Rebecca Lendl:

Welcome to The Long Now Podcast. I’m your host Rebecca Lendl, Executive Director here at The Long Now Foundation.

Today we’re joined by a dynamic pair: Stephen Heintz, a distinguished leader in philanthropy and public policy, and Kim Stanley Robinson, one of the most influential speculative fiction writers of our time.

Stephen and Stan’s long-running friendship and dialogue have been horizon-expanding — for their respective work but also for all of us.

Stephen has cited Stan’s visions of our prospective futures as a kind of shaping mechanism for his own policy work. That more expansive, systemic public policy becomes available with our ability to imagine and think in longer timescales.

Our speakers lift up moments from history like the Atlantic Charter during WWII in one of the darkest moments in human history when we found the moral imagination — as well as the political will — to lay out a utopian vision for a post-war world.

Today’s conversation integrates just these forces — imagination and will — and calls us, as Stephen puts it, “to pierce the darkness and offer a vision, a bold ray of light.”

And that is exactly what we need to do in these times.

If you’re interested in learning more, you’ll find a ton of great resources in our show notes.

Now, before we dive in, a quick note —

In our age of compounding crises, this work of imagining new possibilities may seem daunting. But challenges that feel impossible to tackle within a single human lifetime become conceivable when you have a longer timescale — and a community collaborating across generations.

Here at The Long Now Foundation, we are a counterweight — deepening our capacity to move wisely in these times of uncertainty. If you feel so inspired, we hope you’ll join us. Head over to longnow.org/donate to become a member and get connected to a whole world of long-term thinking.

With that, we’re excited to share with you — A Logic For The Future: International Relations in the Age of Turbulence with Stephen Heintz & Kim Stanley Robinson.

Patrick Dowd:

Stan, Steven, welcome to the Long Now Foundation. How does it feel to be back and be here for the first time?

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Nice to be back, hometown, sort of. I'm from the provinces of my hometown, so I love it more than even the people here.

Steven Heintz:

And for me it's a great pleasure and a great honor, and thank you all for coming, this is great. And I have to say it's a particular honor to be here with Stan, somebody I admire and respect so profoundly. So it's really a delight.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Well, thank you, Steven. It's good to be here with you. And I got questions.

Steven Heintz:

Yeah.

Patrick Dowd:

Well, tonight is going to be a journey of imagination. And we're going to start far out looking on a planetary, even multi-planetary level, and come closer towards the national and international into the local in this moment where we are now.

And in this planetary frame, Stan, you're approaching it through the lens of science fiction based on deep research into the current realities and future possibilities of technology and governance while being in dialogue with people who are leading and shaping governance systems around the world. And Steven, you are in that milieu of the governance systems and academia and philanthropy and think tank world, and you're getting inspiration from the fictional genre. So could you both speak about how in terms of cultivating imagination about what can be possible in the future, you're both inspired by both fiction and nonfiction?

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Well, for me, if you're going to tell a story of the future, you've left the realm of realism and there's reason for the readers to question everything you say, why this is kind of a fantasy, the sets seem to be cardboard, like the Star Trek bridge. Trying to make it more real than realism has been an aesthetic goal. So then you have to learn some stuff to make your story feel solid in the reader's mind.

So then very quickly you come to this realization that the nation state system is a historical artifact that is not fit for purpose, for planetary governance. This is a zero-sum game and really a cause of enormous misunderstandings and strife. And then given my background, it becomes equally obvious that capitalism as practiced is a kind of predatory, parasitic social system that creates inequality, creates environmental destruction as a part of its system. In San Francisco, you get applause for that line, and thank God for that.

So this is what I'm interested in, Steven, is that you have actually been there and seen the nation state systems trying to get along, like with the nuclear deal with Iran and the sheer awkwardness and badness, the potential for misunderstanding conflict. But you have seen a role for yourself and for your organization like yours to serve as a kind of a clutch between an engine and a motor, or some lubricant to make the gears work better and not just freeze up. And so you've had experiences that few people have had of that kind, and I'm interested to hear more.

Steven Heintz:

The Iran deal, yeah, well, thank you, Stan, it's a very interesting case study, and it's kind of a long story, which I'm going to really work hard to truncate. But after 9/11, literally as I had an office on Madison Avenue that looked straight down to the Twin Towers, and the next morning I showed up for work and the towers were no longer there and the smoke was rising from the site, and like everybody, we began to ask questions about, "Well, why did this happen? What is it telling us? What do we need to think differently?"

