Stewart Brand's Blog, page 18

Long Now Partners with GitHub on its Long-term Archive Program for Open Source Code

Long Now is pleased to announce that we have partnered with GitHub on its new archive program to preserve open source software for future generations. 

The archive represents a significant step in averting a potential future digital dark age, when much of the software that powers modern civilization could be lost to bit rot. Taking its lessons from past examples when crucial cultural knowledge was lost, such as the Great Library of Alexandria (which was burned multiple times between 48 BCE 00640 CE) and the Roman recipe for concrete, the GitHub Archive is employing a LOCKSS (“Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe”) approach to preserving open source code for the future. 

“We will protect this priceless knowledge by storing multiple copies, on an ongoing basis, across various data formats and locations,” GitHub says, “including a very-long-term archive designed to last at least 1,000 years.”That long-term archive is the GitHub Arctic Code Vault, in the Arctic World Archive in Svalbard, Norway—an archival facility 250 meters beneath the Arctic permafrost. The Arctic World Archive is adjacent to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, and aims to preserve the world’s data in much the same way the Seed Vault preserves plant seeds. GitHub intends to store every public GitHub repository on film reels coated with iron oxide powder, which can be readable for 1,000 years using either a computer or a magnifying glass. Those who wish to add their code to the vault have until February 2nd, 02020 to do so. At that point, GitHub will take a snapshot of every public repository, and add it to the storage vault. GitHub plans to update the library every 5+ years.

Microsoft Research’s Project Silica storage device.

Another archival method is Microsoft Research’s newly-announced Project Silica quartz glass. Similar to the Rosetta Disk, Project Silica is designed to be a durable, long-term storage device.

Femtosecond lasers “encode data in [the] glass by creating layers of three-dimensional nanoscale gratings and deformations at various depths and angles,” Microsoft Research said in a press release. “Machine learning algorithms read the data back by decoding images and patterns that are created as polarized light shines through the glass.” GitHub intends to archive all public repositories on Microsoft’s Project Silica, which it believes could last for over 10,000 years. Like the Arctic Code Vault, GitHub plans to update the library every 5+ years.

Stewart Brand’s Pace Layers.

The GitHub archive program has adopted Long Now co-founder Stewart Brand’s pace layers framework for their code-archiving strategy. “This approach,” says GitHub, “is designed to maximize both flexibility and durability by providing a range of storage solutions, from real-time to long-term storage.”

GitHub’s Pace Layers approach to code-archiving.

Brand’s fast and slow layers are reconceptualized as hot, warm and cold. The hot layers (GitHub, GitHub Torrent, and GitHub archive) update in near-real time. The warm layers (the Internet Archive and the Software Heritage Foundation) update monthly to yearly. The cold layers (Oxford University’s Bodleian Library, the Arctic World Archive in Svalbard, and Microsoft Research’s Project Silica storage) update every five plus years. 

To ensure the future can use the software in its archive, GitHub has convened an Archive Program advisory panel of experts in technology and the humanities, including Long Now Executive Director Alexander Rose. The archive will include technical guides and a Tech Tree— “a roadmap and Rosetta Stone for future curious minds inheriting the archive’s data.”

An overview of the archive and how to use it, the Tech Tree will serve as a quickstart manual on software development and computing, bundled with a user guide for the archive. It will describe how to work backwards from raw data to source code and extract projects, directories, files, and data formats.

Inspired by Long Now’s Manual For Civilization, the archive will also include information on how to rebuild technologies from scratch.  

“It’s our hope,” GitHub says, “that [the Archive] will, both now and in the future, further publicize the worldwide open source movement; contribute to greater adoption of open source and open data policies worldwide; and encourage long-term thinking.”

How Salvaging Ancient Shipwrecks Might Lead us to Unveil the Mystery of Dark Matter

Shipwreck of the Mandalay. Source: NPS.

In a Long Now talk on dark matter and dark energy, theoretical astrophysicist Priyamvada Natarajan said that “we simultaneously know quite a lot, and not a lot” about the key ingredients of our universe. What we do know is that dark energy makes up about 68% of the universe, with dark matter specifically, comprising about 27%. Dark matter is extremely pervasive but equally elusive. To date, scientists have been unsuccessful in actively detecting dark matter; they only know of its existence by virtue of the presence of other particles.

More information about dark matter could help answer fundamental cosmological questions: How do galaxies hold together without flying apart? Is the universe still expanding or not?

