Stewart Brand's Blog, page 23

Long Now Lessons From Notre Dame

East facade of Notre Dame in the 1860s.

In the hours after news broke that the Cathedral of Notre Dame suffered extensive fire damage, many found hope in a story that circulated on social media about a centuries-old protocol the fire department in Paris followed when battling the fire. The story originated with Twitter user Michael Slavitch, who claimed that firefighters prioritized saving the people and relics over preserving the wooden roof structure of Notre Dame because they knew that the materials needed to rebuild it lay waiting in the Palace of Versailles. After the French Revolution, when large parts of the cathedral were desecrated and damaged, oak trees from Versailles were used to rebuild it. The oaks that were planted thereafter were intended to be used to help rebuild Notre Dame, should it become necessary in the future.

“This is the Long Now in action,” Slavitch tweeted. “It’s what happens when you maintain civilization.”

For many, Slavitch’s story was a silver lining on a dark day. But it is almost certainly apocryphal.¹ It also bears striking similarity to another apocryphal tale we like to tell at Long Now about the oak beams at Oxford.

Stewart Brand on the oak beams of New College, Oxford in “How Buildings Learn.”

That so many wanted the story of the Versailles oaks to be true testifies to the power of foresight and long-term thinking. Just because these stories are apocryphal does not mean they aren’t instructive in teaching us to think long-term. (The Oxford oak beams story, after all, helped inspire the founding of The Long Now Foundation.) Slavitch may be off the mark when he says there are oaks at the ready to rebuild Notre Dame, but he’s correct when he says that doing so is a way to maintain civilization.

In the aftermath of the fire, a number of Long Now community members offered perspective and reasons for hope. Others helped contextualize the fire by invoking some of Long Now’s ideas about long-term thinking. Some of those responses and quotes are reproduced below.

From Jeffrey McGrew, an architect who spoke at The Interval at Long Now in 2015:

Thankfully I believe the entire structure was laser-scanned inside and out at an extremely high level of detail just a few years ago by a a group of art historians and academics.

Also with the rise of more affordable large-scale digital fabrication, which is behind the incredible progress made at La Sagrada Familia in recent years (turning what was going take a few more generations into something that will be completed within our lifetimes), it’s possible the reconstruction could take much less time than anticipated.

A terribly sad day indeed, but also there is hope for the future.

From writer CZEdwards:

From historian Kevin Murphy, quoting “How Buildings Learn” by Long Now Co-Founder Stewart Brand:

From Paul Saffo, a futurist at Stanford and Long Now Board Member:

Watching the news, I cannot shake the feeling that profound and unexpected good will rise from the Notre Dame fire.

In a century, the fire may well be remembered as the event that saved this cultural treasure — and other treasures.

And the fire will remind the rest of the world to love it. The fire will shock the keepers of other cultural treasures worldwide and cause them to look closely at additional protection/preservations. Other treasures will thus be saved from neglect.

For the French, Notre Dame is a national cultural symbol as well as a religious symbol. Its restoration can become a magnet to inspire and bring the public together and help rekindle French solidarity in this perilous and uncertain time. And the restoration is an invitation to to rebuild for another 1000 years.

I couldn’t help but think of the motto of Paris, Fluctuat nec mergitur [“this vessel rocks but is never submerged”]. A motto, incidentally, that speaks to us all amidst the stormy global sea today. Wave-tossed but still afloat… indeed…

Noting the construction of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, the restoration project could be an opportunity for dramatic architectural/engineering innovations that honor the past and lead the future.

All in all, it is a reminder that Notre Dame is neither a museum nor a mere historical artifact, but a living, breathing structure, the heritage not only of the French, but all mankind.

Footnotes

[1] When a Twitter user questioned the provenance of Slavitch’s account, he said he heard it at a lecture in Versailles on disaster recovery and long-term planning over a decade ago. But no one thus far has succeeded in verifying Slavitch’s claims about the protocol and the oaks of Versailles. The day after the fire, the Associated Press reported that a French cultural heritage expert said France no longer has trees big enough to replace the Notre Dame’s wooden beams. The expert made no mention of the oaks of Versailles. A Reddit user said they asked the Versailles press office if the story was accurate. The press office supposedly issued a denial in response: “La rumeur qui circule sur les réseaux sociaux est fausse. Elle est sans fondement historique, compte tenu du caractère royal du domaine.” (Roughly: “The rumor circulating on social networks is wrong. It has no historical basis, given the royal nature of the estate.”) The Palace of Versailles press office has yet to respond to a Long Now inquiry of this writing.

