Stewart Brand's Blog, page 24

A Journey into the Animal Mind

Side view of a Carrion Crow, Corvus corone.

Fish that fake orgasms. Fruit flies that seek out alcohol when they can’t find mates. Crows that take advantage of moving vehicles to crack open walnuts. Are these rote animal behaviors, or signs of something approaching consciousness?

Such is the focus of a provocative meditation on animal intelligence by Ross Andersen in the March 02019 issue of The Atlantic. A Jain bird hospital in Delhi and a Jain religious site on the mountain of Gujarat provide the backdrop for Andersen’s exploration of the latest research into animal consciousness. While the notion that animals possess consciousness was long dismissed in the West until scientific research suggested otherwise beginning in the mid-twentieth century, Jainism has believed as much for over 3,000 years, and promotes an ethical code that forbids the harming of animals.

Jains move through the world in this gentle way because they believe animals are conscious beings that experience, in varying degrees, emotions analogous to human desire, fear, pain, sorrow, and joy. This idea that animals are conscious was long unpopular in the West, but it has lately found favor among scientists who study animal cognition. And not just the obvious cases—primates, dogs, elephants, whales, and others. Scientists are now finding evidence of an inner life in alien-seeming creatures that evolved on ever-more-distant limbs of life’s tree. In recent years, it has become common to flip through a magazine like this one and read about an octopus using its tentacles to twist off a jar’s lid or squirt aquarium water into a postdoc’s face.

For scientists today, Andersen writes, “the resonant mystery is no longer which animals are conscious, but which are not.” Jainism, Andersen suggests, provides something of a contemplative roadmap for the ethical questions that arise around animal-based lab experiments, animal consumption, and the environmental damage caused by human pollution.

There now appears to exist, alongside the human world, a whole universe of vivid animal experience. Scientists deserve credit for illuminating, if only partially, this new dimension of our reality. But they can’t tell us how to do right by the trillions of minds with which we share the Earth’s surface. That’s a philosophical problem, and like most philosophical problems, it will be with us for a long time to come.

You can read Andersen’s piece in full here.

Seminar Highlight: Martin Rees on How To Ensure a Brighter Future For the Planet

“We need to think globally, we need to think rationally, and above all, we need to think long-term.” – Lord Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, speaking at Long Now.

Watch video of the full talk here.

The Long Now Foundation and a Great Basin Mountain Observatory for Long Science

Figure 1. Mt. Washington in the Snake Range, NV, with bristlecone pines. Photo: Connie Millar

About 15 years ago, my work unexpectedly collided with mountain climate science research when the nonprofit organization I work for, The Long Now Foundation, acquired Mt. Washington in eastern Nevada (Fig. 1). Not the whole mountain, but important parts of it, and also parts of the adjacent Spring Valley. Long Now had been looking for a site to build its flagship artifact for the future, the 10,000 Year Clock, and originally acquired the properties with this in mind. For various reasons, this turned out not to be where we are currently constructing the 10,000 Year Clock, which is now in the installation phase in a mountain in west Texas. What we might create on Mt. Washington that is Clock-related is not yet planned. Still, the Mt. Washington and Spring Valley properties remain close to the heart of Long Now, and we conjure what could happen there. One possibility is a long-term science station. More on this below.

The Big Here and The Long Now

Long Now was first established in 01996 with the mission of fostering long-term thinking in society.¹ We modern humans live longer than our ancestors, yet increasingly our tendency is to think and operate in ever shorter time frames — the four-year election cycle, two-year science grant, annual federal budget, or the quarterly return. This is to the detriment of observing longer trends that might impact us, or in strategizing solutions to problems that might take multiple generations, or even centuries to implement. The idea of the “Long Now” (coined by Long Now board member, artist, and musician Brian Eno) is to shift one’s frame of reference, agency and responsibility from the local ‘here’ and short ‘now’ to the Big Here and Long Now — to thinking globally and long-term, and taking good care of one’s civilization.²

To define an operating framework, Long Now looks back 10,000 years to the dawn of human civilization and projects this into the next 10,000 years. In total, this 20,000-year span of history, present, and future is the “Long Now.” Rather than just taking this as an abstract concept, Long Now as an organization engages in projects that require us to take the Long Now seriously. One of these projects is the 10,000 Year Clock, designed to tick and keep time for 10,000 years. Another is The Rosetta Project, which is building an archive of all human languages and creating a backup that can last for thousands of years. Yet another is Long Bets, where you can lay down real money and make predictions of societal consequence, but the bet might not be decided for hundreds or thousands of years (the stakes go to the charity of the winner’s choice). Another project, Revive and Restore, recently spun off of Long Now, and is working on the de-extinction of species like the Passenger Pigeon and Woolly Mammoth. By taking the long-term seriously, we hope to inspire people and give them permission to think longer-term, even if that means ten years from now. We hope it also means 10,000 years from now.

