Pro-actionary Principle?"

Rip Anderson & Gwyneth Cravens: Power to Save the World

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 19:30:00 -0700

### Nuclear Footprint In the early 1980s Gwyneth Cravens was one of the protesters against the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant on Long Island, and also participated in ban-the-bomb rallies. After 15 years of deepening familiarity with nuclear power, she says she still would ban the bomb, but she now regrets that the Shoreham reactor was shut down. Who changed her mind was a nuclear expert at Sandia Labs in Albuquerque, D. Richard Anderson, known as "Rip." "Here was someone who thinks in thousands of years, about climate, about nuclear waste storage," she said. "He applies to nuclear issues the same probabilistic risk assessment that helps us understand what we're facing with climate change." One concept that altered Cravens' perspective was realizing what "baseload" requires. Rip Anderson, on the stage with her, explained that baseload is the fundamental currency of grid power. It is massive power constantly available 24/7. It comes from only three sources-- fossil fuels, hydro-electric dams, and nuclear. Hydro is maxed out. Fossil fuels have to be cut back to slow global warming. That leaves only nuclear growth to handle the expected doubling of energy demand in the world by 2030. Anderson added that his first scientific discipline was oceanography, so one of his greatest concerns about CO2 loading of the atmosphere is that the resulting carbonic acid in the oceans is dissolving the calcifying organisms and could effectively end the crucial carbon sink that oceans provide. Cravens went into detail about the harm brought by coal, which currently provides 51% of US electricity (while hydro is 7%, nuclear 20%). Estimates are that coal pollution causes 24,000 deaths a year in the US, 400,000 a year in China (not counting the 5,000 who die annually in Chinese coal mines). She also mentioned the still-incomplete science of the effects of low radiation-- the amounts below 10,000 millirems. People encounter much higher levels of natural radiation at higher elevations and in some radon-rich areas, but there is no indication of higher cancer rates in those places. The fears of long-lingering cancer effects in the Chernobyl region have not proven out. Comparing the environmental footprint of nuclear versus coal was the most persuasive mind-changer for Cravens. Coal involves vast quantities of mine spoil, vast quantities of fuel, vast quantities of pollution (including mercury and uranium), and vast quantities of carbon dioxide poured into the atmosphere. Nuclear, by contrast, uses the most concentrated form of energy in the world, the plants are small, and the waste amounts to one Coke can per person's lifetime of energy use. There is said to be no geological repository for nuclear waste yet, but Rip Anderson pointed out that the WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant) in a deep salt formation in New Mexico has been operating since 1999. It now handles only military waste, but there is no reason except political that it could not take all of our civilian spent fuel. Two questions from the audience addressed possible limitations on fast growth of nuclear energy in the world. One was, "Won't we quickly run out of uranium?" Anderson said that 10% of US electricity currently comes from recycled Soviet nuclear warheads, and we haven't begun to draw the energy from decommissioned US warheads. The price for uranium ore has been so low in recent decades that mines closed and discovery stopped. Now that the price is rising, mines are reopening and new reserves are being found. (They're mostly in Canada and Australia, some in the US.) Meanwhile, spent fuel in the US still has 98% of its energy in it. Once we reprocess the spent fuel the way the rest of the world does, we will extract more of that energy, and the final amount of waste will be drastically smaller. Second question: "Are there enough nuclear engineers in the pipeline to deal with a worldwide nuclear renaissance?" Answer: No. That's the most limiting resource at this point. Gwenyth Cravens is the author of [_Power to Save the World_.](http://www.amazon.com/Power-Save-World-Nuclear-Energy/dp/0307266567/ref=sr_1_1/102-7773207-6916907?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1190047587/lono0a-20)

Alex Wright: Glut: Mastering Information Though the Ages

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 19:30:00 -0700

### A Series of Information Explosions As usual, microbes led the way. Bacteria have swarmed in intense networks for 3.5 billion years. Then a hierarchical form emerged with the first nucleated cells that were made up of an enclosed society of formerly independent organisms. That's the pattern for the evolution of information, Alex Wright said. Networks coalesce into hierarchies, which then form a new level of networks, which coalesce again, and so on. Thus an unending series of information explosions is finessed. In humans, classification schemes emerged everywhere, defining how things are connected in larger contexts. Researchers into "folk taxonomies" have found that all cultures universally describe things they care about in hierarchical layers, and those hierarchies are usually five layers deep. Family tree hierarchies were accorded to the gods, who were human-like personalities but also represented various natural forces. Starting 30,000 years ago the "ice age information explosion" brought the transition to collaborative big game hunting, cave paintings, and elaborate decorative jewelry that carried status information. It was the beginning of information's "release from social proximity." 5,000 years ago in Sumer, accountants began the process toward writing, beginning with numbers, then labels and lists, which enabled bureaucracy. Scribes were just below kings in prestige. Finally came written narratives such as Gilgamesh. The move from oral culture to literate culture is profound. Oral is additive, aggregative, participatory, and situational, where literate is subordinate, analytic, objective, and abstract. (One phenomenon of current Net culture is re-emergence of oral forms in email, twittering, YouTube, etc.) Wright honored the sequence of information-ordering visionaries who brought us to our present state. In 1883 Charles Cutter devised a classification scheme that led in part to the Library of Congress system and devised an apparatus of keyboard and wires that would fetch the desired book. H.G. Wells proposed a "world brain" of data and imagined that it would one day wake up. Teilhard de Chardin anticipated an "etherization of human consciousness" into a global noosphere. The greatest unknown revolutionary was the Belgian Paul Otlet. In 1895 he set about freeing the information in books from their bindings. He built a universal decimal classification and then figured out how that organized data could be explored, via "links" and a "web." In 1910 Otlet created a "radiated library" called the Mundameum in Brussels that managed search queries in a massive way until the Nazis destroyed the service. Alex Wright showed an [astonishing video of how Otlet's distributed telephone-plus-screen system worked](https://youtube.com/watch?v=qwRN5m64I7Y). Wright concluded with the contributions of Vannevar Bush ("associative trails" in his Memex system), Eugene Garfield's Science Citation Index, the predecessor of page ranking. Doug Engelbart's working hypertext system in the "mother of all demos." And Ted Nelson who helped inspire Engelbart and Berners-Lee and who Wright considers "directly responsible for the generation of the World Wide Web."

Francis Fukuyama: 'The End of History' Revisited

The Long Now Foundation — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 19:30:00 -0700

### Democracy versus Culture Francis Fukuyama began by describing the four most significant challenges to the thesis in his famed 1992 book,_[The End of History and the Last Man](http://www.amazon.com/End-History-Last-Man/dp/0743284550/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-4300234-8355129?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1183410555/lono0a-20)_. In the book he proposed that humanity's economic progress over the past 10,000 years was driven by the accumulation of science and technology over time. That connection is direct and reliable. Less direct and reliable, but very important, is the sequence from economic progress to the adoption of liberal democracy. Political modernization accompanies economic modernization. This is a deep force of history, the book claims. Fukuyama describes the rise of the idea of human rights in the West as a secularization of Christian doctrine. That led to accountability mechanisms-- "You can't have good governance without feedback loops." Once there is a propertied middle class, they demand political participation. The threshold for that demand appears to about $6,000 per capita per year. It's hard to get to, but hundreds of millions of people in the world are making that climb right now. China and Russia will be a test of his thesis, Fukuyama said. They are getting wealthier. If they democratize in the next twenty years, he's right. If they remain authoritarian, he's wrong. Fukuyama is most intrigued by a challenge that comes from his old teacher and continuing friend, Samuel Huntington, author of _The Clash of Civilizations_. Culture can trump modernization, says Huntington-- current radical Islam is an example. Fukuyama agrees that people at the fringe of modernization feel a sense of onslaught, and they can respond as Bolsheviks and Fascists did in the 20th century. "A Hitler or a Bin Laden proclaims, 'I can tell you who you are.'" A second challenge to the universalism of liberal democracy is that it does not yet work internationally. Fukuyama agrees, noting that the major current obstacle is America's overwhelming hegemony. He expects no solution from the UN, but an overlapping set of international institutions could eventually do the job. A third challenge is the continuing poverty trap for so many in the world. Fukuyama says it takes a national state with the rule of law and time to learn from mistakes before you get economic takeoff. He sees later colonialism, done on the cheap (instead of with the patient institution building that England did in India), as a major source of the world's current failed and crippled states. The final challenge that impresses Fukuyama is the possibility that technology may now be accelerating too fast to cure its own problems the way it has done in the past. Climate change could be an example of that. And Fukuyama particularly worries that biotechnology might so transform human nature that it will fragment humanity irreparably. While he sees meaning in history, Fukuyama said it's not a matter of iron law. Human agency counts. History swerves on who wins a battle or an election. We are responsible. Two further angles on Fukuyama's thesis emerged at dinner. One concerned how society's morality should express itself in dealing with the threat/promise of biotechnology. Conservative Fukuyama promoted strict government regulation while the liberals (and libertarians) in the room said the market and Internet should sort it out. Kevin Kelly asked Fukuyama, "Do you think human nature is as good as it can be?" I proposed to Washington-based Fukuyama that he was in the midst of a classic argument between the coasts. East Coast says, "Ready, aim, don't fire." West Coast says, "Fire, aim, ready." Then there's the European Union. In his talk Fukuyama praised it as the fullest realization of his theory. At dinner he acknowledged his concern that Europe may be headed toward permanent conflict with its growing immigrant populations, whose first allegiance continues to be to their own cultures.

Paul Hawken: The New Great Transformation

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 19:30:00 -0700

### Humanity's immune system The title of Paul Hawken's talk, "The New Great Transformation," has two referents, he explained. Economist Karl Polanyi's 1944 book, _The Great Transformation_ , said that the "market society" and modern nation state emerged together in Europe after 1700 and divided society in ways that have yet to be healed. Karen Armstrong's 2006 book, _The Great Transformation_ , explores "the Axial Age" between 800 and 200 BC when the world's great religions and philosophies first took shape. They were all initially social movements, she says, acting on revulsion against the violence and injustice of their times. Both books describe conditions in which "the future is stolen and sold to the present," said Hawken-- a situation we are having to deal with yet again. His new book, [_Blessed Unrest_](http://www.amazon.com/Blessed-Unrest-Largest-Movement-Coming/dp/0670038520/lono0a-20), was inspired by the countless business cards that earnest environmentalists would hand him after his lectures all over the world. After a while he had 7,000, and he wondered, "How many environmental groups are there in the world?" He began actively building a now-public database, [WiserEarth.org](http://www.wiserearth.org/), which includes social justice and indigenous rights organizations because he found they indivisibly overlap in their values and activities. The database now has 105,000 such organizations. The still-emerging taxonomy of their "areas of focus" has 414 categories, amounting to a "curriculum of the 21st century"-- Acid Rain, Living Wages, Tropical Moist Forests, Peacemaking, Democratic Reform, Sustainable Cities, Environmental Toxicology, Watershed Management, Human Trafficking, Mountaintop Removal, Pesticides, Climate Change, Refugees, Women's Safety, Eco-villages, Fair Trade… Extrapolating from carefully inventoried regions to those yet to be tallied, he estimates there are over 1,000,000 such organizations in the world, adding up to the largest and fastest growing Movement in history. The phenomenon has been overlooked because it lacks the customary hallmarks of a movement-- no charismatic leaders, no grand theory or ideology, no "ism," no defining events. The new activist groups are about dispersing power rather than aggregating power. Their focus is on ideas rather than ideology-- ideologies are clung to, but ideas can be tried and tossed or improved. The point is to solve problems, usually from the bottom up. The movement can never be divided because it is already atomized. What's going on? Hawken wondered if humanity might have some collective intelligence that we don't yet understand. The metaphor he finds most useful is the immune system, which is the most complex system in our body-- more complex than the entire Internet-- massive, distributed, subtle, ingenious, and effective. The opposite of a hierarchical army, its power is in the density of its network. It deals with problems not through frontal attack but complex negotiation and rapprochement. Much of the new movement, Hawken said, was inspired, at root, by the slavery abolitionists and by the Transcendentalists Emerson and his student Thoreau. Emerson declared that "everything is connected," and Thoreau wound up going to jail (and making it cool) by taking that idea seriously in social-justice terms. Now, as in the Axial Age, activism comes from acting on the realization that "all life is sacred."

Steven Johnson: The Long Zoom

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 11 May 2007 19:30:00 -0700

### Consilience defeats miasma Steven Johnson began his long zoom survey with the "prior art" of Joyce's Stephen Daedalus locating himself in himself, his neighborhood, Dublin, on out to the universe. The value of a long zoom is in identifying and employing every scale between the very large and very small, noticing how they change each other when held in the mind at the same time. Johnson's core story (and current book) concerned London in 1854, when it was the largest city in the world and in history with 2.5 million people. London famously stank. Cesspools filled basements, slaughterhouses were anywhere, garbage piled up. Medicine at the time held that disease was caused by "miasma," foul air, noxious vapors. "All smell is disease," declared a Doctor Chadwick. The authorities decided that the way to cure the frequent cholera epidemics in London was to get rid of the bad odor-- pump the sewage into the Thames, which people drank. The cholera got worse. Johnson's goal with his book, [_The Ghost Map_](http://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Map-Steven-Johnson/dp/1594489254/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-6115062-9930528?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1179248667/lono0a-20), was to figure out why the wrong theory of disease lingered so long, and what it took to correct it. The answer, he proposes, is in the perspective of the long zoom. The celebrated story goes that John Snow discovered the polluted-water cause of cholera by drawing a "ghost map" of the cholera deaths concentrated around the Broad Street pump in Soho. What really happened is more interesting. Snow had been publishing his theory of water pollution causing cholera for five years. In August of 1854, a horrifying 10% of his neighborhood in Soho perished from the disease. Then he drew up the map, drawing on public statistics provided by the city, and on the street savvy of a popular vicar named Rev. Henry Whitehead. The map confirmed his theory and persuaded the medical establishment and city authorities. In just 12 years, cholera was completely eradicated from London. In Johnson's view, one long zoom had displaced another. The miasma theory of cholera embraced a nested set of scales ranging, from large to small:_cultural traditions - urban development - technology - contemporary politics - "great men" \- human sensory system_. Bad smell, bad people, bad disease. With John Snow's map, a different long zoom took over:_cities - data systems - neighborhood - humans - organs - microbes_. The combination of city density and open-source data about the epidemic made the ghost map possible and persuasive. Doctor Snow noticed that the bodily symptoms of cholera looked like they were caused by something swallowed rather than something inhaled. The data had to be extremely strong to overcome the bias of human sensory apparatus-- our alarm system of smell can detect minute amounts of contagion, but we cannot see them. It took a neighborhood map to defeat what the nose thought it knew. Johnson proposed that another word for the long zoom perspective is "consilience"-- a fine old word, revived by Edward O. Wilson, that links multiple disciplines and multiple levels into a whole body of knowledge with extra benefits the separate disciplines lack. Science and culture can blend rigorously. What is discovered in consilience is not just scales of distance or time but nested systems. Johnson moved on to contemporary popular culture, drawing on his research for his brain book ([_Emergence_](http://www.amazon.com/Emergence-Connected-Brains-Cities-Software/dp/0684868768/ref=sr_1_3/102-6115062-9930528?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1179248720/lono0a-20)) and his book on video games and TV ([_Everything Bad Is Good For You_](http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Bad-Good-Steven-Johnson/dp/B000O17CYM/ref=sr_1_2/102-6115062-9930528?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1179248720/lono0a-20)). Back in the three-network days of "Gilligan's Island," the guiding principle was "least objectionable programming." Now with DVDs and TiVo, the guideline is "most repeatable programming"-- material that will reward you if you study it again and again. Thus a current hit TV series about a very different island, "Lost," has a whole horde of characters and purveys many-leveled complexities and mysteries embracing _geography - economics - technology - sociology - biology - ontology_. Viewers are invited to wonder, among a great many other things, whether the whole damn thing is a dream, and, if so, whose? Our brain is wired with "seeking circuitry" and relishes exercising "the regime of competence." TV shows like "Lost" and video games like "World of Warcraft" are addictive because they reward exploration. Instead of employing narrative arcs, they keep you in a state of being always challenged but not quite overwhelmed as you ascend from skill level to skill level. We are learning to master complexity, to revel in long zooms like Google Earth or the forthcoming Will Wright game, "Spore." A few years ago, Johnson was introducing his 7-year-old nephew to Wright's early video game, "Sim City"-- "Ooh, look at the big buildings!" Shortly, Johnson's factory district was failing. His nephew piped up. "Lower your industrial tax rate," said the child. Johnson ended the talk with another line from James Joyce: "It was very big to think about everything and everywhere." "It's never been easier," said Johnson. PS… Also announced at this talk is the [North American Premiere of Brian Eno's 77 Million Paintings](https://longnow.org/77m/).

