Long Now

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. A...

### 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...

## 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...

### 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...

## 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. T...

## 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...

## 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 wha...

## 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 Av...

### 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 combin...

### 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 y...

### 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 pr...

### 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 out...

### 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...

### 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...

### 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...

### 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 exhaust...

### 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...

### 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 ow...

### 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 o...

### 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...

### 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 P...

### 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 youn...

### 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 p...

### 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 w...

### 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),...