A Clock and a Mountain

In many respects the 10,000 Year Clock is like an ordinary clock. It has a pendulum that ‘ticks’, it has chimes, it uses mechanical gears to track time. It is unusual in that it is built to reckon time for the next 10,000 years, is hundreds of feet tall, uses temperature differences between night and day as an energy source, and its siting requires a mountain (for more, see The Long Now Foundation 02018). When Long Now was looking for a mountain for the Clock, the late Roger Kennedy was on the Board of Directors. He had been head of the National Park Service shortly after Great Basin National Park was established. The park and surrounding area in the Snake Range, Nevada, are home to the impressively long-lived bristlecone pine (Pinus longaeva), one of which, the ill-fated Prometheus Tree (Fig. 2), was felled by the U.S. Forest Service in 01964 at the request of a geomorphology graduate student undertaking research to date glacial moraines. It was posthumously dated at 4,862 years old; at the time it was the oldest known non-clonal organism on Earth. Roger thought that the beauty and remoteness of the area, along with the millennially-ancient bristlecone pine groves would provide an epic and inspirational siting for the 10,000 Year Clock.

Figure 2. The Prometheus Tree. Painting by Laura Welcher.

Just outside the park boundary, south of the tallest peak in the range Mt. Wheeler, lies Mt. Washington. On Mt. Washington’s western side is a gargantuan limestone cliff , reaching 11,657 feet in elevation at its summit. On its slopes, forests of pinyon pine (Pinus monophylla), juniper (Juniperus osteosperma) rise through limber pine (Pinus flexilis), Engelmann spruce (Picea engelmannii) and white fir (Abies concolor) culminating in open groves of stately bristlecone pine and alpine meadows, lush with flowers and pollinators on a midsummer’s day. In winter, it is blanketed by many feet of snow, and icy storms buffet its peak and flanks (Fig. 3).

Figure 3. Late spring in the Snake Range, Scotty Strachan walks up Mt. Washington with Mt. Lincoln behind him.

The property that Long Now purchased for the siting of the Clock is at the summit of Mt. Washington above the limestone escarpment. It was previously a sometimes-operating beryllium mine, and along with surface rights, Long Now acquired mineral rights to the property. Long Now has no interest in mining, but needed those rights in order to excavate inside the cliff, to create the chambers that would house the Clock and protect it from the elements. Long Now also acquired several patent mining claims heading south along the top of the cliff, and one non-patent claim known as the “Pole Adit” at about 7,800 feet on the western slope.

Figure 4. View from the crest of the Snake Range west to Spring Valley. Photo: Scotty Strachan

From atop the peak of Mt. Washington, looking westward the viewshed takes in Spring Valley (Fig. 4), a basin that at the time of Long Now’s purchase was mostly home to alfalfa farmers, sagebrush, sheep and scientifically-significant stands of Rocky Mountain junipers (Juniperus scopulorum, locally known as “Swamp Cedars”, Charlet 02006). Hidden from view, but supporting life in the valley, is an ancient aquifer evidenced here and there where it percolates to the surface in artesian wells. With the help of local realtor Dave Tilford, Long Now purchased its mountain properties, as well as a valley property along Highway 894 with resident Swamp Cedars. A few years later, Long Now also acquired a property sold by the local school board along Highway 50 near Majors Place. This property is slightly higher in elevation from the Swamp Cedar property, and has a glorious view of southern Spring Valley, Mt. Washington, and the western face of the Snake Range (Fig. 5).

Figure 5. The western escarpment of the Snake Range from Spring Valley. Mt. Washington on the left, and Mt. Lincoln on the right. Photo: Scotty Strachan
A Linguist and a Library

This is about where I enter the story. I came to The Long Now Foundation from an academic background in theoretical linguistics. My focus was on the documentation and description of certain indigenous languages of North America, which are today some of the most critically endangered languages on Earth (although many are also being revived as modern, spoken languages). I’d done my Ph.D. at UC Berkeley and was just wrapping up a year’s postdoc in Michigan, when I was hired by Long Now to work on The Rosetta Project.

The Rosetta Project, which at the time was just getting off the ground, is an effort to build an archive of all spoken languages on Earth (there are around 7,000 of them) and to create a backup of this archive that can last and be readable for thousands of years, The Rosetta Disk (The Rosetta Project 02018). The Rosetta Project was conceived as part of the Long Now Library — a companion collection to the 10,000 Year Clock intended to provide a “wisdom line” for humanity, the knowledge to rebuild civilization if necessary, and the context to re-think and re-tool when inspired to do so (Brand 01999). The Rosetta Project was the first entry in the Library, created as a key to whatever information we may leave to the future in the form of our human languages.

The Rosetta Project is a good place for a linguist and budding long-term thinker to hang her proverbial hat. Our 7,000 modern spoken languages, in roughly one hundred and fifty different language families, are the product of millennia of differentiation and change through isolation of speakers as well as contact between them and its associated multilingualism. To study human language in its modern diversity is to peer back through at least 6,000–8,000 years of human history, since that is what we can reconstruct for the better-studied language families like Indo-European. It is also a poignant time to take an archival snapshot of human language, since the total number of languages is bound to be drastically reduced within a century. A massive loss of species is often used as a metaphor for explaining the magnitude of this linguistic change we are witnessing in our lifetimes.