Frans Lanting: Life's Journey Through Time

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 19:30:00 -0700

### The deep past in the remote present It began on a New Jersey beach. Frans Lanting was photographing horseshoe crabs for a story about how they are being ground up for eel bait and at the same time their blood is used for drug testing--a $100 million industry. The crabs have primordial eyesight, which they employ mainly for finding sex partners. Photographing the horseshoes having a spawning orgy one spooky twilight, Lanting felt like he was suddenly back in the Silurian, 430 million years ago… So Lanting and his wife Chris Eckstrom set out in search of "time capsules," places on the present Earth where he could find and photograph all the ancient stages of life. A two-year project expanded to seven years. On a live volcano in Hawaii he found the naked planet of 4.3 billion years ago-- molten rock flowing, zero life. "Your boots melt. You smell early Earth." On the western coast of Australia he shot a rare surviving living reef of stromatolites, made of the cyanobacteria that three billion years ago transformed the Earth by filling the atmosphere with oxygen. Lanting took pains to photograph without blue sky in the background, because the sky was not blue until the cyanobacteria had generated a planet's worth of oxygen. Life's journey through time is a story of innovations, Lanting said. Lichens were the first to colonize land, followed by shelled creatures that could carry ocean inside them-- crabs, turtles, and snails. In Australia Lanting photographed mudskippers--amphibious fish that use their pectoral fins to crawl around on mud and even climb trees. Dinosaurs once browsed on land plants that defended themselves with ferocious spiky leaves. A survivor of that battle is the Araucaria tree in Chile. Lanting planted one in his garden near Santa Cruz and photographed it there. Study of the first feathered reptile, the archaeopteryx, suggested that the contemporary bird with the most similar flight style is the frigate bird, and Lanting photographed one looking like an airborne fossil in the Galapagos Islands. Asteroids and climate change made new niches and new innovations. Following the Cretaceous extinction 65 million years ago, mammals deployed their toothed jaws. Drier climate 25 million years ago created grasslands. When the forests dried, some apes took to walking upright in the savannahs of Africa. And some of those got around to analyzing DNA and noticing that life's entire history is written there. Lanting ended his dazzling show with two demonstrations. One was an 8-minute segment of an hour-long orchestral version of "Life's Journey Through Time," composed by Philip Glass, with a brilliant multi-media version of Lanting's photos. The music and the image dynamics gain complexity stage by stage in synch with the growing complexity of life. (It would be glorious to see this performed locally with the San Francisco Symphony. The ideal occasion would be the opening of the new California Academy of Sciences building in Golden Gate Park next year.) Lanting also did a quick demo of the timeline version of his photos (and videos) on his website. The level of its sophistication drew cheers and applause from the Web-savvy San Francisco audience. See for yourself: The take home version of this talk is Lanting's book, [_Life: A Journey Through Time_](http://www.amazon.com/Life-Journey-Through-Frans-Lanting/dp/3822839949/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-8919416-0579929?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1177966282/lono0a-20), and is a stunning oversized edition published by Taschen. P.S. Lanting's presentation in particular is worth seeing in high-quality video.

Brian Fagan: We Are Not the First to Suffer Through Climate Change

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 18:30:00 -0800

### Catastrophic drought is coming back There are two kinds of historians, Brian Fagan says, parachutists and truffle hunters. Parachutists command an overview of the landscape, while truffle hunters dig deeply to uncover marvelous treasures. Fagan is a parachutist. In his talk Fagan emphasized a wide view of human history as it unrolls in the landscape of climate. In our lookout from the parachute, we can see evidence from ice cores, tree rings, fossil pollen, and historical records, all pointing to the conclusion that people in the past have suffered through global warming periods before. So what happened? Using data from truffle-hunting historians, Fagan told of how vineyard harvest records in Europe show that England became so warm during the period between 800-1250 AD that England not only had vineyards in its central provinces but it also exported wine to France. The medieval warm period had repercussions throughout society. Iceland and Scandinavia warmed up enough to grow cereal crops, tree lines elevated in mountain areas, and there were longer growing seasons everywhere on the continent. This warming up of agriculture initiated the first vast clear-cutting of European forests. In the short 200 years between 1100 and 1300, from one-third to one-half of European wooded wilderness was deforested to make way for fields and pastures -- shaping the lovely farm scenes we now associate with Europe. (Today only Poland has any remaining virgin forests). Fagan says the myth of the medieval warm period is that it was warm. There were all kinds of weather extremes. In 1315 it started to rain for seven years. The newly cleared and naked hills eroded, dams burst, disease spread, and prolonged drought followed. And not just in Europe. Mesoamerica was jolted by long droughts. The Mayan pyramids at Tikal were engineered to act as water collection reservoirs. The collapse of their empire, and others in South America such as the Inca in Peru, are correlated to prolonged droughts. Indeed, says Fagan, the elephant in the climate room is drought. As recently as the 1800s, prolonged droughts killed 20-30 million people in India during the British Raj period. We have a tendency to believe that modern technology has alleviated our susceptibility to drought, and it has -- except for the billions of people on earth today who are living as subsistence farmers. It is upon these people that Fagan wanted us to focus our attention and care, because it is upon these people that the most serious consequences of global warming will fall. Referring to his own experience of many years as an archeologist in Africa, he painted a vivid image of what a severe drought entails and how a drought can act like a cascading disruption and rapidly destroy a vibrant culture to the point where it disappears completely. Forget the rocketing "hockey stick" of global warming, he urges. Even mild climate warming produces prolonged droughts, and we should expect more of them. There's already been a 25% increase in droughts globally since 1990. In the next 100 years, we can expect the number of people to be affected by droughts to rise from 3% of the world's population to 30%. The lesson Fagan wanted us to leave with was that the effects of global warming will be felt greatest on marginal land and marginal peoples -- many far from the sea and rising sea levels - and that because of their marginality, the consequences of prolonged drought will not just be inconvenient, but devastating. In the question and answer period, he was asked what the stricken people can do about it? "Move," he said, "is the only option." If the world is heating up, where would he move to? "Canada. It will be dryer, much warmer, and their politics are reasonable."

Vernor Vinge: What If the Singularity Does NOT Happen?

The Long Now Foundation — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 18:30:00 -0800

### Non-Singularity scenarios Vinge began by declaring that he still believes that a Singularity event in the next few decades is the most likely outcome-- meaning that self-accelerating technologies will speed up to the point of so profound a transformation that the other side of it is unknowable. And this transformation will be driven by Artificial Intelligences (AIs) that, once they become self-educating and self-empowering, soar beyond human capacity with shocking suddenness. He added that he is not convinced by the fears of some that the AIs would exterminate humanity. He thinks they would be wise enough to keep us around as a fallback and backup-- intelligences that can actually function without massive connectivity! (Later in the Q&A I asked him about the dangerous period when AI's are smart enough to exterminate us but not yet wise enough to keep us around. How long would that period be? "About four hours," said Vinge .) Since a Singularity makes long-term thinking impractical, Vinge was faced with the problem of how to say anything useful in a Seminar About Long-term Thinking, so he came up with a plausible set of scenarios that would be Singularity-free. He noted that they all require that we achieve no faster-than-light space travel. The overall non-Singularity condition he called "The Age of Failed Dreams." The main driver is that software simply continues failing to keep pace with hardware improvements. One after another, enormous billion-dollar software projects simply do not run, as has already happened at the FBI, air traffic control, IRS, and many others. Some large automation projects fail catastrophically, with planes running into each. So hardware development eventually lags, and materials research lags, and no strong AI develops. To differentiate visually his three sub-scenarios, Vinge showed a graph ranging over the last 50,000 and next 50,000 years, with power (in maximum discrete sources) plotted against human populaton, on a log-log scale. Thus the curve begins at the lower left with human power of 0.3 kilowatts and under a hundred thousand population, curves up through steam engines with one megawatt of power and a billion population, up further to present plants generating 13 gigawatts. His first scenario was a bleak one called "A Return to MADness." Driven by increasing environmental stress (that a Singularity might have cured), nations return to nuclear confrontation and policies of "Mutually Assured Destruction." One "bad afternoon," it all plays out, humanity blasts itself back to the Stone Age and then gradually dwindles to extinction. His next scenario was a best-case alternative named "The Golden Age," where population stabilizes around 3 billion, and there is a peaceful ascent into "the long, good time." Humanity catches on that the magic ingredient is education, and engages the full plasticity of the human psyche, empowered by hope, information, and communication. A widespread enlightened populism predominates, with the kind of tolerance and wise self-interest we see embodied already in Wikipedia. One policy imperative of this scenario would be a demand for research on "prolongevity"-- "Young old people are good for the future of humanity." Far from deadening progress, long-lived youthful old people would have a personal stake in the future reaching out for centuries, and would have personal perspective reaching back for centuries. The final scenario, which Vinge thought the most probable, he called "The Wheel of Time." Catastrophes and recoveries of various amplitudes follow one another. Enduring heroes would be archaeologists and "software dumpster divers" who could recover lost tools and techniques. What should we do about the vulnerabilities in these non-Singularity scenarios? Vinge 's main concern is that we are running only one, perilously narrow experiment on Earth. "The best hope for long-term survival is self-sufficient off-Earth settlements." We need a real space program focussed on bringing down the cost of getting mass into space, instead of "the gold-plated sham" of present-day NASA. There is a common critique that there is no suitable place for humans elsewhere in the Solar System, and the stars are too far. "In the long now," Vinge observed, "the stars are not too far." **(Note: Vinge's detailed notes for this talk, and the graphs, may be found online at:****[http://rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/ vinge /longnow/index.htm](http://rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/longnow/index.htm) ** **)**

Philip Tetlock: Why Foxes Are Better Forecasters Than Hedgehogs

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 18:30:00 -0800

### Ignore confident forecasters "What is it about politics that makes people so dumb?" From his perspective as a psychology researcher, Philip Tetlock watched political advisors on the left and the right make bizarre rationalizations about their wrong predictions at the time of the rise of Gorbachev in the 1980s and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. (Liberals were sure that Reagan was a dangerous idiot; conservatives were sure that the USSR was permanent.) The whole exercise struck Tetlock as what used to be called an "outcome-irrelevant learning structure." No feedback, no correction. He observes the same thing is going on with expert opinion about the Iraq War. Instead of saying, "I evidently had the wrong theory," the experts declare, "It almost went my way," or "It was the right mistake to make under the circumstances," or "I'll be proved right later," or "The evilness of the enemy is still the main event here." Tetlock's summary: "Partisans across the opinion spectrum are vulnerable to occasional bouts of ideologically induced insanity." He determined to figure out a way to keep score on expert political forecasts, even though it is a notoriously subjective domain (compared to, say, medical advice), and "there are no control groups in history." So Tetlock took advantage of getting tenure to start a long-term research project now 18 years old to examine in detail the outcomes of expert political forecasts about international affairs. He studied the aggregate accuracy of 284 experts making 28,000 forecasts, looking for pattern in their comparative success rates. Most of the findings were negative-- conservatives did no better or worse than liberals; optimists did no better or worse than pessimists. Only one pattern emerged consistently. "How you think matters more than what you think." It's a matter of judgement style, first expressed by the ancient Greek warrior poet Archilochus: "The fox knows many things; the hedgehog one great thing." The idea was later expanded by essayist Isaiah Berlin. In Tetlock's interpretation, Hedgehogs have one grand theory (Marxist, Libertarian, whatever) which they are happy to extend into many domains, relishing its parsimony, and expressing their views with great confidence. Foxes, on the other hand are skeptical about grand theories, diffident in their forecasts, and ready to adjust their ideas based on actual events. The aggregate success rate of Foxes is significantly greater, Tetlock found, especially in short-term forecasts. And Hedgehogs routinely fare worse than Foxes, especially in long-term forecasts. They even fare worse than normal attention-paying dilletantes -- apparently blinded by their extensive expertise and beautiful theory. Furthermore, Foxes win not only in the accuracy of their predictions but also the accuracy of the likelihood they assign to their predictions-- in this they are closer to the admirable discipline of weather forecasters. The value of Hedgehogs is that they occasionally get right the farthest-out predictions-- civil war in Yugoslavia, Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, the collapse of the Internet Bubble. But that comes at the cost of a great many wrong far-out predictions-- Dow 36,000, global depression, nuclear attack by developing nations. Hedgehogs annoy only their political opposition, while Foxes annoy across the political spectrum, in part because the smartest Foxes cherry-pick idea fragments from the whole array of Hedgehogs. Bottom line… The political expert who bores you with an cloud of "howevers" is probably right about what's going to happen. The charismatic expert who exudes confidence and has a great story to tell is probably wrong. And to improve the quality of your own predictions, keep brutally honest score. Enjoy being wrong, admitting to it and learning from it, as much as you enjoy being right. (Iraq footnote. I asked Tetlock to opine on which experts were most right about how things have gone in the Iraq War. He said the most accurate in this case were the regional experts, who opposed the invasion, and what they are predicting now is a partition of Iraq into Kurdish, Shia, and Sunni areas.)

Philip Rosedale: 'Second Life:' What Do We Learn If We Digitize EVERYTHING?

The Long Now Foundation — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 18:30:00 -0800

### 2nd Life takes off What is real life coming to owe digital life? After a couple years in the flat part of exponential growth, the steep part is now arriving for the massive multi-player online world construction kit called "Second Life." With 1.7 million accounts, membership in "Second Life" is growing by 20,000 per day. The current doubling rate of "residents" is 7 months, still shortening, which means the growth is (for now) hyperexponential. For this talk the founder and CEO of "Second Life," Philip Rosedale, tried something new for him-- a simultaneous demo and talk. His online avatar, "Philip Linden," was on the screen showing things while the in-theater Philip Rosedale was conjecturing about what it all means. "This is a game of 'Can I interest you more in what I'm saying than what's going on on the screen?'" He showed how new arrivals go through the "gateway" experience of creating their own onscreen avatar, explaining that because intense creativity is so cheap, easy, and experimental, the online personas become strongly held. "You can have multiple avatars in 'Second Life,' but the overall average is 1.25 avatars per person." The median age of users is 31, and the oldest users spend the most time in the world (over 80 hours per week for 10 percent of the residents). Women are 43 percent of the customers. The on-screen Philip Linden was carrying Rosedale's talk notes (handwritten, scanned, and draped onto a board in the digital world). Rosedale talked about the world while his avatar flew ("Everyone flies-- why not?") to a music club in which a live song performance was going on (the real singer crooning into her computer in real time from somewhere.) The singer recognized Philip Linden in the on-screen audience and greeted him from the on-screen stage. "More is different," Rosedale explained. People think they want total and solitary control of their world, but the result of that is uninteresting. To get the emergent properties that make "Second Life" so enthralling, it has to be one contiguous world with everyone in it. At present it comprises about 100 square miles, mostly mainland, with some 5,000 islands (all adding up to 35 terrabytes running in 5,000 servers). Defying early predictions, the creativity in "Second Life" has not plateaued but just keeps escalating. Everybody is inspired to keep topping each other with ever cooler things. There are tens of thousands of clothing designers. Unlike the aesthetic uniformity of imagined digital worlds like in the movie "The Matrix," "Second Life" is suffused with variety. It is "the sum of our dreams." The burgeoning token economy in "Second Life" is directly connected to the real-world economy with an exchange rate of around 270 Linden dollars to 1 US dollar. There are 7,000 businesses operating in "Second Life," leading this month to its first real-world millionaire (Metaverse real estate mogul Anshe Chung). At present "Second Life" has annual economic activity of about $70 million US dollars, growing rapidly. As Jaron Lanier predicted in the early '90s, the only scarce resource in virtual reality is creativity, and it becomes valued above everything. Freed of the cost of goods and the plodding quality of real-world time, Rosedale explained, people experiment fast and strange, get feedback, and experiment again. They orgy on the things they think they want, play them out, get bored, and move on. They get "married," start businesses with strangers-- "There are 40-person businesses made of people who have never met in real life." Real-world businesses hold meetings in "Second Life" because they're more fun and encourage a higher degree of truth telling. Pondering the future, Rosedale said that every aspect of the quality of shared virtual life will keep improving as the technology accelerates and the number of creators online keeps multiplying. ("Second Life" is now moving toward a deeper order of creativity by releasing most of its world-building software into open source mode.) Real-world artifacts like New York City could become regarded like museums. "As the fastest moving, most creative stuff in our society increasingly takes place in the virtual world, that will change how we look at the real world," Rosedale concluded.

Larry Brilliant, Richard Rockefeller, & Katherine Fulton: The Deeper News About the New Philanthropy

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 18:30:00 -0800

### Philanthropic stamina 10,000 families in the US, Katherine Fulton reported, have assets of $100 million or more. That's up from 7,000 just a couple years ago. Most of that money is "on the sidelines." The poor and the middle class are far more generous in their philanthropy, proportionally, than the very wealthy. Philanthropy across the board is in the midst of intense, potentially revolutionary, transition, she said. There's new money, new leaders, new rules, new technology, and new needs. Where great wealth used to come mainly from inheritance and oil, now it comes from success in high technology and finance-- and ideas and expectations from those business experiences inform (and sometimes over-simplify) the new philanthropy. Some of the great older institutions like the Rockefeller Foundation are radically reorganizing around new ideas and opportunities. But still the greatest amount comes from individuals, many of whom are now "giving while living" instead of handing over the task to heirs. One major new instrument for philanthropy are the community foundations, "the mutual funds of philanthropy, where donors can outsource their strategy." There are 1,000 such organizations in the world, 700 of them in the US, led by innovators such as Acumen Fund, Social Venture Partners, New Profit Inc., and Women's Funding Network. Online giving is growing rapidly, including the development of philanthropic marketplaces for direct, selective, fine-grain giving. Give India, for example, is a national marketspace of charity exchange. "By 2020," Katherine predicted, "we will see a headline, OPEN SOURCE PHILANTHROPIC PORTAL TOPS $1 BILLION IN GIFTS." Katherine drew a matrix to classify kinds of philanthropy, with Short-term & Responsive on the left, Long-term & Systemic on the right; Personal & Local on the bottom, Global on the top. An important trend is from the lower left to upper right, from local and short-term toward global and systemic, exemplified by Bill Gates's move from bringing computers to American schools to bringing health to Africa. "Philanthropy is how we make the long now personal," she said. The trait most often missing in philanthropy, including the new philanthropy, is stamina, patience. "Instead of rewarding success with continued funding, the givers get bored and look for something new. Really effective giving requires deep contextual understanding and tolerance for ambiguity. My advice to new donors is, 'Pick at least one difficult and complex issue and stick with it, and join with others to work on it.'" The greatest needs require philanthropic stamina but will also reward it. She quoted Danny Hillis: "There are problems that are impossible if you think about them in two-year terms-- which everyone does- but they're easy if you think if fifty-year terms." Richard Rockefeller and Larry Brilliant joined Katherine on the stage, and discussion got going that wound up lasting to 1am at dinner with the sponsors of the Seminar series. One subject was the isolation that often comes with great personal wealth. Katherine emphasized that donors have to visit up close with whatever they're giving toward. Dr. Rockefeller supported that, describing how different his view was of Doctors Without Borders once he had worked with the physicians in the field in Peru and Nigeria. He said that direct experience helps free you from lots of theories that are just wrong, and from philanthropy that is a projection of your own neuroses. Questions from the audience revealed a continuing problem with the whole social sector, which is the lack of clear mechanisms of self-correction and accountability. Government has checks and balances. Business has the bottom line. But "it's hard to speak truth to philanthropy," Katherine said. Richard said he looked closely at a $20 million effort by the Robert Wood Johnson to evaluate its programs and was unimpressed by the result. Larry Brilliant added, "And the new philanthropy is even less accountable than the old." Over dinner the subject came back to the 10,000 families with over $100 million dollars, most of it inactive. One problem is that giving really large grants is harder than small grants. Only universities are well geared to attract and receive the multi-million dollar gifts that result in named buildings and additions to already bloated endowments. New institutions and mechanisms are needed for directing large grants in new directions. And something generational is going on, Katherine mused. The generation of Andrew Carnegie and Richard's great grandfather John D. Rockefeller had a strong religious tradition that inspired them to public generosity and inventiveness. Those who came of age in the 1960s and early '70s had their experience with political activism as a driver for later philanthropy. "But I notice that many who became adults during and after Ronald Reagan seem to have no framework at all for giving."

