Stewart Brand's Blog, page 13

Traditional Ecological Knowledge

Archaeologist Stefani Crabtree writes about her work to reconstruct Indigenous food and use networks for the National Park Service:

Traditional Ecological Knowledge gets embedded in the choices that people make when they consume, and how TEK can provide stability of an ecosystem. Among Martu, the use of fire for hunting and the knowledge of the habits of animals are enshrined in the Dreamtime stories passed inter-generationally; these Dreamtime stories have material effects on the food web, which were detected in our simulations. The ecosystem thrived with Martu; it was only through their removal that extinctions began to cascade through the system.

Predicting the Animals of the Future

Jim Cooke / Gizmodo

Gizmodo asks half a dozen natural historians to speculate on who is going to be doing what jobs on Earth after the people disappear. One of the streams that runs wide and deep through this series of fun thought experiments is how so many niches stay the same through catastrophic changes in the roster of Earth’s animals. Dinosaurs die out but giant predatory birds evolve to take their place; butterflies took over from (unrelated) dot-winged, nectar-sipping giant lacewing pollinator forebears; before orcas there were flippered ocean-going crocodiles, and there will probably be more one day.

In Annie Dillard’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, she writes about a vision in which she witnesses glaciers rolling back and forth “like blinds” over the Appalachian Mountains. In this Gizmodo piece, Alexis Mychajliw of the La Brea Tar Pits & Museum talks about how fluctuating sea levels connected island chains or made them, fusing and splitting populations in great oscillating cycles, shrinking some creatures and giantizing others. There’s something soothing in the view from orbit paleontologists, like other deep-time mystics, possess, embody, and transmit: a sense for the clockwork of the cosmos and its orderliness, an appreciation for the powerful resilience of life even in the face of the ephemerality of life-forms.

While everybody interviewed here has obvious pet futures owing to their areas of interest, hold all of them superimposed together and you’ll get a clearer image of the secret teachings of biology…

(This article must have been inspired deeply by Dougal Dixon’s book After Man, but doesn’t mention him – perhaps a fair turn, given Dixon was accused of plagiarizing Wayne Barlowe for his follow-up, Man After Man.)

The Digital Librarian as Essential Worker

Michelle Swanson, an Oregon-based educator and educational consultant, has written a blog post on the Internet Archive on the increased importance of digital librarians during the pandemic:

With public library buildings closed due to the global pandemic, teachers, students, and lovers of books everywhere have increasingly turned to online resources for access to information. But as anyone who has ever turned up 2.3 million (mostly unrelated) results from a Google search knows, skillfully navigating the Internet is not as easy as it seems. This is especially true when conducting serious research that requires finding and reviewing older books, journals and other sources that may be out of print or otherwise inaccessible.

Enter the digital librarian.

Michelle Swanson, “Digital Librarians – Now More Essential Than Ever” from the Internet Archive.

Kevin Kelly writes (in New Rules for the New Economy and in The Inevitable) about how an information economy flips the relative valuation of questions and answers — how search makes useless answers nearly free and useful questions even more precious than before, and knowing how to reliably produce useful questions even more precious still.

But much of our knowledge and outboard memory is still resistant to or incompatible with web search algorithms — databases spread across both analog and digital, with unindexed objects or idiosyncratic cataloging systems. Just as having map directions on your phone does not outdo a local guide, it helps to have people intimate with a library who can navigate the weird specifics. And just as scientific illustrators still exist to mostly leave out the irrelevant and make a paper clear as day (which cameras cannot do, as of 02020), a librarian is a sharp instrument that cuts straight through the extraneous info to what’s important.

Knowing what to enter in a search is one thing; knowing when it won’t come up in search and where to look amidst an analog collection is another skill entirely. Both are necessary at a time when libraries cannot receive (as many) scholars in the flesh, and what Penn State Prof Rich Doyle calls the “infoquake” online — the too-much-all-at-once-ness of it all — demands an ever-sharper reason just to stay afloat.

Learn More



Watch Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle’s 02011 Long Now talk, “Universal Access to All Knowledge.”

The Unexpected Influence of Cosmic Rays on DNA

Samuel Velasco/Quanta Magazine

Living in a world with multiple spatiotemporal scales, the very small and fast can often drive the future of the very large and slow: Microscopic genetic mutations change macroscopic anatomy. Undetectably small variations in local climate change global weather patterns (the infamous “butterfly effect”).

And now, one more example comes from a new theory about why DNA on modern Earth only twists in one of two possible directions:

Our spirals might all trace back to an unexpected influence from cosmic rays. Cosmic ray showers, like DNA strands, have handedness. Physical events typically break right as often as they break left, but some of the particles in cosmic ray showers tap into one of nature’s rare exceptions. When the high energy protons in cosmic rays slam into the atmosphere, they produce particles called pions, and the rapid decay of pions is governed by the weak force — the only fundamental force with a known mirror asymmetry.

Millions if not billions of cosmic ray strikes could be required to yield one additional free electron in a [right-handed] strand, depending on the event’s energy. But if those electrons changed letters in the organisms’ genetic codes, those tweaks may have added up. Over perhaps a million years…cosmic rays might have accelerated the evolution of our earliest ancestors, letting them out-compete their [left-handed] rivals.

In other words, properties of the subatomic world seem to have conferred a benefit to the potential for innovation among right-handed nucleic acids, and a “talent” for generating useful copying errors led to the entrenched monopoly we observe today.

But that isn’t the whole story. Read more at Quanta.

Discovery in Mexican Cave May Drastically Change the Known Timeline of Humans’ Arrival to the Americas

Human history in the Americas may be twice long as long as previously believed — at least 26,500 years — according to authors of a new study at Mexico’s Chiquihuite cave and other sites throughout Central Mexico.

According to the study’s lead author Ciprian Ardelean:

“This site alone can’t be considered a definitive conclusion. But with other sites in North America like Gault (Texas), Bluefish Caves (Yukon), maybe Cactus Hill (Virginia)—it’s strong enough to favor a valid hypothesis that there were humans here probably before and almost surely during the Last Glacial Maximum.”