While I have had the charge of The Rosetta Project for several years at Long Now, I have had many other roles and responsibilities there as well (this is common in small nonprofit organizations). Over the years I have carried the titles of Rosetta Project Director, Development Director, and most recently Director of Operations and The Long Now Library. (I can even add a section to my CV for helping open and run the Long Now bar/café The Interval! If you had told me that as a graduate student, I never would have believed it.) Pretty early on in my tenure at Long Now I took on the role of helping manage the properties in Eastern Nevada and this is where I was first introduced to mountain climate science.

A Mountain and a Transect

In 02007, researchers at several institutions within the Nevada System of Higher Education contacted Long Now about a proposal they were developing to submit to the National Science Foundation’s EPSCoR (Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research, National Science Foundation 2018a) grant competition. They wondered if Long Now might make its Spring Valley and Mt. Washington properties available for the siting of several semi-permanent environmental monitoring stations. The stations on Long Now properties would form a transect in various environments and elevations running roughly southwest to northeast across the Snake Range. Linked by radio, with relays to remote data centers, the whole system would define an area of data collection that could be used to study climate, ecology, and hydrology in this region of the Great Basin.

We listened with interest. Long Now had previously set up a small weather station of its own on Mt. Washington, but despite its remote and unadvertised location on the mountain, it was discovered and repeatedly vandalized (we did nevertheless manage to collect several years of data). This NSF project brought the possibility of a much more advanced set of instruments, with superior data collection through a linked data network that would be built and managed by climate scientists. Other than providing sites for the stations and access to them, Long Now would not be involved with their setup, operation or data collection.

Figure 6. NevCAN weather station in Spring Valley, with David Charlet conducting vegetation plot assessments. Photo: Connie Millar

Long Now said yes to the use of its properties. The proposal was successful, and in 02008 the Nevada Climate-ecohydrology Assessment Network (NevCAN for short) was created by a five-year, fifteen million dollar grant (National Science Foundation 02018b). Three of the seven planned observatory stations for the Snake Range were built on Long Now properties, one in the valley off Highway 894 (Fig. 6) and two on the upper elevations of Mt. Washington. Another monitoring station was added to the network when Long Now acquired additional Spring Valley property off of Highway 50 in 02013.

Deep Time and Long Science

I first had the delight of meeting Scotty Strachan when he was a graduate student at the University of Nevada Reno and had taken charge of the building and communications of all the weather stations in the NevCAN network. These included not just the stations around Spring Valley and Mt. Washington in the Snake Range, but also four stations in southern Nevada in the Sheep Range. Scotty also linked all of the stations by radio and relayed their collected data via repeaters back to his data center at UNR (I should add, using some serious ham radio skills, of which I maintain a merely hobby interest and ability). The use of the network was a critical part of his doctoral research.

All of this, frankly, impressed the socks off of me. Studying linguistics at Berkeley when I did my Ph.D. meant establishing a close relationship with your data. You cut your teeth as a linguist theorizing about data that you, yourself, had collected. This practice instills a strong understanding of the contextual dependence of collected data as well as a responsibility to the longevity of that data and its potential reuse in the future — which also means communicating that contextual dependence to future data users. To this day, Berkeley linguists rarely stray far from field research, and typically base the research of their scholarly careers on it. Given that linguists today are also typically collecting data about languages that are critically endangered means we have a deep responsibility to those communities we work with, as well as to the world, for we are working to document world heritage. But creating a culture of data stewardship through its entire life cycle from collection to its preservation, access and reuse is a problem that has plagued the discipline of linguistics, and we are just beginning to sort it out. Here was my first encounter with climate scientists in the field, and despite all of the challenges inherent in digital data creation and management, they seemed light-years ahead.

Scotty and I kept in contact and over the years had many opportunities to meet up, including when he made annual maintenance trips to work on the stations in Spring Valley and the Snake Range. Often trips were combined with picking juniper berries which we used to flavor the gin for the Long Now bar/ café The Interval, or an ARRL ham radio field day atop Mt. Washington, and these all were a lot of fun. Many a night over a campfire we would talk about how fantastic it would be to build a science research station in Spring Valley. It could support resident scientists working on instrumentation and data collection using the NevCAN network. Building a cabin on Mt. Washington would enable researchers to stay at elevation while they did their work, and could provide shelter for winter field research as well.

What could set such a research station apart from other existing or proposed stations? To name a few, its focus on the Great Basin, and raising the profile of this important region for the study of climate science and human adaptation; its existing infrastructure with the NevCAN transect and the institutional relationship of the transect to the Nevada System of Higher Education; the scientifically important status of the Swamp Cedars and bristlecone pine populations to name just two species of interest. Doubtless there are many others.

Then, as an institutional partner of the research station, Long Now would bring an emphasis on “Long Science.” Stewart Brand devoted a chapter in his book The Clock of the Long Now to this idea (Brand 01999:138). He observed that:

[t]he benefits of very long-term scientific studies are so obvious it is hard to understand why they are so rare…. Enormous, inexorable power is in the long trends, but we cannot measure them or even notice them without doing extremely patient science.

He continues (Brand 01999:142):

If a Long Now Library gets established, one useful role for it might be to broker ambitious longitudinal studies with deep-pocketed — or steady-pocketed — funding sources. It might also guarantee long-term oversight and archival backup for the studies. When they are abandoned by their original researchers, it could try to find new keepers of the work, or at least preserve the accumulated material for later review or revival. Such a Library could foster cross-pollination among the long-term projects: correlating data and spreading the word on new tools, new uses for old data, and newly evolved best practices.