John Baez: Zooming Out in Time

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 19:30:00 -0700

### Welcome to the Anthropocene The graphs we see these days, John Baez began, all look vertical-- carbon burning shooting up, CO2 in the air shooting up, global temperature shooting up, and population still shooting up. How can we understand what really going on? "It's like trying to understand geology while you're hanging by your fingernails on a cliff, scared to death. You think all geology is vertical." So, zoom out for some perspective. An Earth temperature graph for the last 18,000 years shows that we've built a false sense of security from 10,000 years of unusually stable climate. Even so, a "little dent" in the graph of a drop of only 1 degree Celsius put Europe in a what's called "the little ice age" from 1555 to 1850. It ended just when industrial activity took off, which raises the question whether it was us that ended it. Nobel laureate atmospheric scientist Paul Crutzen suggests that the current geological era should be called the "Anthropocene," because it is increasingly dominated by human-caused effects. Baez noted that oil companies now can send their tankers through a Northwest Passage that they may have created, since it is fossil fuel burning that raised the CO2 that raised the summer temperatures in the Arctic that melts the polar ice away from the land. Zoom out further still to the last 65 million years. The temperature graph shows several major features. One is the rapid (every 100,000 years) wide swings of major ice ages. When they began, 1.35 million years ago, is when humans mastered fire. But almost all of the period was much warmer than now, with ferns growing in Antarctica. "Now it's cold. What's wrong with a little warming?" Baez asked. The problem is that the current warming is happening too fast. Studies of 1,500 species in Europe show that their ranges are moving north at 6 kilometers a decade, but the climate zones are moving north at 40 kilometers a decade, faster than they can keep up. The global temperature is now the hottest it's been in 120,000 years. One degree Celsius more and it will be the hottest since 1.35 million years ago, before the ice ages. Baez suggested that the Anthropocene may be characterized mainly by species such as cockroaches and raccoons that accommodate well to humans. Coyotes are now turning up in Manhattan and Los Angeles. There are expectations that we could lose one-third of all species by mid-century, from climate change and other human causes. Okay, to think about major extinctions, zoom out again. Over the last 550 million years there have been over a dozen mass extinctions, the worst being the Permian-Triassic extinction 250 million years ago, when over half of all life disappeared. The cause is still uncertain, but one candidate is the methane clathrates ("methane ice") on the ocean floor. Since methane is a far worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, massive "burps" of the gas could have led to sudden drastic global heating and thus the huge die-off of species. Naturally the methane clathrates are being studied as an industrial fuel for when the oil runs out in this century, "which could make our effect on global warming 10,000 times worse," Baez noted. "Zooming out in time is how I calm myself down after reading the newspapers," Baez concluded. "A mass extinction is a sad thing, but life does bounce back, and it gets more interesting each time. We probably won't kill off all life on Earth. But even if we do, there are a hundred billion stars in our galaxy, and ten billion galaxies in the observable universe."

Orville Schell: China Thinks Long-term, But Can It Relearn to Act Long-term?

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 19:30:00 -0700

### Giant contradictions “China is the most unresolved nation of consequence in the world,” Orville Schell began. It is defined by its massive contradictions. And by its massiveness— China’s population is estimated to be 1.25 to 1.3 billion; the margin of error in the estimate is greater than the population of France. It has 160 cities with a population over one million (the US has 49). It has the world’s largest standing army. No society in the world has more millennia in its history, and for most of that history China looked back. Then in the 20th century the old dynastic cycles were replaced by one social cancellation after another until 1949, when Mao set the country toward the vast futuristic vision of Communism. That “mad experiment” ended with Deng Xiaoping’s effective counter-revolution in the 1980s, which unleashed a new totalistic belief, this time in the market. So what you have now is a society sick of grand visions, in search of another way to be, focussed on the very near term. These days you cannot think usefully about China and its potential futures without holding in your mind two utterly contradictory views of what is happening there. On the one hand, a robust and awesomely growing China; on the other hand a brittle China, parts of it truly hellish. **ROBUST CHINA** * Peaceful borders in all directions * Economic, non-threatening engagement with the entire world, including with societies the US refuses to deal with * 200 million Chinese raised out of poverty * Private savings rate of 40 percent (it’s 1 percent in the US) * 300 million people with cell phones, and the best cell phone service in the world * A superb freeway system built almost overnight * New building construction everywhere, and some of it is brilliant * 150 million people online * 350,000 engineering graduates a year * One-third of the world’s direct investment * Huge trade surplus * And an economic growth rate of 9 to 12 percent a year! For decades. but also… **BRITTLE CHINA** * Not much arable land, so a growing dependence on imported food * Two-thirds of energy production is from dirty coal, by dirty methods, growing at the rate of 1-2 new coal-fired plants per week * 30 percent of China has acid rain; 75 percent of lakes are polluted and rivers are polluted or pumped dry * Of the 20 most polluted cities in the world, 16 are in China; you don’t see the sun any more * Some industrial parts of China are barren, hellish wastes * Driven by environmental horrors and by widespread corruption, there were 87,000 instances of social unrest last year, going up every year * The population is aging rapidly, with no pension or welfare, and a broken healthcare system * The stock markets are grossly manipulated * Public and official amnesia about historical legacies such as Tiananmen Square in 1989 How can such contradictions be reconciled? The best everyone can hope for is steady piecemeal change. For the Chinese the contradictions don’t really bite so long as they have continued economic growth to focus on and to absorb some of the problems. But what happens when there’s a break in that growth? It could come from inside China or from outside (such as a disruption in the US economy). It’s hard to look at the China boom now without thinking about the Japan boom in the 1970s and ’80s, remembering how everyone knew the Japanese were going dominate the US and world economy, and we all had to study Japanese methods to learn how to compete. Then that went away, and it hasn’t come back. The leadership of China is highly aware of the environmental problems and is enlightened and ambitious about green solutions, but that attitude does not yet extend beyond the leadership, and until it does, not much can happen. That’s China: huge, consequential for everybody, and profoundly unresolved.

John Rendon: Long-term Policy to Make the War on Terror Short

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 19:30:00 -0700

### Only connect John Rendon, head of The Rendon Group, is a senior communications consultant to the White Houses and Departments of Defense. His subject in this talk is how to replace tactical, reactive response to terror with long-term strategic initative. I think that people were expecting a silver-tongued devil, an accomplished spin-meister, arrogant but charming, who would dance them into some new nuanced state of understanding. What they got instead from John Rendon was an earnest, soft-spoken message of such directness and scope that it apparently came across to some in the audience as dissembling. Polarization rules in Washington these days, Rendon said, and in the country. Moderates are made voiceless. Civilized discourse is nearly impossible. And everyone is consumed with the pace of the news cycle, displacing any sense of the long view. Meanwhile in the world the US has a severe “credibility deficit,” especially with the people in other nations. He said that his organization, The Rendon Group, has done detailed research on how the United States is perceived in Islamic countries. The universal message from Muslims was, “You look at us but you do not see us.” As for whether they felt positive or negative about the US, three groups emerged. Those who had some direct or even indirect contact with American people felt largely positive about the US. Those with more distant contact thought of the US only in terms of its corporations, such as McDonald’s, and had a more negative view. Those with no contact at all thought of the US strictly in terms of its government, and had the most negative view of all. “This is the key,” Rendon said. “The strength and credibility of the American people must be reflected in our government.” “There are really two campaigns against terror,” Rendon said (he doesn’t like the term “war on terror”). The one being conducted against existing terrorists by the military and intelligence people, and by 76 countries, is going pretty well. But a second campaign, against potential terrorists, terrorists that we are creating, is barely understood. “When we say that our war is with ‘Islamic fundamentalists,’ 1.2 billion people think we mean them.” “We need to turn Islamic street into an active ally, not a passive observer.” He gave an example of the kind of advice he gives US policy makers. When we focussed all our public attention on terrorist individuals, such as Bin Laden and Mullah Omar, we made just heroes of them. Focussing on the various named groups of terrorists has the same effect. But focus on specific terrorist tactics— such stopping a bus and then shooting everyone with a certain kind of name (as happened in Iraq)— puts world attention on something that might lead to changes of mind. Rendon’s greatest fear is that the US could go isolationist at the very time we need most to engage the rest of the world, when we need for people everywhere “to feel that we care more about them than their own governments do.” For that strategic-level approach to policy he had a number of specific proposals: * Let the third year of high school be mandatory overseas. * US newspapers should partner out to the world, swapping journalists. * College alumni programs should emphasize international students. * Humanitarian assistance needs to be more enduring, as with Peace Corps programs. * There should be a global endowment for education, and a global endowment for health care. * Getting a visa to visit the US should be made welcoming instead of humiliating, as it is now. * The US government needs to engage overseas “more as an enabler than as an actor.” * We need to be a better example of democracy by encouraging a convergent rather than divisive public discourse here at home. It comes down to “networks and narratives,” Rendon concluded. Five years from now what will be the narrative about the current five years taught in schools throughout the Islamic world and elsewhere? “The nature of that narrative will determine whether the conflict winds down in seven years or so, or it goes on for a hundred years.” I’ll add one thing that emerged from the long and sometimes contentious questioning from the audience (download the audio this week for the full exercise). One question was, “Since weapons of mass destruction turned out to be nonexistent in Iraq, what is America’s REAL agenda there and in the so-called war on terror? Is it oil, wealth, power, or what?” Rendon had nothing very satisfactory to offer in reply. At dinner after the talk, Danny Hillis suggested to Rendon what might be the root cause of the mutual bafflement. “People see a lot of seemingly irrational behavior and they assume there must be some hidden agenda driving it. What they don’t realize is that having an agenda requires long-term thinking, and there isn’t any going on.” That is pretty much John Rendon’s point. When US policy consists mainly of a sequence of short-term reactions, the aggregate result is massive frustration.

Will Wright & Brian Eno: Playing with Time

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 19:30:00 -0700

### Generative play In a dazzling duet Will Wright and Brian Eno gave an intense clinic on the joys and techniques of "generative" creation. Back in the 1970s both speakers got hooked by cellular automata such as Conway's "Game of Life," where just a few simple rules could unleash profoundly unpredictable and infinitely varied dynamic patterns. Cellular automata were the secret ingredient of Wright's genre-busting computer game "SimCity" in 1989. Eno was additionally inspired by Steve Reich's "It's Gonna Rain," in which two identical 1.8 second tape loops beat against each other out of phase for a riveting 20 minutes. That idea led to Eno's "Music for Airports" (1978), and the genre he named "ambient music" was born. Wright observed that science is all about compressing reality to minimal rule sets, but generative creation goes the opposite direction. You look for a combination of the fewest rules that can generate a whole complex world that will always surprise you, yet within a framework that stays recognizable. "It's not engineering and design," he said, "so much as it is gardening. You plant seeds. Richard Dawkins says that a willow seed has only about 800K of data in it." Eno noted that ambient music, unlike "narrative" music with a beginning, middle, and end, presents a steady state. "It's more like watching a river." Wright said he often uses Eno's music to work to because it gets him in a productive trancelike state. Eno remarked that it's important to keep reducing what the music attempts, and one way he does that is compose everything at double the speed it will be released. Slowing it down reduces its busyness. Wright: "How about an album of the fast versions?" Eno: "'Amphetamine Ambient.'" "These generative forms depend very much on the user actively making connections," Eno said. "In my art installations I always have sound and light elements that are completely unsynchronized, and people always assume that they are tightly synchronized. The synchronization occurs in them. " With Eno noodling some live background music, Will Wright gave a demo of his game-in-progress, "Spore." It compresses 3.5 billion years of evolution into a few hours or days of game play, where the levels are Cell, Creature, Tribe, City, Civilization, Space." The game has potent editing tools, so that 30 mouse clicks can build a unique beautiful creature that would take weeks of normal computer generation, complete with breathing, eye blinks, and shrieks. The computer generates a related set of other creatures to meet-- some to eat, some to avoid. Socialization begins, mating, then babies (using a "neonatal algorithm"), and on to tribes and cities with amazing buildings and vehicles the user designs. "You encounter civilizations built by other players, but the players don't have to be there for the civilizations to be alive and responsive." Wright launched his civilization into space, having first abducted some creatures to plant on other planets for terraforming projects. The computer presented him an infinite variety of planets, some already occupied. Wright: "Oops. I seem to have inadvertently started an interplanetary war here." Eno: "Like America." Building models, said Wright, is what we do in computer games, and it's what we do in life. First it's models of how the world works, then it's models of how other humans work. A significant new element in computer games is the profound command, "Restart." You get to explore other paths to take in the same situation. Eno: "That's what we do with everything I call culture, everything not really necessary, from how we wear our hair to how we decorate a cupcake. We try something, surrender to it, and are encouraged to imagine what else might be tried." It's interesting that just one verb is used both for music and for games: "play." PS. For Eno's website for making your own version of his album with David Byrne, "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, " go to: . For a glimpse of his new show, "77 Million Paintings by Brian Eno," soon to be fully online, see: . For a full Wikipedia article on Wright's "Spore," with lively links, check out:

Will Hearst & Chris Anderson: The Long Time Tail

The Long Now Foundation — Tue, 30 May 2006 21:29:00 -0700

### The power law is the shape of our age You know something is up when an audience member is taking cell phone photos of the presenter's slides for instant transmittal to a business partner. Chris Anderson does have killer slides, full of exuberant detail, defining the exact shape of the still emerging opportunity space for finding and selling formerly infindable and unsellable items of every imaginable description. The 25 million music tracks in the world. All the TV ever broadcast. Every single amateur video. All that is old, arcane, micro-niche, against-the-grain, undefinable, or remote is suddenly as accessible as the top of the pops. "The power law is the shape of our age," Anderson asserted, showing the classic ski-jump curve of popularity-- a few things sell in vast quantity, while a great many things sell in small quantity. It's the natural product of variety, inequality, and network effect sifting, which amplifies the inequality. "Everything is measurable now," said Anderson, comparing charts of sales over time of a hit music album with a niche album. The hit declined steeply, the niche album kept its legs. The "long tail" of innumerable tiny-sellers is populated by old hits as well as new and old niche items. That's the time dimension. For the first time in history, archives have a business model. Old stuff is more profitable because the acquisition cost is lower and customer satisfaction is higher. Infinite-inventory Netflix occupies the sweet spot for movie distribution, while Blockbuster is saddled with the tyranny of the new. Anderson explained that we are leaving an age where distribution was ruled by channel scarcity-- 3 TV networks, only so many movie theater screens, limited shelf space for books. "Those scarcity effects make a bottleneck that distorts the market and distorts our culture. Infinite shelf space changes everything." Books are freed up by print-on-demand (already a large and profitable service at Amazon), movies freed by cheap DVDs, old broadcast TV by classics collections, new videos by Google Videos and You Tube online. Even the newest game machines are now designed to be able to emulate their earlier incarnations, so you can play the original "Super Mario Bros." if so inclined-- and many are. "I'm an editor of a Conde-Nast magazine [Wired] AND I'm a blogger," said Anderson. In other words, he works both in the fading world of "pre-filters" and the emerging world of "post-filters." Pre-filtering is ruled by editors, A&R guys ("artist and repertoire," the talent-finders in the music biz), studio execs, and capital-B Buyers. Post-filtering is driven by readers, recommenders, word of mouth, and buyers. Will Hearst joined Anderson on the stage and noted that social networking software has automated word of mouth, and that's what has "unchoked the long tail of sheer obscure quantity in the vast backlog of old movies, for example." Anderson agreed, "The marketing power of customer recommendations is the main driver for Netflix, and it is zero-cost marketing." "By democratizing the tools of distribution, we're seeing a Renaissance in culture. We're starting to find out just how rich our society is in terms of creativity," Anderson said. But isn't there a danger, he was asked from the audience, of our culture falling apart with all this super-empowered diversity? Anderson agreed that we collect strongly and narrowly around our passions now, rather than just weakly and widely around broadcast hits, but the net gain of overall creativity is the main effect, and a positive one. Questions remain, though. "Digital rights is the elephant in the room of freeing the long tail." Clearing copyright on old material is a profoundly wedged process at present, with no solution in sight. Will Hearst fretted that we may be becoming an "opinionocracy," swayed by TV bloviators and online bloggers, losing the grounding of objective reporting. Anderson observed that maybe the two-party system is a pre-long-tail scarcity effect that suppresses the diversity we're now embracing. Much of how we run our culture has yet to catch up with the long tail.