Read more at Smithsonian Magazine .Read the original study in Nature .

The Comet Neowise as seen from the ISS

For everyone who cannot see the Comet Neowise with their own eyes this week — or just wants to see it from a higher perch — this video by artist Seán Doran combines 550 NASA images from the International Space Station into a real-time view of the comet from 250 miles above Earth’s surface and 17,500 mph.

Six Ways to Think Long-term: A Cognitive Toolkit for Good Ancestors

Illustration: Tom Lee at Rocket Visual

Human beings have an astonishing evolutionary gift: agile imaginations that can shift in an instant from thinking on a scale of seconds to a scale of years or even centuries. Our minds constantly dance across multiple time horizons. One moment we can be making a quickfire response to a text and the next thinking about saving for our pensions or planting an acorn in the ground for posterity. We are experts at the temporal pirouette. Whether we are fully making use of this gift is, however, another matter.

The need to draw on our capacity to think long-term has never been more urgent, whether in areas such as public health care (like planning for the next pandemic on the horizon), to deal with technological risks (such as from AI-controlled lethal autonomous weapons), or to confront the threats of an ecological crisis where nations sit around international conference tables, bickering about their near-term interests, while the planet burns and species disappear. At the same time, businesses can barely see past the next quarterly report, we are addicted to 24/7 instant news, and find it hard to resist the Buy Now button.

What can we do to overcome the tyranny of the now? The easy answer is to say we need more long-term thinking. But here’s the problem: almost nobody really knows what it is.

In researching my latest book, The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short-Term World, I spoke to dozens of experts — psychologists, futurists, economists, public officials, investors — who were all convinced of the need for more long-term thinking to overcome the pathological short-termism of the modern world, but few of them could give me a clear sense of what it means, how it works, what time horizons are involved and what steps we must take to make it the norm. This intellectual vacuum amounts to nothing less than a conceptual emergency.

Let’s start with the question, ‘how long is long-term?’ Forget the corporate vision of ‘long-term’, which rarely extends beyond a decade. Instead, consider a hundred years as a minimum threshold for long-term thinking. This is the current length of a long human lifespan, taking us beyond the ego boundary of our own mortality, so we begin to imagine futures that we can influence but not participate in ourselves. Where possible we should attempt to think longer, for instance taking inspiration from cultural endeavours like the 10,000 Year Clock (the Long Now Foundation’s flagship project), which is being designed to stay accurate for ten millennia. At the very least, when you aim to think ‘long-term’, take a deep breath and think ‘a hundred years and more’.

The Tug of War for Time

It is just as crucial to equip ourselves with a mental framework that identifies different forms of long-term thinking. My own approach is represented in a graphic I call ‘The Tug of War for Time’ (see below). On one side, six drivers of short-termism threaten to drag us over the edge of civilizational breakdown. On the other, six ways to think long-term are drawing us towards a culture of longer time horizons and responsibility for the future of humankind.

These six ways to think long are not a simplistic blueprint for a new economic or political system, but rather comprise a cognitive toolkit for challenging our obsession with the here and now. They offer conceptual scaffolding for answering what I consider to be the most important question of our time: How can we be good ancestors?

The tug of war for time is the defining struggle of our generation. It is going on both inside our own minds and in our societies. Its outcome will affect the fate of the billions upon billions of people who will inhabit the future. In other words, it matters. So let’s unpack it a little.

Drivers of Short-termism

Amongst the six drivers of short-termism, we all know about the power of digital distraction to immerse us in a here-and-now addiction of clicks, swipes and scrolls. A deeper driver has been the growing tyranny of the clock since the Middle Ages. The mechanical clock was the key machine of the Industrial Revolution, regimenting and speeding up time itself, bringing the future ever-nearer: by 01700 most clocks had minute hands and by 01800 second hands were standard. And it still dominates our daily lives, strapped to our wrists and etched onto our screens.

Speculative capitalism has been a source of boom-bust turbulence at least since the Dutch Tulip Bubble of 01637, through to the 02008 financial crash and the next one waiting around the corner. Electoral cycles also play their part, generating a myopic political presentism where politicians can barely see beyond the next poll or the latest tweet. Such short-termism is amplified by a world of networked uncertainty, where events and risks are increasingly interdependent and globalised, raising the prospect of rapid contagion effects and rendering even the near-term future almost unreadable.

Looming behind it all is our obsession with perpetual progress, especially the pursuit of endless GDP growth, which pushes the Earth system over critical thresholds of carbon emissions, biodiversity loss and other planetary boundaries. We are like a kid who believes they can keep blowing up the balloon, bigger and bigger, without any prospect that it could ever burst.

Put these six drivers together and you get a toxic cocktail of short-termism that could send us into a blind-drunk civilizational freefall. As Jared Diamond argues, ‘short-term decision making’ coupled with an absence of ‘courageous long-term thinking’ has been at the root of civilizational collapse for centuries. A stark warning, and one that prompts us to unpack the six ways to think long.

Six Ways to Think Long-term



1. Deep-Time Humility: grasp we are an eyeblink in cosmic time

Deep-time humility is about recognising that the two hundred thousand years that humankind has graced the earth is a mere eyeblink in the cosmic story. As John McPhee (who coined the concept of deep time in 01980) put it: ‘Consider the earth’s history as the old measure of the English yard, the distance from the king’s nose to the tip of his outstretched hand. One stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases human history.’

But just as there is deep time behind us, there is also deep time ahead. In six billion years, any creatures that will be around to see our sun die, will be as different from us, as we are from the first single-celled bacteria.

Yet why exactly do long-term thinkers need this sense of temporal humility? Deep time prompts us to consider the consequences of our actions far beyond our own lifetimes, and puts us back in touch with the long-term cycles of the living world like the carbon cycle. But it also helps us grasp our destructive potential: in an incredibly short period of time — only a couple of centuries — we have endangered a world that took billions of years to evolve. We are just a tiny link in the great chain of living organisms, so who are we to put it all in jeopardy with our ecological blindness and deadly technologies? Don’t we have an obligation to our planetary future and the generations of humans and other species to come?

