Stewart Brand's Blog, page 3

Honoring Alexander Rose

After more than 26 years of dedicated service to The Long Now Foundation, Alexander Rose will be stepping down from his role as Executive Director to focus on The Clock of the Long Now, along with his research into the world’s longest-lived organizations. He will continue to serve on the Foundation’s Board of Directors.

For the past quarter century, Alexander Rose – known to his friends and colleagues simply as Zander – has been the engine behind so much of Long Now’s work. Under his leadership, The Long Now Foundation has gone from a fledgling nonprofit to a living, thriving organization, with a vibrant membership program, and twenty years of thought-provoking Talks.  He also created The Interval, our combination cocktail bar, cafe, and gathering space in Fort Mason, San Francisco and is an active steward of The Clock of the Long Now.

Zander’s approach to guiding the Foundation has impacted every single one of us at Long Now. In order to properly commemorate his time here, we talked to the people he worked most closely with among Long Now’s staff, Board of Directors, and associates to paint a whole picture of Zander —  as Long Now’s leader, but also as a friend and dedicated member of our community.

Origins

When The Long Now Foundation was still in a primordial state in the midst of the 01990s, its co-founders Stewart Brand, Danny Hillis, and Brian Eno ran the show. But as the Foundation grew and began to get to work on its core projects, it quickly became clear that Long Now needed a dedicated employee to manage The Clock and The Library. Stewart immediately sought out Zander, who he had known since Zander was just a kid in the junkyards and dockyards of Sausalito, California. Stewart served as “adult supervision” to paintball games and other adventures on the Sausalito waterfront, and to Stewart, Zander’s qualities as a “natural born leader” were clear from a young age. Kevin Kelly, another founding board member and denizen of the Sausalito waterfront, agreed, noting that even at a young age Zander was a tinkerer and skilled paintball tactician, “immediately trying to improve” the crude early paintball equipment and using it to “crush” Kevin, Stewart, and all other challengers.

When Stewart reached out to Zander more than a decade later, Zander, by then a recent graduate of Carnegie Mellon who was looking for work in the field of industrial design, was at first uncertain. As recounted in Whole Earth, John Markoff’s 02022 biography of Stewart Brand, Stewart also helped Zander get job interviews with a number of companies from the contemporary crop of San Francisco Bay Area technology startups. Yet even as he pursued those interviews, Zander couldn’t help but be captivated by the promise Long Now’s Clock and Library projects offered, even in a nascent form.

In the end, his home would be The Long Now Foundation, becoming the organization’s first full time employee and a general project manager, creative leader, and jack-of-all-trades in the Foundation’s early operations. From his first meeting with Zander, Danny Hillis was impressed by his “very practical sense of building things and getting them to work.”

Clock Maker

The two would work closely together for years on the preliminary design and prototyping of The Clock of the Long Now. Zander provided a key understanding of, in Danny’s words, the “poetry and the philosophy of the Clock” from the very start. He was able to balance The Clock’s dual nature, holding it as “a machine to be engineered but, on the other hand, a story to be told.”

Zander working on designs for the face and mechanism of the Clock, 01999

One early Clock design moment where Zander’s sensibility shone through was in the design of the Clock’s face. In Danny’s recollection, he brought a rough sketch of the astronomical lines he wanted depicted on the Clock’s face to Zander, who proceeded to turn it into the iconic rete design that still serves as part of Long Now’s brand to this day.

Zander and Danny Hillis placing the final touches on the prototype Clock before its debut on New Year's Eve 01999

For the last few years of the 01990s, Danny, Zander, and a small team of collaborators worked tirelessly to get the prototype ready for their “very hard deadline”: New Years Eve 01999. Without Zander, Danny told us, they wouldn’t have made it:

“I brought my whole family up there and everyone at Long Now was gathered in the Presidio, where we were sharing a space with the Internet Archive. We had finally got all the pieces put together, but when we got them together, we realized that there was a bug in the direction of rotation of one shaft and that it was going to, when it hit the millennium, go from saying, oh, 01999 to 01998 instead of 02000 — the wrong direction.”