Jimmy Wales: Vision: Wikipedia and the Future of Free Culture

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 19:30:00 -0700

### Community-built content rules Vision is one of the most powerful forms of long-term thinking. Jimmy Wales, founder and president of the all-embracing online encyclopedia Wikipedia, examines how vision drives and defines that project and its strategy-- and how it fits into the even larger world and prospects of "free culture." "The design of Wikipedia," said its founder and president Jimmy Wales, "is the design of community." When Wikipedia was started in 2001, all of its technology and software elements had been around since 1995. Its innovation was entirely social-- free licensing of content, neutral point of view, and total openness to participants, especially new ones. The core engine of Wikipedia, as a result, is "a community of thoughtful users, a few hundred volunteers who know each other and work to guarantee the quality and integrity of the work." Wikipedia, already enormous, continues to accelerate its growth. It is one of the top 20 websites, with 5 billion page views monthly. As an encyclopedia, it is larger than Britannica and Encarta combined and is now in so many languages, only 1/3 of the total Wikipedia is in English. When Wales went to Taiwan last week, strangers recognized him on the train, and 1,200 came to his talk. (One attraction to a Chinese audience is that Wikipedia takes the position of "no compromise with censors, ever.") The free licensing of Wikipedia content means that it is free to copy, free to modify, free to redistribute, and free to redistribute in modified forms, with attribution links. This is in service to the Wikipedia vision "to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language." One byproduct is that Wikipedia's success is helping shift the terms of the copyright debate, in a public-good direction. The secret of Wikipedia's content-generating process, Wales explained, is the nurturing and shaping of trust, instead building everything around distrust. He said that most social software systems are designed around expected problems. "Suppose you ran a restaurant that way. If you serve steak, that means steak knives, which are really dangerous in the wrong hands, so you need to put barriers between the tables." "If you prevent people from doing bad things, you prevent them from doing good things, and it eliminates opportunities for trust." Thus every page of Wikipedia has an open invitation to edit it, and the operational motto is "Be bold." The expectation is that most edits will be improvements, and they are. Problems are dealt with completely post facto. There is an all-recent-changes page watched by hundreds of people, and another page proposing "Articles for Deletion." Regular users set up watch lists for Wikipedia articles they care about, so they are notified immediately of new edits. Besides the edit history and text comparison features of the wiki itself, many users employ IRC (Internet Relay Chat) to discuss ongoing issues, from article details to general policy. The court of last resort to resolve fraught issues is a benign emperor, Jimbo Wales. Wales continually fights the programmers to keep them from automating matters he thinks must remain social. Issues are decided not by voting but by dialogue, in which some voices have more weight because they are recognized to have earned it. Yet users do not get formal ratings. "Suppose you had to go around wearing a badge that says how many people like you." In support of the Wikipedia rule to welcome new contributors, programmers would like to install the ability to automatically send a welcome note to anyone who has made eight contributions. Wales insists that only people can welcome people. The best way to keep Wikipedia deeply radical, Wales feels, is to keep its process deeply conservative. Wikipedia is a window into further realms of free culture. What else can be done with wiki-enhanced communities? "A library is bigger than an encyclopedia." So alongside the nonprofit Wikipedia Wales has set up the for-profit Wikia-- a general purpose wiki community enabler, drawing its income from Google ads. Most leaders, in my experience, focus on their organization's product. Jimmy Wales focuses with exceptional clarity and insight on Wikipedia's process, and therein lies its magic.

Kevin Kelly: The Next 100 Years of Science: Long-term Trends in the Scientific Method.

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 18:30:00 -0800

### Recursion drives science The co-founding editor of “Wired” magazine and author of _Out of Control_ is working on a new book on “what technology wants.” His research led to the first-ever history of scientific methodology. Starting from this long-term view of science’s past transformation, he speculates on how the practice of science will change in the future. Science, says Kevin Kelly, is the process of changing how we know things. It is the foundation our culture and society. While civilizations come and go, science grows steadily onward. It does this by watching itself. Recursion is the essence of science. For example, science papers cite other science papers, and that process of research pointing at itself invokes a whole higher level, the emergent shape of citation space. Recursion always does that. It is the engine of scientific progress and thus of the progress of society. A particularly fruitful way to look at the history of science is to study how science itself has changed over time, with an eye to what that trajectory might suggest about the future. Kelly chronicled a sequence of new recursive devices in science… * 2000 BC - First text indexes * 200 BC - Cataloged library (at Alexandria) * 1000 AD - Collaborative encyclopedia * 1590 - Controlled experiment (Roger Bacon) * 1600 - Laboratory * 1609 - Telescopes and microscopes * 1650 - Society of experts * 1665 - Repeatability (Robert Boyle) * 1665 - Scholarly journals * 1675 - Peer review * 1687 - Hypothesis/prediction (Isaac Newton) * 1920 - Falsifiability (Karl Popper) * 1926 - Randomized design (Ronald Fisher) * 1937 - Controlled placebo * 1946 - Computer simulation * 1950 - Double blind experiment * 1962 - Study of scientific method (Thomas Kuhn) Projecting forward, Kelly had five things to say about the next 100 years in science… **1)** There will be more change in the next 50 years of science than in the last 400 years. **2)** This will be a century of biology. It is the domain with the most scientists, the most new results, the most economic value, the most ethical importance, and the most to learn. **3)** Computers will keep leading to new ways of science. Information is growing by 66% per year while physical production grows by only 7% per year. The data volume is growing to such levels of “zillionics” that we can expect science to compile vast combinatorial libraries, to run combinatorial sweeps through possibility space (as Stephen Wolfram has done with cellular automata), and to run multiple competing hypotheses in a matrix. Deep realtime simulations and hypothesis search will drive data collection in the real world. **4)** New ways of knowing will emerge. “Wikiscience” is leading to perpetually refined papers with a thousand authors. Distributed instrumentation and experiment, thanks to miniscule transaction cost, will yield smart-mob, hive-mind science operating “fast, cheap, & out of control.” Negative results will have positive value (there is already a “Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine”). Triple-blind experiments will emerge through massive non-invasive statistical data collection— no one, not the subjects or the experimenters, will realize an experiment was going on until later. (In the Q&A, one questioner predicted the coming of the zero-author paper, generated wholly by computers.) **5)** Science will create new levels of meaning. The Internet already is made of one quintillion transistors, a trillion links, a million emails per second, 20 exabytes of memory. It is approaching the level of the human brain and is doubling every year, while the brain is not. It is all becoming effectively one machine. And we are the machine. “Science is the way we surprise God,” said Kelly. “That’s what we’re here for.” Our moral obligation is to generate possibilities, to discover the infinite ways, however complex and high-dimension, to play the infinite game. It will take all possible species of intelligence in order for the universe to understand itself. Science, in this way, is holy. It is a divine trip. PS… Kevin Kelly’s book in progress on all this, and much more, is being written online and is visitable and discussable at .

Stephen Lansing: Perfect Order: A Thousand Years in Bali

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 18:30:00 -0800

### Hidden order in the Balinese "religion of water" With lucid exposition and gorgeous graphics, anthropologist Stephen Lansing exposed the hidden structure and profound health of the traditional Balinese rice growing practices. The intensely productive terraced rice paddies of Bali are a thousand years old. So are the democratic subaks (irrigation cooperatives) that manage them, and so is the water temple system that links the subaks in a nested hierarchy. When the Green Revolution came to Bali in 1971, suddenly everything went wrong. Along with the higher-yield rice came "technology packets" of fertilizers and pesticides and the requirement, stated in patriotic terms, to "plant as often as possible." The result: year after year millions of tons of rice harvest were lost, mostly to voracious pests. The level of pesticide use kept being increased, to ever decreasing effect. Meanwhile Lansing and his colleagues were teasing apart what made the old water temple system work so well. The universal problem in irrigation systems is that upstream users have all the power and no incentive to be generous to downstream users. What could account for their apparent generosity in Bali? Lansing discovered that the downstream users also had power, because pests can only controlled if everybody in the whole system plants rice at the same time (which overloads the pests with opportunity in one brief season and starves them the rest of the time). If the upstreamers didn't let enough water through, the downstreamers could refuse to synchronize their planting, and the pests would devour the upstreamers' rice crops. Discussion within the subaks (which dispenses with otherwise powerful caste distinctions) and among neighboring subaks takes account of balancing the incentives, and the exquisite public rituals of the water temple system keep everyone mindful of the whole system. The traditional synchronized planting is far more effective against the pests than pesticides. "Plant as often as possible" was a formula for disaster. It seems clear how such "perfect order" can maintain itself, but how did it get started? Was there some enlightened rajah who set down the rules centuries ago? Working with complexity scientists at Santa Fe Institute, Lansing built an agent-based computer model of 172 subaks planting at random times, seeking to maximize their yields and paying attention to the success of their neighbors. The system self-organized! In just ten years within the model the balanced system seen in Bali emerged on its own. No enlightened rajah was needed. (Interestingly, the very highest yields came when the model subaks paid attention not just to their immediate neighbors but to the neighbors' neighbors as well. If they paid attention primarily to distant subaks, however, the whole system went chaotic.) In Balinese language and understanding, "rice paddies" equals "jewel" equals "mind." One result of Lansing's work is that in the 1980s the Balinese government threw out the "plant often" and pesticide parts of the Green Revolution and renewed respect for the water temple system. It kept the providentially higher yield rice. Unfortunately, it also kept pouring on the fertilizer. Balinese water is so naturally nutrient-rich, the extra fertilizer just passes through the watershed out to the sea, where it is destroying the coral reefs with algal blooms. So far, the water temple system does not reach that far downstream. Lansing ended with a suggestion for Long Now about the perception and practice of time. In the standard western perspective, time is long but thin-- just past, present, future. In Bali, he said, time is dense. The Balinese have ten kinds of weeks operating concurrently-- solar, lunar, and 7-day, 6-day, on down to a one-day week ("Today is always luang.") It's like the difference between the shimmering density of polycyclic gamelan music versus western romantic narrative music-- beginning, middle, end. The Long Now Foundation should figure out how to introduce Balinese time density to the time-impoverished West, Lansing said.

Ralph Cavanagh & Peter Schwartz: Nuclear Power, Climate Change and the Next 10,000 Years

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 18:30:00 -0800

### Climate change and nuclear prospects Given the power to decide who would go first-- anti-nuke Ralph Cavanagh from Natural Resources Defense Counsel or pro-nuke Peter Schwartz from Global Business Network-- the large audience Friday night voted for Schwartz to make the opening argument. It is the threat of "abrupt climate change" that converted him to support new emphasis on nuclear power, Schwartz said. Gradual global warming is clearly now under way, and there is increasing reason to believe that human activity is driving it, mostly through the burning of coal and oil. If warming is all that happens, it will be an enormous problem, but some regions of the Earth would gain (Russia, Canada) while many others would lose. In the event of abrupt climate change, though, everyone loses. The most likely change would be a sudden (in one decade) shift to a much colder, drier, and windier world. The world's carrying capacity for humans would plummet, driving human population from the current 6.5 billion to as low as 2 billion, with most of the losses from war. It would be a civilization-threatening catastrophe. From research Schwartz has led for the Pentagon as well as from his own training in fluid dynamics, he thinks that continuation of the current warming is very likely to trigger the kind of radical climate instability that has been the norm in Earth's past, except for the last 10,000 years of uncharacteristically stable climate. Therefore everything must be done to head off the shift to climate instability. Meanwhile, Schwartz said, world demand for energy will continue to grow for decades, as two billion more people climb out of poverty and developing nations become fully developed economies. China and India alone will double or quadruple their energy use over the next 50 years. We will run out of oil in that period. That leaves coal or nuclear for electricity. Conservation is crucial, but it doesn't generate power. Renewables must grow fast, but they cannot hope to fill the whole need. Nuclear technology has improved its efficiency and safety and can improve a lot more. Reprocessing fuel will add further efficiency. The discussion format called for Cavanagh to quiz Schwartz for ten minutes, drawing out his views further. Cavanagh asked, "What about the storage of nuclear waste?" "We defined the problem wrong," Schwartz said. "Storage for thousands of years is not needed. The present storage on site in concrete casks is working, and the 'waste' is available as a further energy source with later technology." In the discussion Schwartz also pointed out that new reactor sites are not needed in the US, since all the existing sites are expandable. The format called for Cavanagh to now summarize Schwartz's argument. He did so to Schwartz's satisfaction, adding a point Schwartz missed-- recent findings indicating that the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is now the highest it has been in 25,000 to 400,000 years. It was Ralph Cavanagh's turn to present for 15 minutes, striding the front of the stage. He began by agreeing that messing with the atmosphere and thus the climate is a "suicidal" experiment for humanity to be conducting, and it has to be stopped. He agreed that nuclear should not be considered taboo and should be included as a candidate clean power source, but its history is not encouraging. No new reactors have built in the US since 1973. Nevada has stonewalled on waste storage at Yucca Mountain. The nuclear industry has all manner of government subsidies, loan guarantees, and protections from liability. It has never competed in the open market with other energy sources. California, Cavanagh said, has led the way in developing a balanced energy policy. Places like China are paying close attention. PG&E has become the world's largest investor in efficiency, led by Carl Weinberg (who was in the audience and got a round of applause). And now there are signs that California may become the leader in setting limits to carbon emissions. Within limits like that, then the private sector can compete with full entrepreneurial zest, and may the best technologies win. Nuclear would have to compete fairly with new forms of biofuels and with ever improving renewables. Schwartz asked Cavanagh about the large government subsidies for solar research while there have been none for nuclear (except fusion). Cavanagh said the subsidies were declining, and should. There should be more funding for R&D in biofuels and other alternatives, but the main role for government should be in setting emission standards and then let the private sector duke it out for the best solutions. Schwartz summarized Cavanagh's argument to his satisfaction (many later reported they liked that feature of the evening), and then a host of written questions came from the audience. Asked for a catalog of desirable new technologies, Schwartz wanted cheaper solar, effective energy storage (batteries are painfully limited), and a better electrical grid, while Cavanagh would like more R&D on vehicles and breakthroughs on coal processing. My take on the evening is that Cavanagh was particularly persuasive on the need for nuclear to compete on the open market, and Schwartz was persuasive on the direness of climate prospects and the relative readiness of nuclear power to help.

Sam Harris: The View from the End of the World

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 09 Dec 2005 18:30:00 -0800

### On necessary heresy With gentle demeanor and tight argument, Sam Harris carried an overflow audience into the core of one of the crucial issues of our time: What makes some religions lethal? How do they employ aggressive irrationality to justify threatening and controlling non-believers as well as believers? What should be our response? Harris began with Christianity. In the US, Christians use irrational arguments about a soul in the 150 cells of a 3-day old human embryo to block stem cell research that might alleviate the suffering of millions. In Africa, Catholic doctrine uses tortured logic to actively discourage the use of condoms in countries ravaged by AIDS. "This is genocidal stupidity," Harris said. Faith trumps rational argument. Common-sense ethical intuition is blinded by religious metaphysics. In the US, 22% of the population are CERTAIN that Jesus is coming back in the next 50 years, and another 22% think that it's likely. The good news of Christ's return, though, can only occur following desperately bad news. Mushroom clouds would be welcomed. "End time thinking," Harris said, "is fundamentally hostile to creating a sustainable future." Harris was particularly critical of religious moderates who give cover to the fundamentalists by not challenging them. The moderates say that all is justified because religion gives people meaning in their life. "But what would they say to a guy who believes there's a diamond the size of a refrigerator buried in his backyard? The guy digs out there every Sunday with his family, cherishing the meaning the quest gives them." "I've read the books," Harris said. "God is not a moderate." The Bible gives strict instructions to kill various kinds of sinners, and their relatives, and on occasion their entire towns. Yet slavery is challenged nowhere in the New or Old Testaments; slave holders in the old south used the Bible to defend their practice. The religious texts have power because they are old, but they are also hopelessly out of date because they are old. It's taboo among religious moderates to compare religions, said Harris, but we must. "Where are the Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers? For that matter, where are the Palestinian Christian suicide bombers-- they're as Arab and aggrieved as anyone." The fundamental beliefs of Islam really are a problem. "Martyrdom in jihad is not a fringe doctrine; it is believed by millions of Muslims." It's not a question of ignorance-- two-thirds of al Qaeda operatives are college educated. "We have no reason to expect to survive our religious differences indefinitely. Faith is intrinsically divisive. We have a choice between conversation and war." It was conversation that ended slavery, not faith. "Faith is a declaration of immunity to conversation. To make religious war unthinkable, we have to undermine the dogma of faith. The continuance of civilization requires not moderation, but reason." Harris ended by lauding meditation and mysticism as a form of experiential science, and observed, "The wisdom of contemplative life is not evenly distributed. The East has more than the West."