2. Legacy Mindset: be remembered well by posterity

We are the inheritors of extraordinary legacies from the past — from those who planted the first seeds, built the cities where we now live, and made the medical discoveries we benefit from. But alongside the good ancestors are the ‘bad ancestors’, such as those who bequeathed us colonial and slavery-era racism and prejudice that deeply permeate today’s criminal justice systems. This raises the question of what legacies we will leave to future generations: how do we want to be remembered by posterity?

The challenge is to leave a legacy that goes beyond egoistic legacy (like a Russian oligarch who wants a wing of an art gallery named after them) or even familial legacy (like wishing to pass on property or cultural traditions to our children). If we hope to be good ancestors, we need to develop a transcendent ‘legacy mindset’, where we aim to be remembered well by the generations we will never know, by the universal strangers of the future.

We might look for inspiration in many places. The Māori concept of whakapapa (‘genealogy’), describes a continues lifeline that connects an individual to the past, present and future, and generates a sense of respect for the traditions of previous generations while being mindful of those yet to come. In Katie Paterson’s art project Future Library, every year for a hundred years a famous writer (the first was Margaret Atwood) is depositing a new work, which will remain unread until 02114, when they will all be printed on paper made from a thousand trees that have been planted in a forest outside Oslo. Then there are activists like Wangari Maathai, the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. In 01977 she founded the Green Belt Movement in Kenya, which by the time of her death in 02011 had trained more than 25,000 women in forestry skills and planted 40 million trees. That’s how to pass on a legacy gift to the future.

3. Intergenerational Justice: consider the seventh generation ahead

“Why should I care about future generations? What have they ever done for me?’ This clever quip attributed to Groucho Marx highlights the issue of intergenerational justice. This is not the legacy question of how we will be remembered, but the moral question of what responsibilities we have to the ‘futureholders’ — the generations who will succeed us.

One approach, rooted in utilitarian philosophy, is to recognise that at least in terms of sheer numbers, the current population is easily outweighed by all those who will come after us. In a calculation made by writer Richard Fisher, around 100 billion people have lived and died in the past 50,000 years. But they, together with the 7.7 billion people currently alive, are far outweighed by the estimated 6.75 trillion people who will be born over the next 50,000 years, if this century’s birth rate is maintained (see graphic below). Even in just the next millennium, more than 135 billion people are likely to be born. How could we possibly ignore their wellbeing, and think that our own is of such greater value?

Such thinking is embodied in the idea of ‘seventh-generation decision making’, an ethic of ecological stewardship practised amongst some Native American peoples such as the Oglala Lakota Nation in South Dakota: community decisions take into the account the impacts seven generations from the present. This ideal is fast becoming a cornerstone of the growing global intergenerational justice movement, inspiring groups such as Our Children’s Trust (fighting for the legal rights of future generations in the US) and Future Design in Japan (which promotes citizens’ assemblies for city planning, where residents imagine themselves being from future generations).

4. Cathedral thinking: plan projects beyond a human lifetime

Cathedral thinking is the practice of envisaging and embarking on projects with time horizons stretching decades and even centuries into the future, just like medieval cathedral builders who began despite knowing they were unlikely to see construction finished within their own lifetimes. Greta Thunberg has said that it will take ‘cathedral thinking’ to tackle the climate crisis.

Historically, cathedral thinking has taken different forms. Apart from religious buildings, there are public works projects such as the sewers built in Victorian London after the ‘Great Stink’ of 01858, which are still in use today (we might call this ‘sewer thinking’ rather than ‘cathedral thinking’). Scientific endeavours include the Svalbard Global Seed in the remote Arctic, which contains over one million seeds from more than 6,000 species, and intends to keep them safe in an indestructible rock bunker for at least a thousand years. We should also include social and political movements with long time horizons, such as the Suffragettes, who formed their first organisation in Manchester in 01867 and didn’t achieve their aim of votes for women for over half a century.

Inspiring stuff. But remember that cathedral thinking can be directed towards narrow and self-serving ends. Hitler hoped to create a Thousand Year Reich. Dictators have sought to preserve their power and privilege for their progeny through the generations: just look at North Korea. In the corporate world, Gus Levy, former head of investment bank Goldman Sachs, once proudly declared, ‘We’re greedy, but long-term greedy, not short-term greedy’.

That’s why cathedral thinking alone is not enough to create a long-term civilization that respects the interests of future generations. It needs to be guided by other approaches, such as intergenerational justice and a transcendent goal (see below).

5. Holistic Forecasting: envision multiple pathways for civilization

Numerous studies demonstrate that most forecasting professionals tend to have a poor record at predicting future events. Yet we must still try to map out the possible long-term trajectories of human civilization itself — what I call holistic forecasting — otherwise we will end up only dealing with crises as they hit us in the present. Experts in the fields of global risk studies and scenario planning have identified three broad pathways, which I call Breakdown, Reform and Transformation (see graphic below).

Breakdown is the path of business-as-usual. We continue striving for the old twentieth-century goal of material economic progress but soon reach a point of societal and institutional collapse in the near term as we fail to respond to rampant ecological and technological crises, and cross dangerous civilizational tipping points (think Cormac McCarthy’s The Road).

A more likely trajectory is Reform, where we respond to global crises such as climate change but in an inadequate and piecemeal way that merely extends the Breakdown curve outwards, to a greater or lesser extent. Here governments put their faith in reformist ideals such as ‘green growth’, ‘reinventing capitalism’, or a belief that technological solutions are just around the corner.

A third trajectory is Transformation, where we see a radical shift in the values and institutions of society towards a more long-term sustainable civilization. For instance, we jump off the Breakdown curve onto a new pathway dominated by post-growth economic models such as Doughnut Economics or a Green New Deal.

Note the crucial line of Disruptions. These are disruptive innovations or events that offer an opportunity to switch from one curve onto another. It could be a new technology like blockchain, the rise of a political movement like Black Lives Matter, or a global pandemic like COVID-19. Successful long-term thinking requires turning these disruptions towards Transformative change and ensuring they are not captured by the old system.

