Stewart Brand's Blog, page 11

The Data of Long-lived Institutions

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity. 

I want to lead you through some of the research that I’ve been doing on a meta-level around long-lived institutions, as well as some observations of the ways various systems have lasted for hundreds of thousands of years. 

Long Now as a Long-lived Institution

This is one of the early projects I worked with Stewart Brand on at Long Now. We were trying to define our problem space and explore the ways we think on different timescales. Generally, companies are working in the “nowadays,” although that’s been shortening to some extent, with more quarterly thinking than decade-level thinking.

It was Peter Schwartz who suggested this 10,000 year timeframe. Danny Hillis’ original idea for what would ultimately become The 10,000 Year Clock was that it would be a Millennium Clock: it would tick once a year, bong once a century, and the cuckoo would come out once a millennium. He didn’t really have an end date. 

We use the 10,000 year time frame to orient our efforts at Long Now because global civilization arose when the last Interglacial period ended 10,000 years ago. It was only then, around 8,000 BC, that we had the emergence of agriculture and the first cities. If we can look back that far, we should be able to look forward that far. Thinking about ourselves as in the middle of a 20,000 year story is very different than thinking about ourselves as at the end of a 10,000 year story. 

This pace layers diagram is the very first thing I worked on at Long Now. The notion of pace layers came out of a discussion between Stewart and Long Now co-founder Brian Eno. They were trying to tease apart these layers of human time. 

Institutions can be mapped across the pace layers diagram as well. Take Apple Computer, for example. They’re coming out with new iPhones every six months, which is the fashion layer. The commerce layer is Apple selling these devices. The infrastructure layer is the cell phone networks and chip fabs that it’s all built on. The governance layer—and note that it is governance, not government; they’re mostly working with governments, but they also have to work with general governing systems. Some of these companies are hitting walls against different types of governments who have different ideas of privacy, different ideas of commercialization, and they’re now having to shape their companies around that. And then obviously, culture is moving slower underneath all of this, but Apple is starting to affect culture. And then there’s the last pace layer, nature, moving the slowest. At some point, Apple is going to have to come to terms with the level of environmental damage and problems that are happening on the nature pace layer if it is going to be a company that lasts for hundreds or a thousand years. So we could imagine any large institution mapped across this and I think it’s a useful tool for that. 

Also very early on in Long Now’s history, in 01997, Kees van der Heijden, who wrote the book on scenario planning, came to a charrette that Long Now organized to come up with business ideas for our organization. He formulated a business plan that was strangely prophetic:

The squares are areas where we have core competencies. The dotted lines indicate temporary competencies, like the founders. The other items indicate all the things we hadn’t really gotten to yet or figured out: we didn’t have a way of funding ourselves; we didn’t have a membership program; we didn’t have a large community of donors; we didn’t have an endowment; and we didn’t have people willing to give their estates to us. We still don’t have an endowment or people willing to give us our estates, but we’ve achieved the rest. And now that we’ve been around for 22 years, we can imagine how those two items are going to start to happen next.  

I also want to point out the cyclical nature of this diagram. There’s no system in the world that I’ve found that is linear that has lasted on these timescales. You need to have a cyclical business model, not a linear business model.

The Longest-Lived Institutions in the World

I’ve been collecting data on all of the longest lived institutions in the world. As you look at these, there’s a few things that stick out. Notice: brewery, brewery, winery, hotel, bar, pub, right? And also notice that a lot of them are in Japan. There’s been a rough system of government there for over 2,000 years (the Royal Family) that’s held together enough to enable something like the Royal Confectioner of Japan to be one of the oldest companies in the world. But there’s also temple builders and things like that.

In the West, most of the companies that have survived for a very long time are basically service companies. It’s a lot easier to reinvent yourself as a service-oriented company than it is as a commodity company when that particular commodity goes out of use.

Colgate Palmolive (founded 01806) and DuPont (founded 01802) are commodity companies that are broad enough to change the kinds of products they sell over time. I’m interested in learning more about all these companies, as they probably all have some kind of special sauce in their stories of longevity. 

Something else that came out of this research is the fact that the length of company’s lives is shrinking at almost one year per year. In 01950, the average company on the Fortune 500 had been around for 61 years. Now it’s 18 years. Companies’ lives are getting shorter.