Clay Shirky: Making Digital Durable: What Time Does to Categories

The Long Now Foundation — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 18:30:00 -0800

### Categories go nova It is fortunate that the leading thinker in "social software" is one of the best speakers in the high-tech world, a hot ticket at any conference that can get him. Clay Shirky gave one of his dazzling presentations Monday, Nov. 14, examining a new dimension in one of the most vexed problems in the digital world-- how the hell do we keep anything digital usable beyond ten years? When a whole civilization goes digital, as we are, loss of continuity becomes a crucial issue, fit subject for a Seminar About Long-term Thinking. Thus… Clay Shirky is an adjunct professor at New York University and, among other provocations, runs a mailing list on "Networks, Economics and Culture" at . Sample Shirkyism: "The only group that can categorize everything is everybody." That defies 3,000 years of intellectual practice (Library of Congress, etc.), and it obviously can't work, but it blithely does work in a Googlized world, and over time it's the only thing that can work, but time introduces other problems. "THIS is what the Internet has been straining to become," said Clay Shirky Monday night, both joking and meaning it. He was referring to a category ("tag") that emerged from users on the photo-sharing site Flickr. The category is "cats in sinks." Growing use of the unlikely seeming tag exposed something that a lot of cats do and a lot of people feel compelled to photograph… Shirky pointed out that "cats in sinks" has none of the limitations of former category systems such as the Dewey Decimal System or the Library of Congress scheme or Yahoo's hierarchical category structure. There is no need for a category "cats" with subcategory "in sinks," nor a category "sinks" with subcategory "cats in". The specificity of the category precisely fits its content, its traffic, and its currency. (Unlike the Dewey Decimal system which has 10 categories under "Religion," 8 of them about Christianity and one for "Other Religions. And unlike the Library of Congress system, which retains outdated categories like "Former Soviet Union" and gives equal value to the categories "Asia" and "the Balkans.") "The only group that can categorize everything is everybody," said Shirky. And that's what web services like Google, Flickr, and Del.icio.us makes possible. Flickr links up users, photos, and tags. Del.icio.us links up users, websites, and tags. All you need for a comprehensive category system to emerge is links and tags! There is all manner of overlap, but that's not a problem (thanks to global search). Instead it's a virtue. A high degree of overlap (or redundancy, or "degeneracy" as Shirky called it) makes the system far more robust against disruption and against the erosion of time. An example of the virtue of overlap is the Rosetta Stone. Having the same text in three written languages was the breakthrough for decoding Egyptian Hieroglyphics, whereas the meaning of Inca knotted-string language and Easter Island's Rongorongo remain lost because there is no overlapping text. The title of Shirky's talk was "Making Digital Durable: What Time Does to Categories." While he had good news, and deep news, on the category front, he was less encouraging about digital preservation in general. "We don't know yet how bad the problem is," he said. He pointed out that there are an alarming number of levels between preserving bits (which is easy) and preserving essence (which is at best expensive and at worst impossible). To make the Bits express the Essence over time, you have to preserve (or accurately translate forward) the Medium; and the Format; and the Interpreter; and various Dependencies; and the Operating System; and the Architecture; and the Power system (is 110 A.C. power forever?) Any of that missing or corrupted or misblended, and all is lost. In 1995 Shirky published a book called _Voices From the Net_. Though written and printed with digital files, neither the author nor the publisher Ziff-Davis have a working digital version of the book's text, but Shirky's posts in sundry Usenet flame wars from that same period are preserved intact to embarrass him apparently indefinitely. Why did one form of his writing survive and the other not? The book was written and printed with an expensive, brittle system with few users, whereas Usenet is a cheap, flexible system with a vast number of users. Cheap and big always wins. But for how long? "Preservation is an outcome," said Shirky. You don't know if it is working until afterward. All you can do is reduce the risk of loss. Making digital durable, he said, is a "wicked" problem, meaning it can't actually be solved. It will be an endless process of negotiation.

George Dyson, Freeman Dyson, & Esther Dyson: The Difficulty of Looking Far Ahead

The Long Now Foundation — Wed, 05 Oct 2005 19:30:00 -0700

### Finessing the future Instead of one podium there were four chairs on the stage of Wednesday's seminar. In three seats, three Dysons: Esther, George and Freeman. They were appearing together on stage for the first time. The fourth held Stewart Brand who led the three through an evening of queries. The questions came from Stewart himself, from the audience, and from one Dyson to another Dyson -- a first for this format in a Long Now seminar. George introduced his dad with an exquisite slideshow of Freeman's prime documents. He began with a scan of a first grade school paper Freeman wrote on "Astronimy." Besides the forgivable misspellings, the essay was full of fantasy. Freeman did not just copy material from an encyclopedia. He imagined what should be and wrote it as fact. George then showed a later blue-book essay of Freeman's fiction, but it was studded with numbers and calculations. Right there was the pattern for Freeman's many other publications (first pages shown by George): speculations built upon calculations. We saw one paper inscribed by Freeman with the note: "From one crackpot to another!" His most famous speculation is for a solar system-sized enclosure around a sun now called a Dyson Sphere. George's presentation on Freeman ended with a video clip of a Star Trek episode where the befuddle Captain Piccard ponders a mysterious hollow solar-sized ball blocking their way and gasps, "Could it be a dyson-sphere?!!" Freeman followed this with a few minutes of musing on the difficulty of long term predictions. When Von Neumann and others were working on the first computers, none of them could imagine they would be used in toys for 3-year olds. In a theme that he would return to the rest of the evening, Freeman compared that surprise with the coming surprises we'll see in biotech. He said, "It is unfortunate that Von Neumann used the first computers to build nuclear weapons, because computers became associated with institutional destruction. The same thing is happening now with biotech. It is unfortunate that the first biotech is being used for institutional destruction of weeds, but soon biotech will become smaller scale, user-friendly, and employed by gardeners, naturalists, and kids to make their own creations. People's feelings about biotech will also change." "I misjudged a lot of things. Like nuclear power took much longer than I thought. We also thought we had a wonderful spaceship that was going to take us to Saturn (we were really going to go ourselves). The hardest thing to foresee is how long things take." Freeman sang the praises of science fiction as hugely important for science. "It's where the most radical ideas come from first." He wishes he read more of it, a sentiment echoed by George and Esther. Esther chimed in with her interpretation of future study. Freeman, she said, tried to understand things now by speculating on their future, while George mined the past to try to understand the future. She, on the contrary, wasn't interested in understanding the future. She chiefly wanted to affect it. "What good is it to have a conference about future technologies unless you can in some way make things happen?" What won't change? That was a question from the audience. George told about spying inhabited islands off the coast of the northwest 30 years ago and expecting that technology would transform them into places full of humans. But they are still deserted; cities are ever more enticing. The early native tribes he studied would have 12 good friends and 30 close acquaintances. He says that if you check people's cell phones they have on average 12 intimate friends always allowed to ring and 30 names to call out. We haven't changed much. Freeman continued that thread saying he is a skeptic of the singularity notion. "My mother saw more change in her life than I have. She went from traveling in a pony cart to flying across the ocean in a jet. I don't see things going faster. It is an illusion." I asked, "What have you changed you mind about?" Esther said she changed her mind about anonymity. She used to think it was hugely important, but now she believes everything works out better when there is transparency, including in people. "We may become more tolerant because everything is visible." Freeman admitted he was a skeptic on global warming. His problem was not change in the climate. "In the long view we ARE changing the climate." He felt that climate was hugely complex, that we understand very little of it and many people are reducing this unknown complexity into one data point -- the average temperature somewhere. Until we understand what kind of changes we are making in our "solutions" he says he believes the best action on global climate change right now is inaction. Of course this is only a sample of the wide-ranging conversation, which lasted 90 minutes. (Like all past talks, this one will be posted for download streaming on the Long Now site.) The agile wit and intelligence of the three Dysons was in full gear by the end of the seminar. This exchange near the end is paraphrased from my rough notes, which I believe captures the tone of the evening: Stewart: You are 81, Freeman, and pro biotech. What's your take on bio-engineered longevity? Freeman: The worst thing that could happen would be if doctors cured death. There would be no room for young people in power. It would be the end of science! For me it is a black cloud on the horizon. But I think it is unavoidable. First we'll extend life to 100 years, then to 200 years, 300 and so on… George: Just like copyright! Freeman: Really. The only solution is to move far far away, to have other worlds, in space or on planets where the young can dominate. Esther: Even better, send the old guys to Mars! It was great to have the three Dysons on earth, young and old.

Ray Kurzweil: Kurzweil's Law

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 19:30:00 -0700

### Escape velocity Attempts to think long term, Ray Kurzweil began, keep making the mistake of imagining that the pace of the future is like the pace of the past. Pondering the next ten years, we usually begin by studying the last ten years. He recommends studying the last twenty year for clues about the rate and degree of change coming in the next ten years, because history self-accelerates. That's Kurzweil's Law of accelerating returns: "technology and evolutionary processes progress in an exponential fashion." Thus, since the rate of progress doubles every ten years or so, we will see changes in the next 90 years equivalent to the last 10,000 years, and in the next 100 years changes equivalent to the last 20,000 years. It is always the later doublings where the ferocious action is. The many skeptics about the Human Genome project being done in 15 years thought they were being proved right at year 10. They were astounded when the project came in on schedule. "People look at short sections of an exponential growth curve and imagine they are straight lines," said Kurzweil. Noticing that his audience was astute as well as large (650 in the Herbst), the speaker gave a dense, fast-moving talk. He said that as an inventor and entrepreneur he found that "you have to invent for when you finish a project, not when you start-- you need to figure out what enabling factors will be in place when your product comes to market." That was what started him studying trends in technology. In rapid succession he showed on the screen graphs of technological advance in microprocessors per chip (Moore's Law), microprocessor clock speed, cheapness of transistors, cheapness of dynamic random access memory, amount and cheapness of digital storage, bandwidth, processor performance in MIPS, total bits shipped, supercomputer power, Internet hosts and data traffic, and then on into biotech with cheapness of genome sequencing per base pair, growth in Genbank, and further on into nanotech with smallness of working mechanical devices, and nanotech science citations and patents. They ALL show exponential growth rates, with no slowing in overall progress, since new paradigms always arise to keep up the pace, as transistors replaced vacuum tubes in computers, and 3D molecular computing and nanotubes will replace transistors. "Everything to do with information technology is doubling every 12 to 15 months, and information technology is encompassing everything." I was impressed that the growth curves ignore apparent shocks. The 1990s dot-com boom and subsequent bust seemed like a big event, but it doesn't even show up as a blip on Kurzweil's exponential growth curve of e-commerce revenues in the US. At dinner with Long Now sponsors after the talk, he proposed that the stringent American regulations on stem cell research will not slow the pace of breakthroughs in that field, because there are so many political (overseas, for example) and technological workarounds. The fate of individual projects is always unknowable, but the aggregate behavior over time of massive and complex arrays of activity is knowable in surprising detail. Kurzweil expects this century to provide dramatic events early and often. "With the coming of gene therapy, before we see designer babies we'll see designer baby-boomers." By 2010 he expects computers to disappear into our clothing, bodies, and built environment. The World Wide Web will be a World Wide Mesh, where all the linked devices are also servers, so massive supercomputing can be ubiquitous. Images will be project right onto retinas, helping lead toward true immersion virtual reality. Search engines won't wait to be asked to offer information. By 2030 he presumes that nanobots will occupy and enhance our nervous systems. The brain will have been reverse engineered so that we will understand the real structure of intelligence. A thousand dollars of machine computation will exceed human brain capacity by a thousand times. Shortly after that intelligence begins to break completely free of its biological constrictions and carries humanity into suffusing energy and matter toward potentially cosmic scale (IF the restricting barrier of the speed of light can be worked around). Kurzweil noted that among "singularitarians" he is known as somewhat conservative, expecting a "soft takeoff" instead of hard takeoff. In the Q & A he dealt with the usual "but what about limitations of resources?" questions with predictions that nanotech would increase efficiencies and make materials so fungible that what are seen now as severe limitations will fall away. Only one question made him pause, and a very long pause it was, sort of a stunned silence. I asked him (through Kevin Kelly), "As everything goes faster and faster, is there anything that will or should remain slow?" Finally Kurzweil said, "Well. You know, even meditation will go quicker." Another pause. "But it might SEEM slow," he said politely.

Robert Fuller: Patient Revolution: Human Rights Past and Future

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 12 Aug 2005 19:30:00 -0700

### The culminating human right What does it take to change human habits of cruelty (such as slavery, genocide) and humiliation (racism, sexism)? What do past and present efforts for human rights tell about their future?… Robert Fuller is author of the ground-breaking _Somebodies and Nobodies: Overcoming the Abuse of Rank_. "Personal is political," Robert Fuller began, and he recounted his experience as president of Oberlin College in the early 1970s. It was the time when a number of movements were coming to a focus to empower women, blacks (and native Americans and Latinos), gays, and the disabled. As it happened, Oberlin had dealt with anti-Semitism a half-century earlier, so that was not in the mix but served as an example of how to make things better. Fuller wondered if all the movements have something in common and eventually concluded that they do. Each is a specific instance of a generic wrong-- the abuse of rank. Rank itself is fine, indeed necessary to any functioning hierarchy. The abuse is taking advantage of rank to deal out humiliation. "Rankism ranges all the way from hurt feelings to genocide," said Fuller. Misusing rank defeats what value there is in rank. Organizations and societies that indulge in it are only partially functional. What can be done about it? "The Golden Rule needs teeth." Fuller observed that in the past it always took someone in the oppressor class to get action moving. Once a movement is under way, it has to just keep bearing down over time. You stand down the bullies one by one. Criminal executives, he noted, are now going to jail, even though most people predicted none would. In time politicians who indulge in ad hominem insults of their opponents should be voted out. Rankists in business should find their careers blighted. Television shows that bank on humiliation ("reality" TV, political wrath programs) should lose their advertisers. Humiliation worked as a tool in previous movements-- women ridiculing sexist men-- but it can't work in this one. "If you sneer at someone for driving an obnoxious Hummer, he'll just go out and buy a bigger Hummer." To be treated with dignity you have to treat others with dignity. That was Martin Luther King's genius, and why he won. Fuller observed that enormous changes in what is assumed to be human nature can be accomplished in just a few generations. His great-grandparents would have participated in a lynching; his children date interracially. Democracy, one of the tools for defeating rankism, has been growing exponentially since the Magna Carta in 1215. Rankist behavior could be in full retreat in this century. It will take wide and steady effort. But there no guarantee. If society breaks down from a catastrophic pandemic, climate change, or nuclear war, everything goes backward.

Jared Diamond: How Societies Fail-And Sometimes Succeed

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 15 Jul 2005 19:30:00 -0700

### On failing to think long-term Sophisticated societies from time to time collapse utterly, often leaving traces of a civilization that was at a proud peak just before the fall. Other societies facing the same dangers figure out how to adapt around them, recover, and go on to further centuries of success. Tonight the author of _Collapse_ examines the differences between them… To an overflow house (our apologies to those who couldn't make it in!), Jared Diamond articulately spelled out how his best-selling book, _Collapse_ , took shape. At first it was going to be a book of 18 chapters chronicling 18 collapses of once-powerful societies-- the Mayans with the most advanced culture in the Americas, the Anasazi who built six-story skyscrapers at Chaco, the Norse who occupied Greenland for 500 years. But he wanted to contrast those with success stories like Tokugawa-era Japan, which wholly reversed its lethal deforestation, and Iceland, which learned to finesse a highly fragile and subtle environment. Diamond also wanted to study modern situations with clear connections to the ancient collapses. Rwanda losing millions in warfare caused by ecological overpressure. China-- "because of its size, China's problems are the world's problems." Australia, with its ambitions to overcome a horrible environmental history. And Diamond's beloved Montana, so seemingly pristine, so self-endangered on multiple fronts. He elaborated a bit on his book's account of the Easter Island collapse, where a society that could build 80-ton statues 33 feet high and drag them 12 miles, and who could navigate the Pacific Ocean to and from the most remote islands in the world, could also cut down their rich rain forest and doom themselves utterly. With no trees left for fishing canoes, the Easter Islanders turned to devouring each other. The appropriate insult to madden a member of a rival clan was, "The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth!" The population fell by 90% in a few years, and neither the society nor the island ecology have recovered in the 300 years since. Diamond reported that his students at UCLA tried to imagine how the guy who cut down the LAST tree in 1680 justified his actions. What did he say? Their candidate quotes: "Fear not. Our advancing technology will solve this problem." "This is MY tree, MY property! I can do what I want with it." "Your environmentalist concerns are exaggerated. We need more research." "Just have faith. God will provide." The question everyone asks, Diamond said, is, How can people be so dumb? It's a crucial question, with a complex answer. He said that sometimes it's a failure to perceive a problem, especially if it comes on very slowly, like climate change. Often it's a matter of conflicting interests with no resolution at a higher level than the interests-- warring clans, greedy industries. Or there may be a failure to examine and understand the past. Overall, it's a failure to think long term. That itself has many causes. One common one is that elites become insulated from the consequences of their actions. Thus the Mayan kings could ignore the soil erosion that was destroying their crops. Thus the American wealthy these days can enjoy private security, private education, and private retirement money. Thus America itself can act like a gated community in relation to the rest of the world, imagining that events in remote Somalia or Afghanistan have nothing to do with us. Isolation, Diamond declared, is never a solution to long-term problems. I'll add two items to what Diamond said in his talk. One good sharp question came from Mark Hertzgaard, who asked the speaker if he agreed "with Stewart Brand's view that the threat of climate change justifies adopting more nuclear power." To my surprise, Diamond said that he was persuaded by last year's "Bipartisan Strategy to Meet America's Energy Challenges" to treat nuclear as one important way to reduce the production of greenhouse gases. (In the commission's report, the environmentalist co-chair John Holdren wrote: ""Given the risks from climate change and the challenges that face all of the low-carbon and no-carbon supply options, it would be imprudent in the extreme not to try to keep the nuclear option open.") While I was driving Jared Diamond back to the El Drisco hotel, we got talking about how to separate the good actors from the bad actors among corporations. He said that third-party validation was absolutely essential. For instance, he studied the exemplary environmental behavior of Chevron in Papua New Guinea and reported on it in "Discover" magazine. As a result of that favorable report, validated by the World Wildlife Fund (where Diamond is a director), Chevron was able to land an immensely valuable contract with Norway, who was demanding environmentally responsible behavior from any oil company it would deal with. The new term taken seriously in oil and mining corporations, Diamond said, is "social license to operate." A company must earn that from the public in order to stay in business. And we the public must do our vigilant part so that "social license" means something.