“So, there were hours to go before New Year's Day and we had been working on it and I had been traveling and I just said, ‘oh, well this is just kind of hopeless.’ And I actually fell asleep at that point because I was thinking ‘I don't know what's gonna happen, but I am exhausted.’ So I fell asleep. But then Zander figured it out. He realized that we could do it by just remachining one part and so he drove across to Sausalito. And by the time I woke up, Zander had remachined the part. And so when I actually came to midnight it was all put together and sure enough, at midnight it ticked forward and the dial clicked to the year 02000 and the beautiful chime that Zander had chosen, this beautiful Zen bowl chime rang twice. And so the clock chimed in the year 02000 with two bongs in perfect order.”

Culture Builder

Zander’s work at Long Now, even in those early days, was not limited to The Clock. The Foundation’s core project has always involved building a cultural institution to deepen our understanding of long-term thinking in parallel to the Clock, and Zander dove into that cause with full commitment.

Zander with Stewart Brand and Laura Welcher, Long Now's Former Director of Operations and The Long Now Library, at the Long Now Museum in San Francisco in 02008

Along with a dedicated core of early colleagues, Zander helped develop a diverse set of projects that, in their ways, would help foster long-term thinking in the world. These projects included the Rosetta Project, a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers that aims to preserve the world’s languages using long-term archival devices like microscopically etched disks, and Long Bets, our initiative for long-term predictions and wagers for charity.

In 02018, Zander presented Girls Inc. of Omaha a two-million dollar check as the proceeds from Warren Buffett's victorious Long Bet

Zander didn’t just help get these projects started; he has kept them running for decades as well. Andrew Warner, who has worked as a project manager in Long Now’s programs team for the last decade, says that Zander has “basically done every job at Long Now at some point,” from Clock designer to project manager to maintenance man. Earlier this year, Zander repaired a damaged hot water heater at the Long Now offices the same day he departed on a multi-week research trip on long-lived institutions in India. Throughout all those roles, Zander has maintained his unique sensibility and perspective on leadership. Former Long Now Director of Strategy Nicholas Paul Brysiewicz describes this perspective as a certain “pragmatism” that “does not suffer needless philosophizing.” Long-time Long Now Director of Programs Danielle Engelman cites Zander’s “clear decision-making process after weighing key options & opportunities” as having “kept Long Now's projects and programs moving forward at a pace that belied the small team working on them in the beginning.”

As a host of Long Now Talks, Zander brought together some of the world's leading voices on long-term thinking

Over the years, Zander has also taken a lead role in one of Long Now's longest-running projects: our speaker series. Since 02020, Zander has acted as the host and co-curator for Long Now's main talk series, bringing together perspectives on long-term thinking from everyone from science fiction authors and artists to scientists, sociologists, and political leaders.

These projects, along with The Clock, helped build a mythos around the Foundation over the years. With this cultivated mythos came interest from the broader culture, with many around the world expressing interest in becoming more involved with Long Now’s work. In response, Zander worked to establish Long Now’s membership program in 02007. According to Danny Hillis, “he really led the idea of the membership program and supported Long Now members. And I think that the original board didn’t really see the potential of that the way that Zander did, but we trusted his intuition on that.”

The Interval

As Long Now entered its adolescence as an organization, Zander began to research the world’s longest-lasting institutions — groups that had lasted for more than a millennium from businesses to religious orders. This project would later become Long Now's Organizational Continuity Project.

As he studied the records of these organizations, he began to notice a particular, unexpected commonality: across continents and cultural contexts, many of the longest-lived institutions were those that served and produced alcohol, from German breweries to Japanese Sake Houses.

For Zander, the obvious corollary to this finding was to open up a cocktail bar. At first, Long Now’s Board of Directors was skeptical. Running a bar is complicated, and a task far from the core competencies of Long Now at the time. As Andrew Warner put it, “Opening a successful bar is really hard and people didn't really ‘get it’ until it was done.”