As I mentioned, most of the oldest companies in the world are in Japan. In a survey of 5,500 companies over 200 years old, 3,100 are based in Japan. The rest are in some of the older countries in Europe. 

But—and this was a fact I found curious, and one that speaks to the cyclical nature of things—90% of the companies that are over 200 years old have 300 employees or less; they’re not mega companies. 

In surveying 1,000 companies over 300 years old, you find a huge amount of disparity concerning which industries they’re a part of. But there were a few big groupings that I found interesting. 23% are in the alcohol industry, and this doesn’t even include pubs and restaurants and hotels that may sell alcohol. 

Patrick McGovern, a biomolecular archeologist who I talked to when we were building The Interval, has done DNA analysis on vines, which are a clonal species. From that analysis, we  know that civilization started cultivating wine 8,000 BC. McGovern supposes that it’s not at all clear if civilization stopped being nomadic in order to ferment things, or because they started fermenting things, they stopped being nomadic. It’s an intriguing correlation, and notable that some of this overwhelmingly large segment of the oldest companies in the world deal in alcohol.

Long-term Thinking is Not Inherently Good

A quick word about values: long-term thinking, and aspiring to be a long-term institution, is not inherently good. At Long Now, we’ve always emphasized the importance of long-term thinking without trying to ascribe a lot of values to it. But I don’t think that’s intellectually honest. We have to ask ourselves what we’re trying to perpetuate. We have to step back far enough and ensure that the kinds of things we’re perpetuating are generally good for society. 

How to Build Things That Last

One way that things have lasted for a really long time is to just take a really long time to build them. Cathedrals are a famous example of this. The most dangerous time for anything that’s lasting is really just one generation after it was built. It’s no longer a new, cool thing; it’s the thing that your parents did, and it’s not cool anymore. And it’s not until another couple generations later where everyone values it, largely because it is old and venerable and has become a kind of cultural icon. 

And we already see this with this cathedral: the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.  It’s still under construction, 125 years into its build process, and it’s already a UNESCO World Heritage Site. 

The other way things last for a really long time, and this is the Japanese model, is that they’re just extremely well-maintained. 

At about 1,400 years old, these are the two oldest continuously standing wooden structures in the world. And they’ve replaced a lot of parts of them. They keep the roofs on them, and even in a totally humid and raining environment, the central timbers of these buildings have stayed true. Interestingly, this temple was also the place where, over a thousand years ago, a Japanese princess had a vision that she needed to send a particular prayer out to the world to make sure that it survived into the future. And so she had, literally, a million wooden pagodas made with the prayer put inside them, and distributed these little pagodas as far and wide as she could. You can still buy these on eBay right now. It’s an early example of the philosophy of “Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe” (LOCKSS). 

Another Japanese example that uses a totally different strategy is this Shinto shrine.

Shinto is an animist religion whose adherents believe that spirits are in everything, unlike Buddhism, which came to Japan later. In the Shinto belief system, temples have this renewing technology, if you will, where they’re rebuilt in a site right next to each other in different periodicities. This one, which is the most famous in Japan, is the Ise Shrine, which is rebuilt every 20 years. A few years ago, I was fortunate enough to attend the rebuilding ceremony. (One of the oldest companies in the world, I should add, is the Japanese temple building company that builds these temples. 

The emphasis here is not on maintenance, but renewal. These temples made of thatch and wood—totally ephemeral materials—have lasted for 2,000 years. They have documented evidence of exact rebuilding for 1,600 years, but this site was founded in 4 AD—also by a visionary Japanese princess. And every 20 years, with the Japanese princess in attendance, they move the treasures from one from one temple to the other. And the kami—the spirits—follow that. And then they deconstruct the temple, the old one, and they send all those parts out to various Shinto temples in Japan as religious artifacts.

I think the most important thing about this particular example is that each generation gets to have this moment where the older master teaches the apprentice the craft. So you get this handing off of knowledge that’s extremely physical and real and has a deliverable. It’s got to ship, right? “The princess is coming to move the stuff; we have to do this.” It’s an eight year process with tons of ritual that goes into rebuilding these temples.

I think an interesting counterexample to things lasting a very long time is when they ascribe to certain ideologies. And I think it’s curious, one of our longest lived institutions is the Catholic Church, and the ideology of something like the Buddha’s Obamian has lasted, but a lot of the artifacts become targets for people who don’t believe in that ideology. The Taliban spent weeks dynamiting and using artillery to destroy these Buddhas. You would think that Buddhism, a relatively innocuous religion, is unthreatening—but not so much to the Taliban.