Robert Neuwirth: The 21st Century Medieval City

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 10 Jun 2005 19:30:00 -0700

### World squatter reality Humanity is urbanizing at a world-changing pace and in a world-changing way. A billion squatters are re-inventing their lives and their cities simultaneously. One of the few to experience the range of the phenomenon first hand is Robert Neuwirth, author of _Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World_. He took up residence in the scariest-seeming parts of squatter cities in Rio, Nairobi, Istanbul, and Mumbai. They vary profoundly. What Neuwirth found in the new "slums" is the future via the past. Hence his title: "The 21st-century Medieval City," Robert Neuwirth, For his talk "The 21st-century Medieval City," Robert Neuwirth took an overflow audience to "the cities of tomorrow," the developing-world shanty-towns where a billion people live now, and three billion (a third of humanity) are expected to be living by 2050. With vivid stories and slides (shown for the first time publicly), Neuwirth detailed how life works for the squatters in Rio, Nairobi, Istanbul, and Mumbai. It's hard for new arrivals-- 1.4 million a week around the world, 70 million a year. They throw together mud huts and make do with no water, no electricity, no transportation, no sewage, and barely room to turn around amid square miles of dense crowding. What brings them from the countryside is the hope of economic activity, and it abounds. Restaurants, beauty shops, bars, health clinics, food markets. No land is owned, but a whole low-cost real estate economy takes shape, managed without lawyers or government approval. (Hernando de Soto is wrong about land ownership being necessary for growth.) People build their house, a wall at a time when they have a bit of money, and then sell their roof space for another family to build a home there, and so on up, story after story. Devoid of legal land title there are prospering department stores and car dealerships in the older squatter towns of Istanbul. Forty percent of Istanbul, a city of 12 million, is squatter built. Rio is a famously dangerous city, for tourists and natives alike, except in the squatter neighborhoods where no police go. There security is provided by drug gangs, who have become surprisingly communitarian, building day care facilities and soccer fields along with providing safety on the "streets"-- narrow stairways kinking up the steep mountainside amid overhanging upper stories looking indeed medieval. There are wires and pipes everywhere carrying stolen electricity and water. (Enlightened power companies realized the thieves are potential customers and are making it easy for them to buy into legitimate service.) Neuwirth pointed out that squatters "do more with less than anybody." All that the rest of us have to do is meet them halfway for their new cities to thrive. There are two crucial ingredients for success. One is what the UN calls "security of tenure"-- confidence that you will not be arbitrarily evicted. The second is access to politics-- some avenue to growing legitimacy and participation in the larger city. This is the historic process, after all. All the great cities, including San Francisco, began as dense warrens of illegal huts. "It is a legitimate form of urban development."

: Cities & Time

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 08 Apr 2005 19:30:00 -0700

### A world made of cities Cities are the human organizations with the greatest longevity but also the fastest rate of change. Just now the world is going massively and unstoppably urban (governments everywhere are trying to stop it, with zero success). In a globalized world, city states are re-emerging as a dominant economic player. Environmental consequences and opportunities abound. As the author of _How Buildings Learn_ I kept getting asked to give talks on "How Cities Learn." With a little research I found that cities do indeed "learn" (adapt) impressively, but what cities mainly do is teach. They teach civilization. I started with a spectacular video of a stadium in Philadelphia being blown up last year. The announcer on the video ends it, "Ladies and gentlemen, you have just witnessed history!" Indeed demolition is the history of cities. Cities are humanity's longest-lived organizations (Jericho dates back 10,500 years), but also the most constantly changing. Even in Europe they consume 2-3% of their material fabric a year, which means a wholly new city every 50 years. In the US and the developing world it's much faster. Every week in the world a million new people move to cities. In 2007 50% of our 6.5 billion population will live in cities. In 1800 it was 3% of the total population then. In 1900 it was 14%. In 2030 it's expected to be 61%. This is a tipping point. We're becoming a city planet. One of the effects of globalization is to empower cities more and more. Communications and economic activities bypass national boundaries. With many national governments in the developing world discredited, corporations and NGOs go direct to where the markets, the workers, and the needs are, in the cities. Every city is becoming a "world city." Many elites don't live in one city now, they live "in cities." Massive urbanization is stopping the population explosion cold. When people move to town, their birthrate drops immediately to the replacement level of 2.1 children/women, and keeps right on dropping. Whereas children are an asset in the countryside, they're a liability in the city. The remaining 2 billion people expected before world population peaks and begins dropping will all be urban dwellers (rural population is sinking everywhere). And urban dwellers have fewer children. Also more and more of the remaining population will be older people, who also don't have children. I conjured some with a diagram showing a pace-layered cross section of civilization, whose components operate at importantly different rates. Fashion changes quickly, Commerce less quickly, Infrastructure slower than that, then Governance, then Culture, and slowest is Nature. The fast parts learn, propose, and absorb shocks; the slow parts remember, integrate, and constrain. The fast parts get all the attention. The slow parts have all the power. I found the same diagram applies to cities. Indeed, as historians have pointed out, "Civilization is what happens in cities." The robustness of pace layering is how cities learn. Because cities particularly emphasize the faster elements, that is how they "teach" society at large. Speed of urban development is not necessarily bad. Many people deplored the huge Levittown tracts when they were created in the '40s and '50s, but they turned out to be tremendously adaptive and quickly adopted a local identity, with every house becoming different. The form of housing that resists local identity is gated communities, with their fierce regulations prohibiting anything interesting being done by home owners that might affect real estate value for the neighbors (no laundry drying outside!). If you want a new community to express local life and have deep adaptivity, emphasize the houses becoming homes rather than speculative real estate. Vast new urban communities is the main event in the world for the present and coming decades. The villages and countrysides of the entire world are emptying out. Why? I was told by Kavita Ramdas, head of the Global Fund for Women, "In the village, all there is for a woman is to obey her husband and family elder, pound grain, and sing. If she moves to town, she can get a job, start a business, and get education for her children. Her independence goes up, and her religious fundamentalism goes down." So much for the romanticism of villages. In reality, life in the country is dull, backbreaking, impoverished, restricted, exposed, and dangerous. Life in the city is exciting, less grueling, better paid, free, private, and safe. One-sixth of humanity, a billion people, now live in squatter cities ("slums") and millions more are on the way. Governments try everything to head them off, with total failure. Squatter cities are vibrant places. They're self-organized and self-constructed. Newcomers find whole support communities of family, neighbors, and highly active religious groups (Pentacostal Christians and Islamicists). The informal economy of the squatter cities is often larger than the formal economy. Slum-laden Mumbai (Bombay) provides one-sixth of India's entire Gross Domestic Product. The "agglomeration economies" of the burgeoning mega-cities leads to the highest wages, and that's what draws ever more people. So besides solving the population problem, the growing cities are curing poverty. What looks like huge cesspools of poverty in the slums are actually populations of people getting out of poverty as fast as they can. And cities also have an environmental dimension, which has not yet been well explored or developed. There has been some useful analysis of the "ecological footprint" that cities make on the landscape, incorporating the impacts of fuel use, waste, etc. but that analysis has not compared the per-person impact of city dwellers versus that of people in the countryside, who drive longer distances, use large quantities of material, etc. The effect of 1,000 people leaving a county of 1,000 people is much greater than that of the same 1,000 people showing up in a city of one million. Density of occupation in cities has many environmental advantages yet to be examined. At present there's little awareness among environmentalists that growing cities are where the action and opportunities are, and there's little scientific data being collected. I think a large-scale, long-term environmental strategy for urbanization is needed, two-pronged. One, take advantage of the emptying countryside (where the trees and other natural systems are growing back fast) and preserve, protect, and restore those landscape in a way that will retain their health when people eventually move back. Two, bear down on helping the growing cities to become more humane to live in and better related to the natural systems around them. Don't fight the squatters. Join them.

Spencer Beebe: Very Long-term Very Large-scale Biomimicry

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 11 Mar 2005 18:30:00 -0800

### The rainforests of home Spencer Beebe is founder and head of Ecotrust, the Portland-based organization that is setting in motion a permanently prosperous conservation economy for the entire Pacific Coast from San Francisco north to Alaska-- the temperate rain forest also known as "Salmon Nation." Spencer Beebe began his Seminar About Long-term Thinking last night with some quotes. First was from Janine Benyus, with her evoking of Nature as model, as measure, and as mentor for proper human biomimicry. Then came quotes from Jane Jacobs insisting that humans are so embedded in nature we can't imitate it, but only use its methods. (Spencer observed, "Nature not only bats last, it owns the stadium.") Finally, Dave Foreman of Earth First! once was asked what's the best thing an individual can do for the environment, and his advice was "Stay home." (That was challenged later.) Our home, said Spencer, is a coastal temperate rain forest, the largest in the world (they're rare.) It is 2,000 miles long north to south, spanning far more latitudes than any other uniform environment. (That may help make it robust against climate change.) It has more standing biomass than any other natural system, three to four times that of tropical rain forests. Temperate rain forests are shaped by rain through 80% of the year, with no summer drought, hence few fires, hence huge and old trees. A red cedar can live 1,500 years. Since the forest is relatively recent, just 5,000 years old, that's just five generations of cedars. It is all salmon country. Ecotrust has named the region "Salmon Nation." Spencer noted that European impact on the region has been to drastically reduce the forests, the salmon, and the native tribes, with a gradient of damage from south to north, from here to Alaska. The greatest damage comes from clear-cutting the forest. With vivid pictures and economic analysis he showed the much greater long-term yield that can be accomplished with biomimetic forest practices, expanding on the storm-damage patchiness that occurs naturally. Thus selective logging with patch cuts and thinning brings out plenty of marketable timber but leaves a fully intact and healthy forest producing an ever-growing harvest of jobs, clear water, carbon capture, and rich biodiversity. Ecotrust has an astonishing array of projects-- working with the Haisla tribe in Canada to permanently protect the only remaining unlogged watershed on the Pacific coast; working with the variety of groups in Clayaquot Sound in BC to convert the area to an "eco-economy;" spending $12-million on rebuilding a historic warehouse in Portland, Oregon, to generate an urban center for eco-activities; running vast geographic inventories of the whole region; publishing an array of inspirational and technical works (our book table sold out all the Ecotrust publications)… "Societies do what societies think," said Spencer. He quoted Jane Jacobs and Kevin Kelly to the effect that "Systems make themselves up as they go along. That means you don't have to figure out everything in advance, you can just jump in." In the Q & A, Paul Hawken asked how Ecotrust was able to so quickly win the trust and active collaboration of tribal groups like the Haisla. Spencer said, "You just listen. I went fishing with them. They've been here for ten or twelve thousand years. You respect that knowledge and work with it." Later at dinner Kevin Kelly disputed Spencer's assumption that humans are wholly immersed in Nature-- "I think we're just partly immersed, and that's what makes us human and effective." I linked Kevin's question to mine wondering about the "Stay home" admonition. Spencer brought passionate perspective and array of skills to saving the "rainforests of home" by having LEFT his five-generation home in Oregon, to work first as a Peace Corps volunteer in Central America, then as a professional environmentalist saving tropical rain forests for decades. He didn't just think globally, he acted globally, THEN returned and acted locally to great and satisfying effect.

Roger Kennedy: The Political History of North America from 25,000 BC to 12,000 AD

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 25 Feb 2005 18:30:00 -0800

### Ancient American politics Roger Kennedy, the former head of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History and former Director of the US National Park Service, is so eloquent that Walt Kelly based a "Pogo" character on him (the bear P.T. Bridgeport, whose speech balloons are circus posters). Roger Kennedy's most driving current interest is the long-term effects of long-term abuse of natural systems, and he means seriously long term. Kennedy knows politics. For decades a major player himself in Washington DC, he has written redefining biographies of Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and Aaron Burr. Kennedy knows history. Besides writing and hosting a number of television series on American history, he wrote _Rediscovering America_ and _Hidden Cities: The Discovery and Loss of Ancient North American Civilization_. And Kennedy knows natural systems. As a highly popular Director of the National Park Service, he pushed the whole Park System toward greater emphasis on science. Roger Kennedy also found the mountain in Nevada where The Long Now Foundation aims to build the 10,000-year Clock. In this talk he defines the continental frame of the Clock. Most of Roger Kennedy's audience Friday night had no idea that a multi-millennia sequence of major cultures, cities, and earth monuments of enormous size once occupied the Mississippi valley and areas in Ohio and the Southeast. They had never heard of the vast ruins at places such as Poverty Point and Cahokia. But American founding fathers Washington and Jefferson knew of the ancient works and honored them with new-made earth mounds at Mt. Vernon and Monticello. The continent was seething with activity before whites arrived. The native woodland farmers of the Great Lakes who were driven west into the plains by the Chippewayan tribes were transforming into fierce horseback warriors known as the Sioux. The Iroquois League was building into a major military empire. Apaches and Navahos were streaming down from the northwest and challenging the dry farming Pueblo tribes. From time to time whole areas, such as Ohio, had their carrying capacity exceeded and emptied out of people and were afterward known as "cursed" regions. Misuse of natural systems was common of old on the continent. It has accelerated lately. Roger focussed in particular on the new levels of hazard to people from wildfire, caused by "sprawling into danger"-- the growth of human habitation (often government subsidized) into known highly flammable environments. The situation is akin to what was finally figured out about flood plains. Roger expects some disasters with thousands killed unless the mechanisms of prudence are figured out. Every small increment of climate warming will greatly increase the danger. At the intense dinner with Sponsors later, Roger urged a tax revolt against the government paying for people's losses to wildfire. If private insurers won't give coverage in some flammable areas, the government should not either. Roger jolted the San Francisco audience with frequent Christian quotes and allusions, noting the MORAL reverence of natural systems advocated by Genesis, by Saint Francis, and by the great New England pilgrim preacher Jonathan Edwards. Roger noted that Americans occasionally get their nerve up and change the nation's behavior at a profound level. In 1830 most American men went to bed drunk. By a decade later, the alcoholism had been cut by 60%, without draconian laws. In the 1860s moral force overcame economic force, and slavery was abolished, at great cost eventually deemed wholly worth it. Yet another gathering of nerve is needed, Roger opined, to deeply adjust our behavior in relation to the continent's natural systems. He sees signs that the moral strength needed is indeed building.

James Carse: Religious War In Light of the Infinite Game

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 14 Jan 2005 18:30:00 -0800

### Finite and infinite games Countless readers have been hooked by the opening line of James P. Carse's [_Finite and Infinite Games_](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0345341848/qid=1105811409/lono0a-20) -- "There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other, infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play." Readers become rereaders; the tiny book rewards close study. I used Carse's ideas for the concluding chapter of my own book on long-term thinking. Meanwhile we seem to be flirting these days with the prospect of a global religious war. "War is the ultimate finite game. Religion is the ultimate infinite game," said Jim Carse last night. "Evil does exist: it is when an infinite game is absorbed utterly in a finite game. All evil is an attempt to eliminate evil." Carse's talk, "Religion War in Light of the Infinite Game," drew on the work he's doing toward a new book, to be titled _Higher Ignorance: The Religious Case Against Belief_. Belief, he said, assumes that nothing can happen later to change your belief. It is the opposite of the long now. It is a right-now that never changes. Such end-of-history thinking can be extremely vicious. Communism, for example, had a merciless logic behind its purges. Believers require non-believers and are always thinking about them. But living religions, he said, can never be fully defined. They are like a reverse black hole that endlessly generates provocation. They are profoundly "horizonal"--wonder driven-- as opposed to bounded. Finite games require boundaries in space, time, and psychology. Infinite players prefer to live within horizons--boundaries that expand as you approach them. And rather than seeking to defeat the opponent, "an infinite player has the talent to see when someone is about to lose and is eager to change the rules to get them back in the game." The copies of Carse's book [_Finite and Infinite Games_](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0345341848/qid=1105811409/lono0a-20) we had on hand sold out (that's never happened before with a speaker). [You can get your own copy at this LINK.](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0345341848/qid=1105811409/lono0a-20)

Ken Dychtwald: The Consequences of Human Life Extension

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 03 Dec 2004 18:30:00 -0800

### What long life means Ken Dychtwald gave a terrific talk Friday evening to a standing-room audience on "The Consequences of Human Life Extension." The growing--and soon overwhelming--prevalence of the old in developed nations is leading to a "new old." Ken described meeting a bright-eyed apparent 70-year-old who talked about his gym workouts. "I asked when he started, and he told me, 'Oh, a couple years ago when I was 100. I'm getting in shape for the Senior Olympics.' When he competed he not only won every event he entered, he set the World Record. He was alone in his age category-- a two-foot shot put was the best ever. That's typical. Everything the new old do is a first in human history." Ken gave an expertly graphic presentation, but much is quotable… "Of all the human who have ever lived over 65, two-thirds are now alive now." "I went to a conference of cosmetic surgeons. All their wives looked identical." "Heart disease kills more people than all the other leading causes of death put together, including cancer. Cure heart disease and you create 20 million demented people. Our health system is not geared for chronic disease." "In the US the old used to be the poorest segment of society. Now they're the richest. For instance, they buy 80% of luxury travel. So why are they still getting discounts?" "People vote their age. 30% of 30-year-olds vote. 50% of 50-year-olds vote. 70% of 70-year-olds vote. We have a gerontocracy." "The old do the least volunteering of any age group, and for every 11 cents that children get from government, the old demand and get a dollar. The concept of giving back is still foreign to them. If the now-aging Baby Boomers decide to reverse that, they'll earn the title, "The Grandest Generation." "What people really want, and what they're going to get, is longer HEALTH span. We should be asking now, What is the PURPOSE of longer life?"

