Stewart Brand's Blog, page 14

The Cataclysm Sentence

WNYC’s Radiolab recently released a podcast about what forms of knowledge are worth passing on to future generations.

One day in 1961, the famous physicist Richard Feynman stepped in front of a Caltech lecture hall and posed this question to a group of undergraduate students: “If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence was passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words?” Now, Feynman had an answer to his own question – a good one. But his question got the entire team at Radiolab wondering, what did his sentence leave out? So we posed Feynman’s cataclysm question to some of our favorite writers, artists, historians, futurists – all kinds of great thinkers. We asked them, “What’s the one sentence you would want to pass on to the next generation that would contain the most information in the fewest words?” What came back was an explosive collage of what it means to be alive right here and now, and what we want to say before we go.

The episode’s framing is very much in line with our Manual For Civilization project. A few Long Now Members and past speakers contributed answers to the project, including Alison Gopnik, Maria Popova, and James Gleick.

Kim Stanley Robinson: “The Coronavirus is Rewriting Our Imaginations.”

Science Fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson has written a powerful meditation on what the pandemic heralds for the future of civilization in The New Yorker.

Possibly, in a few months, we’ll return to some version of the old normal. But this spring won’t be forgotten. When later shocks strike global civilization, we’ll remember how we behaved this time, and how it worked. It’s not that the coronavirus is a dress rehearsal—it’s too deadly for that. But it is the first of many calamities that will likely unfold throughout this century. Now, when they come, we’ll be familiar with how they feel.

What shocks might be coming? Everyone knows everything. Remember when Cape Town almost ran out of water? It’s very likely that there will be more water shortages. And food shortages, electricity outages, devastating storms, droughts, floods. These are easy calls. They’re baked into the situation we’ve already created, in part by ignoring warnings that scientists have been issuing since the nineteen-sixties. Some shocks will be local, others regional, but many will be global, because, as this crisis shows, we are interconnected as a biosphere and a civilization.

Kim Stanley Robinson, “The Coronavirus is Rewriting Our Imaginations,” in The New Yorker.

Kim Stanley Robinson has spoken at Long Now on three occasions:

“Learning from Le Guin,” November 13, 02018.“Adapting to Sea Level Rise: The Science of New York 2140,“ May 9, 02017.“How Climate Will Evolve Government and Society,” May 10, 02016.

Alexander Rose Joins Long Now Board

Photograph by Christopher Michel.

Long Now’s Executive Director, Alexander Rose, has been invited to join the Long Now board. He will remain in his role as Executive Director.

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. Rose speaks about the work of The Long Now Foundation all over the world at venues ranging from the TED conference to corporations and government agencies.

As the Executive Director of Long Now, Rose 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. Rose shares several design patents on the 10,000 Year Clock with Danny Hillis, the first prototype of which is in the Science Museum of London, and the monument scale version is now under construction in West Texas.

Rose writes about building artifacts and institutions that last, co-curates the Long Now Seminars, as well as The Conversations at The Interval and some talks at The Battery SF. Alexander is also an advisor to the METI project. 

“Having worked with Long Now for over twenty years, I am honored to be joining the board of directors,” Rose said. “Each member of the board has been a mentor for me as we have grown the foundation from a single project into a thriving community. I look forward to a long future serving with all of them.”

The Archaeobotanist Searching Art for Lost Fruit

KC5AE3 Madonna and Child (Madonna of the Pear) by Albrecht Durer (1471-1528), oil on panel, 1526

As Vittoria Traverso writes for Atlas Obscura, Isabella Dalla Ragione brings art and nature together in her search for the forgotten fruits of Northern Italy. By combing through clues in ancient paintings and manuscripts, Ragione has revealed the extensive biodiversity of Renaissance Italy, having identified hundreds of bygone plants. From apples and pears of old monastic orchards to abandoned fields of harvest, Ragione has illuminated the plethora of knowledge hidden beautifully in plain sight. 