This is the University of Bologna, which is largely credited as the earliest university in the world. It’s almost 1000 years old at this point. Oxford was shortly behind it. And there’s another 40 or so universities over 500 years old.

Universities have this ability to do a kind of continual refresh where every four years, especially in undergraduate programs, you have a whole new set of people. And so they have to sell themselves to a new generation every single year. Their customer is a whole class. And we see universities now struggle when they aren’t teaching relevant things to people and they have to adjust. And that has kept them around as some of the longest lived institutions in the world. 

I think the idea of communities of practice is a really interesting one. In these communities, knowledge of practice is handed down from generation to generation. Such is the case with martial arts, which we have evidence for dating back at least 2,000 or 3,000 years.

There’s several strategies in nature that allow systems to last for thousands of years. There’s clonal strategies like the Aspen tree. We’ve measured Mesquite rings in the desert where they die and then they grow up in a ring from the root structure that indicates that a Mesquite ring has the same DNA, effectively for 50,000 years. And these clonal forests have definitely been around for thousands of years, even though each individual will only last a few years in some cases.

In other cases, things are cultivated. Going back to the wine example, where we know we have effectively the DNA of clonal species like these grapes from ancient Rome where we have taken a clipping and cultivated it from generation to generation. So there’s been this kind of interplay between humans and the natural world and we also see this in a lot of tree-caring practices. 

The bristlecone exemplifies how an existential crisis gives you practice in terms of how you’re going to survive. The bristlecone is the oldest continuously living single organism that we know of in the world. And the funny thing about the bristlecone is it was not discovered by coring to be the oldest living species in the world; it was postulated because a particular tree scientist had cored other pine species, and as they did that, they found that all the ones in the worst environments were the oldest. And he said: “If you can find the pine species that is living in the absolute worst environment, you will find the oldest species of pine in the world.” And he coined this term: adversity breeds longevity. And so then people went to go find the pines in the worst environment and up at the top of the White Mountains and in the Snake Range in Nevada, and some in Colorado as well, they found three different species of bristlecone, which have been dated to over 5,000 years at this point.

Taking the Future into Account

If any of us are to build an institution that’s going to last for the next few hundred or 1,000 years, the changes in demographics and the climate are a big part of it. This is the projected impact of climate change on agricultural yields until the 02080s. And as you can see, agricultural yields in the global south are going to be going down. In the global north and the much further north, more like Canada and Russia, they’re going to be getting a lot better. And this is going to change the world markets, world populations, and what we’re warring over for the next 100 years.

In all natural systems, you have these sigmoid curves that things always go down. We are always assuming things like our population and our economies to always go up, but that is not the way the world works; it has never been that way, and we always have these kinds of corrections. In this case, a predator follows the prey as a lower sigmoid. Once its prey runs out, then the predators start dying off. 

How do we get good at failing, but not totally dying out? The lynx never dies out totally, but companies that do one thing are bad at recovering when that one thing is no longer the big commodity. It wasn’t record companies that invented iTunes; it was an outsider company. Record companies were adept at selling plastic circles and when there were no plastic circles to sell music on, they didn’t know how to adjust for that. The crux of anything that’s going to last for a long time is: how do you get good at reinvention and retooling?

There’s no scenario that I’ve seen where the world population doesn’t start going down by at least a hundred years from now, if not less than 50 years from now. 

So even the median projection, that red line in the middle, tapers off. But this data is a couple of years old, and it’s now starting to increasingly look a lot more like that dotted blue line at the bottom. And the world has really never lived through a time, except for a few short plague seasons, where the world population was going down—and, by extension, where the customer base was going down.

Even more dangerous than the population going down is that the population is changing. The red line here is the number of 15 to 64 year olds. And the blue line is the zero to 14 year olds. If the world is made up largely of older people who hoard wealth, don’t work hard, and don’t make huge contributions of creativity to the world the way 20 year olds do, that world is a world that I don’t think we’re prepared to live in right now.