6. Transcendent Goal: strive for one-planet thriving

Every society, wrote astronomer Carl Sagan, needs a ‘telos’ to guide it — ‘a long-term goal and a sacred project’. What are the options? While the goal of material progress served us well in the past, we now know too much about its collateral damage: fossil fuels and material waste have pushed us into the Anthropocene, the perilous new era characterised by a steep upward trend in damaging planetary indicators called the Great Acceleration (see graphic).

See an enlarged version of this graphic here.

An alternative transcendent goal is to see our destiny in the stars: the only way to guarantee the survival of our species is to escape the confines of Earth and colonise other worlds. Yet terraforming somewhere like Mars to make it habitable could take centuries — if it could be done at all. Additionally, the more we set our sights on escaping to other worlds, the less likely we are to look after our existing one. As cosmologist Martin Rees points out, ‘It’s a dangerous delusion to think that space offers an escape from Earth’s problems. We’ve got to solve these problems here.’

That’s why our primary goal should be to learn to live within the biocapacity of the only planet we know that sustains life. This is the fundamental principle of the field of ecological economics developed by visionary thinkers such as Herman Daly: don’t use more resources than the earth can naturally regenerate (for instance, only harvest timber as fast as it can grow back), and don’t create more wastes than it can naturally absorb (so avoid burning fossil fuels that can’t be absorbed by the oceans and other carbon sinks).

Once we’ve learned to do this, we can do as much terraforming of Mars as we like: as any mountaineer knows, make sure your basecamp is in order with ample supplies before you tackle a risky summit. But according to the Global Footprint Network, we are not even close and currently use up the equivalent of around 1.6 planet Earths each year. That’s short-termism of the most deadly kind. A transcendent goal of one-planet thriving is our best guarantee of a long-term future. And we do it by caring about place as much as rethinking time.

Bring on the Time Rebellion

So there is a brief overview of a cognitive toolkit we could draw on to survive and thrive into the centuries and millennia to come. None of these six ways is enough alone to create a long-term revolution of the human mind — a fundamental shift in our perception of time. But together — and when practised by a critical mass of people and organisations — a new age of long-term thinking could emerge out of their synergy.

Is this a likely prospect? Can we win the tug of war against short-termism?

‘Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change,’ wrote economist Milton Friedman. Out of the ashes of World War Two came pioneering long-term institutions such as the World Health Organisation, the European Union and welfare states. So too out of the global crisis of COVID-19 could emerge the long-term institutions we need to tackle the challenges of our own time: climate change, technology threats, the racism and inequality structured into our political and economic systems. Now is the moment for expanding our time horizons into a longer now. Now is the moment to become a time rebel.

Roman Krznaric is a public philosopher, research fellow of the Long Now Foundation, and founder of the world’s first Empathy Museum. His latest book is The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short-Term World. He lives in Oxford, UK. @romankrznaric

Note: All graphics from The Good Ancestor: How to Think Long Term in a Short-Term World by Roman Krznaric. Graphic design by Nigel Hawtin. Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND.

Long Now partners with Avenues: The World School for year-long, online program on the future of invention

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” – Alan Kay

The Long Now Foundation has partnered with Avenues: The World School to offer a program on the past, present, and future of innovation. A fully online program for ages 17 and above, the Avenues Mastery Year is designed to equip aspiring inventors with the ability to: 

Conceive original ideas and translate those ideas into inventions through design and prototyping, Communicate the impact of the invention with an effective pitch deck and business plan, Ultimately file for and receive patent pending status with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. 

Applicants select a concentration in either Making and Design or Future Sustainability. 

Participants will hack, reverse engineer, and re-invent a series of world-changing technologies such as the smartphone, bioplastics, and the photovoltaic cell, all while immersing themselves in curated readings about the origins and possible trajectories of great inventions. 

The Long Now Foundation will host monthly fireside chats for participants where special guests offer feedback, spark new ideas and insights, and share advice and wisdom. Confirmed guests include Kim Polese (Long Now Board Member), Alexander Rose (Long Now Executive Director and Board Member), Samo Burja (Long Now Research Fellow), Jason Crawford (Roots of Progress), and Nick Pinkston (Volition). Additional guests from the Long Now Board and community are being finalized over the coming weeks.

The goal of Avenues Mastery Year is to equip aspiring inventors with the technical skills and long-term perspective needed to envision and invent the future. Visit Avenues Mastery Year to learn more, or get in touch directly by writing to ama@avenues.org.

Racial Injustice & Long-term Thinking

Long Now Community,

Since 01996, Long Now has endeavored to foster long-term thinking in the world by sharing perspectives on our deep past and future. We have too often failed, however, to include and listen to Black perspectives.

Racism is a long-term civilizational problem with deep roots in the past, profound effects in the present, and so many uncertain futures. Solving the multigenerational challenge of racial inequality requires many things, but long-term thinking is undoubtedly one of them. As an institution dedicated to the long view, we have not addressed this issue enough. We can and will do better.

We are committed to surfacing these perspectives on both the long history of racial inequality and possible futures of racial justice going forward, both through our speaker series and in the resources we share online. And if you have any suggestions for future resources or speakers, we are actively looking.

Alexander Rose

Executive Director, Long Now

Learn More

A recent episode of this American Life explored Afrofuturism: “It’s more than sci-fi. It’s a way of looking at black culture that’s fantastic, creative, and oddly hopeful—which feels especially urgent during a time without a lot of optimism.”The 1619 Project from The New York Times, winner of the 02020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary,  re-examines the 400 year-legacy of slavery. A paper from political scientists at Stanford and Harvard analyzes the long-term effects of slavery on Southern attitudes toward race and politics.Ava DuVernay’s 13th is a Netflix documentary about the linked between slavery and the US penal system. It is available to watch on YouTube for free here. “The Case for Reparations” is a landmark essay by Ta-Nehisi Coates about the institutional racism of housing discrimination. 
I Am Not Your Negro is a documentary exploring the history of racism in the United States through the lens of the life of writer and activist James Baldwin. The documentary is viewable on PBS for free here.