And everybody was focused on the Arab world because of course the terrorists who conducted that terrible event were Sunni Arabs. And I kept looking at the map and I said, "Yes, I understand that. And that's obviously something people need to work on, need to understand, need to figure out." But then I kept saying, "But you know, Iran, which is a Shia Muslim country, is geostrategically located, very large and totally not understood by Americans because we have not had any diplomatic relations with them since the 1979 revolution," and I had this feeling that Iran was going to loom very large in the coming years.

And so I just started talking to people about this. I didn't know anything about Iran either. And through the kind of networking that people in my profession are very privileged to be able to do, I was introduced to Iran's Ambassador at the United Nations and we started having this conversation and he said, "You know, we need to find a way for Americans and Iranians to actually talk to each other about the issues that divide us, because otherwise we are headed into some kind of collision course." And so we organize what is known in the field as a track two diplomatic effort, so non-official, but with people who are serious practitioners of diplomacy. The US team that we assembled were all former American diplomats, highly distinguished and regarded diplomats who had served in both Republican and Democratic administrations, some for their entire careers and at very high levels, including a former ambassador to the UN, et cetera. And the Iranians ultimately also brought together a team.

And it was very complicated, as you can imagine, just getting started. But the point I think you're asking me to address is that the governments couldn't do this because of the zero-sum logic that pervaded international relations and the fact that the 1979 revolution happened, we had the hostage crisis, we carried that grievance deeply in the American psyche, they had the assassination or the overthrow rather of Mosaddegh the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran in 1953 because he nationalized the oil industry, they carry that grievance deeply in their psyche and there was no possible way for the two governments to talk to each other.

In fact, American diplomats, this is how stupid it gets, American diplomats, if they went to an embassy reception at the United Nations, they were not allowed to even greet the Iranian diplomats in the room. So we became the alternative, and it was a very, very difficult process, it's still ongoing in this moment. But we did, to your point, once we started building trust between these two teams, and we met dozens and dozens of times in the woods outside of Stockholm because we were then able, once we had the level of trust to start putting ideas on the table, "Well, how could we solve this nuclear problem? What are things that might work? What are things that might be acceptable to your side and the other side?" And then we would go back to our capitals and we would go to the White House, we would go to the State Department and we would describe what we were learning, and they would give us their perceptions and we'd go back and meet six weeks later.

And this was an iterative process that ultimately generated ideas that helped, and I don't want to overstate the case, but John Kerry would say if he were here and even President Obama, that this helped create the possibility for the two governments to actually begin to negotiate directly. And then when they started the negotiations, we were a place that was able to keep transmitting ideas into the formal, the track one negotiations from this track two process. So it is a good example of how civil society organizations, of which we are one at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, working with other civil society organizations can actually be a kind of constructive intermediary in solving planetary significant problems like the Iran nuclear question.

Patrick Dowd:

Both in Ministry for the Future and in your monograph, Steven, A Logic for the Future, you imagine a world in which things work out for planetary governance, and I want to invite you to share that with our audience, perhaps people who might not have already read either of your works. What does it look like, things working out? Over what kind of timeframe? What are some of the elements of a planetary program that could get us from where we are to a more sustainable future?

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Well, I define myself as a utopian science fiction writer, so that is unusual and interesting. New stories come out of it. I've said this before, perhaps on this very stage, the utopias are like blueprints and novels are like soap operas. And so combining blueprints and soap operas is not automatically a key to aesthetic success. But we have Ursula K. Le Guin and The Dispossessed as an example of how it can be done. And I've always held that up to myself. If it can be done once, it can be done again.

So the human story of trying to make a better world, as long as you don't think of utopia as an end case, but rather as a process, a name for positive history, that's utopian, then, A, you've got stories, you've got to create it, you've got to protect it after and keep it good after it's been established. In fact, I would like to quote the greatest American utopian science fiction story ever written as a example of how it works, "The government of the people by the people for the people shall not perish from the earth." This is in the future tense, future imperative, it's an injunction. We are required to do it, we are enjoined to do it. It's almost a legal term, "Shall not." And that is a utopian story that we have to keep keeping alive.

So stories are there. It was a mistake to think that it was utopias are blueprints and soap operas, it was actually a matter of writing about history. And then I will just finish by saying for our moment in history, avoiding a mass extinction event is a utopian science fiction story because we are so scarily close, we've begun it'll be hard to pull out of it, it's going to take a lot of international cooperation of the kind you're describing to make it work. And so now with the bar that low, all kinds of fictions that are interesting could be called utopian science fiction.