We’re seeing this now happening in a lot of the developed world and most notably in Japan. Those of you who remember the 01980s recall that there was no scenario where Japan was not an absolute dominant part of the economy of the world. And now they’re struggling just to be relevant in a lot of ways, and it’s largely because this population change happened and the young people were not there. They wouldn’t allow any immigration, and that creativity, and that thrust of civilization, went out of a country that was a dominant world economic power.

Watch the video of Alexander Rose’s talk on the Data of Long-lived Institutions:

A Long Now Drive-in Double Feature at Fort Mason

Join the Long Now Community for a night of films that inspire long-term thinking. On October 27, 02020, we’ll screen Samsara followed by 2001: A Space Odyssey at Fort Mason.

SAMSARA



Drive-in Screening on Tuesday October 27, 02020 at 6:00pm PT




Get Tickets

SAMSARA is a Sanskrit word that means “the ever turning wheel of life” and is the point of departure for the filmmakers as they search for the elusive current of interconnection that runs through our lives.  SAMSARA transports us to sacred grounds, disaster zones, industrial sites, global gatherings and natural wonders. By dispensing with dialogue and descriptive text, the film subverts our expectations of a traditional documentary, instead encouraging our own inner interpretations inspired by images and music that infuses the ancient with the modern. 

Filmed over five years in twenty-five countries, SAMSARA (02011) is a non-verbal documentary from filmmakers Ron Fricke and Mark Magidson, the creators of BARAKA. It is one of only a handful of films shot on 70mm in the last forty years. Through powerful images, the film illuminates the links between humanity and the rest of nature, showing how our life cycle mirrors the rhythm of the planet.

2001: A Space Odyssey



Drive-in Screening on Tuesday October 27, 02020 at 8:45pm PT




Get Tickets

The genius is not in how much Stanley Kubrick does in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” but in how little. This is the work of an artist so sublimely confident that he doesn’t include a single shot simply to keep our attention. He reduces each scene to its essence, and leaves it on screen long enough for us to contemplate it, to inhabit it in our imaginations. Alone among science-fiction movies, “2001″ is not concerned with thrilling us, but with inspiring our awe. 

What Kubrick had actually done was make a philosophical statement about man’s place in the universe, using images as those before him had used words, music or prayer. And he had made it in a way that invited us to contemplate it — not to experience it vicariously as entertainment, as we might in a good conventional science-fiction film, but to stand outside it as a philosopher might, and think about it.

— Roger Ebert

Ticket & Event Information:

Tickets are $30 per vehicle for members, General Public Tickets are $60 per vehicle.Separate tickets must be purchased for each of the screenings.Parking opens at 5:00pm for the 6:00pm showing, and 7:45pm for the 8:45pm showing.Please have your ticket printed out or on your phone so we can check you in.Parking location will be chosen by the venue to insure that everyone can best see the screen.The film audio will be through your FM radio receiver. There will be concessions available at the event! The Interval will be open to purchase to-go drinks, there will be a Food Truck and popcorn, candy and other snacks for sale.

COVID-19 Safety Information:

This is a socially distant event. Please do not attend if you are experiencing any symptoms of COVID-19. Bathrooms will be cleaned throughout the evening.Masks are required when outside of your vehicle. Masks with exhalation valves are not allowed.Attendees must remain inside their vehicles except to use the restroom facilities or pickup concessions.Each vehicle may only be occupied by members of a “pod” who have already been in close contact with each other.Attendees who fail to follow safe distancing at the request of staff will cause the attendee to be subject to ejection of the event. No refund will be given.

About FORT MASON FLIX  

With drive-in theaters experiencing a renaissance around the country, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture (FMCAC) announces FORT MASON FLIX, a pop-up drive-in theater launching September 18, 2020. Housed on FMCAC’s historic waterfront campus, FORT MASON FLIX will present a cornucopia of film programming, from family favorites and cult classics to blockbusters and arthouse cinema.

Charting Earth’s (Many) Mass Extinctions

How many mass extinctions has the Earth had, really? Most people talk today as if it’s five, but where one draws the line determines everything, and some say over twenty.

However many it might be, new mass extinctions seem to reveal themselves with shocking frequency. Just last year researchers argued for another giant die-off just preceding the Earth’s worst, the brutal end-Permian.