So over twenty years ago, Stewart Brand saw a role for Long Science within the Long Now.

Why is Long Science especially valuable in Spring Valley? Right now, given there is a proposed project to build a pipeline and pump groundwater out of the valley, the obvious problem in need of a good long-term solution is basin groundwater access and use (Southern Nevada Water Authority 02018). Sustainable adaptations to a changing climate require long-term observation, analysis, planning and implementation. A Long Science research station in Spring Valley could potentially serve as public oversight to the proposed water pipeline project — if the pipeline is built, there will most certainly be defined triggers where mitigation plans must be put into effect. We will need third-party, robust data collection and analysis for monitoring.

Besides this need, there are good avenues for connecting longterm research across several disciplines to build a detailed, multi-faceted scientific chronology of the region. The climate record in multi-millennial bristlecones pines is one, also packrat middens (Neotoma cinerea; N. lepida) and their 40,000 years’ record of fossilized plant material and pollen (Thompson 01990). Archaeology as well — as evidenced in the Baker, Nevada archaeological site, an agricultural community thrived in Snake Valley less than a millennium ago, in what today is an arid, dusty basin (Great Basin National Heritage Site 02018).

Long Now is a public-facing organization, and this is also important to its mission which is operating on the level of trying to change culture. We are always working to broaden our public engagement. So in addition to scientific residencies at the research station, we imagine resident artists and writers helping to open up the science to a broader audience. Stewart Brand observes that “science and art are always inspiring each other” (Brand 01999:142). Ideally, the resident scientists and artists would be in ongoing dialog with each other.

Then, our vision expands — with the more recently acquired property on Highway 50 we imagine a visitor center where people can come to learn about the work of the research station, and the importance of long-term thinking and science in the region. It would also be a great neighbor to the Great Basin National Park visitor centers on the east side of the Snake Range, and their growing emphasis on astronomy.³

Long Now and The Long Now

As I mentioned at the beginning, it isn’t clear whether Long Now will build a Clock on Mt. Washington. While we have the means to purchase property in Spring Valley and on Mt. Washington, we don’t have the funding to build the Clock itself. Mt. Washington also presents logistic challenges, not the least of which is a dirt access road that can’t handle regular travel or heavy equipment, and an elevation significant enough that it requires acclimatization, at least for anyone used to living near sea level. Also, the potential impact of construction on the alpine environment and the bristlecones pines is a serious consideration (Fig. 7).

Figure 7. Ancient bristlecone pine. Painting by Laura Welcher

As board members have pointed out, we would be serving the Long Now mission by just holding the properties we have in Eastern Nevada, with their resident bristlecone pines and Swamp Cedars. But building something on Mt. Washington is certainly still on the table. Maybe it is some kind of a Clock. Maybe it is an observatory, as Danny Hillis, creator of the 10,000 Year Clock has mused. Maybe it is a library.

Maybe it is long-term science station.

Notes

¹ Long Now uses 5-digit dates to help prevent the Y10K bug.

² It is worth mentioning that in many ways the Long Now Foundation is a cultural successor of the Whole Earth Catalog, which Stewart Brand launched with the question to NASA “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?” When we did, he knew that would change everything, and he was right.

³ In 02016, Great Basin National Park was designated an International Dark Sky park. Indeed, on a moonless night you can easily walk around there by the light of the Milky Way. Also in 02016, the Great Basin Observatory celebrated first-light for its new .7 meter, remote-operation telescope. It is the first research-grade telescope built within a national park, and it is especially intended for educational use. Dave Tilford, who is on the board of the Great Basin National Park Foundation that raised the funds for the telescope said that their dream is that school children who could access and use the telescope would grow up and be inspired to become astrophysicists.

References

Brand, S. 01999. Clock of the Long Now. New York: Basic Books.

Charlet, D. 02006. Effects of Interbasin Water Transport on Ecosystems of Spring Valley, White Pine County, Nevada.

Great Basin National Heritage Area. Baker Archaeological Site.

National Science Foundation. 02018a. Office of Integrative Activities Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research.

National Science Foundation. 02018b. Nevada Infrastructure for Climate Change Science, Education, and Outreach, NSF Award abstract 0814372. Retrieved from here.

The Long Now Foundation. 02018. The 10,000 Year Clock.

The Rosetta Project. 02018.

Thompson, R. 01990. Late Quaternary vegetation and climate in the Great Basin. Pp. 200–239 in J. Betancourt, T. Van Devender, and P. Martin (eds.). Packrat Middens: The Last 40,000 Years of Biotic Change. Tucson. The University of Arizona Press.

Originally published in  Mountain Views Vol. 12, №2  Fall 02018, Consortium for Integrated Climate Research in Western Mountains. Reprinted with permission.

Mountain Observatories and a Return to Environmental Long Science

Figure 1. Bristlecone pines on Mt. Washington, Snake Range, NV.