Long-term Perspectives During a Pandemic

Long Conversation speakers (from top left): Stewart Brand, Esther Dyson, David Eagleman, Ping fu, Katherine Fulton, Danny Hillis, Kevin Kelly, Ramez Naam, Alexander Rose, Paul Saffo, Peter Schwartz, Tiffany Shlain, Bina Venkataraman, and Geoffrey West.

On April 14th, 02020, The Long Now Foundation convened a  Long Conversation ¹ featuring members of our board and invited speakers. Over almost five hours of spirited discussion, participants reflected on the current moment, how it fits into our deeper future, and how we can address threats to civilization that are rare but ultimately predictable. The following are excerpts from the conversation, edited and condensed for clarity.

Stewart Brand is co-founder and President of The Long Now Foundation. Photograph: Mark Mahaney/Redux.



The Pandemic is Practice for Climate Change



Stewart Brand

I see the pandemic as practice for dealing with a much tougher problem, and one that has a different timescale, which is climate change. And this is where Long Now comes in, where now, after this — and it will sort out, it’ll take a lot longer to sort out than people think, but some aspects are already sorting out faster than people expected. As this thing sorts out and people arise and say: Well, that was weird and terrible. And we lost so and so, and so and so, and so and so, and so we grieve. But it looks like we’re coming through it. Humans in a sense caused it by making it so that bat viruses could get into humans more easily, and then connecting in a way that the virus could get to everybody. But also humans are able to solve it.

Well, all of that is almost perfectly mapped onto climate change, only with a different timescale. In a sense everybody’s causing it: by being part of a civilization, running it at a much higher metabolic rate, using that much more energy driven by fossil fuels, which then screwed up the atmosphere enough to screw up the climate enough to where it became a global problem caused by basically the global activity of everybody. And it’s going to engage global solutions.

Probably it’ll be innovators in cities communicating with other innovators in other cities who will come up with the needed set of solutions to emerge, and to get the economy back on its legs, much later than people want. But nevertheless, it will get back, and then we’ll say, “Okay, well what do you got next?” Because there’ll now be this point of reference. And it’ll be like, “If we can put a man on the moon, we should be able to blah, blah, blah.” Well, if we can solve the coronavirus, and stop a plague that affected everybody, we should be able to do the same damn thing for climate.

Watch Stewart Brand’s conversation with Geoffrey West.

Watch Stewart Brand’s conversation with Alexander Rose.

Esther Dyson is an investor, consultant, and Long Now Board member. Photograph: Christopher Michel.



The Impact of the Pandemic on Children’s Ability to Think Long-term



Esther Dyson

We are not building resilience into the population. I love the Long Now; I’m on the board. But at the same time we’re pretty intellectual. Thinking long-term is psychological. It’s what you learn right at the beginning. It’s not just an intellectual, “Oh gee, I’m going to be a long-term thinker. I’m going to read three books and understand how to do it.” It’s something that goes deep back into your past.

You know the marshmallow test, the famous Stanford test where you took a two-year-old and you said, “Okay, here’s a marshmallow. You sit here, the researcher is going to come back in 10 minutes, maybe 15 and if you haven’t eaten the first marshmallow you get a second one.” And then they studied these kids years later. And the ones who waited, who were able to have delayed gratification, were more successful in just about every way you can count. Educational achievement, income, whether they had a job at all, et cetera.

But the kids weren’t just sort of randomly, long-term or short-term. The ones that felt secure and who trusted their mother, who trusted — the kid’s not stupid; if he’s been living in a place where if they give you a marshmallow, grab it because you can’t trust what they say.

We’re raising a generation and a large population of people who don’t trust anybody and so they are going to grab—they’re going to think short-term. And the thing that scares me right now is how many kids are going to go through, whether it’s two weeks, two months, two years of living in these kinds of circumstances and having the kind of trauma that is going to make you into such a short-term thinker that you’re constantly on alert. You’re always fighting the current battle rather than thinking long-term. People need to be psychologically as well as intellectually ready to do that.

Watch Esther Dyson’s conversation with Peter Schwartz.

Watch Esther Dyson’s conversation with Ramez Naam.

David Eagleman is a world-renowned neuroscientist studying the structure of the brain, professor, entrepreneur, and author. He is also a Long Now Board member. Photograph: CNN.



The Neuroscience of the Unprecedented



David Eagleman

I’ve been thinking about this thing that I’m temporarily calling “the neuroscience of the unprecedented.” Because for all of us, in our lifetimes, this was unprecedented. And so the question is: what does that do to our brains? The funny part is it’s never been studied. In fact, I don’t even know if there’s an obvious way to study it in neuroscience. Nonetheless, I’ve been thinking a lot about this issue of our models of the world and how they get upended. And I think one of the things that I have noticed during the quarantine—and everybody I talked to has this feeling—is that it’s impossible to do long-term thinking while everything’s changing. And so I’ve started thinking about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in terms of the time domain.

Here’s what I mean. If you have a good internal model of what’s happening and you understand how to do everything in the world, then it’s easy enough to think way into the distance. That’s like the top of the hierarchy, the top of the pyramid: everything is taken care of, all your physiologic needs, relationship needs, everything. When you’re at the top, you can think about the big picture: what kind of company you want to start, and why and where that goes, what that means for society and so on. When we’re in a time like this, where people are worried about if I don’t get that next Instacart delivery, I actually don’t have any food left, that kind of thing, it’s very hard to think long-term. When our internal models are our frayed, it’s hard to use those to make predictions about the future.

Watch David Eagleman’s conversation with Tiffany Shlain.

Watch David Eagleman’s conversation with Ping Fu.

Ping Fu is anentrepreneur, scientist, artist, who co-founded Geomagic, a 3D imaging software company, and is a Long Now Board member. Danny Hillis is co-chair of the Board of Directors of The Long Now Foundation, Designer of the 10,000 Year Clock, and co-founder of Applied Invention. Photograph: Christopher Michel.