This is How The Universe Ends

A still from Melodysheep’s Timelapse of the Future.

This much is certain: The sun, like all stars, will one day die. Its demise will begin five billion years from now, when it starts running out of fuel. It will slowly bloat into a red giant, becoming over two hundred times larger than it is today and thousands of times more luminous. As it expands, it will consume nearby planets—including, most probably, our own. After devouring the planets it helped sustain, it too will die.

This cosmic fate—distant, inconceivable, and inevitable, all at once—occurs only three minutes into Melodysheep’s half-hour-long video, Timelapse of the Future: A Journey to the End of Time. The viewer hears the voice of British physicist Brian Cox coolly narrate the end of life as we know it while the incendiary expanding fireball of the sun swallows up Earth. A counter on the bottom of the screen adds to the tension, moving exponentially through time by doubling every five seconds. The description next to the counter (“EARTH DESTROYED BY THE DYING SUN”) is chillingly matter-of-fact.

A still from Melodysheep’s Timelapse of the Future.

The effect of this demise coming so early in the video is unsettling, akin to Hitchcock killing off Janet Leigh’s character less than a third of the way through Psycho. What comes next, now that the top-billed star has met its end?

Quite a lot, it turns out. If Timelapse of the Future has any message, it’s this: the universe has only just begin. Cosmic milestones whizz by in dizzying fashion as the timelapse reaches trillions of trillions of years into the future: stars begin to die off, neutron stars collide, black holes swallow stray matter, atoms decay, and the universe cools into a void of nothingness. The computer-generated visuals are complemented by narration from some of the world’s foremost cosmologists, helping provide perspective for what are strange times ahead, indeed.

This is heady stuff, and not the kind of material you’d think would go viral on YouTube (The video currently sits at 7.5 million views). But MelodySheep, whose real name is John D. Boswell, has made a career out of remixing science and making it palatable for the masses. His first hits were catchy three-to-five-minute-long music videos that featured auto-tuned raps from scientists like Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, and Richard Feynman as they held forth on quantum physics, Mars, and our place in the cosmos. Boswell’s videos splice together from clips from science documentaries and lectures, and feature music and animations Boswell creates himself.

“That sense of wonder you have as a kid? It never goes away,” Boswell said in a 2016 talk. “It just needs to be rekindled in the right way. Dinosaurs and space are just as cool to adults as they are for kids.” Boswell sees his science videos as a way to “spark that wonder again in people it might have faded for.”

But he’s never made a video longer, or more cosmically out there, than Timelapse of the Future. Creating it required months of research into physical cosmology, where speculations about the ultimate fate of the universe are legion, and often contradictory. Watching it requires a commitment that goes beyond the normal social media attention span, and a willingness to countenance our smallness in the face of long-lasting cosmic forces.

Boswell is surprised that the video has garnered millions of views. But he has a few ideas as to why it’s resonated.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

John D. Boswell, aka Melodysheep.

Long Now: What inspired you to make this video?

Melodysheep: I was inspired by the cosmic calendar that Carl Sagan talked about in Cosmos. In that mental construct, imagining all of universal history as a single calendar year, humans occupy the last hour of the last day. That was always a total mindfuck to me. I made a YouTube version exploring the idea of the cosmic calendar called Timelapse of the Entire Universe. It was my first long-term piece on YouTube. After I finished that, the obvious question that lingered was: Well, what’s next? What’s the next second of this timeline going to be like?

