Stewart Brand's Blog, page 119

Good news about energy

The Long News: stories that might still matter fifty, or a hundred, or ten thousand years from now.

It's obvious energy will be one of the great challenges of this century. But it's possible to hope that the current BP oil spill might help prompt a broader conversation about possible alternatives.

Over the past few weeks we've been looking for stories about the future of energy, running a News Hunt with the help of social news site NewsTrust.

There was good news on many fronts – we found a lot o...

Ed Moses, "Clean Fusion Power This Decade"

Imminent fusion power

All the light we see from the sky, Moses pointed out, comes from fusion power burning hydrogen, the commonest element in the universe—3/4 of all mass. A byproduct of the cosmic fusion is the star-stuff that we and the Earth are made of.

On Earth, 4 billion years of life accumulated geological hydrocarbons, which civilization is now burning at a rate of 10 million years' worth per year. In 1900, 98% of the world's energy came from…

Read the rest of Stewart Brand's Summary...

Plastic Century

Attendees at The Academy of Science debate whether or not to try the water from 02030

Long Now Research Fellow – Stuart Candy (along with cohorts) recently presented the Plastic Century futures project at the Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. The project gives you the option of drinking water from decades ranging from 01910 (no plastic) to a hypothetical 02030 (mostly plastic).   After sampling each  I found them all to be fine except for 01960 which was a bit bitter for some reason…

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The woman that programmed the first computer

Information Pioneers: Ada Lovelace from Information Pioneers on Vimeo.

This is a nice intro to Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer who wrote programs for Babbage's mechanical computer. While this computer is similar to the binary mechanical computer used in the first 10,000 Year Clock prototype, Babbage's computers are decimal based.

2.5 Billion Seconds

Dinosaur Comics, June 11th 02010, (click for full size)

Same images every time but different words, what a stupid comic right?  Wrong. Dinosaur Comics are super awesome.  This particular one is awesome in a Long Now way.  Enjoy.

Oldest Leather Shoe Discovered

There's a great story bouncing around last week – a shoe was found in an Armenian cave.  Not just any shoe, of course.  It's about five and a half thousand years old.  It's the oldest leather shoe ever found, predating Ötzi the Iceman's footwear by about 300 years.

It is objects like this that always remind us when doing a lot of research around materials for the Clock, that given the right environment (in this case freezing) just about any material could last 10,000 years.

(via New York...

Ancient Beers

Beer is as old as civilization itself and Dogfish Head Craft Brewery is giving you a chance to try some of the oldest known brews.  Scientific American gives us this story on three ancient reconstituted recipes by Dogfish Head.  The unexpected fruit of molecular anthropology, these beer recipes come from chemical analyses of ancient pottery.

If you've a taste for vintage, there's also a beer made with 45 million year old yeast that was harvested from a weevil trapped in fossilized amber!

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Frank Gavin Ticket Info

The Long Now Foundation's monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking presents Frank Gavin on "Five Ways to Use History Well"Monday July 12, 02010 at 7:30 pm at the Cowell Theater in San FranciscoLong Now Members can reserve 2 seats, join today!or you can purchase tickets for $10 each.

About this Seminar:
Historian Francis J. Gavin uses lessons from our recent history to suggest strategic policy decisions that counter-balance alarmist speculation about international security issues, such as...

Mammoth Time Lapse

This video is part of the Mammoths and Mastadons exhibit at The Field Museum in Chicago, and was the Long Short for our Seminar with Nils Gilman.

Untitled from bryan campen on Vimeo.

It's a reverse time lapse put together by Greg Mercer and Emily Ward (editing), and David Quednau (animation). Unwinding 20,000 years of a modern American city and frontier outposts, Native American settlements and the last ice age, we arrive in their world and resurrect them in film.

Perhaps most interesting is...

The Future of Energy: a news hunt

Heliotron magnetic field fusion containment device

Is There Good News About Energy?

In the face of the BP disaster, it would be all too easy to lose hope about our energy future. But it's possible there might be a silver lining in that oily cloud: if we're lucky, the spill may prompt a deeper conversation about the need to find new, global, scalable solutions to meet our energy needs.

As part of that conversation, we'd like to invite you to join our Energy News Hunt, with social news site