And so I'm thinking now here of the scale in your Logic For, there's scale up and then scale in, and I'll mention them, but you'll have to talk about them one at a time maybe, the scaling up national sovereignty, the zero-sum game that's wrecking things. You mentioned the EU as the most important development of the second half of the 20th century, and I already had been taught that by my beloved late teacher, Frederick Jameson, to go from nation-state to member-state is crucial, legally, financially, and psychologically. So that's the scale up. And then the scale down, I want to talk later about human sovereignty as a phrase and an idea, but tell us more about why you describe the EU that way?

Steven Heintz:

So can I just say as I get ready to answer that question that I think in this conversation about the importance of imagination, Patrick, which you started us with, and I remember Andrew Wyeth saying about his paintings that they were dreaming in the presence of reality. And I think that's what your novels do. You are dreaming about a future based on science of today and science that people are developing. So it is a dream based on scientific realities. And my own work in this regard is about dreaming of a better system for this century, not as far into the future perhaps as some of the work that you've done, also in the presence of the realities of international relations and history and politics.

So when we think about people who had dreams, the founders of the European Union were doing exactly that, they were dreaming in the presence of the reality of the end of the Second World War on a continent where they had fought two world wars back-to-back basically, largely between France and Germany. And the dreamers who created the European Union decided they had to create, they had to invent something that would prevent that from ever happening again. And they started out small with something called the European Coal and Steel Community to create a common market for those products. And from there, they kept building and building out to create a peace project essentially. We think of the European Union as a political entity, as a market, as a very important economy in the world now, more or less equivalent in GDP to the US economy. But it was a peace project and it has worked really well ever since it was founded.

But the real lesson in this is that 27 European countries have given up some of their sovereignty because they see the benefit of pooling that sovereignty, expanding the zone and working on environmental, economic, political, social, and now security problems collectively as opposed to trying to do it individually. And to me, this is probably the most successful political development of the 20th century, certainly the second half. And it is a model for the future.

It has its flaws and they know it, the Europeans know it, and they're trying to work through those flaws. They have the same problem that we have in this country and that the United Nations has, and you and I were talking about this earlier, which is their founding documents, Constitution of the United States, the Maastricht Treaty or the Treaty of Rome, the two founding documents of the European Union, and the UN Charter are all flawed in the most fundamental ways that they are almost unamendable at this point, and yet we need to amend them in order to make these institutions relevant to the world we're facing.

But the EU, to me, is the best example we've got so far because of this notion of actually giving up some sovereignty. Then they also created another innovation that gets to a point, Patrick, that you were talking about, they created the concept of subsidiarity, which is that problems ought to be delegated to the unit of government best able to provide a solution to that problem. So if it's better handled by the city government of San Francisco to manage, let's say, building code regulations for better earthquake sustainability, that's obviously where that should happen. If the problem is a planetary problem like climate change, we ought to be creating the institutions that can manage that problem as a planetary problem.

And regional organizations like the European Union or the African Union or ASEAN in Southeast Asia are beginning to play another intermediary role. And the nation state is not going to be irrelevant, but it needs to become less dominant because who fights wars? It's nation states. Who violates the Paris Climate Agreement? It's nation states. Who withdraws from the Paris Climate Agreement? A nation state. So I think the nation state, which by the way is a 17th century invention in the Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the 30 years war in 1638, and we're still living with this concept. And it's not that we need to eliminate it, but it's part of the logic of the past that needs to be really rethought and redesigned as part of the logic for the future.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Something occurs to me from what you said, that there's too high of a bar for amending the US Constitution. Even the youngest person here will probably never see an amendment to the US Constitution, even though there's 27 of them, and it used to work, but two-thirds of the state legislators voting for something, it just seems very unlikely at this point. The changing the UN charter has a similar two-thirds bar, the COP process for the Paris Agreement requires unanimity for each COP statement at the end of the year, which is impossible and so they're talking about unanimity minus one or minus five. European Union has the problem of, luckily they have some tools to beat on, if there's one country, like say Hungary being recalcitrant, they can beat on that country and override it. But mostly these are too high of bars.

I just want to say the world needs what California has, which is called the Lazy Voter Act. If you make a legitimate attempt and you don't get to two-thirds, but you get to something like 50%, you can take it to a judge who will look at it and say, "Okay, you did the best you can. These are lazy voters, I'm passing it." So now we need a world court in H.G. Wells style and we have a world court, although it doesn't really function as such, but someone to say that if you've gotten to 60% but not 67, you could still make institutional changes because we're somewhat frozen in older formulations that are not flexible enough and not fit for purpose.