My original plan was to make something more like an art installation piece where there wouldn’t be so much talking and facts; it would basically just be the timeline and some chill music and meditative imagery of black holes that would just span for like 10 minutes at a time, and you’d get this abstract impression of how long the future is going to be, and how much emptiness there is. But the more I dug into it, the more I found there’s so much to talk about, and so much to say, that it would be foolish to waste this opportunity. I had a draft of this last summer, and felt it needed to be taken to the next level. So I spent another six months really digging into the VFX of it all, and the research, and figuring out how to build the flow of it and the structure and how to make it work. And I am glad I did. There’s just so much to say, and so much I had to leave out. But it came together really well and I am pretty stoked about how it turned out.

Were you surprised that millions of people were willing to watch a 30 minute video about black holes, dark matter and developments that are trillions and trillions of years into the future?

Truly, I did not expect this response at all. When I was making it I thought, “Who’s going to watch this? Who’s going to sit down for half an hour on YouTube and take the time and digest all this stuff?” But I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the reaction. People seem to be attentive to it, and I try to draw people’s attention through the whole time. I don’t want any lulls.

Why do you think it resonated?

I think there’s just something about the fate of everything that is really intriguing to people. You can’t quite look away; you’ve got to know how it ends.

The exponential counter on the bottom, which doubles its journey through time every five seconds, certainly adds to the tension of the piece. What led you to make that choice advancing exponentially?

The counter used in Timelapse of the Entire Universe was pretty straightforward; every minute corresponded to roughly a billion years. The exponential counter in Timelapse of the Future took a lot more thought and trickery. I chose one doubling of time every five seconds. It could have been every three seconds, and the video would have been over in fifteen minutes. But then you’re really cramming a ton of stuff into the first few minutes. Everything from the present day to the death of the earth would’ve occurred in one minute instead of three to four. That would’ve made it really hard to breathe. But then you have to apply that same rule to the rest of the video, and ensure you’ve got enough stuff in there to fill the time. It’s a balance.

You’re engaging with a lot of speculative futures. What creative choices did you make to fill in the gaps in our knowledge about what might happen in the deep future, or deal with contradicting theories?

That was a challenge. There’s so much to say in the first few minutes. And then the last fifteen minutes or so, there’s basically nothing to say. I had a breakthrough when I realized that I didn’t have to focus on just events that are actually happening, but could discuss theoretical stuff as well. I could step away from the physical events and talk about the metaverse and these bigger ideas while letting the counter run in the background.

Otherwise it would just be black for half the video, you know? There would be black holes here and there, but it would just be this empty void with these millions of black holes just sitting in silence doing nothing for trillions and trillions of years. So that was my creative workaround, and it seemed to work.

In terms of what I chose to fill in the gaps, it was just a matter of doing the research and digging in and seeing what I could find, because there’s so many predictions about what’s going to happen. And, like you said, some of them do contradict. Especially regarding climate change. It’s very speculative. I had Antarctica melting at 50 million years or so, but that could happen in the next ten thousand years. No one’s really quite sure. It’s guaranteed you’re going to have to do a lot of speculation anyway, so I’m not too concerned about scientific accuracy when it’s impossible to predict the future.

You’ve received a lot of feedback from people who found the video depressing or existentially bleak, mostly along the lines of: “Why does anything matter at all, if ultimately Earth will be destroyed, the sun will die, and the universe will end in a cold freeze?” I suspect you don’t see it that way. How does the ultimate fate of the universe make you feel?

I find it comforting. It’s beautiful in a way that the Big Bang was started from nothing and then at the end it’s going to be nothing all over again. There’s an arc to it that I find really poetic. I don’t fear the nothingness. If that’s really the way it is, then so be it. I think it puts everything in your life into perspective. It really is about the journey, not the destination. And we’re just here to live our moment in the sun as best as we can and enjoy it. It really highlights how special our moment in time is. We live in this moment when it’s not the early days of the universe, where it’s this completely homogenous fireball. And we’re not at the end of the universe where it’s this completely icy cold void with nothing in it. We’re in this Goldilocks moment. If we play our cards right, we potentially have trillions of years to live this moment and appreciate it as much as we can.

Learn More

Watch more videos by Melodysheep here.
Timelapse of the Future features audio from Craig Childs’ 02013 Long Now Seminar. Watch the full talk here.
Former Long Now Seminar speaker Martin Rees is also featured in voiceover. Watch his recent Long Now talk here.
Support for the video was provided by former Seminar speaker Juan Benet and his Protocol Labs. Watch Juan Benet’s full Long Now talk here.