The Virus as a Common Enemy and the Pandemic as a Whole Earth Event



Danny Hillis and Ping Fu

Danny Hillis: Do you think this is the first time the world has faced a problem, simultaneously, throughout the whole world?

Ping Fu: Well, how do you compare it to World War II? That was also simultaneous, although it didn’t impact every individual. In terms of something that touches every human being on Earth, this may be the first time.

Danny Hillis: Yeah. And also, we all are facing the same problem, whereas during wars, people face each other. They’re each other’s problem.

Ping Fu: I am worried we are making this virus an imaginary war.

Danny Hillis: Yes, I think that’s a problem. On the other hand, we are making it that, or at least our politicians are. But I don’t think people feel that they’re against other people. In fact, I think people realize, much like when they saw that picture of the whole earth, that there’s a lot of other people that are in the same boat they are.

Ping Fu: Well, I’m not saying that this particular imaginary war is necessarily negative, because in history we always see that when there is a common enemy, people get together, right? This feels like the first time the entire earth identified a common enemy, even though viruses have existed forever. We live with viruses all the time, but there was not a political social togetherness in identifying one virus as a common enemy of our humanity.

Danny Hillis: Does that permanently change us, because we all realize we’re facing a common enemy? I think we’ve had a common enemy before, but I don’t think it’s happened quickly enough, or people were aware of that enough. Certainly, one can imagine that global warming might have done that, but it happens so slowly. But this causes a lot of people to realize they’re in it together in real time, in a way, that I don’t think we’ve ever been before.

Ping Fu: When you talk about global warming, or clean air, clean water, it’s also a common enemy. It’s just more long term, so it’s not as urgent. And this one is now. That is making people react to it. But I’m hoping this will make us realize there are many other common enemies to the survival of humanity, so that we will deal with them in a more coherent or collaborative way.

Watch Ping Fu’s conversation with David Eagleman.

Watch Ping Fu’s conversation with Danny Hillis.

Watch Danny Hillis’ conversation with Geoffrey West.

Katherine Fulton is a philanthropist, strategist, author, who works for social change. She is also a Long Now Board member. Photograph: Christopher Michel.



An Opportunity for New Relationships and New Allies



Katherine Fulton

One of the things that fascinates me about this moment is that most big openings in history were not about one thing, they were about the way multiple things came together at the same time in surprising ways. And one of the things that happens at these moments is that it’s possible to think about new relationships and new allies.

For instance, a lot of small business people in this country are going to go out of business. And they’re going to be open to thinking about their future and what they do in the next business they start and who is their ally. In ways that don’t fit into any old ideological boxes I would guess.

When I look ahead at what these new institutions might be, I think they’re going to be hybrids. They’re going to bring people together to look at the cross-issue sectors or cross-business and nonprofit and cross-country. It’s going to bring people together in relationship that never would have been in relationship because you’ll need these new capabilities in different ways.

You often have a lot of social movement people who are very suspicious of business and historically very suspicious of technology — not so much now. So how might there be completely new partnerships? How might the tech companies, who are going to be massively empowered, the big tech companies by this, how might they invest in new kinds of partnerships and be much more enlightened in terms of creating the conditions in which their businesses will need to succeed?

So it seems to me we need a different kind of global institution than the ones that were invented after World War II.

Watch Katherine Fulton’s conversation with Ramez Naam.

Watch Katherine Fulton’s conversation with Kevin Kelly.

Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired, a magazine he helped launch in 01993. He served as its Executive Editor from its inception until 01999. From 01984–01990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical news. He is also a Long Now board member. Photograph: Epsilon Theory.



The Loss of Consensus around Truth



Kevin Kelly

We’re in a moment of transition, accelerated by this virus, where we’ve gone from trusting in authorities to this postmodern world we have to assemble truth. This has put us in a position where all of us, myself included, have difficulty in figuring out, like, “Okay, there’s all these experts claiming expertise even among doctors, and there’s a little bit of contradictory information right now.”

Science works well at getting a consensus when you have time to check each other, to have peer review, to go through publications, to take the doubts and to retest. But it takes a lot of time. And in this fast-moving era where this virus isn’t waiting, we don’t have the luxury of having that scientific consensus. So we are having to turn, it’s like, “Well this guy thinks this, this person thinks this, she thinks that. I don’t know.”

We’re moving so fast that we’re moving ahead of the speed of science, even though science is itself accelerating. That results in this moment where we don’t know who to trust. Most of what everybody knows is true. But sometimes it isn’t. So we have a procedure to figure that out with what’s called science where we can have a consensus over time and then we agree. But if we are moving so fast and we have AI come in and we have viruses happening at this global scale, which speeds things up, then we’re outstripping our ability to know things. I think that may be with us longer than just this virus time.

We are figuring out a new way to know, and in what knowledge we can trust. Young people have to understand in a certain sense that they have to assemble what they believe in themselves; they can’t just inherit that from an authority. You actually have to have critical thinking skills, you actually have to understand that for every expert there’s an anti-expert over here and you have to work at trying to figure out which one you’re going to believe. I think, as a society, we are engaged in this process of coming up with an evolution in how we know things and where to place our trust. Maybe we can make some institutions and devices and technologies and social etiquettes and social norms to help us in this new environment of assembling truth.

Watch Kevin Kelly’s conversation with Katherine Fulton.

Watch Kevin Kelly’s conversation with Paul Saffo.

Ramez Naam holds a number of patents in technology and artificial intelligence and was involved in key product development at Microsoft. He was also CEO of Apex Nanotechnologies. His books include the Nexus trilogy of science fiction thrillers. Photograph: Phil Klein/Ramez Naam.



The Pandemic Won’t Help Us Solve Climate Change



Ramez Naam

There’s been a lot of conversations, op-eds, and Twitter threads about what coronavirus teaches us about climate change. And that it’s an example of the type of thinking that we need.