Steven Heintz:

That's right.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

So we are in a scary situation in that regard, and there is no such thing as a Lazy Voter Act. Although the people running the Paris Agreement for COP30 in Belém, Brazil, by the time they get there, will have proposals to change that process so it doesn't become completely irrelevant by being so damn slow.

Steven Heintz:

The term that I like for this concept of moving away from unanimity or moving away from these very high bars is sufficient consensus. Not unanimity, but sufficient consensus. Do we have enough consensus that it means this is the direction we should go? It's the lazy voter concept, but with a different kind of twist.

Patrick Dowd:

Steven, your logic for the future, and you yourself were instrumental in shaping the UN Summit for the Future and the resulting Pact for the Future, which was a serious collaborative attempt at an act of imagination within the UN context, and I'm really curious, what did you observe there? How are you seeing these ideas that you're advocating for finding purchase in the real world?

Steven Heintz:

Well, the Summit of the Future was an idea put forward by the Secretary General Guterres, who has framed it I think really quite elegantly. He said, "The international system designed by our grandparents is not fit for the future our grandchildren deserve." And that's exactly the problem. So he decided that while he was Secretary General, he was going to organize a process to actually think about the UN we need as opposed to the UN we have. And that became the Summit for the Future, which was a heads of state summit. But with two years of negotiations among the 193 member states around iteration after iteration of this pact, the outcome document that was finally adopted.

And it was an audacious idea to have a Summit of the Future, I mean, it was really an audacious idea, and a lot of people in the beginning didn't take it very seriously because it was utopian.

And so the real challenge is how do you take a utopian idea and begin the iterative process of actually getting to something meaningful? And when you're negotiating with 193 sovereign states, that is a messy process at the very best. And it had to be a consensus document, not of the sufficient consensus type, but of the unanimous consensus type. And it almost got lost at the very end. Literally at the 11th hour, there was a motion put forward by Russia that would have derailed the entire thing and it was the African Group of Nations in the General Assembly that pushed back the hardest, and they managed to get this thing adopted with only five countries voting for Russia's amendment, which failed. So it was a pretty remarkable story.

And the document, if you read it, it's not fun reading like Stan's books, it's pretty turgid, but it's a very important benchmark written in UN language but it has 56 commitments that the nation states make, the 193 members, to building the UN of the future that we need. Now, it falls short in a lot of areas, but it's the first major statement about UN Security Council reform that the UN has adopted since 1963. It has a remarkable statement or annex document, which is called the Global Digital Compact, which is especially for this audience something I really commend you to read. And then there's a further annex called The Compact for Future Generations. And one of the things that came out of this is that the Secretary General is now going to appoint an envoy for future generations, not just youth, not today's youth, but literally the unborn, and what are their rights in this world of the future?

So it was a utopian concept, very audacious, a lot of people were very skeptical. But you know what was so inspiring was that these diplomats, just normal, regular human beings who happen to be diplomats worked really hard at this and compromised, and there was a lot of give and take and they've now put out this kind of baseline, and now it's up to, to get to our earlier conversation who's going to hold them accountable? And that's going to have to happen through global civil society, through movements, through think-tanks, through investigative journalism, through all of the means that we've been holding countries accountable for their climate commitments and all of the things we've done to hold people accountable for their human rights commitments. And we're going to have to do the same and up the ambition because this pact, even as good as it is, is not going to solve this global problem, but it's a start and we need to build on it and make it something really, really meaningful.

Patrick Dowd:

How would you invite people in the audience, in the community, in the global community of long-term thinkers into this process of imagination that they can see a role for themselves in shaping something along the lines of the planetary governance features that you've been speaking about?

Kim Stanley Robinson:

I was in Germany when a group of women came up to me and said, "We run a Ministry for the Future. It's a kindergarten." So we all can do stuff, that was a great moment, we all can do stuff. We already know it already. And for sure, this is a moment to speak to the glory and comfort of being a Californian. I mean, San Francisco is the cultural leader of the world, and then also it's the obvious cultural center of California. And so being here or near it, around it, you can feel the buzz of the shadow of the future, the making of the future by the collective action of people here. You don't have to fight or be a tiny minority. It's actually just San Francisco culture leading the world into what? Diversity, equity, and inclusion. Yeah.

Steven Heintz:

Arrest this man.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Yeah. And I will say that there are some people in Washington DC who I would say there's genocide, there's ecocide, there is attempted futurecide to kill the future, which you cannot do. So this is a fantasy of people sticking their head in the sand and hoping that they could go back to the past, various kinds of bad fantasy. And as a science fiction writer, I hate fantasy of course. But these people, you cannot kill the future. It comes and it comes no matter what a few reactionaries do in a momentary seizure of power, it's coming anyway. They can't stop it.