Now, one more has come into focus as stratigraphy improves. With that, four of the most awful things that life has ever suffered all came down (in many cases, literally, as volcanic ash) within 60 million years. Not a great span of time with which to spin the wheel, in case your time machine is imprecise…

The Language Keepers Podcast

A six-part podcast from Emergence Magazine explores the plight of four Indigenous languages spoken in California—Tolowa Dee-ni’, Karuk, Wukchumni, and Kawaiisu—among the most vulnerable in the world:

“Two centuries ago, as many as ninety languages and three hundred dialects were spoken in California; today, only half of these languages remain. In Episode One, we are introduced to the language revitalization efforts of these four Indigenous communities. Through their experiences, we examine the colonizing histories that brought Indigenous languages to the brink of disappearance and the struggle for Indigenous cultural survival in America today.”

Five New Discoveries Offer an Opportunity to Contemplate the Difference Between the Dead and Merely Dormant

Changmiania liaoningensis, buried while sleeping by a prehistoric volcano. Image Source.

Although the sensitive can feel it in all seasons, Autumn seems to thin the veil between the living and the dead. Writing from the dying cusp of summer and the longer bardo marking humankind’s uneasy passage into a new world age (a transit paradoxically defined by floating signifiers and eroded, fluid categories), the time seems right to survey five new discoveries from paleontology, zoology, and neuroscience that offer up an opportunity to contemplate the difference between the dead, and merely dormant.

We start 125 million years ago in the unbelievably fossiliferous Liaoning Province of China, one of the world’s finest lagerstätten (an area of unusually rich floral or faunal deposits — such as Canada’s famous Burgess Shale, which captured the transition into the first bloom of complex, hard-shelled, eye-bearing life; or the Solnhofen Limestone in Germany, from which flew the “Urvogel” feathered dinosaur Archaeopteryx, one of the most significant fossil finds in scientific history). Liaoning’s Lujiatan Beds just offered up a pair of perfectly-preserved herbivorous small dinosaurs, named Changmiania or “Sleeping Beauty” for how they were discovered buried in repose within their burrows by what was apparently volcanic ash, a kind of prehistoric Pompeii:

Changmiania in its eternal repose. Image Source.

There’s something especially poignant about flash-frozen remains that render ancient life in its sweet, quiet moments — a challenge to the reigning iconography of the Dawn Ages with their battling giants and their bloodied teeth. Like the Lovers of Valdaro, or the family of Pinacosaurus buried together huddling up against a sandstorm, Changmainia makes the alien past familiar and reminds us of the continuity of life through all its transmutations.

Similarly precious is the new discovery of a Titanosaurid (long-necked dinosaur) embryo from Late Cretaceous Patagonia. These creatures laid the largest eggs known in natural history — a requisite to house what would become some of the biggest animals to ever walk the land. Even so, their contents were so small and delicate it is a marvelous surprise to find the face of this pre-natal “Littlefoot” in such great shape, preserving what looks like an “egg tooth”-bearing structure that would have helped it break free:

The face of a baby dinosaur brings the ancient and brand new into stereoscopic focus. Image Source.

From ancient Argentina to the present day, we move from dinosaurs caught sleeping by fossilization to the “lizard popsicles” of modern reptiles who have managed to adapt to freezing night-time temperatures in their alpine environment. Legends tell of these outliers in the genus Liolaemus walking on the Perito Moreno glacier, a very un-lizard-like haunt; they’re regularly studied well above 13,000 feet, where they may be using an internal form of anti-freeze to live through blistering night-time temperatures. The Andes, young by montane standards, offer a heterogeneous environment that may function like a “species pump,” making Liolaemus one of the most diverse lizard genuses; 272 distinct varieties have been described, some of which give live birth to help their young survive where eggs would just freeze solid.

Liolaemus in half-popsicle mode. Image Source.

Even further south and further back in time, mammal-like reptile Lystrosaurus hibernated in Antarctica 250 million years ago — a discovery made when examining the pulsing growth captured in the records of ringed bone in its extraordinary tusks, much like the growth rings of a redwood:

Lystrosaurus tusks looking remarkably like a redwood tree cross-section. Image Source.

This prehistoric beast, however, lived in a world predating woody trees. Toothless, beaked, and tusked, its positively foreign face nonetheless slept through winter just like modern bears and turtles…which might be why it managed to endure the unimaginable hardships of the Permo-Triassic extinction, which wiped out even more life than the meteor that killed the dinosaurs 135 million years later. Slowing down enough to imitate the dead appears to be, poetically, a strategy for dodging draft into their ranks. And likely living on cuisine like roots and tubers during long Antarctic nights, it may have thrived both in and on the underworld. Lystrosaurus seems to have weathered the Great Dying by playing dead and preying on the kinds of flora that could also play dead through a crisis on the surface.