‘Take “Madonna and Child with the Pear,” an oil-on-wood painting completed in 1526 by German master Albrecht Dürer, currently preserved at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. “You can find so many texts detailing the symbolic meaning of pears in this painting,” Dalla Ragione says. However, the distinctive shape of the top of the fruit in Durer’s painting made Dalla Ragione realize that it was actually a “mouth of the ox” apple, an ancient variety that Dalla Ragione had found years ago in an abandoned field near Perugia and now grows on her farmstead.

She personally takes care of her 600 plants year-round. Between September and October, she picks up most of her pears and apples and preserves them inside an abandoned chapel next to her farmstead. Standing against the chapel’s frescoes, these baskets of fruit symbolize Archeologia Arborea’s mission statement: that plants are an essential element of cultural heritage.’

Vittoria Traverso, Atlas Obscura

An Epidemic of False Confidence Related to COVID-19

As someone who spent my childhood moving from epidemic to epidemic with my virologist father and epidemiologist mother, I am surprised at the degree of certainty expressed by both optimists and pessimists regarding their predictions of the COVID-19 epidemic. In fact, our ignorance of key facts leaves room for a wide range of scenarios. To illustrate this, I would like to describe a little-discussed scenario that is both relatively optimistic and consistent with the currently available evidence. Under this scenario, millions may already be infected, but with less serious medical consequences than generally feared. This scenario is not a reason to cut back on public health measures, but rather a reason why they may be effective. 

In general, an epidemic will continue to grow for as long as each infected person infects more than one other, but it also matters how quickly that contagion happens. To understand the epidemic, we must estimate two important parameters: the infection rate of the disease, and the number of infected people that show no symptoms. These are currently unknown for COVID-19. My illustrative scenario assumes that the disease is rapidly infectious, but that the percentage who show symptoms is very low. In this “fast-and-stealthy“ scenario, the epidemic has already spread widely, and many have already become infected. The small percentage of people who have shown serious symptoms have overwhelmed local medical systems because they got sick at almost the same time. 

This fast-and-stealthy scenario is optimistic because public health measures can slow the rate of spread. Even if these measures do not reduce the number of people eventually infected, they can prevent the medical system from becoming overwhelmed. In the fast-and-stealthy scenario, the epidemic eventually limits its own infection rate by building up a high rate of immunity in the general population. Although many eventually become infected, most will show no symptoms and, the medical system will have the capacity to handle the treatment of a very small portion who do. Also, the additional time bought by the public health measures may give more people the opportunity to take advantage of improved methods of treatment. 

The fast-and-stealthy scenario is consistent with the evidence reported to date from China, Italy, and isolated cruise ships. Consider the Diamond Princess as an extreme example of what can happen with an older population and delayed social distancing: 3,711 people on board, about 700 had the virus when tested, 400 of these were asymptomatic, 300 became sick, 7 died. But, how many of the 3,711 had recovered before they were tested? One of the problems is that the current tests for COVID-19 only tell us if someone is currently hosting the virus. The vast majority of people tested so far have been negative; is that because they never had the infection or is it because they had already successfully recovered? If 3,000 on the Diamond Princess recovered before testing, the mortality rate was 0.2%. That is high, but it is much better than the mortality rate of those we know caught the virus. 

To distinguish between the most optimistic and pessimistic possibilities, we would need to measure how many people have developed an immunity to the virus. Fortunately, there are at least two different well-understood methods for developing such “serologic” tests, and the first such test has recently been developed for COVID-19. The first studies to use these tests are already underway in China and Singapore. We should know the results within a few months, if not weeks. These results may show that far more have been infected than we currently assume, and that news would not be entirely bad. It would show that the mortality rate is much lower than what we currently guess, and that more are already immune. 