Jeff Goodell: We’re Not Going to ‘Fix’ Climate Change

There’s not going to be a ‘fix’ for climate change, says science journalist Jeff Goodell. There will only be adaptations. From the Long Now Seminar, “The Water Will Come.”

‘Extraordinary’ 500-Year-Old Library Catalog Reveals Books Lost to Time

Researchers in Copenhagen have discovered a catalog containing thousands of summaries of books from 500 years ago, many of which no longer exist:

The Libro de los Epítomes manuscript, which is more than a foot thick, contains more than 2,000 pages and summaries from the library of Hernando Colón, the illegitimate son of Christopher Columbus who made it his life’s work to create the biggest library the world had ever known in the early part of the 16th century. Running to around 15,000 volumes, the library was put together during Colón’s extensive travels. Today, only around a quarter of the books in the collection survive and have been housed in Seville Cathedral since 1552.

Via The Guardian.

Alison Gopnik on the Long-term Future of AI



Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology and philosophy at UC-Berkeley, believes that the changes AI will bring to humanity will be profound, but that we won’t notice them.

From John Brockman’s Long Now Seminar “Possible Minds.”

Technology in Deep Time

In a new essay for BBC’s Deep Civilisation series, British philosopher Tom Chatfield explores how technology has co-evolved alongside humans. While humans have only existed as a brief interval on the cosmic timescale, the process of “recursive iteration” that defines our relationship with our tools has led to us having an outsized impact on the planet. “We have introduced something exponential into the equations of planetary time,” Chatfield writes, “and that something is technology”:

[Coevolution with technology] marks humanity’s departure from the rest of life on Earth. Alone among species […] humans can consciously improve and combine their creations over time – and in turn extend the boundaries of consciousness. It is through this process of recursive iteration that tools became technologies; and technology a world-altering force.

Looking at our history with technology not as a “greatest hits” of innovation but as a long-term process of co-evolution enables us to understand how every great invention, from the printing press to the iPhone, was simply a combination of pre-existing technology that is being driven along by much the same force that is at play in biological evolution: “fitness as manifested through successful reproduction.”

As technology evolves at an exponential rate, the most pressing question becomes, according to Chatfield: “Can we deflect the path of technology’s needs towards something like our own long-term interest, not to mention that of most other life on this planet?” The answer lies in eschewing narratives about an inevitable Singularity to come, or humanity’s impotence in the face of technology’s growing power:

Like our creations, we are minute in individual terms – yet of vast consequence collectively. It took the Earth 4.7 billion years to produce a human population of one billion; another 120 years to produce two billion; then less than a century to reach the seven-and-a-half billion humans currently alive, contemplating their future with all the tools of reason, wishfulness, knowledge and delusion that evolution and innovation have bequeathed.

This is what existence looks like at the sharp end of 4.7 billion years. We have less time than ever before – and more that we can accomplish.

You can read Chatfield’s essay in full here.

Transmissions from the Ambient Frontier

The music by the Italian record label Glacial Movements is meant to evoke the vastness, stillness and cold of the Arctic. Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

This is the third article in our series, Music, Time and Long-term Thinking . Two previous articles explored long-term thinking in several musical domains, with focus on three artists: Brian Eno, John Cage and Jem Finer. For this third entry, we open our field of interest to broadly survey projects with unique temporal approaches. 

One of the easiest ways to explore temporality through music is to simply slow it down. Just as we would seem incredibly slow to a hummingbird, slowed-down recordings can make us feel like the world is slowing down, each moment resonating with new intensity.

Sheet music for Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.

Along these lines, Norwegian composer Leif Inge has taken Beethoven’s 9th symphony and stretched it to 24 hours in length while maintaining the original pitch. In 02004, the piece was presented as a “once-in-a-lifetime all-night pajamas-please sleep-over concert-event” at San Francisco’s 964 Natoma, organized by Member Aaron Ximm. As Ximm describes it:

The result is a remarkable remaking of Beethoven as massive soundscape: a piece in which familiar motifs develop twenty times more slowly than we’re used to, at times lovely, at times overwhelming. It is the best-known symphony in the world transformed: transformed into a dramatic and haunting and hypnotizing soundscape that passes like clouds over a vast landscape.