I’m not so optimistic. I still think we’re going to make enormous headway against climate change. We’re not on path for two degrees Celsius but I don’t think we’re on path for the four or six degrees Celsius you sometimes hear talked about. When I look at it, coronavirus is actually a much easier challenge for people to conceptualize. And I think of humans as hyperbolic discounters. We care far more about the very near term than we do about the long-term. And we discount that future at a very, very steep rate.

And so even with coronavirus — well, first the coronavirus got us these incredible carbon emissions and especially air quality changes. You see these pictures of New Delhi in India before and after, like a year ago versus this week. And it’s just brown haze and crystal clear blue skies, it’s just amazing.

But it’s my belief that when the restrictions are lifted, people are going to get back in their cars. And we still have billions of people that barely have access to electricity, to transportation to meet all their needs and so on. And so that tells me something: that even though we clearly can see the benefit of this, nevertheless people are going to make choices that optimize for their convenience, their whatnot, that have this effect on climate.

And that in turn tells me something else, which is: in the environmentalist movement, there’s a couple of different trains of thought of how we address climate change. And on the more far left of the deep green is the notion of de-growth, limiting economic growth, even reducing the size of the economy. And I think what we’re going to see after coronavirus will make it clear that that’s just not going to happen. That people are barely willing to be in lockdown for something that could kill them a couple of weeks from now. They’re going to be even less willing to do that for something that they perceive as a multi-decade threat.

And so the solution still has to be that we make clean choices, clean electricity, clean transportation, and clean industry, cheaper and better than the old dirty ones. That’s the way that we win. And that’s a hard story to tell people to some extent. But it is an area where we’re making progress.

Watch Ramez Naam’s conversation with Esther Dyson.

Watch Ramez Naam’s conversation with Katherine Fulton.

Alexander Rose is an industrial designer and has been working with The Long Now Foundation and computer scientist Danny Hillis since 01997 to build a monument scale, all mechanical 10,000 Year Clock. As the director of Long Now, Alexander founded The Interval and has facilitated a range of projects including The Organizational Continuity Project, The Rosetta Project, Long Bets, Seminars About Long Term Thinking, Long Server and others. Photograph: Christopher Michel.



The Lessons of Long-Lived Organizations



Alexander Rose

Any organization that has lasted for centuries has lived through multiple events like this. Any business that’s been around for just exactly 102 years, lived through the last one of these pandemics that was much more vast, much less understood, came through with much less communication.

I’m talking right now to heads of companies that have been around for several hundred years and in some cases—some of the better-run family ones and some of the corporate ones that have good records—and they’re pulling from those times. But even more important than pulling the exact strategic things that helped them survive those times, they’re able to tell the story that they survived to their own corporate or organizational culture, which is really powerful. It’s a different narrative than what you hear from our government and others who are largely trying in a way to get out from under the gun of saying this was a predictable event even though it was. They’re trying to say that this was a complete black swan, that we couldn’t have known it was going to happen.

There’s two problems with that. One, it discounts all of this previous prediction work and planning work that in some cases has been heeded by some cultures and some cases not. But I think more importantly, it gets people out of this narrative that we have survived, that we can survive, that things are going to come back to normal, that they can come back so far to normal that we are actually going to be bad at planning for the next one in a hundred years if we don’t put in new safeguards.

And I think it’s crucial to get that narrative back in to the story that we do survive these things. Things do go back to normal. We’re watching movies right now on Netflix where you watch people touch, and interact, and it just seems alien. But I think we will forget it quicker than we adopted it.

Watch Alexander Rose’s conversation with Bina Venkataraman.

Watch Alexander Rose’s conversation with Stewart Brand.

Paul Saffo is a forecaster with over two decades experience helping stakeholders understand and respond to the dynamics of large-scale, long-term change. Photograph: Vodafone.



How Do We Inoculate Against Human Folly?



Paul Saffo

I think, in general, yes, we’ve got to work more on long-term thinking. But the failure with this pandemic was not long-term thinking at all. The failure was action.

I think long-term thinking will become more common. The question is can we take that and turn it to action, and can we get the combination of the long-term look ahead, but also the fine grain of understanding when something really is about to change?

I think that this recent event is a demonstration that the whole futurist field has fundamentally failed. All those forecasts had no consequence. All it took was the unharmonic convergence of some short sighted politicians who had their throat around policy to completely unwind all the foresight and all the preparation. So thinking about what’s different in 50 or 100 or 500 years, I think that the fundamental challenge is how do we inoculate civilization against human folly?

This is the first of pandemics to come, and I think despite the horror that has happened, despite the tragic loss of life, that we’re going to look at this pandemic the way we looked at the ’89 earthquake in San Francisco, and recognize that it was a pretty big one. It wasn’t the big one in terms of virus lethality, it’s more a political pandemic in terms of the idiotic response. The highest thing that could come out of this is if we finally take public health seriously.

Watch Paul Saffo’s conversation with Kevin Kelly.

Watch Paul Saffo’s conversation with Tiffany Shlain.

Peter Schwartz is the Senior Vice President for Global Government Relations and Strategic Planning for Salesforce.com. Prior to that, Peter co-founded Global Business Network, a leader in scenario planning in 01988, where he served as chairman until 02011. Photograph: Christopher Michel.



How to Convince Those in Positions of Power to Trust Scenario Planning



Peter Schwartz

Look, I was a consultant in scenario planning, and I can tell you that it was never a way to get more business to tell a CEO, “Listen, I gave you the scenarios and you didn’t listen.”

My job was to make them listen. To find ways to engage them in such a way that they took it seriously. If they didn’t, it was my failure. Central to the process of thinking about the future like that is finding out how you engage the mind of the decision maker. Good scenario planning begins with a deep understanding of the people who actually have to use the scenarios. If you don’t understand that, you’re not going to have any impact.

[The way to make Trump take this pandemic more seriously would’ve been] to make him a hero early. That is, find a way to tell the story in such a way that Donald Trump in January, as you’re actually warning him, can be a hero to the American people, because of course that is what he wants in every interaction, right? This is a narcissist, so how do you make him be a leader in his narcissism from day one?