Steven Heintz:

I also want to say that Stan's book, this is not San Francisco, but it's another important intellectual and creative community called Oxford University, and a group of scientists and scholars at Oxford were so inspired by Stan's book that they've created the Ministry for the Future. And maybe you should say a word about that.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Yes, it's a beautiful thing. Oxford University, Hartford College, and a couple of the business schools, there's an Oxford Ministry for the Future, and I am instantly emeritus and advisory. It's better to be instantly emeritus than to actually have to do the work. But I asked them to follow one topic or another. At the end of April, it will be about the health of wild animals and things like interspecies money or various kinds of debt for nature trades. How can we introduce into a political economy our fellow citizens that happen to be the other creatures, our cousin creatures, what Muir called our horizontal brothers and sisters? So that will be just one topic at Oxford Ministry for the future and they'll have two or three meetings a year to talk about these things.

And Oxford does have a immense crowd of interesting thinkers gathered there to talk to each other. It's a complicated ecology, but it's actually quite productive and fruitful. They're excited to be there. They're having a good time, they're talking their heads off. It's amazing how long the days go. I've been stunned in the most literal sense days there. So I'm happy that it's working. I'm really happy at all these things. I think, I mean, as an English major, of course you believe in sentences, but even phrases, it couldn't be Ministry of the Future, it needed to be Ministry for the Future. And the book could have had about, there were about 20 titles, and I actually for once said, "No, I've got the right title here, don't change it." And The Ministry for the Future, as a phrase, seems to be kind of a spark or a turning of a key in people's imaginations. So I'm very happy, of course, and they're doing good things that I'll continue to stay involved in.

Patrick Dowd:

A question from audience member Ansh Jumaja, "It's clear the US is retreating rather than building global coalitions in this new age of international relations. How do you see this going over the next few years if things continue in this direction? And would you adjust your hope for the next decade considering the current state?"

Steven Heintz:

Well, I'll just jump in if that's okay. So I originally wrote my monograph in 2023, and it was published in 2024 before the election, and it was before the Summit of the Future had actually taken place. So at the end of last year with the summit having taken place and with the results of the election that we got, I went back through the paper to say, "What should I change here to make this paper more relevant to the new?" And I hardly changed a word because I actually think, and this is pride of authorship probably taken to extremes, but I actually think the ideas in the paper are more relevant because of what's happening in Washington right now than maybe they were before.

Because one of the most important sub-chapters in this work is that the United States itself needs to completely transform the way it behaves in the world if we're going to get to the global system that we really need. And that is more apparent now because of the way the United States has been behaving in the last 55 or whatever days it is. And we need to give up on the notion of great power dominance. We need to give up on the notion that the United States is the indispensable nation, a phrase that a very good friend of mine, Madeleine Albright, coined, and we used to argue about. We need to move to the notion that the United States needs to be an indispensable partner. We need to be more humble on the world stage, we need to be more honest on the world stage and not hypocritical. We need to back up the International Court of Justice and not walk away from it.

And those things are more apparent now because of what is happening in Washington today. So in some ways, we have to get through this very, very challenging and potentially very dark period. And then, this is a community that talks a lot about creative destruction, what we're getting right now is all destruction and no creativity, but that gives us all the opportunity for the creativity, which gets back to the imagination theme that we've been talking about. So we got to defend what needs defending, we got to protect what needs to be protected, but we then got to use the destruction that's occurred and make something out of it for the future.

Patrick Dowd:

Steven, just on this point, and I want to invite your answer as well, Stan, but Steven, you were mentioning backstage about the Atlantic Charter and what was the environment in which that came to be. I found that inspiring, would you share that story?

Steven Heintz:

And you'll remember this from your own study of history, but in August of 1941, after Hitler had literally swept across the European continent, Great Britain was literally hanging on by a thread, the United States was not yet in the war because Pearl Harbor didn't occur until December, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt met on a destroyer off the coast of Newfoundland, and they together drafted a very short, beautifully written document called the Atlantic Charter, which lays out actually a utopian vision for the post-war world that said the major powers eschew the use of force to settle their differences, there will be freedom from want and freedom from need, we will work to solve problems cooperatively, and we will create the mechanisms so that we never have a war like this again.