A meme from 02010 captures this same effect with a pop song. A user on Reddit posted a link to a recording he’d created of Justin Bieber’s “U Smile” slowed down 800%. The result was shared virally across the internet for the next several days.

 

The original Soundcloud post of the recording by Shamantis has been deleted, but remnants still exist on YouTube.

A Soundcloud user by the name of PsychicWhoosh captures the unnerving beauty of this piece in a comment on the track:

This thing is having a profound impact on my view of the universe at the moment, that here, hidden in this crappy, commercial pop song is a piece of music so transcendent in its cosmic beauty, it is moving me to heights of spiritual ecstasy. It was there all along, like a cipher hiding in plain sight which no one knew needed decoding. It simply needed to be tuned to the right frequency, to be tracked along the proper coordinates of time.

In contrast to dramatically slowing a recording down and extending its length, artists have also explored the possibilities of repeating short recordings over and over. The history of looping in modern composing is a story of the accidental beauty of technological imperfection and decay. In 01965, composer Steve Reich recorded a preacher in Union Square, declaring “It’s gonna rain.” While attempting to start a second loop halfway through the first recording, Reich found that the technology was imperfect, creating what is known as a phase shift.

Phase shift.

The idea behind a phase shift is that two identical loops start off in sync, and then over time one drifts, creating a doubling effect. As the second loop shifts further, the loops conflict more and more, until their waveforms are exactly opposite. From this point the second loop continues its shift and eventually catches back up with the first loop, bringing the loops back into sync and completing the process.

Steve Reich’s “It’s Gonna Rain.”

While originally unintentional, Reich liked the sound of the phase shift, and the piece “It’s Gonna Rain” became Reich’s landmark composition and a significant contribution to minimalism and process music. Brian Eno, in a Long Now lecture, cited “It’s Gonna Rain” as his first experience with minimalism and the genre that would come to be known as ambient music.

In the days before digital audio, ambient musicians looped sound via tape loops. 

Just a few years after Reich’s creative accident, a young composer named Alvin Lucier was also experimenting with looping. The premise was simple — Lucier recorded himself reading a paragraph of text while sitting in a room:

I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.

Alvin Lucier — I Am Sitting in a Room

The piece thus unfolds exactly as Lucier explains it, with the recording slowly sliding from intelligible language into the haunting natural reverberant tones of the specific room. Here the room has become the instrument as the recording loop deviates further and further from the original recording.

William Basinski.

Another major piece of music that incorporates looping is William Basinski’s “The Disintegration Loops.” Former Pitchfork Editor-in-Chief Mark Richardson tells the story of Basinski’s process in his article about the collection:

In the 1980s, he constructed a series of tape loops consisting of processed snatches of music captured from an easy listening station. When going through his archives in 2001, he decided to digitize the decades-old loops to preserve them. He started a loop on his digital recorder and left it running, and when he returned a short while later, he noticed that the tape was gradually crumbling as it played. The fine coating of magnetized metal was slivering off, and the music was decaying slightly with each pass through the spindle. Astonished, Basinski repeated the process with other loops and obtained similar results.

The very process of media decay, a running theme on our blog, led to a beautiful piece that turns the decay into a meditation on the impermanence of sound and structure. Basinski was listening to the loops on September 11th, 02001, when the World Trade Center fell. Basinski decided to record a video of the billowing smoke of the collapsed towers from his roof in Brooklyn, and set one of the loops to the video, adding a haunting, poignant twist to the theme of decay.

Disintegration Loop 1.1 consists of one static shot of Lower Manhattan billowing smoke during the last hour of daylight on September 11th, 02001, set to the decaying pastoral tape loop Basinski had recorded in August 02001.

The Disintegration Loops is one of the most powerful manifestations of the inevitable cycle of life ever committed to tape, even as it documents the inevitable decay of all that is committed to tape. The very passage of time is its most effective instrument. — MMLXII

Like any good musical genre, ambient music started as a description of something new and unique, quickly garnered a following and imitators, was codified and sub-divided, and ultimately spun off communities of creators, promoters and aficionados.