My point is not that this fast-and-stealthy scenario is correct, but rather that we should be more honest in admitting our ignorance. As near as I can tell, very little attention is being given in the United States to widespread serological testing. Yet, such testing would tell us a lot about what is actually happening and enable us to respond more wisely. It would also allow those who are immune to know that they are immune, freeing them up to help deal with this epidemic and accelerate society’s return to normal life. 

The Thames at Low Tide Reveals a Treasure Trove of Historical Tokens

Mudlarking by The Thames. Photo credit: Andrew Testa for The New York Times

As recently reported by Megan Specia for The New York Times, The Thames in London is hiding historical secrets on its shore, and certain explorers are eager to uncover them. At low tide, the river peels back to expose a beachy foreshore, and with it, long forgotten antiques and partially buried objects, dating as far back as the Roman Empire. The foragers and collectors of these bygone fragments of Britain are known as Mudlarks, meeting twice daily at low tide to look for Victorian jugs or even 17th century watches. 

‘The name — mudlark — was first given to the Victorian-era poor who scrounged for items in the river to sell, pulling copper scraps, rope and other valuables from the shore. But more recently the label has stuck to London’s hobbyists, history buffs and treasure hunters who scour the river edge searching for objects from the city’s past.

Mudlarking’s popularity has grown steadily in recent years, driven in part by social media communities where enthusiasts share their finds, and tour groups that offer a trudge through the shards of history’s castoffs.’

Megan Specia, The New York Times

The Neobiological Frontier: An Interview with Jane Metcalfe, Founder and CEO of NEO.LIFE

Our March 02020 Seminar speaker is Jane Metcalfe, the Founder and CEO of NEO.LIFE, a digital media and events company she created in 02017 to explore the rapid developments at the intersection of technology and biology, and how those forces are shaping the future of our species. (Metcalfe is the former president and co-founder of WIRED magazine.)

NEO.LIFE has just published a book, NEO.LIFE: 25 Visions For the Future of Our Species, a collection of 25 essays, interviews, and works of fiction and art offering a big-picture perspective on the profound changes made possible by the merging of biology and technology.  

The book features insights from many Long Now thinkers, including Danny Hillis, Long Now co-founder and the inventor of the 10,000 Year Clock (Hillis spoke at Long Now in 02004 and 02014); David Eagleman, a neuroscientist and Long Now board member (Eagleman spoke at Long Now in 02010 and 02016); George Church, the Harvard geneticist working with Revive & Restore to bring back the woolly mammoth; Ramez Naam, the science fiction author behind the Nexus trilogy (Naam spoke at Long Now in 02015); Megan Palmer, a scientist and engineer who focuses on where synthetic biology meets (and will meet) policy (Palmer sits on the board of Revive & Restore and spoke at The Interval in 02018); and Hannu Rajaniemi, a science fiction author, scientist, and entrepreneur (Rajaniemi spoke at The Interval in 02018).

We spoke with Metcalfe about her new book, dizzying advances in biotechnology and genomics, and what she has to say to those who raise concerns about this emerging frontier.

Was there an aha moment that made you realize humans are on the cusp of a “neobiological revolution”? What trends/examples were you seeing that inspired you to found NEO.LIFE?

The neobiological revolution has been taking shape for the past 15 years, starting with the sequencing of the human genome. But it was really once we started being able to edit and reprogram DNA that things started to get interesting. At the same time, we started to map the brain and develop tools for not only seeing individual neurons, but to interpret brain signals and reprogram them. We can see inside organs and follow pathways we never knew existed before. We can engineer bacteria and viruses, synthesize and reprogram proteins and use Yamanaka factors to rejuvenate cells. 

We have massive amounts of data, not only from medical records and DNA sequencing, but also from the inputs we get from the sensors in our watches and rings, in our shirts and our diapers, in our brains and our pills. And thanks to that, we’re training neural networks and creating algorithms to parse big data sets, and finding not just correlations, but causations, and predict which treatments will work. And with our smart phones, we have a massive distribution network for pushing out new apps to monitor, educate, train, predict, prevent, and cure diseases. 