Zander made The Interval a focus of his second decade at Long Now, creating a home for long-term thinking at Fort Mason in San Francisco

But Long Now collectively put their trust in Zander, and he delivered. The Interval, which opened in 02013 after an extensive crowdfunding campaign was “pure Alexander,” per Stewart, with Zander’s fingerprint on everything: its “invention, funding, and peerless delivery.” Danny noted that Zander was especially adept at “getting all the permissions for getting things to happen at Fort Mason,” requiring Zander to use his “political finesse” to navigate the bureaucratic structures of working on federal property.

The Interval, which took the former space of Long Now’s museum and offices and turned it into a world-class cocktail bar, café, and gathering place, was thoroughly shaped by Zander’s influence. As Andrew recounted to us, he even “took the first doorman shift” for the bar’s opening day. Yet perhaps nothing about The Interval’s design speaks to Zander’s unique perspective more than the bar’s Gin Robot. As Nicholas Paul Brysiewicz describes it, “the gin robot at The Interval is the one thing I associate with Zander alone. It’s quintessentially his. It makes billions of gins. It lights up. The lights change color. The only ways it could be more Zandery would involve pyrotechnics.”

Zander with Neil Gaiman at The Interval

Over the past decade, The Interval has become more than just a place to get expertly-crafted cocktails and view the collection of Long Now’s Manual for Civilization. Under Zander’s supervision, the bar has become a place to tell — and to continue —  Long Now’s story, a headquarters with a mythos all its own.

Travels

Zander’s time at Long Now did not, of course, keep him confined to our offices in Fort Mason in San Francisco. In Long Now’s early days, he traveled extensively with Danny, Stewart, and other board members to explore sites in the American southwest and beyond to find an eventual home for The Clock of The Long Now. As part of that process, Zander became an accomplished rock climber and cave explorer, venturing hundreds of feet into the depths of caves in Texas or mountains in Arizona.

Over the past two decades, Zander has become a devoted explorer and steward of Long Now's site at Mount Washington in Nevada

Eventually, Long Now landed on a site at Mount Washington, on the border between Nevada and Utah in the Great Basin, as a likely choice for The Clock. Zander served as a de facto leader for the Long Now team as they explored the many crags and crevices of the mountain. As Danny recounted, “in dangerous situations it's always good to have somebody in charge who's making the decisions and Zander was the one to do that.”

After years of exploration of Mount Washington, Zander and the rest of the team thought they had found nearly all of the useful approaches and pathways within. Yet one particular entrance still eluded them. Inspired by the Siq, a narrow, shaft-like gorge that serves as the grand main entrance to the classical Nabatean city of Petra, Danny and Stewart had imagined a similar pathway as the main approach to The Clock. For years, they searched for it to no avail, until June 21, 02003.

On that day, Zander found a certain opening in what first seemed to Stewart and Danny, his travel companions, to be a “sheer cliff” face on the west side of the mountain. Zander found his way through that passage, a Class 4 crevice, ascending 600 feet alone.  “Henceforth,” Stewart told Long Now, “it is known as Zander’s Siq.”

Zander's travels have taken him all over the world in search of the most compelling stories of long-term thinking

Once the potential sites for The Clock were identified, Zander’s travels did not stop. Instead, he took on a role as a kind of international ambassador for Long Now and for long-term thinking broadly. Those travels have taken him everywhere from the Svalbard seed bank and the far reaches of Siberia to the Hoover Dam, the 1400-year-old Ise Shrine in Japan, and the ancient stepwells of India.

Danny, who accompanied Zander on an early trip to Japan for the rebuilding of the Ise Shrine, which has occurred every 20 years since 00692 CE, recounted that the two of them had been two of the few westerners invited to the rededication ceremony, and the “amazingly moving” feeling of being there with Zander. Afterwards, the Long Now traveling party went to one of the area’s “bottle keep” bars, where patrons can leave part of a liquor bottle reserved for future use for an indefinite period of time. Zander explained to the bartender that Long Now would be returning to the bar in twenty years — in time for the next rebuilding of the shrine. While the bartender was at first skeptical, Zander managed to convince him that they’d actually be back — spreading the word about Long Now along the way. That encounter also ended up inspiring Zander to create The Interval’s own bottle keep system, which can, of course, be used more frequently than once every two decades.