Wind cutting across my cheek, I marched across a grey, sharp limestone slope at treeline in the Great Basin. The tinkle of rock under shoe and a light whistle of air though bristlecone pine krummholtz were the only sounds heard in a stark, seemingly timeless landscape. Oh, and labored breathing at 3500 m elevation. I was here at the summit of Mt. Washington, Great Basin, North America, to eavesdrop on an art project idea that would predict the slow advance of bristlecone growth over thousands of years (Fig. 1).

I caught up with the artist team downslope in a grove of both live and long since expired trees, listening to brainstorming about how to demark growth extents of stems over millennia. It hit me as I reviewed the various strategies that even the artists seeking to communicate vast differences between human and tree timescales were struggling with the realities of nature’s physics.

“Hey gang, let’s put on our ten-thousand-year goggles. You need to view the eroding soil column more like a fluid on this slope.”

“Wait, what?”

Science, as it turns out, is not very different in this regard — with the human element as the common denominator. Short-term demands of the mission, personal experience, economic drivers, and community dynamics often shape scientific work far more than we are willing to admit. As science continues to evolve from infancy into adolescence, it adopts the aggregate behavioral norms of the human participants (Fig. 2).

Figure 2. If we adapt the Long Now Foundation’s Stewart Brand “Pace Layers” to environmental science, we get something like this. Research fashion changes like the weather.

Looking at Western culture as an incubator of modern science, we can readily draw parallels in research with the societal cycles of fashion, entertainment, politics, finance, and international conflict. Alarmingly, as science becomes “mainstream”, these short-term cycles increasingly impact how science is “done”. And, more importantly, how science is taught. These issues pervade all fields of inquiry, and mountain science is no exception. At the recent MtnClim 2018 conference, held at Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Colorado, I was refreshed to see venerated attendees describing common measurements of physical processes spanning decades of time. True “Long Science” being done in relatively simple ways like dedicated billy barr’s weather observations, or in more elaborate schemes requiring electricity and endless counting mantras like Dr. John Harte’s 28- year meadow warming experiment (Fig. 3).

Figure 3. Professor John Harte giving a keynote talk at MtnClim 2018 on his 28 years of meadow warming (#MtnClim2018).

This “observatory” or “Long Science” approach of establishing long-term, regular, repeated measurements that may be evaluated over time for bias, error, and repeatability is a mindset that goes far back into the evolution of scientific research itself. Particularly in the environmental sciences, where strict laboratory control of variables and time is simply not possible. Sadly, one need only look at the stream of modern publication titles and abstracts to see that this approach is far from common in today’s Research Economy.

Science-meets-unfettered-Capitalism is the order of the day in the race for bibliometrics, and “by any means necessary” is dangerously close to being normalized. For environmental science, drivers are typically management or policy objectives as opposed to pure inquiry (true discovery science doesn’t pay anymore). Landscape management or resource policies are generally focused on conditions (snapshot) as opposed to a layered, complex process (ain’t nobody got time for that). The trends play out as we watch budgets for in-situ environmental observations shrink across agencies and governments. Arguably, the technology for comprehensive airborne/space (remote) sensing is still quite crude and we are far from scaling high-resolution tools across space and time to replace lost ground stations.

At the plot scale, we actually know very little. When listing the chain of critical processes to, say, account for the life of a bristlecone pine (microbiome, cellular physiology, phenological plasticity, soil hydrology and evolution, precipitation rate and phase, competitive interaction, radiation budget, vapor pressure deficit, and dozens of other key variables), we quickly run out of our knowledge comfort zone even at single timesteps! Environmental science is truly still in infancy, and we place our collective reliance increasingly on “modeling” using drive-by data collected with the research equivalent of stone tools (Fig. 4). Rather, establishment of “Long Science” observatories in mountains offers a natural antidote to our default snapshot, tunnel-vision approach in environmental research.

Figure 4. Even with thousands of hours of embedded participation in field environments, many career field scientists will find it difficult to log more than a few years’ equivalent over a lifetime. And how many researchers actually live in the field for extended periods? What do we know? What do we miss?

First of all, mountains represent those critical landscapes of process and change that in turn affect all things below them. Societal concern about water supply, hydroelectric power, weather, timber resources, recreation, wildfire, and so forth is inextricably linked with mountain environments. Thinking about, designing for, and communicating the links between mountains and populated lowlands force expanded views on all sides of the conversation. Science in mountains demands greater integration of cross-domain knowledge and expertise. It certainly brings with it a physical reality of long-term dynamism as well as rapid change across space. Single-species conservation focus, for example, becomes difficult to apply in this holistic spatiotemporal perspective.

Figure 5. Even small high-elevation observatories, such as the one being serviced by the author here, are difficult and expensive to establish and maintain; it comes as no surprise that such activities are uncommon.

Secondly, it happens that direct monitoring of the environment decreases dramatically as elevation increases. Comprehensive observational science in mountains is comparatively rare (Fig. 5). Those of us who work in these fields understand why: it is difficult, expensive, and complex — relative to performing the same work in more benign geography. Study design, activity planning, support logistics, equipment maintenance, replication, and data continuity all take on new dimensions when we bring science to mountains. It forces us to think longer and harder about exactly what we are trying to accomplish, and how much we are willing to pay for or endure to meet rigorous standards of study (Fig. 6). It also means we are still on a steep learning curve.