My aha moment came at Daniel Kraft’s Exponential Medicine conference in 02015, when I realized that today, people in medicine and life sciences not only have deep knowledge and understanding and extensive training in human biology, but also data and computer skills. Suddenly I realized this is the next stage of the digital revolution, only this time we are engineering life. And amazingly enough, many of the people at the forefront of this revolution don’t have the bandwidth to see beyond the enormous problem they’re solving in the field they’re so deeply entrenched in. I found myself telling a neuroscientist things she didn’t know about genetics. Or a longevity researcher about synthetic biology developments. And no one seemed to be paying enough attention to the role of nutrition. 

So that’s why I started NEO.LIFE: to help connect the dots among all these siloed disciplines; to identify the extraordinary scientists and innovators who are pioneering new biological solutions; and to help build a community and create some perspective on where this could and should (or should not) be going. 

Is there a particular neobiological-related project you’ve come across lately that has been especially eye-opening in terms of getting you excited about the future?

There are stories every day that excite and inspire me, and choosing just one is impossible. But there are a couple of projects that really blow my mind. There is a company in Pittsburgh called Lygenesis, who are harnessing the liver’s ability to regenerate itself to save patients with end stage liver disease. They do it by using the body’s lymph nodes as mini bioreactors that can convert stem cells into liver cells. So in effect, they can engineer multiple livers within an animal. They’ve done it in mice and larger mammals and are preparing for human clinical trials. Another example is in the field of synthetic biology, where the company Novo Nutrients is using symbiotic bacteria and gas bioreactors to convert carbon dioxide into industrial fish feed at a fraction of the cost, with greater availability and eventually higher nutritional quality. 

I’m pretty excited about reengineering longevity, too. And I think we will learn so much about the diseases of aging in the next five years. The work at David Sinclair’s lab at Harvard is particularly exciting, as is the work at a company like BioAge, who are using historical data from blood banks combined with bioinformatics and machine learning to uncover previously unknown  pathways of aging and identify the drugs that can impact those pathways. 

And that’s not to mention the brain-computer interfaces being developed at a company like Openwater. Or the potential for growing human organs inside pigs for human transplant patients. 

The list goes on. We have a lot of work to do at NEO.LIFE!

NEO.LIFE has been publishing a popular newsletter and online articles about the neobiological revolution for a few years now. Why do a book?

Digital media gives us access to all the world’s information. But sometimes the bigger trends and the bigger picture get lost in the torrent. People get stuck in their disciplines. And not a lot of people are doing Google searches on the term “neobiological revolution”!

I have always loved big ideas supported by deep reporting and excellent writing, and wrapped in beautiful design. The work we’re covering is so foundational to our future that we wanted to capture this moment in time, and establish a baseline for what we know today, and where we hope these tools can take us. So we created a beautiful object that can sit on a coffee table or in a waiting room for all kinds of people to discover today or years from now. Think of it as an artifact for future humans, or in Long Now terms, a time capsule. We had to make it something people would pick up out of curiosity and read with a sense of wonder and hope. We hope it sparks conversations all over the world. 

Despite its promise, many find this emerging frontier terrifying, and raise questions around ethics, potential misuse, and unintended consequences. I imagine you hear these concerns all the time. What do you say in response?

I’m still untangling the difference between ethics and morals. The science exists and isn’t stopping. The opportunities are vast and we will wonder some day in the future why we would ever have questioned a parent’s right to edit an embryo to prevent a genetically inherited disease. Or why we poured so many resources into raising animals that we then killed to eat and ship all over the world when we could have simply grown our proteins in a bioreactor down the street. 

As for misuse, there are lots of people thinking about this all day long. Anything can be misused, from a box cutter to an airplane to a bacterial editing tool. We have to learn responsible use of these technologies and teach our values to the next generation—or perhaps learn new values from the next generation. Evolving a comprehensive set of guidelines and regulations will not be easy, since every nation, every culture, and every genetic propensity will have its own interpretation of  what’s right. 