They didn't even have the confidence that they were going to win the war, and yet they were able to think through that darkness, pierce the darkness, and offer literally a vision, a bold ray of light that became a part of the inspiration for the United Nations here in San Francisco in 1945. So in one of the darkest moments in human history, people of moral and political imagination were able to pierce that darkness and move to something that was just an extraordinary accomplishment. And that's what we need to do in this period, it's exactly what we need to do. And they married it, so this is the last point, I'm sorry I'm probably going on too long here, but it was this marriage of political and moral imagination and political will. They not only had the vision, they were determined to make it happen. And that's what we're going to need to build.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Hopefully we can. I'm thinking about this subsidiarity San Francisco, the cultural capital of California, California the great state, the world space between the Gold Rush, Hollywood and Silicon Valley, some kind of magical catastrophe that is our state, and then subsidiarity America, well, it is indispensable country as an idea of everybody getting along together from all over the world. Like in California, the 115 languages, and the sense that everybody could come here and make something new in history, the utopian dream of America. Also, the horrible empire, the manifest destiny, the genocide of the Native Americans. The two stories are tied together like conjoined twins, they can't be separated, they can only be improved by clear sight and by acknowledging both parts of it.

So while you have to fight a bad vision of America that's still being inflicted on us, 5% of the world's population, about 7% of the world's land surface and about 70% of the world's capital, and also the US dollar, the benchmark currency, so a fiscal empire of immense power. But empires fall, and when they fall apart, people who are devoted to the idea of that empire get very upset. But there's some huge advantages to not being an empire, because an empire is always oppressive and a form of master-slave relationship that isn't good. So the bad part of America, if there are suddenly people in power who are proclaiming it as the greatest possible value, what it does is give an opportunity for saying, "No, that's not the right part of America. There's another right part of America." And a lot of that is illustrated in California, but it needs to be done at the federal level.

And then I want to add a little story. I just saw, maybe it was yesterday, Stanford economist, actually he's at Oxford now, Doyne Farmer, a map of all the things it needs to make your laptop, and it was a map of the world and there were like, I don't know, 60 dots on the map, and therefore about 300 lines between the dots on the map. And this is just to make one laptop for you and not to mention the expertise, et cetera, et cetera. You can't do tariffs, you can't raise a fortress of America. This whole thing is, again, a fantasy, it's a stupid fantasy and there's a certain viciousness to it. But it can't be enacted because you can't even make a laptop without engaging the entire world.

Globalization, for better and worse, it worked. We are in a global economy and we are in a global technology in the terms of the supply chains, which Doyne taught me, it's not really chains, it's more in networks and loops, it's an ecology that we've created for ourselves that is our economy. To think that one nation, even the one that holds the dollar, could dominate and bully around all the other parts of the network, really? No. What I think is that this fantasy will crash and then we will have to pick up pieces. Damage is being done.

I want to say this, that hammering National Institute of Health is particularly stupid and vicious because it's a murder-suicide in that everybody suffers when there isn't medical research, everybody. So then you have to ask why do it? Now, there are people struggling mightily in Washington and New York and around the world thinking, "Well, there must be some rational urge behind it," no, I'm going to say it's simply the Goethe Damerung, it's, "If I have to go down, the world's going down with me,". It's the twilight of the gods. This is a kind of malignant narcissism. There is not an economic plan behind it. There's various smokescreens, but underneath it is an urge to destroy because every time $10 billion of medical research is devoted to medical research, say 10 billion, the average lifespan of all humans on earth goes up by about a month. Social scientists do this, cost-benefit analysis.

So I've been talking to college students in the last couple weeks, and I'd like to shock them a little bit with the idea that them being young, they are going to suffer the most loss of lifetime, that the last 55 days or whatever has shortened their life by months to years. And sometimes, of course, they're 25, they're thinking, "Well, I'm never going to die anyway, much less get old," but nevertheless, if you talk about it as actual tables and say, "Let's get real for a while, and what's real? Well, death is real. That's the incontrovertible reality." And when you begin to shorten humans' lifespans in order to pursue a cause that doesn't even have a rationale to it, then you're in a disruptive derby type mentality and these people need to be resisted and hopefully stopped and reversed. And that will be hard. I mean, you can break something in six months that it'll take 10 years to fix, but some things you can just overturn immediately say, "No, that's wrong. Let's fix it back to right."

So we are in a wicked political battle now, but I think reality bites, they call it reality because you can't escape it with a fantasy. You stick your head in the ground and then you drown. So reality will win in the end, and therefore the people who are the party of reality will win in the end.

Patrick Dowd:

This is a question from Kevin Kelly. "Describe how a representative government for 8 billion people might work. Does it scale?"