3D map of the large-scale distribution of dark matter. Source: NASA/ESA/Richard Massey (California Institute of Technology)

In order to conduct successful dark matter experiments, very specific environments and criteria need to be met — the most important being a lack of radiation. Dark matter detectors are far more sensitive to radiation than living beings. In order to minimize interference, external radiation, and in particular gamma rays, need to be blocked. The most successful shield known is lead. But any lead that dates after 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 01945¹ — the world’s first ever nuclear device detonation — will be contaminated, and will not have low enough levels of radiation to act effectively as a block. What researchers need, then, is antique lead. The best place to find it is at the bottom of the ocean.

Many shipwrecks, some of which sunk over 800 years ago, carried cargos of lead. Most often found in European waters, shipwrecked lead was originally forged as construction materials, weapons, or coins, and sometimes dates back all the way to Ancient Rome. Sunken, ancient lead is not only shielded under the water from cosmic rays, but after centuries of stagnation its unstable lead-210 isotope will have decayed into a stable lead-206. This rare and hard to source metal, is, according to Chamkaur Ghag, a physicist at University College London, “sort of like gold dust.”

However, there have been many debates around the ethics of disturbing archeological sites in pursuit of scientific knowledge. Many of the shipwrecks are cultural sites of historical importance, preserved and protected under the sea. The question is whether it is worth sacrificing historical artifacts in order to do cutting-edge science that advances dark matter research.

This issue is further complicated by scarcity. Shipwrecked lead is finite, and much of the salvaged metal is auctioned off to both the scientific and the commercial sector. Low-background lead is essential for the production of microchips for computers and smartphones. Newly-produced low background lead is available, however sunken, ancient lead is much cheaper, resulting in competition from the microelectronics industry.

While the commercial sector has a choice in the matter of using ancient versus newly-produced low background lead, scientists running dark matter experiments argue that they do not. A 02015 paper found that “freshly mined lead is naturally polluted by radioactive elements such as nuclei from the uranium, thorium and actinium decay chains,” and concluded that “a source of lead with low 210Pb content (low-alpha lead) is a sine qua non condition for the successful outcome of direct searches [for dark matter]. These low levels of emission cannot be achieved by modern lead manufacturing capabilities.”

In a piece for The Atlantic, Robin George Andrews interviewed scientists who emphasized that the scientific approach towards using shipwrecked lead was cautious, limited, and mindful of ethical considerations:

[Fernando] Gonzalez-Zalba explains that the Romans produced about 88,000 tons of lead each year, and many experiments require only a tiny fraction of this. Scientists, he says, are also increasingly aware of and sensitive to the ethical dilemmas surrounding the extraction of low-background materials.

Particle physicists should keep cultural heritage and the origins of their materials front of mind, [Alan] Duffy says. But he emphasizes that low-background material is “certainly treated” as a precious resource and not used without consideration.

“More than ever, our worldview and our understanding of the cosmos hinges on unseen quantities,” Natarajan said in her Long Now talk. With careful balance between ethics and application, shipwrecked lead might one day help scientists make the unseen quantity of dark matter more visible.

Learn More



Read “Why the Search for Dark Matter Depends on Ancient Shipwrecks” by Robin George Andrews in The Atlantic.Watch Priyamvada Natarajan’s 02016 Long Now Seminar, “Solving Dark Matter and Dark Energy.”Read “The role of underwater cultural heritage on dark matter searches: Ancient lead, a dual perspective” by E.Perez-Alvaroa and M.F.Gonzalez-Zalbabc in Ocean & Coastal Management, Volume 103, January 02015, Pages 56–62 (subscription required).

Former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis on Long-term Thinking

In a new piece in The Atlantic, former Secretary of Defense James Mattis invokes long-term thinking as a necessary but increasingly-forgotten principle of American democracy:

Acting wisely means acting with a time horizon not of months or years but of generations. Short-term thinking tends toward the selfish: Better get mine while I can! Long-term thinking plays to higher ideals. Thomas Jefferson’s idea of “usufruct”—in his metaphor, the responsibility to preserve fertile topsoil from landowner to landowner—embodied an obligation of stewardship and intergenerational fairness. Our Founders thought in centuries. Such thinking discourages shortsighted temptations (such as passing an immense burden of national debt onto our descendants) and encourages the effective management of intractable problems. It conditions us to take heart from the slow accretion of small improvements—the slow accretion that gave us paved roads, public schools, and electrification. I remember being a boy in Washington State and the sense of wonder I felt as bridges replaced ferries on the Columbia River. I remember my grandfather pointing out new power lines extending into our rural part of the state. I think often of the long history of nuclear-arms control. Steady diplomatic engagement with Moscow over five decades—pursued until recently—ultimately gave us an approximately three-quarters reduction in nuclear arsenals, and greater security. Here’s the not-so-secret recipe, applicable to members of Congress and community activists alike: Set a strategic goal and keep at it. Former Secretary of State George Shultz, using his own Jeffersonian metaphor, likened the effort to gardening: a continual, never-ending process of tilling, planting, and weeding.

Jim Mattis, “The Enemy Within,” in The Atlantic.

American Infrastructure’s “Technical Debt”

The wind driven Kincade fire burns near the town of Healdsburg, California, U.S., October 27, 2019. REUTERS/Stephen Lam – RC1E050253E0

With fires burning in California again, Alexis Madrigal has written a piece in The Atlantic on the technical debt embedded in America’s infrastructure:

A kind of toxic debt is embedded in much of the infrastructure that America built during the 20th century. For decades, corporate executives, as well as city, county, state, and federal officials, not to mention voters, have decided against doing the routine maintenance and deeper upgrades to ensure that electrical systems, roads, bridges, dams, and other infrastructure can function properly under a range of conditions. Kicking the can down the road like this is often seen as the profit-maximizing or politically expedient option. But it’s really borrowing against the future, without putting that debt on the books.

-Alexis Madrigal, “The Toxic Bubble of Technical Debt Threatening America” in The Atlantic.

Research and Rescue: A new piece in Longreads about De-extinction, Revive & Restore

Ashley Braun has recently written a feature for Longreads about de-extinction. Her piece profiles Revive & Restore‘s efforts to bring the passenger pigeon and black-footed ferret back from extinction, and features interviews with past Long Now speaker Beth Shapiro and Revive & Restore’s lead scientist Ben Novak:

“De-extinction was never about creating replicas of extinct species. We can’t,” Novak says. Instead, he explains, it is about creating something that looks and acts like an extinct species, an imitation that can fill an ecological hole caused by extinction.

Novak works for the nonprofit Revive & Restore, which is exploring de-extinction for the passenger pigeon, heath hen, and woolly mammoth. But that “reviving” work is only part of his organization’s mission; the majority of its work focuses on restoring threatened species that haven’t yet gone extinct. Unifying this work, as Tom Maloney, the nonprofit’s former conservation science director, tells me, is the drive to explore and develop potential “genomic and biotech tools to address some conservation challenges today.”

Ashley Braun, Longreads

The Visual Language of the Hong Kong Protests

Suhanya Raffel, Executive Director of the M+ Museum in Hong Kong, shares her curatorial perspective on the unique visual art of the Hong Kong protests, which is largely un-authored and digital in nature.

Watch the full talk here.

The History of (Western) Philosophy

The History of Philosophy is an interactive tool enabling users to dig into a visual timeline of 2,500 years of philosophical thought and discover lines of agreement and divergence.

The project is the brainchild of Deniz Cem Önduygu, who is continually updating it as he learns more. Since sharing this link on social media, we’ve heard back from readers that the project’s title is something of a misnomer, as no Eastern or Middle Eastern philosophy is surveyed.

Others have chimed in with suggestions of possible inquiry. Önduygu has responded that while he hopes to expand the project’s scope in the future, his aim, for now at least, is to keep things simple.

Andrew McAfee Bets on More from Less

The Mount Whaleback Iron Ore Mine in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. One of McAfee’s Long Bets predicts that by 02029, we’ll use less iron and steel than we do today. Daily Overview.

Our next Seminar speaker, Andrew McAfee, has offered a group of 14 predictions on Long Bets related to the issues of resource consumption explored in his new book, More From Less. McAfee, co-founder and co-director of MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy and a Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management, studies how digital technologies are changing the world.

In More From Less, McAfee argues that “we have at last learned how to increase human prosperity while treading more lightly on our planet.”

McAfee’s Long Bets all share the same duration (10 years; 02019-02019) and are all predicated on the same central thesis: that economic growth in technology-intensive economies will lead to dematerialization:

During the Industrial Era economies around the world grew rapidly. And as they grew, they used more year after year of the Earth’s resources: metals, minerals, fertilizers, trees, fossil fuels, cropland, and so on.