Michael West: The Prospects of Human Life Extension

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 12 Nov 2004 18:30:00 -0800

### Ever longer life Our germline cells (eggs and sperm) are already immortal. What if the rest of the cells of our body could acquire the same ability? Tissue by tissue, one degenerative disease after another, it could gradually happen in the course of one or two human generations. When it does happen, what we mean by "generation" changes completely. Thanks to Proposition 71, which funds embryonic stem cell research, California is now the frontier of the key technology for rejuvenating human cells, tissues, and organs; for not just treating but curing lethal diseases. Michael West, founder of Geron and Advanced Cell Technology, has been in the thick of regenerative biomedicine since the early '90s. As soon as normal human life spans begin to increase beyond 100 years, on purpose, everything we think and do will change. Will it really happen? If so, how soon? Michael West has been in the thick of cures for human aging since his work on telomerase and the founding of Geron in the 1990s. Now, as chair and CEO of Advanced Cell Technology, he is a leader in the use of embryonic stem cells and cloning for the regeneration of aging tissue and organs. He is author of _The Immortal Cell: One Scientist 's Quest to Solve the Mystery of Human Aging_.

Paul Hawken: The Long Green

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 15 Oct 2004 19:30:00 -0700

### The long green The environmental movement has moved on. It has become so deep and wide that it adds up to something new entirely, still unnamed. Whatever it is, it is now the largest movement in the world and the least ideological. Driven by science and patience, it is civilization-scale therapy. Paul Hawken co-authored the now classic _Natural Capitalism_ with Amory Lovins and also wrote _The Ecology of Commerce_ and _Growing a Business_. He co-founded a great garden company, Smith & Hawken, and a great organic food company, Erewhon. He chaired the introduction of The Natural Step to the US and currently is creating several companies for Pax Scientific.

Danny Hillis: Progress on the 10,000-year Clock

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 10 Sep 2004 19:30:00 -0700

"How's the Clock coming?" Everyone connected with The Long Now Foundation or with Danny Hillis hears that question all the time. "Progress on the 10,000-Year Clock," Danny Hillis -- Friday, September 10, 7pm, Fort Mason Conference Center, San Francisco. Doors open for coffee and books at 7pm; lecture is promptly at 8pm. You may want to come early to be sure of a seat. Admission is free (donation of $10 very welcome, not required). Planned as an art/engineering work of heroic scale inside a Nevada mountain, the 10K Clock is meant to embody and inspire long-term thinking. The first working prototype was completed in 2000 and now ticks sedately away (one tick per minute) in London at the Science Museum (the Queen came to the opening). The second working prototype is nearing completion. Meanwhile the designated mountain-- Mt. Washington, 11,600 feet high in eastern Nevada-- is being explored in depth. If all goes well, construction of the Mountain Clock could begin soon. Co-founder and co-chair of The Long Now Foundation, Danny Hillis is an inventor, scientist, author, and engineer. He pioneered the concept of parallel computers that is now the basis for most supercomputers, as well as the RAID disk array technology used to store large databases. He is co-chair and chief technology officer at Applied Minds. Before that he was a vice president and Fellow at Disney. Before that he co-founded Thinking Machines, which built the first massively parallel supercomputers. (Full bio [here](https://longnow.org/about/board/hillis.htm "Danny Hillis"). )

Phillip Longman: The Depopulation Problem

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 13 Aug 2004 19:30:00 -0700

### The depopulation problem Full PDF of the talk [here](http://static.longnow.org/seminars/020040813-longman/salt-020040813-longman.pdf "PDF"), slideshow [here](https://media.longnow.org/salt-slides/Longman.html "The Depopulation Problem"). No need to summarize this time. Phillip Longman wrote out his whole talk, with the illustrations more viewable even than they were at the Seminar and talk. (excerpt below) It is full of rethink-the-news sentences like: "Notice that Japan's lengthening recession began just as continuously falling fertility rates at last caused its working-age population to begin shrinking in relative size." One thing worth adding from the Q&A at Phil's public lecture August 13th. Kevin Kelly asked him what he thought the world might feel like in 100 years. "People a century from now will have so few blood relatives I think it could be very lonely." The audience, convinced by then, was utterly still. Excerpt from Longman's talk: "So where will the children of the future come from? Some biologists speculate that modern human beings have created an environment in which the “fittest”, or most successful, individuals are precisely those who have few, if any, offspring. As more and more humans find themselves living under conditions in which children have become costly impediments to success, those who are well adapted to this new environment will tend not to reproduce themselves. And many others who are not so successful will imitate them. But this hardly implies extinction. Some people will still have children. They just won’t be people highly motivated by material concerns or secular values. Disproportionately, the parents of the future will be people who are at odds with the modern environment – people who either “don’t get” the new rules of the game that make large families a liability or who, out of religious or chauvinistic conviction, reject the game altogether. In short people like Mormons. "

Jill Tarter: The Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence: Necessarily a Long-term Strategy

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 09 Jul 2004 19:30:00 -0700

### The long search "The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence: Necessarily a Long-term Strategy" is the title for Jill Tarter's Seminar About Long-term Thinking this Friday. There's no deeper question than "Are we alone in the universe?" And there's no quick way to answer it. Slow, steady science is the hardest to fund and organize, but Jill Tarter has been working on the question for 30 years and the SETI Institute (which she co-founded) for 20 years. The work has had incremental jumps in capacity, such as with the seti@home program (the first major peer-to-peer application) and with the Allen Telescope Array, coming on line later this year. Jill Tarter holds the Bernard Oliver chair and directs the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute in Mountain View. Interested in the subject since the mid-70s, Dr. Tarter first published on SETI in 1977. Recipient of numerous prizes and awards, Dr. Tarter has lately expanded her activities to include helping educate the next generation of scientists. She was the model for the Ellie Alloway character in Carl Sagan's 1985 novel _Contact_ and the 1997 movie starring Jodie Foster. "We are the first generation of humans who can investigate for signs of other intelligences in the universe," began Jill Tarter at the July 8-9 Seminar About Long-term Thinking. All we have to find is one case for the universe to appear utterly different to us, because finding one will guarantee there are many. "Anybody we find," she went on, "will be older than we are. SETI was rightly characterized right back at the beginning of the idea in 1959 as 'archaeology of the future'-- their past, our future." "We can't detect intelligence at a distance, so really SETI is SETT-- the Search for Extra-terrestrial TECHNOLOGY." Jill thinks that the technological Singularity feared by some won't happen, "because in nature all exponential growths saturate at some point." If, however, technologies always self-extinguish, then we will find no one (and presumably we will eventually join the great silence). But if technologies at least sometimes stabilize, or even keep on accelerating, and they bother to communicate, we could gradually build a catalog of the ways technology can develop, to better guide our own. In Earth's history inferior technologies have always been crushed by the "guns, germs, and steel" of superior technologies. Isn't contacting civilizations certain to be superior to ours asking for serious trouble? You can't catch a cold through the phone, Jill pointed out. The effect of ET contact is more likely to be what Europe experienced when it reached back in time for the culture, science, and technology of the Classical era (and across Asia via the Mongol Empire for the "compass, gunpowder, and printing" of China): the result of those contacts was the Renaissance. As Jill chronicled the history of SETI, I was impressed at how limited the search has been so far, even though 101 targeted and survey searches have been reported since around 1974. If the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, were leaking TV and radio signals like Earth is, we would not detect it-- yet. The SETI Institute is now building at Hat Creek, California, a 300-times improvement on previous search technology-- the Allen Telescope Array (initially funded by Paul Allen; $16 million is needed to complete it). It will have 350 ingenious dishes (designed by Jill's husband Jack Welch) arrayed in a Gaussian random pattern. The next stage would be a Square Kilometer Array, offering 100-times better still power, for a cost of $1 billion. Then really good listening could be done from the far side of the Moon ("the only place in the Solar System not exposed to Earth's electronic noise"). Jill's catalog of search technology to come (she's a self-confessed hardware geek) had a piece of stunning news, at least to me. If computation keeps getting better and our radio-telescopy keeps improving, we should know by 2040 whether or not there's anyone out there, at least in our galaxy. That's soon! And huge. On of Jill's slides quoted cartoonist Walt Kelly (via Porkypine): "Thar's only two possibilities: Thar is life out there in the universe which is smarter than we are, or we're the most intelligent life in the universe. Either way, it's a mighty sobering thought." What about Earth transmitting instead of just listening? Jill noted that for a signal to go out and be answered could take up to 200,00 years. (That's within our galaxy; for the next galaxy over it would be millions of years.) She ended her talk: "Who should talk for Earth? The winders of the Clock of the Long Now. What should they say? The Library of human culture. You could call it… 'the long hello.'"

Bruce Sterling: The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 11 Jun 2004 19:30:00 -0700

One reason lots of people don't want to think long term these days is because technology keeps accelerating so rapidly, we assume the world will become unrecognizable in a few years and then move on to unimaginable. Long-term thinking must be either impossible or irrelevant. The commonest shorthand term for the runaway acceleration of technology is "the Singularity"--a concept introduced by science fiction writer Vernor Vinge in 1984. The term has been enthusiastically embraced by technology historians, futurists, extropians, and various trans-humanists and post-humanists, who have generated variants such as "the techno-rapture," "the Spike," etc. It takes a science fiction writer to critique a science fiction idea. Along with being one of America's leading science fiction writers and technology journalists, Bruce Sterling is a celebrated speaker armed with lethal wit. His books include _The Zenith Angle_ (just out), _Hacker Crackdown_ , _Holy Fire_ , _Distraction_ , _Mirrorshades_ (cyberpunk compendium), _Schismatrix_ , _The Difference Engine_ (with William Gibson), _Tomorrow Now_ , and _Islands in the Net_. The Seminar About Long-term Thinking on June 10-11 was Bruce Sterling examining "The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole." He treated the subject of hyper-acceleration of technology as a genuine threat worth alleviating and as a fond fantasy worth cruel dismemberment. Sterling noted that the first stating of the Singularity metaphor and threat came from John Von Neuman in the 1950s in conversation with Stan Ulam--"the rate of change in technology accelerates until it is mind-boggling and beyond social control or even comprehension." But it was science fiction writer Vernor Vinge who first published the idea, in novels and a lecture in the early 1980s, and it was based on the expectation of artificial intelligence surpassing human intelligence. Vinge wrote: "I believe that the creation of greater than human intelligence will occur during the next thirty years. I'll be surprised if this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030." Vinge was not thrilled at the prospect. The world-changing event would happen relatively soon, it would be sudden, and it would be irrevocable. "It's an end-of-history notion," Sterling drawled, "and like most end-of-history notions, it is showing its age." It's almost 2005, and the world is still intelligible. Computer networks have accelerated wildly, but water networks haven't--in fact we're facing a shortage of water. The Singularity feels like a 90s dot-com bubble idea now--it has no business model. "Like most paradoxes it is a problem of definitional systems involving sci-fi handwaving around this magic term 'intelligence.' If you fail to define your terms, it is very easy to divide by zero and reach infinite exponential speed." It was catnip for the intelligentsia: "Wow, if we smart guys were more like we already are, we'd be godlike." Can we find any previous Singularity-like events in history? Sterling identified three--the atomic bomb, LSD, and computer viruses. The bomb was sudden and world changing and hopeful--a new era! LSD does FEEL like it's world changing. Viruses proliferate exponentially on the net. LSD is pretty much gone now. Mr. Atom turned out to be not our friend and has blended in with other tools and problems. Singularity proponents, Sterling observed, are organized pretty much like virus writers--loose association, passionate focus, but basically gentle. (They'd be easily rounded up.) "They don't have to work very hard because they are mesmerized by the autocatalyzing cascade effect. 'Never mind motivating voters, raising funds, or persuading the press; we've got a mathematician's smooth line on a 2D graph! Why bother, since pretty soon we'll be SUPERHUMAN. It's bound to happen to us because we are EARLY ADAPTERS.'" Vernor Vinge wrote: "For me, superhumanity is the essence of the Singularity. Without that we would get a glut of technical riches, never properly absorbed." Said Sterling, "A glut of technical riches never properly absorbed sounds like a great description of the current historical epoch." Sterling listed five kinds of kinds of reactions to the Singularity. 1) Don't know and don't care (most people). 2) The superbian transhumanists. 3) The passive singularitatians--the Rapture of the Nerds. 4) The terrified handflapping apocalypse millennialists (a dwindling group, too modish to stay scared of the same apocalypse for long). 5) The Singularity resistance--Bill Joy killjoys who favor selective relinquishment. Sterling turned out to be a fellow traveler of the Resistance: "Human cognition becoming industrialized is something I actually worry about." Vinge did a great thing, said Sterling. The Singularity has proved to be a rich idea. "In the genre of science fiction it is more important to be fruitfully mistaken than dully accurate. That's why we are science fiction writers, not scientists." Suppose some kind of Singularity does come about. Even though it is formally unthinkable to characterize post-Singularity reality, Sterling proposed you could probably be sure of some things. The people there wouldn't feel like they are "post"-anything. For them, most things would be banal. There wouldn't be one Singularity but different ones on different schedules, and they would keep on coming. It would be messy. Death would continue as the great leveler. Suppose humanity elected to slow down an approaching Singularity to a manageable pace, what could we actually do? How do you stop a runaway technology? --You could reverse the order of scientific prestige from honoring the most dangerous new science (such as nuclear physics) to honoring the most responsible restraint--a Relinquishment Nobel. It would be scientific self-regulation. --You could destroy scientific prestige through commercialization. Scientists diminish into mercenaries--"put-upon Dilberts and top-secret mandarins." It would still be dangerous, though. --Have a few cities leveled by a Singularity technology and you could bounce into world government with intense surveillance and severe repression of suspect technologies and technologists. Most societies are already anti-science; this would fulfill their world view. "You can run but you can't hide! You will be brought to justice or justice will be brought to you! Into the steel cage, Mr. Singularity. Into Guantanamo till you tell us who your friends are. Then they join you in there." Or maybe it's not that fierce, and it's all done by benevolent non-governmental organizations. Sterling concluded: "It does come down to a better way to engage with the passage of time. The loss of the future is becoming acute. The most effective political actors on the planet right now are guys who want to blow themselves up--they really DON'T want to get out of bed in the morning and face another day. People need a motivating vision of what comes next and the awareness that more will happen after that, that the future is a process not a destination. The future is a verb, not a noun. Our minds may reach the ends of their tethers, but we'll never stop futuring."

David Rumsey: Mapping Time

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 14 May 2004 19:30:00 -0700

### Maps and time David Rumsey's spectacularly illustrated lecture, "Mapping Time" is not just about maps. It is the future of data and knowledge handling. People literally gasp at the things Rumsey shows can be done. I love it when techies, artists, and historians all gasp at the same time. That happened with David Rumsey's spectacularly illustrated Seminar About Long-term Thinking on May 13-14, "Mapping Time." Once an artist, long a real estate success, now one of the world's leading historic map collectors and THE leading online map innovator, David Rumsey gives an exceptionally deft graphic talk. Complex and elegant things kept happening with his images, always on cue with never a hesitation or false move. I've never seen a tighter weaving of ideas, words, and persuasive images. You can find everything he talked about and more at his website: [http://www.davidrumsey.com](http://www.davidrumsey.com/) Maps define worlds, Rumsey said. Compare the Spanish and British maps of the years of discovery in the New World. Because the Spanish maps and charts were kept as state secrets, their voluminous naming of rivers and mountains and so on didn't last. The British proudly published all their discovery maps as a proof of ownership. Their names are the ones that still adorn the land. The combination of the Web and GIS (Geographic Information Systems) has utterly transformed the world of maps. When Rumsey contemplated donating his collection of historic maps to a library or museum, he learned that they would be hidden carefully away in some vault, and almost no one would see them. So instead he put the collection online--inventing new super-high-resolution imaging systems and new browsers that could read the multi-gigabyte images. His site now gets two million visitors a year. Stanford's excellent map library gets six thousand users a year. Nothing shows the value of high resolution as well as maps, said Rumsey. For example, he was able to take the 110 separate sheets of a bird's-eye view of late 19th Century St. Louis and in a "digital knitting project" connect them all into one vast, beautiful image. There are two TERAbytes of data on his website. Because the files are too large to download, he invented browsers that can explore and compare them. It's the comparison tools that are shocking. Thanks to GIS, Rumsey can take old somewhat incorrect maps and "geo-rectify" them, using "rubber-sheeting" software tools he developed, so that the old maps can overlay perfectly on current precisely accurate maps. He demonstrated with four maps and an aerial photo of the San Francisco waterfront area where he was giving the talk. Starting with the old map, he faded up through the sequence of maps to the present, and you saw the city build in exquisite detail. Then he popped the four maps into four separate windows and scrolled them all in synch. Take Lewis and Clark's hand-drawn maps of the Missouri River from 1805. Once geo-rectified, you can use them for navigating now, GPS in hand. Tim O'Reilly commented, "This means that old maps are no longer 'wrong.' The past is not a mistake. You can add new information to an old document in a way that keeps it perpetually valuable." Rumsey demo-ed some other features of his site, such as his way of empowering serendipity by providing a "ticker"--a crawl of random images from his collections (and now other collections, including art) scrolling along the bottom of the screen. Click on anything enticing, and off you go to explore it. He said that getting totally covered by Google was essential--"Google is the ultimate catalog." Once fully linked on Google, his traffic took off from 2,000 visitors a day to 7,000. Then Rumsey showed what happens when you "drape" his maps over a raised-relief topological version of the landscape. You can view it obliquely. You can fly through it! As you fly through it, you can flick from one historic version of the landscape to another! This is where the gasps took over. To my mind, Rumsey's dynamic layering tools for visual data are new tool of thought, one that will become common. They are a compelling new way to think in time. All of Rumsey's maps can be perused totally for free. We asked him how much it costs to run his incredible operation. He said it's maybe 3 or 400K a year. Where does the money come from? From him. David Rumsey is one of the most impressive just-do-it philanthropists I've ever met. He is having more fun with his money and his time and the world than just about anyone.