The honest truth is that that was part of the strategy with some CEOs that I’ve worked with in the past. I think Donald Trump is an easy person to understand in that respect; he’s very visible. The problem was that he couldn’t see any scenario in which he was a winner, and so he had to deny. You have to give him a route out, a route where he can win, and that’s what I think the folks around him didn’t give him.

Watch Peter Schwartz’s conversation with Bina Venkataraman.

Watch Peter Schwartz’s conversation with Esther Dyson.

Honored by Newsweek as one of the “Women Shaping the 21st Century,” Tiffany Shlain is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker, founder of The Webby Awards and author of 24/6: The Power of Unplugging One Day A Week. Photograph: Anitab.



The Power of Unplugging During the Pandemic



Tiffany Shlain

We’ve been doing this tech shabbat for 10 years now, unplugging on Friday night and having a day off the network. People ask me: “Can you unplug during the pandemic?” Not only can I, but it has been so important for Ken and I and the girls at a moment when there’s such a blur about time. We know all the news out there, we just need to stay inside and have a day to be together without the screens and actually reflect, which is what the Long Now is all about.

I have found these Tech Shabbats a thousand times more valuable for my health because I’m sleeping so well on Friday night. I just feel like I get perspective, which I think I’m losing during the week because it’s so much coming at me all the time. I think this concept of a day of rest has lasted for 3000 years for a reason. And what does that mean today and what does that mean in a pandemic? It means that you go off the screens and be with your family in an authentic way, be with yourself in an authentic way if you’re not married or with kids. Just take a moment to process. There’s a lot going on and it would be a missed opportunity if we don’t put our pen to paper, and I literally mean paper, to write down some of our thoughts right now in a different way. It’s so good to put your mind in a different way.

The reason I started doing Tech Shabbats in the first place is that I lost my father to brain cancer and Ken’s and my daughter was born within days. And it was one of those moments where I felt like life was grabbing me by the shoulders and saying, “Focus on what’s important.” And that series of dramatic events made me change the way I lived. And I feel like this moment that we’re in is the earth and life grabbing us all by the shoulders and saying, “Focus on what’s important. Look at the way you’re living.” And so I’m hopeful that this very intense, painful experience gets us thinking about how to live differently, about what’s important, about what matters. I’m hopeful that real behavioral change can come out of this very dramatic moment we’re in.

Watch Tiffany Shlain’s conversation with Paul Saffo.

Watch Tiffany Shlain’s conversation with David Eagleman.

Bina Venkataraman is the editorial page editor of The Boston Globe. Previously, she served as a senior adviser for climate change innovation in the Obama White House, was the director of Global Policy Initiatives at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and taught in the Program on Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. Photograph: Podchaser.



We Need a Longer Historical Memory



Bina Venkataraman

We see this pattern—it doesn’t even have to be over generations—that when a natural disaster happens in an area, an earthquake or a flood, we see spikes in people going out and buying insurance right after those events, when they’re still salient in people’s memory, when they’re afraid of those events happening again. But as the historical memory fades, as time goes on, people don’t buy that insurance. They forget these disasters.

I think historical memory is just one component of a larger gap between prediction and action, and what is missing in that gap is imagination. Historical memory is one way to revive the imagination about what’s possible. But I also think it’s beyond that, because with some of the events and threats that are predicted, they might not have perfect analogs in history. I think about climate change as one of those areas where we’ve just never actually had a historical event or anything that even approximates it in human experience, and so cognitively it’s really difficult for people, whether it’s everyday people in our lives or leaders, to be able to take those threats or opportunities seriously.

People think about the moon landing as this incredible feat of engineering, and of course it was, but before it was a feat of engineering, it was a feat of imagination. To accomplish something that’s unprecedented in human experience takes leaps of imagination, and they can come from different sources, from either the source of competition, from the knowledge of history, and indeed from technology, from story, from myth.

Watch Bina Venkataraman’s conversation with Alexander Rose.

Watch Bina Venkataraman’s conversation with Peter Schwartz.

Theoretical physicist Geoffrey West was president of Santa Fe Institute from 2005 to 2009 and founded the high energy physics group at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Photograph: Minesh Bacrania Photography.



The Pandemic is a Red Light for Future Planetary Threats



Geoffrey West

If you get sick as an individual, you take time off. You go to bed. You may end up in hospital, and so forth. And then hopefully you recover in a week, or two weeks, a few days. And of course, you have built into your life a kind of capacity, a reserve, that even though you’ve shut down — you’re not working, you’re not really thinking, probably — nevertheless you have that reserve. And then you recover, and there’s been sufficient reserve of energy, metabolism, finances, that it doesn’t affect you. Even if it is potentially a longer illness.

I’ve been trying to think of that as a metaphor for what’s happening to the planet. And of course what you realize is that how little we actually have in reserve, that it didn’t take very much in terms of us as a globe, as a planet going to bed for a few days, a few weeks, a couple months that we quickly ran out of our resources.

And some of the struggle is to try to come to terms with that, and to reestablish ourselves. And part of the reason for that, is of course that we are, as individuals, in a sort of meta stable state, whereas the planet is, even on these very short timescales, continually changing and evolving. And we live at a time where the socioeconomic forces are themselves exponentially expanding. And this is what causes the problem for us, the acceleration of time and the continual pressures that are part of the fabric of society.

We’re in a much more strong position than we would have been 100 years ago during the Flu Epidemic of 01918. I’m confident that we’re going to get through this and reestablish ourselves. But I see it as a red light that’s going on. A little rehearsal for some of the bigger questions that we’re going to have to face in terms of threats for the planet.

Watch Geoffrey West’s conversation with Danny Hillis.

Watch Geoffrey West’s conversation with Stewart Brand.

Footnotes

[1] Long Conversation is a relay conversation of 20 minute one-to-one conversations; each speaker has an un-scripted conversation with the speaker before them, and then speaks with the next participant before they themselves rotate off. This relay conversation format was first presented under the auspices of Artangel in London at a Longplayer performance in 02009.