Figure 6. The platinum-standard Mount Washington (New Hampshire) Observatory, famous for its extreme weather, has precious little company even after 84 years of near-continuous operation. Dedicated private support from across populated New England has kept this vision alive.

Finally, it is that merging of applicability and cross-domain synthesis, combined with the functional challenges, which can rebuild the original wide-eyed mentality of observation and discovery. The mountain observatory approach is the scientific equivalent of making a difficult pilgrimage to sacred location, perhaps confronting demons along the way, to experience something that cannot be fully anticipated and requires much meditation to digest. A scientist dedicated to making observations in mountains over a continuous period must by necessity participate in the extremes of season; must plan for the decade-to-decade changes of soil, rock, vegetation, snow, ice, and weather; must face the realities of a dynamic environment that has few pre-existing records, and prepare to be surprised.

Humans, mountain art teams, and scientists of all disciplines avoid surprises out of habit, unless perhaps inside a dim movie theater or at a friendly birthday party. Surprise in the sciences can mean significant datasets reduced to uselessness, or, heaven forbid, years of assumption uncovered. This dichotomy of “surprise is necessary” for scientific progress certainly clashes with the human preference for security, but demands introspection.

Thus, the surprises, difficulties, and uncertainties of maintaining “Long Science” in mountains do not lend themselves well to the socio-economic demands of acceptance and tenure, of community consensus and funding, or even of frequent “groundbreaking” publication. Yet, the need/availability ratio of mountain observations remains higher than ever. It is research on the frontier of environmental knowledge, extending away from the trampled corridors of niche focus, aggregating assumption, and coveted publicity. A more poignant self-reflection by the community might be to determine how representative these trends are of evolution in scientific progress. But the mere fact that large and empty regions still exist on the map of earth systems, with rumors that “there be dragons”, should stir the intentions of the historical von Humboldt or the fictional Maturin in all of us hoist the sails of the good ship Surprise for a Long Science adventure.

All photos by the author. Originally published in  Mountain Views Vol. 12, №2 Fall 2018, Consortium for Integrated Climate Research in Western Mountains. Reprinted with permission.

Rosetta and PanLex Head to the Moon

Last week, data from Long Now’s Rosetta and PanLex projects made its way to the moon aboard SpaceIL’s Beresheet mission as part of the Arch Mission Foundation’s Lunar Library. The Lunar Library is a 30 million page archive intended as a backup for civilization. 20 million of the pages in the Lunar Library consist of data from Long Now’s Rosetta and PanLex projects, which provide a linguistic key to 5,000 languages with 1.5 billion cross-language translations.

The Lunar Library makes use of similar nanofiche technology as the Rosetta Disk:

Nanofiche is a nanotechnology for storing data so that it can last for extremely long durations. It is made of pure nickel, which is impervious to radiation and temperatures on the Moon, and can last for billions of years without losing any data. Each layer of Nanofiche is created using a process called optical nanolithography, in which data is first etched to glass by laser at 300,000 dots per inch, and then grown at atomic scale in nickel using an electrodeposition process. Each layer is only 40 microns (0.04mm) thick and weighs only 4 grams. The entire 120mm diameter Arch Disc, of 25 layers of Nanofiche, weighs only 100 grams and is only 1mm in thickness once assembled, which is about the size and weight and thickness of a DVD. Although quite small, this artifact contains approximately 30 million pages of knowledge, making it one of the most information-dense objects humanity has ever made.

The Beresheet mission is scheduled to land on the moon on April 11th. If the Beresheet sticks the landing—which might prove challenging—its data-collecting parts will stop working due to heat within two days, but the durable archive could last for billions of years to come.

“This partnership with the Arch Mission Foundation is a great way for Long Now to explore archiving in space, and hopefully other archival media and methods as well,” said Laura Welcher, Director of Operations and the Long Now Library.

For more on the launch, read the Arch Mission Foundation’s press release.

press release.

How We’ll Forget John Lennon

Nautilus recently interviewed Cesar A. Hidalgo, Director of the Collective Learning group at the MIT Media Lab, on how people and products become forgotten by culture. 

We began by looking at how popular something is today based on how long ago it became popular in the first place. The expectation is collective memory decays over time in a smooth pattern, that the more time goes by, the more things become forgotten. But what we found when we looked at cultural products—movies, songs, sports figures, patents, and science papers—was that decay is not smooth, but has two defined regimes. There’s the first regime in which the attention starts very high and the decay is really fast. Then there’s the second regime in which it has a much longer tail, when the decay is smoother, and the attention is less.

When we started to think about decay, we realized we could take two concepts from anthropology—“communicative memory” and “cultural memory.” Communicative memory arises from talking about things. Donald Trump is very much in our communicative memory now. You walk down the street and find people talking about Trump—Trump and tariffs, Trump and the trade war. But there’s going to be a point, 20 years in the future, in which he’s not going to be talked about everyday. He’s going to exit from communicative memory and be part of cultural memory. And that’s the memory we sustain through records. Although the average amount of years that something remains in communicative memory varies—athletes last longer than songs, movies, and science papers, sometimes for a couple decades—we found this same overall decay pattern in multiple cultural domains.