Lystrosaurus in the woodless landscape of the Triassic. Image Source.

And while we’re on the subject of the blurry boundary between the worlds of life and death, Yale University researchers recently announced they managed to restore activity in some parts of a pig’s brain four hours after death. In the 18th Century when the first proto-CPR resuscitation methods were invented, humans started adding horns to coffins so the not-quite-dead could call for help upon awakening, if necessary; perhaps we’re due for more of this, now that scientists have managed to turn certain regions of a dead brain back on just by simulating blood flow with a special formula called “BrainEx.”

Revived cells in a dead pig’s brain. Image Source.

At no point did the team observe coordinated patterns of electrical activity like those now correlated with awareness, but the research may deliver new techniques for studying an intact mammal brain that lead to innovations in brain injury repair. Discoveries like these suggest that life and death, once thought a binary, is a continuum instead — a slope more shallow every year.

If life and death are ultimately separated only by the paces at which processes at which the many layers of biology align, the future seems like it will be a twilight zone: a weird and wide slow Styx akin to Arthur C. Clarke’s 3001: The Final Odyssey, rife with de-extincted mammoths and revived celebrities of history, digital uploads and doubles and uncanny androids, cryogenic mummies in space ark sarcophagi — and more than a few hibernating Luddites waiting for a sign that it is safe to re-emerge.

Sleeping Beauties of Prehistory and the Present Day

Changmiania liaoningensis, buried while sleeping by a prehistoric volcano. Image Source.

Although the sensitive can feel it in all seasons, Autumn seems to thin the veil between the living and the dead. Writing from the dying cusp of summer and the longer bardo marking humankind’s uneasy passage into a new world age (a transit paradoxically defined by floating signifiers and eroded, fluid categories), it seems right to constellate a set of sleeping beauties, both extant and extinct, recently discovered and newly understood. Much like the “sleeping beauties” of forgotten scientific research, as described by Sidney Redner in his 02005 Physics Today paper and elaborated on by David Byrne’s Long Now Seminar, these finds provide an opportunity to contemplate time’s cycles — and the difference between the dead, and merely dormant.

We start 125 million years ago in the unbelievably fossiliferous Liaoning Province of China, one of the world’s finest lagerstätten (an area of unusually rich floral or faunal deposits — such as Canada’s famous Burgess Shale, which captured the transition into the first bloom of complex, hard-shelled, eye-bearing life; or the Solnhofen Limestone in Germany, from which flew the “Urvogel” feathered dinosaur Archaeopteryx, one of the most significant fossil finds in scientific history). Liaoning’s Lujiatan Beds just offered up a pair of perfectly-preserved herbivorous small dinosaurs, named Changmiania or “Sleeping Beauty” for how they were discovered buried in repose within their burrows by what was apparently volcanic ash, a kind of prehistoric Pompeii:

Changmiania in its eternal repose. Image Source.

There’s something especially poignant about flash-frozen remains that render ancient life in its sweet, quiet moments — a challenge to the reigning iconography of the Dawn Ages with their battling giants and their bloodied teeth. Like the Lovers of Valdaro, or the family of Pinacosaurus buried together huddling up against a sandstorm, Changmainia makes the alien past familiar and reminds us of the continuity of life through all its transmutations.

Similarly precious is the new discovery of a Titanosaurid (long-necked dinosaur) embryo from Late Cretaceous Patagonia. These creatures laid the largest eggs known in natural history — a requisite to house what would become some of the biggest animals to ever walk the land. Even so, their contents were so small and delicate it is a marvelous surprise to find the face of this pre-natal “Littlefoot” in such great shape, preserving what looks like an “egg tooth”-bearing structure that would have helped it break free:

The face of a baby dinosaur brings the ancient and brand new into stereoscopic focus. Image Source.