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Well, this might be a Kevin Kelly idea, in which case it's very recursive, but I just heard this. In Taiwan, you gather together a group of citizens like in a jury system, come on down and we'll host you, you got your food, you got maybe a per diem and a time off from work. We're going to give you a political problem, we want you to brainstorm about it. So they do that. And we've all been in brainstorming sessions, saifu, brainstorming sessions, you know what they're like. Mostly you walk away and think, "Well, that was kind of a waste of a day."

But what they do here in this program is they give it to a large language model and they say, "Turn today's brainstorming post-it notes into two pieces of legislative language, bills to be enacted that the Taiwanese legislature has already agreed to consider as legislation." Suddenly you've got crowdsource legislation that bypasses the gatekeepers and the bot lobbyists, et cetera. And it would scale, it's still representative. And for once there's AI assistance that looks to be quite useful because they do summarize, they could do something in about, what, 30 seconds that might take two months for a human to do and then the human's bias would bias it anyway. So there's something quite interesting going on in this crowdsource legislation that might scale.

Steven Heintz:

Yeah, I agree with that. There are all kinds of experiments with various forms of citizens assemblies that are kind of facilitated and moderated citizens gatherings for deliberation that then are actually utilized by legislative bodies. And with technology, you can scale these things quite remarkably now. And I think that's the way we have to get at this. And I'm not yet an advocate for world government, I think that's an idea that is scary for people and also is not adequate, I think it's more complicated than thinking about kind of a name. But I do think these ways of aggregating citizen opinion and citizen contribution is a really good way to start this process.

Patrick Dowd:

I have a beautifully short question here from Don Means who writes, "China?"

Steven Heintz:

Right, exactly. Well, fortunately, I've been going to China since 1976 when I was just recently out of college and I've been working there on and off pretty much ever since and we are still working there at the foundation. I have an office in Beijing, and I serve on kind of, to my own surprise, the government, the Chinese government appointed me to a high level international advisory body on environment and development, which they take extremely seriously. You wouldn't see anything like this in Washington, by the way.

So I have really come to appreciate the complexity of China and also the extraordinary progress that China's making in a lot of fields. And we are actually moving more and more to a world where there are two really important major powers, China and the United States, economically, technologically, environmentally, militarily. To simplify, one could argue that this is becoming a G2 world, not a G20 world. So the future of US-China relations is absolutely the most consequential relationship of the 21st century. And if we get it wrong, we're going to have planetary catastrophe. And that's why we have to change the thinking about China dramatically.

And people who are trying to get us to think, "Oh, we're now in a new Cold War and the war is with China," are pulling us back into the logic of the past, which are these binaries of us versus them in a bipolar kind of world and it won't work. And we have to recognize the complexity, the subtleties, the nuances, and compete with China where we must, cooperate with China where we must and avoid confrontation with China for the benefit of the planet. And that is not an easy matter, but we are not going about it in a very thoughtful way.

So the one proposal that I put in my monograph was that because this relationship is so important, it shouldn't be left to episodic meetings of top-level officials, summits of the presidents, or even meetings of the Secretary of the Treasury and the Finance Minister of China, or the Foreign Affairs Ministers or the environment ministers, et cetera. That's all very important and necessary, but it's not sufficient for managing this relationship in a constructive manner. And I propose creating an actual joint entity in some neutral place like Geneva or Singapore where high-level civil servants in the key ministries of both countries are literally seconded to work together on a day-to-day basis and argue with each other and debate each other and produce new ideas and write papers and send them back to their capitals and work on this relationship so that we get it right, because, "China?" is the question of the 21st century.

Patrick Dowd:

Lovely. A great long now question here from Gideon, "How do you stoke interest in long-term utopian thinking right now when people are so focused on short-term catastrophism?"

Kim Stanley Robinson:

I think it's harder than hell, especially if people are stressed and in the precariat, which means almost everybody. On the other hand, it's a natural thing or it's a cultural thing. You care intensely about your kids and then about your grandkids and you only have to take one more step to think your grandkids are going to have grandkids and it won't take very long for that to happen. And you get to the kind of Indigenous notion of the seven generations and the seven generations that came to you, that gave you what you are and then what you give to the seven generations along. That's not a very hard notion to talk to people about. And then if they can clear any kind of a space in their heads from the daily pressure to make ends meet, it's as natural as being human.

Steven Heintz:

Yeah. Isn't there something liberating in a way about thinking about the future? Instead of focusing on your problem today, focusing on something that is longer term and offers the possibility of something very optimistic, I think can also be reinvigorating in how we address the problems we face on a day-to-day basis.

Patrick Dowd:

Completely. Long-term thinking, I like to say, is the polar opposite of being in a constant crisis mindset.