Treeline, a Documentary Shot Partly On Long Now’s Nevada Property

Patagonia has released a mini documentary about skiers, snowboarders and scientists as they explore “an ancient story written in rings.” The doc was shot in part on Long Now’s Nevada property in Mount Washington, and shows stunning images of something we at Long Now have not yet had a chance to see: the ancient Bristlecone pines on the mountain in deep winter.

 

How to Run a 500-Year Long Science Experiment

Glass vials containing dried B. subtilis spores (R. Möller and C. S. Cockell)

Last week, The Atlantic‘s Sarah Zhang profiled a University of Edinburgh science experiment that began in 02014 and—if everything goes according to plan—will conclude in 02514.

The experiment is studying the longevity of bacteria, which can remain viable well past the lifespan of humans.

Physically, the 500-year experiment consists of 800 simple glass vials containing either Chroococcidiopsis or another bacterium, Bacillus subtilis. The glass vials have been hermetically sealed with a flame. Half are shielded with lead, to protect them from the radiation of radon or cosmic rays, which can cause DNA damage. (A duplicate set of the vials sits in the Natural History Museum in London for backup.) Every other year for the first 24 years, and then every quarter century for the next 475, scientists are supposed to come test the dried bacteria for viability and DNA damage. The first set of data from the experiment was published last month.

Running a science experiment for 500 years introduces a number of challenges of interest to Long Now and our various long-term projects, from questions around storage and backup to institutional infrastructure to linguistic and technological considerations.

Opening vials, adding water, and counting colonies that grow from rehydrated bacteria is easy. The hard part is ensuring someone will continue doing this on schedule well into the future. The team left a USB stick with instructions, which Möller realizes is far from adequate, given how quickly digital technology becomes obsolete. They also left a hard copy, on paper. “But think about 500-year-old paper,” he says, how it would yellow and crumble. “Should we carve it in stone? Do we have to carve it in a metal plate?” But what if someone who cannot read the writing comes along and decides to take the metal plate as a cool, shiny relic, as tomb raiders once did when looting ancient tombs?

No strategy is likely to be completely foolproof 500 years later. So the team asks that researchers at each 25-year time point copy the instructions so that they remain linguistically and technologically up to date.

Zhang’s piece also details a number of other long-term science experiments, including a fertilizer and crop study that’s been underway since 01843 and a seed viability study that began in 01879 and will conclude in 02020.

Read her piece in full here.

Seminar Highlight: Martin Rees on Space Exploration

“I think it’s a dangerous delusion to think that space offers an escape from Earth’s problems.” -Lord Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, speaking at Long Now in January 02019.

Watch video of the full talk here.

The 26,000-Year Astronomical Monument Hidden in Plain Sight

One of the two massive bronze cast sculptures that flank Hoover Dam’s Monument Plaza. (Photo by Alexander Rose)

On the western flank of the Hoover Dam stands a little-understood monument, commissioned by the US Bureau of Reclamation when construction of the dam began in 01931. The most noticeable parts of this corner of the dam, now known as Monument Plaza, are the massive winged bronze sculptures and central flagpole which are often photographed by visitors. The most amazing feature of this plaza, however, is under their feet as they take those pictures.

The plaza’s terrazzo floor is actually a celestial map that marks the time of the dam’s creation based on the 25,772-year axial precession of the earth.

Marking in the terrazzo floor of Monument Plaza showing the location of Vega, which will be our North Star in roughly 12,000 years. (Photo by Alexander Rose)

I was particularly interested in this monument because this axial precession is also the slowest cycle that we track in Long Now’s 10,000 Year Clock. Strangely, little to no documentation of this installation seemed to be available, except for a few vacation pictures on Flickr. So the last time I was in Las Vegas, I made a special trip out to Hoover Dam to see if I could learn more about this obscure 26,000-year monument.

Monument Plaza with access road on left. (Image courtesy of US Bureau of Reclamation).

I parked my rental car on the Nevada side of the dam on a day pushing 100 degrees. I quickly found Monument Plaza just opposite the visitor center where tours of the dam are offered. While the plaza is easy to find, it stands apart from all the main tours and stories about the dam. With the exception of the writing in the plaza floor itself, the only information I could find came from a speaker running on loop, broadcasting a basic description of the monument while visitors walked around the area. When I asked my tour guide about it, he suggested that there may be some historical documentation and directed me to Emme Woodward, the dam’s historian.

Hansen laying out the axial precession. (Image courtesy of US Bureau of Reclamation)

I was able to get in touch with her after returning home. As she sent me a few items, I began to see why the Bureau of Reclamation doesn’t explain very much about the monument’s background. The first thing she sent me was a description of the plaza by Oskar J. W. Hansen, the artist himself, which I thought would tell me everything I wanted to know. While parts of it were helpful, the artist’s statement of intention was also highly convoluted and opaque. An excerpt:

These [human] postures may be matched to their corresponding reflexes in terms of angle and degree much as one would join cams in a worm-gear drive. There is an angle for doubt, for sorrow, for hate, for joy, for contemplation, and for devotion. There are as many others as there are fleeting emotions within the brain of each individual who inhabits the Earth. Who knows not all these postures of the mind if he would but stop to think of them as usable factors for determining proclivities of character? It is a knowledge bred down to us through the past experience of the whole race of men.