Daniel Janzen: Third World Conservation: It's ALL Gardening

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 09 Apr 2004 19:30:00 -0700

### Mega gardening Big as life and twice as opinionated, the renowned preservation biologist Daniel Janzen spoke for The Long Now on Friday, April 9, 2005. His perspective on preservation may be jarring to some: "It's ALL Gardening". Dan Janzen is most widely known for his heroic efforts helping set all of Costa Rica on a preservation path, ensuring that the mega-diverse nation continues indefinitely as a haven for science and eco-tourism. His particular focus, Guanacaste Conservation Area, was recently declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. His ongoing work there in field taxonomy and innovative preservation practices led to his receiving the Crafoord Prize (1984), the Kyoto Prize (1997), and the Albert Einstein Science Prize (2002). Professor Janzen teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.

Rusty Schweickart: The Asteroid Threat Over the Next 100,000 Years

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 12 Mar 2004 18:30:00 -0800

### Asteroid threat report Schweickart filled the hall with some 240 at the Presidio Officers Club and gave a dazzling lecture. He left the next day for Washington DC to lobby Congress to apply its will to making the Earth safe for the very long term. "For life to survive in planetary systems," said Schweickart, "it has to figure out how to deal with massive asteroid impacts. Who knows how many advanced life forms in the universe have failed or passed that test. Humanity is just now on that cusp. We have the knowledge and the ability---if not yet the will---to prevent future large-scale extinction events from asteroids." Data-rich, graphics-rich, and huge in conceptual scale, it was the most long-now Seminar yet---"The Asteroid Threat Over the Next 100,000 Years." Impact craters everywhere---Moon, Mercury, Mars; even asteroids have craters from other asteroids. (And occasional comets---1% of the source of impacts is from comets, as we saw very recently when a fragmented comet carpet-bombed Jupiter.) "How many asteroids are in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter? Pick a number. But if it doesn't have at least nine zeroes after it, it's wrong." Rusty's presentation was full of lore. Most asteroids are stone, but they are light---they absorb impact like Styrofoam. There are 100,000 shooting stars every night on Earth---small asteroids. Meteorites are COLD when they land, not hot (the deep cold of space is preserved, while the air-friction hot surface ablates away.) Air bursts from large asteroids cause more damage than ground strikes, and ocean impacts can cause tremendously destructive tsunamis. With really large impacts, the planets exchange material---Mars rocks on Earth, Earth rocks on Mars. When the last major-extinction impact occurred in Yucatan 65 million years ago, 10% of the stupendous blast debris exploded clear away from the Earth, while the other 90% rained down incandescent with re-entry all over the Earth for 90 minutes of burning sky---everything flammable on Earth burned up, and one meter of the oceans boiled off. (That was a 10-kilometer asteroid; when a 200-kilometer asteroid hits, it boils off the whole oceans). Then there was no sunlight for several years. 65% of all species on Earth ceased to exist, including the super-dominant dinosaurs. They failed the asteroid test. Rusty showed a diagram with all important asteroid data in it. The power-law distribution (many small, few large) is so perfect you can directly correlate frequency of impact with size of asteroid and energy released in megatons and the damage that would result. (Calibration: the largest nuclear weapon tested was a Soviet bomb of 58 megatons---6,000 times the force of the Hiroshima bomb. The 1908 air-burst of an asteroid over Tunguska, Siberia, made an 11-megaton explosion that flattened 2,100 square kilometers of forest.) "The asteroid threat over the next 100,000 years is right there in the chart," said Rusty. In the next hundred millennia: * There's a 10% chance of an asteroid causing planet-scale damage with 100,000 megatons of energy released. * There's a 50-50 chance of a 500-meter asteroid that could destroy an area the size of Texas with a 6,000 megaton explosion---100 times the USSR's biggest bomb. * There will be about TEN 200-meter asteroid impacts, good for 400 megatons. * There will be about A HUNDRED 70-meter-diameter asteroids, each causing 15 megatons of damage (i.e. worse than the Tunguska explosion, which would have wiped out all of London if it had hit there instead of the remote wilderness). NASA's Space Guard program has been looking for PHA's---Potentially Hazardous Asteroids---that are 1 kilometer or more in diameter. There are about 1,100 of them---700 have been detected and tracked and found innocent of threat; that leaves some 400 still unknown. Since asteroids orbit with the Earth around the Sun, any collision path is gradually convergent. Advance knowledge of collision with a very large asteroid can range from 40 years to 2 years, with the kind of attention now being paid. Extreme case: "1950DA" is an asteroid that has been tracked since 1950. Its orbit is so precisely known that we can forecast there is a 1-in-300 chance it will collide with Earth on March 16, 2880---876 years from this month. Orbital mechanics are destiny. One of the sponsors of the SALT series, Leighton Read, noted that the asteroid threat is a rare instance where we really CAN predict the future, a very long way out and in great detail, at least statistically. Furthermore, this is a rare instance where we really can do something about the future. Threatening asteroids can not only be detected, they can be deflected. Rusty said there are two main approaches to deflection---sudden impulse (like a nuclear explosion), and slow, guided redirection. He favors the second, and lead-authored an article in last November's SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN on the design and use of an "asteroid tugboat." He noted that some of those favoring nuclear deflectors have an agenda of weaponizing space and see this as a dual-use back door to something now thoroughly forbidden by treaties. Rusty heads the B612 Foundation (named for the Little Prince's asteroid), which is lobbying to add asteroid deflection to NASA's Prometheus mission to Jupiter's icy moons, planned for around 2015. The tugboat would have an ion or plasma drive (highly efficient) powered by a nuclear reactor. Asteroids spin, and they are extremely massive. Moving them where you want is tricky. The evening before the talk, Danny Hillis jarred Rusty by suggesting a "tractor beam"---use the gravitational attraction between the tug and the asteroid to "pull" the spinning asteroid without have to touch it. It turned out that one of Rusty's colleagues had come up with exactly the same idea several weeks ago. To make an asteroid miss the Earth, all you have to do is add or subtract 40 seconds from a 2-year orbit---1/200th of a mph of a rock traveling at some 66,000 mph. Big rock, though.

James Dewar: Long-term Policy Analysis

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 13 Feb 2004 18:30:00 -0800

### Long-term policy analysis Dewar is head of RAND’s Pardee Center on very long-term policy—35 to 200 years For over half a century the RAND Corporation has influenced national policy and invented major intellectual tools. Packet switching (Paul Baran) came from RAND; so did scenario planning (Herman Kahn); so does the current understanding of “net warfare” (John Arquilla). For all of its power, RAND’s thinkers are seldom heard in public. Three years ago RAND set out to engage serious long-term thinking. A RAND alum funded the Pardee Center for Longer Range Global Policy and the Future Human Condition, with the charge “to improve our ability to think about the longer-range future–from 35 to as far as 200 years ahead.” Selected to run the new center was 22-year-RAND-veteran James Dewar. Jim Dewar from RAND laid out a persuasive case for long-term thinking and planning at the Seminar last Thursday. Examples of successful long-term planning include: * The US Constitution * Panama Canal * Transcontinental railroad in the US * Marshall Plan * Bismarck’s unification of Germany * George Kennan’s policy of “containment” of the USSR * US Social Security plan—cemented in place with a card for every citizen, by clever Roosevelt * FCC wisely helping the US phone system connect to computers * Leighton Read noted that all these examples emerged from traumatic conditions. As for an example of “getting it right about getting it wrong,” Dewar cited Keynes’s 1919 book, _The Economic Consequences of the Peace_ , about how taking revenge on the defeated Germans would lead to another war. It did. The next time, the Allies took Keynes’s advice, and that was the Marshall Plan. Historian David Lowenthal, a guest at the seminar, observed that no publisher would take Keynes’s book, so he published it himself, and made $2 million on it. Unpacking the idea of Long-Term Policy Analysis (LPTA), Dewar stated that “long-term” means “characterized by deep uncertainty”—typically including uncertainty at the systemic level (structure), uncertainty about likelihood of which way events might go, uncertainty about the migration of values, and uncertainty about what are proper goals. Leighton Read suggested we should build a detailed taxonomy of the various kinds of uncertainties about the future. Dewar observed that one of the greatest difficulties of doing long-term policy analysis is GETTING THE ATTENTION of policy makers. Peter Schwartz recalled that at Royal Dutch/Shell he had extensive profiles on all the managing directors of Shell—his direct customers for scenario planning—so he could tailor the work to their interests. Both Dewar and David Lowenthal noted that policy makers find it much easier to take on known, existing problems that to work on emerging problems that are not defined yet. They’re great at “pound of cure,” terrible at “ounce of prevention.” That’s what long-term policy analysis has to fix. Dewar showed slides of a technique his center at RAND is developing to run models using thousands of scenarios, but what he was showing seemed incomprehensible, so the seminar group challenged it strongly. This was tremendously helpful for the lecture the following evening, where Dewar made the same slides very compelling by spelling out a case—involving the tradeoffs of various forms of taxing polluters against joint gains in economic growth AND “decoupling” that growth from environmental harm.

George Dyson: There's Plenty of Room at the Top: Long-term Thinking About Large-scale Computing

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 09 Jan 2004 18:30:00 -0800

### Long-term thinking about large-scale computing Ever since his 1997 breakthrough book, _Darwin Among the Machines_ , Dyson has become regarded as a leading historian and interpreter of computer science, bringing a rigorous and unconventional perspective. Thus his willingness to examine the long-term prospects for mega-scale computing. Most computer people are averse to discussing seriously any future beyond ten years. With the Dyson seminar, our series begins to get down to specific cases of applying long-term thinking. "Your now is only as long as you remember. To way to understand the future is give the present more depth," said George Dyson at the start of his Seminar at Long Now last Thursday. Then he proceeded to help us remember what really went on at the very beginning of computerdom, back in 1947 at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) when John von Neumann and colleagues were inventing the digital world. Thanks to his physicist/mathematician father Freeman, George grew up at the IAS, along with his older sister Esther. Last year he went back to spend an entire year burrowing through the ancient files and logbooks of the von Neumann period. A skilled photographer, he has hundreds of richly evocative photos of those records to show. In them the past comes to life. Nion McEvoy said George's artifacts are deep and consequential, like relics from earliest Christianity. The artifacts showed that at the beginning the code was small and sound and the machines (vacuum tubes and oscilloscope tubes) were maddenly flaky. By the end of that period the machines had become reliable, and most of the problems were in the ever-growing code. Von Neumann wrote a landmark paper, "Reliable Organizations of Unreliable Elements." Strings of bits (then still called binary digits) come in two forms, Dyson reminded us---sequential in time and structural in space. The sequences make things happen; stored as structure they are memory. Building an architecture that would manage the transitions adroitly and also scale up radically for decades was a profound achievement. Engineers were never particularly welcome at the IAS. One letter shows an administrator complaining that the computer people from the basement were using excessive quantities of sugar and tea, and doing so at all hours of the night. Programmers evidently have been caffeine and sugar swilling nocturnal troglodytes from the very start. Like Eniac, the IAS computer was mainly used for atomic bomb studies---that's where the money came from. The researchers also worked on weather prediction (with approaches still in use, only now they're fast enough to predict the future instead of the past), and von Neumann assumed we would eventually use them to control the weather---an assumption George shares. By 1953 at the IAS Nils Barricelli was working on "Symbiogenetic Evolution Processes Realized by Artificial Methods," running the first artificial life programs. (Their source code is still around and could come to life again.) Danny Hillis, who has also done a-life experiments, noted that there are no seriously long-lived computations going on (max is a year, for prime numbers and the like). Maybe Long Now should start some. George ended by looking at the larger picture. He said that computation at present is still parasitic on us, but it probably is in the process of becoming part of life itself---it's just another system of genetics. Evolution, after all, is massively parallel computation, and now the world of code is evolving, perhaps to reshape the tree of life itself. As von Neumann's famous work on Theory of Games showed, coalitions are the most important element. "The great collective organism we're becoming part of will have a completely different sense of time."

Peter Schwartz: The Art Of The Really Long View

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 12 Dec 2003 18:30:00 -0800

### The art of the really long view For such a weighty subject there was a lot of guffawing going on in the Seminar Thursday night. The topic was "The Art of the Really Long View." Peter Schwartz chatted through his slides for tonight's lecture, then the discussion waded in. Present were Danny Hillis, Leighton Read, Angie Thieriot, Ryan Phelan, David Rumsey, Eric Greenberg, Kevin Kelly, Anders Hove, Schwartz, and me. The event was very well audio and video taped, so we can link you to a fuller version later. For now, here's a few of my notes. Much of discussion circled around Schwartz's assertion that the most durable and influential of human artifacts are IDEAS. And a distinction worth drawing is between POWERFUL ideas and GOOD ideas. Not all powerful ideas turn out to be good, in the long run. For example, Schwartz proposed that monotheism has been an extremely powerful idea, dominating all kinds of human activity for millennia, but its overall goodness is increasingly questionable. Or take the powerful idea of Communism and the powerful idea of Capitalism. Looking at them when both were being touted as world solutions around, say, 1890, how would you distinguish which one was likelier to play out as good? Most of us, then, would probably have given the nod to Communism, particularly in light of robber-baron excesses in the US, etc. Danny Hillis proposed that bad powerful ideas are essentially collective hallucinations which mask reality, whereas good powerful ideas have built into them all kinds of reality checks. So Capitalism---expressed as markets---has prevailed so far because it is an emergent, distributed, out-of-control feedback system. Some notable quotes (among many): > "The future is the ONLY thing we can do anything about." --Hillis > "Denial is a special case of optimism." --Leighton Read. Revisiting Long Now's frequent chant that multiplying options is the great good to do for future generations, we examined the idea of "toxic choice"---for instance the stupefying multiplicity of choices in a supermarket or department store that make you long for a good boutique. "But lots of boutiques," said Ryan Phelan. "I've got it! " said Read, "We'll have two big toxic choice emporiums, connected by a bunch of boutiques! I think we've just invented the mall." Contemplating work to be done, Schwartz said: "We know it would be a good idea to have the rule of law extended to include ecological systems, but we haven't figured out how to make that a powerful idea yet."

Brian Eno: The Long Now

The Long Now Foundation — Fri, 14 Nov 2003 18:30:00 -0800

### The Long Now Brian told the origins of his realizations about the "small here" versus the "big here" and the "short now" versus the "long now." He noted that the Big Here is pretty well popularized now, with exotic restaurants everywhere, "world" music, globalization, and routine photos of the whole earth. Instant world news and the internet has led to increased empathy worldwide. But empathy in space has not been matched by empathy in time. If anything, empathy for people to come has decreased. We seem trapped in the Short Now. The present generation enjoys the greatest power in history, but it appears to have the shortest vision in history. That combination is lethal. Danny Hillis proposed that there's a bug in our thinking about these matters---about long-term responsibility. We need to figure out what the bug is and how to fix it. We're still in an early, fumbling phase of doing that, like the period before the Royal Society in 18th-century England began to figure out science. Tim O'Reilly gave an example of the kind of precept that can emerge from taking the longer-term seriously. These days shoppers are often checking out goods (trying on clothes, etc.) in regular retail stores but then going online to buy the same goods at some killer discount price. Convenient for the shopper, terrible for the shops, who are going out of business, hurting communities in the process. The aggregate of lots of local, short-term advantage-taking is large-scale, long-term harm. Hence Tim's proposed precept, now spreading on the internet: "Buy where you shop." Ie. When you shop online, buy there. When you shop in shops, buy there. Four simple words that serve as a reminder to head off accumulative harm. Leighton Read observed that imagining the future is an acquired skill, and comes in stages. An infant can't imagine the next bottle, or plan for it. A teenager can at most imagine the next six months, and only on a good day; on a rowdy Saturday night, Sunday morning is too remote to grasp. For us adults the distant future is still unimaginable. One thing that Leighton likes about the 10,000-year Clock project is that it lets you imagine a particular part of the very remote future---the Clock ticking away in its mountain---and then you can widen your scope from there, to include climate change over centuries, for example. Alexander Rose suggested that we should collect examples where a small effort in the present pays off huge in the long term. Tim O'Reilly would like to see us develop a taxonomy of such practices. Brian's talk Friday night at Fort Mason was a smashing affair. Some 750 people were pried into the Herbst Pavillion, while 400-500 had to be turned away. Eno evidently attracts the sweetest, brightest people---everyone was polite and helpful and patient. The only publicity for the lecture had been email forwarded among friends and posted on blogs, plus one radio show (Michael Krasny's "Forum").