Over the Summit by Netherworld (Glacial Movements, 02013)
[image error]

Beyond just coining the term, Brian Eno set forth many new paths through his foundational work. One direction ambient explorers inspired by Eno took was into textural explorations: music that was produced largely to aurally represent something — a place, a vision, a feeling — almost exclusively through its timbre. Harmony and rhythm aren’t unimportant to this music, but they tend to work in a subtle, supporting role to combinations of droning synthesized and recorded sounds.

A record label based in Rome called Glacial Movements produces a blend of this style that it calls “glacial and isolationist ambient.” The music is meant to evoke the vastness, the stillness and the cold of the Arctic.

The density of the Arctic’s frigid air makes sound travel quickly and crisply to one’s ears. But, because it can be such a still, isolated place, those sounds tend to be deep and structural — like ice floes slowly grinding against one another — or as diaphanous as ice crystals and snowflakes forming out of the air itself.

Just as John Cage’s experience in a supposedly silent anechoic chamber revealed to him the deep and low frequencies produced by his body itself, the seeming silence of the Arctic can heighten one’s sonic awareness. The music features sounds as hard and smooth as miles of perfectly clear, ancient ice, or as light and crunchy as footsteps in fresh snow.

The Arctic is also known for its extended light and dark cycles, alternating between months of day and months of night. Likewise, the music of Glacial Movements tends toward a kind of stasis, without clear rhythmic markings to count time as it goes by.

DJ Spooky.

Similarly inspired by the polar region’s unique sound profile, Paul H. Miller, aka DJ Spooky, has created music that takes a very different approach to representing cold, icy realms. His particular interest in Antarctica stems less from its aesthetics than from the singular political situation it inhabits — Antarctica is without national affiliation — and the ecological implications of such an arrangement.

Miller has written a book in conjunction with scientists Brian Greene and Ross A. Virginia called The Book of Ice. Accompanying the book is an album-length composition featuring sounds recorded in Antarctica called Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica.

DJ Spooky discusses John Cage’s influence on his project Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica.

The glacial landscape portrayed therein is comparatively livelier than that of the Glacial Movements recordings. It starts off with a raucous reminder of the animal life that calls the Antarctic home before transitioning into a more traditionally ambient portrayal of the region’s significant winds, followed by a strings portion perhaps meant to evoke the continent’s missing Anthem that gives way to parade-like drums (celebrating independence?). And that’s just the first 15 minutes.

Exploring realms even farther afield, Robert Alexander’s work leaves our planet altogether. In partnership with the Solar and Heliospheric Research Group at the University of Michigan, Alexander uses astronomical data on the sun and the solar wind to generate sound and music. One piece he shared with NPR in 02013 is generated from 40 years’ worth of measurements tracking the sun’s rotation. It features a deep rumble topped with blips of static. The piece is a fairly straightforward example of what he calls sonification—aurally representing a dataset. In some of his other work, he incorporates sonified data into compositions of his own.

Alexander spoke to Vice Media in January of 02013 about the way he crafts his compositions from scientific research. He also explained that his musical approach to exploring the data led to a unique analytical discovery. He noticed an acoustical resonance between two data sources and was able to identify a correlation between carbon and the solar wind that scientists later confirmed in a published paper.

Fortunately, one doesn’t need access to a space program to sonify astronomical data. A community of enthusiasts has coalesced around the recording of Very Low Frequency radio waves. VLF waves can be 10 to 100 kilometers in length, making them useful for certain types of communication, but also susceptible to a great deal of atmospheric interference.

Aurora Borealis, which creates VLF radio waves through interactions between the solar wind and our planet’s magnetic field.

It’s the latter characteristic that makes them interesting to a certain class of audio-hobbyist. Interference that can be heard in the recordings of VLF waves is generated by many sources, but is usually dominated by the sound of the AC power grid.

Tuning in from a remote area more than a few miles from power lines, however, will yield primarily natural sounds — lightning strikes, primarily, but also the Aurora Borealis and Australis, ethereal phenomena caused by interactions between the solar wind and our planet’s magnetic field. Stephen P. McGreevy has made an album of just such recordings. He traveled to remote locations all over North America to gather these eery, glitchy sounding passages.