What’s important is to have these conversations now and bake as many of our universal values into our technologies as we can, upfront. And then design, test, analyze, and adjust as we go along. 

NEO.LIFE: 25 Visions For the Future of Our Species is available for purchase here. 

Learn More

Listen to Jane Metcalfe’s interview with Long Now board member Kevin Kelly on his Cool Tools podcast.Read George Church’s NEO.LIFE interview with Ramez Naam on how to turn science fiction into science fact. Subscribe to the NEO.LIFE newsletter.

Podcast: Long-Term Stock Exchange | Eric Ries

Companies that operate with a long-term mindset tend to outperform their peers over time. But the pressure to achieve short-term quarterly gains often works against longer-term sustainable growth, and can push even the most visionary company into a short-term mindset.

In 02019, the Long-Term Stock Exchange was approved as the country’s 14th and newest stock exchange. It offers a new framework for companies to raise capital while keeping their focus on long-term results. By requiring participating companies to accept a set of governance standards and incentive systems that deprioritize the short-term, the Long-Term Stock Exchange hopes to reward investments and business strategies that focus on a longer time horizon.

Eric Ries is the founder and CEO of Long-Term Stock Exchange. He created the Lean Startup methodology and is author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way. Ries founded IMVU and served as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Harvard Business School, IDEO, and Pivotal.

Listen on Spotify.

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Discovery of Archaeological ‘Megasities’ Resituates Research on Early Urban Areas

Site plan at Nebelivka. Photo: NEBELIVKA PROJECT, PRODUCED BY M. NEBBIA

New research, as reported by Science News, suggests our first cities were more expansive and socially egalitarian than originally thought. Beneath Nebelivka, a small Ukrainian village in Eastern Europe, newly discovered ancient remnants expose what is known archaeologically as a ‘megasite.’ These sites are sprawling and low-density, presenting very differently from the traditional first cities of Iran and Syria. The excavations at Nebelivka even suggest an organizational layout that promoted equal social standing and collective governance.

‘Over six years of fieldwork since 2009, the researchers have excavated and mapped Nebelivka structures located over more than a square kilometer. Aerial photos, satellite images and geomagnetic data, supplemented by excavations of 88 test pits, identified 1,445 residential houses and 24 communal structures dubbed assembly houses. Residential houses, some intact and most in ashes after having burned, were grouped into 153 neighborhoods, a majority containing three to seven houses. Neighborhoods, in turn, formed 14 quarters, each with one or more assembly houses situated in an open area.  

During about 200 years of occupation, Nebelivka served as both a dwelling site and, oddly enough, a kind of cemetery for incinerated houses, Gaydarska says. About two-thirds of Nebelivka houses had been deliberately burned at different times, creating mounds of charred debris across the site. Sediment and pollen excavated in and around Nebelivka display no signs of wildfire, a clue that the houses were intentionally set aflame.’

Bruce Bower , Science News

Podcast: Engram Preservation – Early Work Towards Mind Uploading | Robert McIntyre

Is it possible to preserve and read memories after someone has died? Robert McIntyre thinks it is, and that the technology is closer than most people realize. His company Nectome is working on documenting the physical properties of memory formation, and studying ways to preserve those physical properties after death. McIntyre has already won the Brain Preservation Institutes’ “Small Mammal” & “Large Mammal” prizes for preserving a full brain down to the synaptic level, and is now taking the next steps in figuring out how to decode those synapses. These are early experiments, but this is the type of work that will be required if we are someday able to preserve a mind and memories past biological death.

Robert McIntyre is a former AI researcher at MIT, where he worked with Marvin Minsky, Patrick Winston, and Gerald Sussman studying the role of embodiment in AI. He left MIT in 02015 to compete for the Brain Preservation Prizes, and is currently CEO of Nectome, a company he founded to further develop brain preservation technology.

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