It is pretty hard to imagine the US Bureau of Reclamation using this type of write-up to interpret the monument… and they don’t. And so there it stands, a 26,000-year clock of sorts, for all the world to see, and yet still mired in obscurity.

Markings on the floor showing that Thuban was the North Star for the ancient Egyptians at the time of the Great Pyramids. (Photo by Alexander Rose)

While I may never totally understand the inner motivations of the monument’s designer, I did want to understand it on a technical level. How did Hansen create a celestial clock face frozen in time that we can interpret and understand as the date of the dam’s completion? The earth’s axial precession is a rather obscure piece of astronomy, and our understanding of it through history has been spotty at best. That this major engineering feat was celebrated through this monument to the axial precession still held great interest to me, and I wanted to understand it better.

The giant bronze statues being craned into place. (Image courtesy of US Bureau of Reclamation)

I pressed for more documentation, and the historian sent me instructions for using the Bureau of Reclamation’s image archive site as well as some keywords to search for. The black and white images you see here come from this resource. Using the convoluted web site was a challenge, and at first I had difficulty finding any photos of the plaza before or during its construction. As I discovered, the problem was that I was searching with the term “Monument Plaza,” a name only given to it after its completion in 01936. In order to find images during its construction, I had to search for “Safety Island,” so named because at the time of the dam’s construction, it was an island in the road where workers could stand behind a berm to protect themselves from the never-ending onslaught of cement trucks.

Hansen next to the completed axial precession layout before the terrazzo was laid in. (Image courtesy of US Bureau of Reclamation)

I now had some historical text and photos, but I was still missing a complete diagram of the plaza that would allow me to really understand it. I contacted the historian again, and she obtained permission from her superiors to release the actual building plans. I suspect that they generally don’t like to release technical plans of the dam for security reasons, but it seems they deemed my request a low security risk as the monument is not part of the structure of the dam. The historian sent me a tube full of large blueprints and a CD of the same prints already scanned. With this in hand I was finally able to re-construct the technical intent of the plaza and how it works.

In order to understand how the plaza marks the date of the dam’s construction in the nearly 26,000-year cycle of the earth’s precession, it is worth explaining what exactly axial precession is. In the simplest terms, it is the earth “wobbling” on its tilted axis like a gyroscope — but very, very slowly. This wobbling effectively moves what we see as the center point that stars appear to revolve around each evening.

Long exposure of star trails depicting how all the stars appear to revolve around the earth’s celestial axis, which is currently pointed close to our current North Star — Polaris. Note that when I say that the stars of the night sky “appear to” rotate around Polaris, it is because this apparent rotation is only due to our vantage point on a rotating planet. (Image courtesy of NASA)

Presently, this center point lies very close to the conveniently bright star Polaris. The reason we have historically paid so much attention to this celestial center, or North Star, is because it is the star that stays put all through the course of the night. Having this one fixed point in the sky is the foundation of all celestial navigation.

Figure 1. The earth sits at roughly a 23 degree tilt. Axial precession is that tilt slowly wobbling around in a circle, changing what we perceive as the celestial pole or “North Star.” (Image from Wikipedia entry on Axial Precession.)

But that point near Polaris, which we call the North Star, is actually slowly moving and tracing a circle through the night sky. While Polaris is our North Star, Hansen’s terrazzo floor points out that the North Star of the ancient Egyptians, as they built the great pyramids, was Thuban. And in about 12,000 years, our North Star will be Vega. The workings of this precession are best explained with an animation, as in figure 1. Here you can see how the axis of the earth traces a circle in the sky over the course of 25,772 years.

Unfortunately it is a bit difficult to see how this all works in the inlaid floor at Monument Plaza. The view that you really want to have of the plaza is directly from above. You would need a crane to get this view of the real thing, but by using the original technical drawing as an underlay I was able to mark up a diagram which hopefully clarifies it (Fig. 2).

Figure 2. Description overlaid on the original technical drawing for the layout of terrazzo floor. (Underlay courtesy of US Bureau of Reclamation, color notations by Alexander Rose.)

In this diagram, you can see that the center of the circle traced by the axial precession is actually the massive flag pole in the center of the plaza. This axial circle is prominently marked around the pole, and the angle of Polaris was depicted as precisely as possible to show where it would have been on the date of the dam’s opening. Hansen used the rest of the plaza floor to show the location of the planets visible that evening, and many of the bright stars that appear in the night sky at that location.

By combining planet locations with the angle of precession, we are able to pinpoint the time of the dam’s completion down to within a day. We are now designing a similar system — though with moving parts — in the dials of the 10,000 Year Clock. It is likely that at least major portions of the Hoover Dam will still be in place hundreds of thousands of years from now. Hopefully the Clock will still be ticking and Hansen’s terrazzo floor will still be there, even if it continues to baffle visitors.

A high resolution drawing of the terrazzo layout. (Courtesy of US Bureau of Reclamation)

I would like to thank Emme Woodward of the US Bureau of Reclamation for all her help in finding the original images and plans of Monument Plaza. If you have further interest in reading Hansen’s original writings about the plaza or in seeing the plans, I have uploaded all the scans to the Internet Archive.