I want to close this evening's conversation, this journey of imagination from the planetary to the international to the local with zooming out into the future and asking each of you to inspire us with a vision of what it would feel like for imagination to really blossom in our future. Steven, you had a front-row seat to the fall of the Berlin Wall, Stan, in your novels, when you get to the end of them, you can feel sometimes this resolution and the imagination working. How might that feel for us in the future?

Steven Heintz:

In very unexpected ways, I suspect. And you mentioned the Berlin Wall, I happened to be in Berlin one month before the wall fell and I went through Checkpoint Charlie from West to East, spent the day in the East, went back through checkpoint Charlie in the evening, and I left Berlin after that visit thinking, "This divided city is an abomination and it's not going to change in my lifetime." One month later. So the point is we can get ourselves convinced that things won't change and then they will change. And the question is, are we prepared at that moment to make the best of it?

And so to me, the future is going to be about those unexpected moments and how we as a human society react to them. And the more we think about that, the better prepared we will be not for the thing we can't imagine, which is in that instance the fall of the Berlin Wall, but for the things we can imagine that we can then say, "Oh, now that this has happened, we can do some things to get closer to that."

And just to end on this, because I think it's quite relevant, I would say that period from 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down to the end of 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, was a moment of missed creativity. We, especially in America, treated it as a triumphal moment, the end of communism, the victory of capitalism and democracy. And it was the unipolar moment that we could feel so comfortable in, but we did not exercise our imagination and realize that that was going to be gone like that. And it did, it evaporated very quickly. And because we weren't able to exercise imagination in that moment, we have gotten stuck in the logic of the past and we are doing things again that are only going to lead us into more international and global difficulties. So thinking ahead and being ready, when those unexpected moments happen, to pivot is, to me, the thing that we all have to prepare ourselves for.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Well, I thought when I finished Ministry for the Future that the most unrealistic and utopian part of it was the idea of E.O. Wilson's idea of half earth that we would confine humanity's impact on the earth to about half of the earth's surface and the oceans, and wild animals and the biosphere at large, the living cousins would prosper and then we'd be healthier. Oh, that's a beautiful dream, so I put it in that novel. But now we can think 50 years out, there's a 30 by 30 program in California and in the world at large, 30% of the land surface and of the ocean left to the wild creatures. This is so fast, that turning point. First, the idea of it, and it wasn't Wilson's idea, there were precursors in various space cadets in early American history and early 20th century history imagining these things and then Wilson codifying it up into a system and now we've got a state program.

I met Jennifer Norris, the Head of California's 30 by 30 program. She tells me that in California we're at about 25% and we need to get to 30% and we're going to get there. And everybody in her program talks about 50 by 50, that by 2050 we have half the earth. Well, this implies regenerative agriculture and it implies a health for our fellow creatures, it implies dodging the mass extinction event. So not only can you imagine out to a utopian space, but you can see the roots of it and the first shoots of it since we're in springtime, the rapid growth of spring.

And this is unstoppable even by negative forces out there. There's a certain kind of a momentum in world history right now that those things, and I've just spent the last five years traveling the world talking to people about these very issues. It's been intense and it's been super interesting. It's kind of like the way Stuart and Kelly have lived the last 50 years. And I'm amazed, it's quite an effort. But it's interesting, right? It's interesting because you learn a lot.

And you also get a sense that humans as a group are realizing that 8 billion people on the planet is an intensely dangerous situation. It's a technological achievement, it's unstable as hell and we got to work to make it more stable so that everybody has that kind of adequacy of life means, and the opportunity, this is very San Francisco, to become more like themselves than ever before, which I think is a great definition of utopian space. There's a role towards it that if we can thread the needle or the needles in this next few decades, that we can get to a space that is really quite astonishing in terms of its potential.

So let's hold the line here and keep our nerve and hang together. In fact, this is another great American short story, another one of the great, we must all hang together or else we will all hang separately. So let's hang together.

Patrick Dowd:

Here, here. Thank you. Thank you, Steven, thank you, Stan, for inspiring us to think long-term.

Kim Stanley Robinson:

Thank you, Patrick.

Patrick Dowd:

For calling us to imagination and for being here with us this evening. Thank you so much.

Steven Heintz:

Thank you. Thank you all.

Rebecca Lendl:

If you enjoyed this Long Now Talk, head over to longnow.org to check out more Long Now Talks and programs, and of course to become a member and get connected to a whole world of long-term thinking.

Huge thanks to our generous speakers, Stephen Heintz & Kim Stanley Robinson.

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