From ancient Argentina to the present day, we move from dinosaurs caught sleeping by fossilization to the “lizard popsicles” of modern reptiles who have managed to adapt to freezing night-time temperatures in their alpine environment. Legends tell of these outliers in the genus Liolaemus walking on the Perito Moreno glacier, a very un-lizard-like haunt; they’re regularly studied well above 13,000 feet, where they may be using an internal form of anti-freeze to live through blistering night-time temperatures. The Andes, young by montane standards, offer a heterogeneous environment that may function like a “species pump,” making Liolaemus one of the most diverse lizard genuses; 272 distinct varieties have been described, some of which give live birth to help their young survive where eggs would just freeze solid.

Liolaemus in half-popsicle mode. Image Source.

Even further south and further back in time, mammal-like reptile Lystrosaurus hibernated in Antarctica 250 million years ago — a discovery made when examining the pulsing growth captured in the records of ringed bone in its extraordinary tusks, much like the growth rings of a redwood:

Lystrosaurus tusks looking remarkably like a redwood tree cross-section. Image Source.

This prehistoric beast, however, lived in a world predating woody trees. Toothless, beaked, and tusked, its positively foreign face nonetheless slept through winter just like modern bears and turtles…which might be why it managed to endure the unimaginable hardships of the Permo-Triassic extinction, which wiped out even more life than the meteor that killed the dinosaurs 135 million years later. Slowing down enough to imitate the dead appears to be, poetically, a strategy for dodging draft into their ranks. And likely living on cuisine like roots and tubers during long Antarctic nights, it may have thrived both in and on the underworld. Lystrosaurus seems to have weathered the Great Dying by playing dead and preying on the kinds of flora that could also play dead through a crisis on the surface.

Lystrosaurus in the woodless landscape of the Triassic. Image Source.

And while we’re on the subject of the blurry boundary between the worlds of life and death, Yale University researchers recently announced they managed to restore activity in some parts of a pig’s brain four hours after death. In the 18th Century when the first proto-CPR resuscitation methods were invented, humans started adding horns to coffins so the not-quite-dead could call for help upon awakening, if necessary; perhaps we’re due for more of this, now that scientists have managed to turn certain regions of a dead brain back on just by simulating blood flow with a special formula called “BrainEx.”

Revived cells in a dead pig’s brain. Image Source.

At no point did the team observe coordinated patterns of electrical activity like those now correlated with awareness, but the research may deliver new techniques for studying an intact mammal brain that lead to innovations in brain injury repair. Discoveries like these suggest that life and death, once thought a binary, is a continuum instead — a slope more shallow every year.

If life and death are ultimately separated only by the paces at which processes at which the many layers of biology align, the future seems like it will be a twilight zone: a weird and wide slow Styx akin to Arthur C. Clarke’s 3001: The Final Odyssey, rife with de-extincted mammoths and revived celebrities of history, digital uploads and doubles and uncanny androids, cryogenic mummies in space ark sarcophagi — and more than a few hibernating Luddites waiting for a sign that it is safe to re-emerge.

Time’s Arrow Flies through 500 Years of Classical Music, Physicists Say

A new statistical study of 8,000 musical compositions suggests that there really is a difference between music and noise: time-irreversibility. From The Smithsonian:

Noise can sound the same played forwards or backward in time, but composed music sounds dramatically different in those two time directions.

Compared with systems made of millions of particles, a typical musical composition consisting of thousands of notes is relatively short. Counterintuitively, that brevity makes statistically studying most music much harder, akin to determining the precise trajectory of a massive landslide based solely on the motions of a few tumbling grains of sand. For this study, however, [Lucas Lacasa, a physicist at Queen Mary University of London] and his co-authors exploited and enhanced novel methods particularly successful at extracting patterns from small samples. By translating sequences of sounds from any given composition into a specific type of diagrams or graphs, the researchers were able to marshal the power of graph theory to calculate time irreversibility.

In a time-irreversible music piece, the sense of directionality in time may help the listener generate expectations. The most compelling compositions, then, would be those that balance between breaking those expectations and fulfilling them—a sentiment with which anyone anticipating a catchy tune’s ‘hook’ would agree.

Stunning New Universe Fly-Through Really Puts Things Into Perspective

A stunning new video lets viewers tour the universe at superluminal speed. Miguel Aragon of Johns Hopkins, Mark Subbarao of the Adler Planetarium, and Alex Szalay of Johns Hopkins reconstructed the layout of 400,000 galaxies based on information from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 7:

“Vast as this slice of the universe seems, its most distant reach is to redshift 0.1, corresponding to roughly 1.3 billion light years from Earth. SDSS Data Release 9 from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), led by Berkeley Lab scientists, includes spectroscopic data for well over half a million galaxies at redshifts up to 0.8 — roughly 7 billion light years distant — and over a hundred thousand quasars to redshift 3.0 and beyond.”