Stephen P. McGreevy discusses his process of capturing sounds of Earth’s magnetic field.

Whether exploring temporality through slowing or looping music, trying to take people to an imaginary frozen tundra, depict the actual hellscape of the sun, or record interactions between the two, artists are finding music to have sufficiently pliable boundaries to accomplish their expressive tasks. These projects have vastly different aims and influences, but seem in some way to evoke vastness and awe, themes that overlap with the Long View.

Technology in Deep Time

In a new essay for BBC’s Deep Civilisation series, British philosopher Tom Chatfield explores how technology has co-evolved alongside humans. While humans have only existed as a brief interval on the cosmic timescale, the process of “recursive iteration” that defines our relationship with our tools has led to us having an outsized impact on the planet. “We have introduced something exponential into the equations of planetary time,” Chatfield writes, “and that something is technology”:

[Coevolution with technology] marks humanity’s departure from the rest of life on Earth. Alone among species […] humans can consciously improve and combine their creations over time – and in turn extend the boundaries of consciousness. It is through this process of recursive iteration that tools became technologies; and technology a world-altering force.

Looking at our history with technology not as a “greatest hits” of innovation but as a long-term process of co-evolution enables us to understand how every great invention, from the printing press to the iPhone, was simply a combination of pre-existing technology that is being driven along by much the same force that is at play in biological evolution: “fitness as manifested through successful reproduction.”

As technology evolves at an exponential rate, the most pressing question becomes, according to Chatfield: “Can we deflect the path of technology’s needs towards something like our own long-term interest, not to mention that of most other life on this planet?” The answer lies in eschewing narratives about an inevitable Singularity to come, or humanity’s impotence in the face of technology’s growing power:

Like our creations, we are minute in individual terms – yet of vast consequence collectively. It took the Earth 4.7 billion years to produce a human population of one billion; another 120 years to produce two billion; then less than a century to reach the seven-and-a-half billion humans currently alive, contemplating their future with all the tools of reason, wishfulness, knowledge and delusion that evolution and innovation have bequeathed.

This is what existence looks like at the sharp end of 4.7 billion years. We have less time than ever before – and more that we can accomplish.

You can read Chatfield’s essay in full here.

Patrick Collison Joins Long Now Board

We are pleased to welcome Patrick Collison to the Long Now board. Collison is the CEO and co-founder of Stripe, a technology company that builds economic infrastructure for the internet.

Collison has been in Long Now’s orbit for several years. In 02017, Stripe began sponsoring the Long Now Seminars and Conversations at The Interval.

“I’ve admired the Long Now for many years, and am honored to contribute even a small part to its advancement of long-term thinking,” Collison said.

Below is a bit more about Collison’s story:

Patrick Collison is chief executive officer and co-founder of Stripe, a technology company that builds economic infrastructure for the internet. After experiencing firsthand how difficult it was to set up an online business, Patrick and his brother John started Stripe in 2010. Their goal was to make accepting payments on the internet simpler and more inclusive. Today, Stripe powers millions of online businesses around the world.

Prior to Stripe, Patrick co-founded Auctomatic, which was acquired by Live Current Media for $5 million in March 2008. In 2016, he was named a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship by President Obama. Originally from Limerick, Ireland, Patrick now lives in San Francisco, where Stripe is headquartered.

Five Principles for Thinking Like a Futurist

On the occasion of 50th anniversary of the founding of the Institute for the Future, Marina Gorbis (who has worked at IFTF for 20 years) recently shared five principles for thinking like a futurist:

Forget about predictions.
Focus on signals.
Look back to see forward.
Uncover patterns.
Create a community.

As Gorbis puts it:

At its best, futures thinking is not about predicting the future; rather, it is about engaging people in thinking deeply about complex issues, imagining new possibilities, connecting signals into larger patterns, connecting the past with the present and the future, and making better choices today. Futures thinking skills are essential for everyone to learn in order to better navigate their own lives and to make better decisions in the face of so many transformations in our basic technologies and organizational structures. The more you practice futures thinking, the better you get.

Read the piece in full here.