Then we invented the computer and its kin, and the pattern changed.

Hardware, software, and networks allow companies to use fewer materials as they produce their goods and services. Profit-seeking companies in competitive markets are eager to pursue these opportunities to dematerialize because they bring cost savings, and a penny saved is a penny earned. Dematerialization accumulates over time, and the economy as a whole eventually moves past “peak stuff” with respect to more and more resources.

The counterintuitive result is that capitalist, technology-intensive economies like America’s are now dematerializing across a wide range of resources, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Andrew McAfee, Long Bet 795

McAfee is predicting that by 02029, the United States will consume less energy and produce less CO2 emissions than it did a decade prior. Crop tonnage will be greater, but we’ll use less total cropland, fertilizer, and water for irrigation in agriculture. We’ll use less iron and steel, aluminum, nickel, copper, gold, rare earth elements, chromium, tin and tungsten—all of which will become more affordable to the world’s average person. We’ll also use less timber and paper.

The predictions call to mind the bet that biologist and environmentalist Paul Ehrlich made with economist Julian Simon in 01980. Ehrlich bet Simon $10,000 that the prices of five metals (copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten) would increase over a decade. The prices declined sharply, and Simon won the bet.

The Simon-Ehrlich wager.

The wager received a lot of publicity over the decade, and the result ultimately shaped societal thinking around limited resources. “Simon was a prolific skeptic of environmentalism,” Kevin Kelly wrote, “yet nothing that he ever wrote had as much impact on the course of culture as his wager with Ehrlich. That single, relatively small bet transformed the environmental movement by casting doubt on the notion of resource scarcity.” (Although, if the bet were repeated in subsequent decades, Ehrlich would have won, given the rise in commodity prices. On a long enough timescale, however, it’s one more blip in a multiple-centuries-long trend towards decreasing prices).

McAfee is now seeking challengers for his bets. “If you think that economic growth is incompatible with taking less from the planet,” he tweeted, “these bets are for you!”

Learn More

Think McAfee’s got it wrong about the future? Dig into all his Long Bets here, and challenge him if you’re game.Learn more about Long Bets in our 02018 feature on Warren Buffett’s million-dollar Long Bet.Watch Paul Ehrlich’s 02008 Long Now talk, The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment.

Long Short: Lil Buck with Icons of Modern Art

Lil Buck with Icons Of Modern Art from NOWNESS on Vimeo.

The Long Short for Suhanya Raffel’s seminar, World Art Through the Asian Perspective, featured American dancer Lil Buck dancing his way through the Foundation Luis Vuitton in Paris.

“We’re going to hear many interventions that happen at museums,” Alexander Rose said, “and this is one of the more, let’s say, disruptive ones.”

The Long Short even inspired Stewart Brand to try his hand at Lil Buck’s “gangsta walk.”

How to Send Messages 10,000 Years into the Future

Popular Science recently profiled our Rosetta and 10,000 Year Clock projects, as well as a number of related long-term thinking projects, such as Martin Kunze’s Memory of Mankind, the Apollo 12 MoonArk, nuclear waste ray cats, and the Star Map at Hoover Dam.

Corroded, wrecked, and half-buried for 2,000 years like an accidental time capsule, the Statue of Liberty that looms over Charlton Heston in the final scene of the original Planet of the Apes is a literal symbol of humanity’s missteps: a horrible communiqué from the distant past about atomic annihilation. In the real world, many linguists, designers, and scientists are puzzling over how to intentionally send millennia-spanning messages to recipients whose languages, senses, and fears could bear little resemblance to our own. The projects these ­forward-​­thinkers dream up aim to convey clues about our existence, hellos to extraterrestrials, or warnings about nuclear waste—like postcards that will be legible to beings 1,000, 5,000, even 10,000 years ahead.

A highlight of the piece are the illustrations of the various projects, presented as postcards from the future.

Learn More

Re: Ray Cats: The Other 10,000 Year Project: Long-term Thinking and Nuclear Waste (Long Now)Re: The MoonArk: Re: the Star Map of Hoover Dam: The 26,000 Year Astronomical Monument Hidden in Plain Sight (Long Now)Re: the Voyager Golden Record: Billion Year Mashup (Long Now)Re: the Memory of Mankind Project: The Time Capsule That’s As Big As Human History (GQ)