Time-Binding and The Music History Survey

Musicologist Phil Ford, co-host of the Weird Studies podcast, makes an eloquent argument for the preservation of the “Chants to Minimalism” Western Music History survey—the standard academic curriculum for musicology students, akin to the “fish, frogs, lizards, birds” evolutionary spiral taught in bio classes—in an age of exponential change and an increased emphasis on “relevance” over the remembrance of canonical works:

Perhaps paradoxically, the rate of cultural change increases in proportional measure to the increase in cultural memory. Writing and its successor media of prosthetic memory enact a contradiction: the easy preservation of cultural memory enables us to break with the past, to unbind time. At its furthest extremes, this is manifested in the familiar and dismal spectacle of fascist and communist regimes, impelled by intellectual notions permitted by the intensified time-binding of literacy, imagining utopias that will ‘wipe the slate clean’ and trying to force people to live in a world entirely divorced from the bound time of social/cultural tradition.

See, for instance, Mao Zedong’s crusade to destroy Tibetan Buddhism by the erasure of context that held the Dalai Lama’s social role in place for fourteen generations. How is the culture to find a fifteenth Dalai Lama if no child can identify the relics of a prior Dalai Lama? Ironically this speaks to larger questions of the agency of landscapes and materials, and how it isn’t just our records as we understand them that help scaffold our identity; but that we are in some sense colonial organisms inextricable from, made by, our environments — whether built or wild. As recounted in countless change-of-station stories, monarchs and other leaders, like whirlpools or sea anemones, dissolve when pulled out of the currents that support them.

That said, the current isn’t just stability but change. Both novelty and structure are required to bind time. By pushing to extremes, modernity self-undermines, imperils its own basis for existence; and those cultures that slam on the brakes and dig into conservative tradition risk self-suffocation, or being ripped asunder by the friction of collision with the moving edge of history:

Modernity is (among other things) the condition in which time-binding is threatened by its own exponential expansion, and yet where it’s not clear exactly how we are to slow its growth.  Very modern people are reflexively opposed to anything that would slow down the acceleration: for them, the essence of the human is change. Reactionaries are reflexively opposed to anything that will speed up acceleration: for them, the essence of the human is continuity. Both are right!  Each side, given the opportunity to realize its imagined utopia of change or continuity, would make a world no sensible person would be caught dead in.

Ultimately, therefore, a conservative-yet-innovative balance must be found in the embrace of both new information technologies and their use for preservation of historic repertoires. When on a rocket into space, a look back at the whole Earth is essential to remember where we come from:

The best argument for keeping Sederunt in the classroom is that it is one of the nearly-infinite forms of music that the human mind has contrived, and the memory of those forms — time-binding — is crucial not only to the craft of musicians but to our continued sense of what it is to be a human being.

This isn’t just future-shocked reactionary work but a necessary integrative practice that enables us to reach beyond:

To tell the story of who we are is to engage in the scholar’s highest mission. It is the gift that shamans give their tribe.

Study Group for Progress Launches with Discount for Long Now Members

Long Now Member Jason Crawford, founder of The Roots of Progress, is starting up a weekly learning group on progress with a steep discount for Long Now Members:

The Study Group for Progress is a weekly discussion + Q&A on the history, economics and philosophy of progress. Long Now members can get 50% off registration using the link below.

Each week will feature a special guest for Q&A. Confirmed speakers so far include top economists and historians such as Robert J. Gordon (Northwestern, The Rise & Fall of American Growth), Margaret Jacob (UCLA), Richard Nelson (Columbia), Patrick Collison, and Anton Howes. Readings from each author will be given out ahead of time. Participants will also receive a set of readings originally created for the online learning program Progress Studies for Young Scholars: a summary of the history of technology, including advances in materials and manufacturing, agriculture, energy, transportation, communication, and disease.

The group will meet weekly on Sundays at 4:00–6:30pm Pacific, from September 13 through December 13 (recordings available privately afterwards). See the full announcement here and register for 50% off with this link