Futures

While 02023 marks the end of Zander’s time as Long Now’s Executive Director, his work with us is far from over. He will continue his work on The Clock of the Long Now as its installation continues. He will also continue to work on the Organizational Continuity Project, discovering the lessons behind the world’s long-lived institutions and pulling these lessons into a first of its kind book. He will also continue to be a dedicated member of Long Now’s community, a vital part of the culture that he has fostered over the last quarter century as we go into our next quarter century. Thank you, Zander.

Photo by Christopher Michel💡With great optimism, we launch our search for Long Now’s next Executive Director, who will help steward the organization into its second quarter century with future centuries and millennia in mind. We are seeking a visionary leader and an unusually bold thinker ready to build an audacious, resilient, diverse, intergenerational, curious, awe-inspiring organization with us. You can help by spreading the word.

Reimagining the Rise and Fall of Civilizations

In his Histories, Herodotus tells the story of Croesus, a wealthy king who ruled the region of Lydia some 2,500 years ago. One day, Croesus consulted the famous oracle at Delphi about his conflict with the neighboring Persians. The oracle responded that if Croesus went to war, he would destroy a great empire. Sure of victory, Croesus marched for battle. Much to his surprise, however, he lost. The great empire he destroyed was not his enemies’, but his own. A few centuries later, the Persians were in turn bested by Alexander the Great.

Civilizations rise and fall, sometimes at the stroke of a sword. Myriad explanations have been posited as to why this happens. Often, hypotheses of collapse say more about the preoccupations of contemporary society than they do about the past. It is no coincidence that Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (01776), written during the anticlerical Age of Reason, blamed Christianity for Rome’s downfall, just as it is no coincidence that recent popular accounts of civilizational collapse such as Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (02005) point toward environmental damage and climate change as the main culprits.

💡 Watch Jared Diamond's 02005 Long Now Talk, "How Societies Fail — And Sometimes Succeed," which describes how his book, Collapse (02005), took shape.

I’ve been fascinated by the oscillations of human societies ever since the early days of my research for my Ph.D. in archaeology. Over the last 12,000 years, we’ve gone from small hunter-gatherer groups to highly urbanized communities and industrialized nation-states in a globally interconnected world. As societies grow, they expand in territory, produce economic growth, technological innovation, and social stratification. How does this happen, and why? And is collapse inevitable? The answers provided by archeology were unsatisfying. So I looked elsewhere.

Ultimately, I settled on a radically different framework to explore these questions: the field of complexity theory. Emerging from profound cross-disciplinary frustrations with reductionism, complexity theory aims to understand the properties and behavior of complex systems (including the human brain, ecosystems, cities and societies) through the exploration of their generative patterns, dynamics, and interactions.

In what follows, I’ll share some thoughts about what social complexity is, how it develops, and why it provides a more comprehensive account of societal change than the traditional evolutionary approaches that permeate archeology. By recasting the rise and fall of civilizations in terms of social complexity, we can better understand not only the past of human societies, but their possible futures as well.

In the 19th century, scholars like the sociologist Herbert Spencer and anthropologist Lewis Morgan became interested in the historical development of societies. They found a suitable explanatory framework in the principles of biological evolution as posited by Charles Darwin. Social evolution holds that human groups undergo directed processes of change driven by fitness adaptations to external circumstances, resulting in an inherent tendency to increase complexity over time. The phrase “survival of the fittest,” often attributed to Darwin, was coined by Herbert Spencer to describe the evolutionary struggles of societies. Social evolutionists conceptualized historical change as part of a teleological trajectory towards higher stages of social complexity. They believed complex societies to be the most successful. “Complex” entailed more developed rationality, philosophy, and morality. It meant, in short, more civilized. This notion of successful societies was appropriated and embedded in a wider framework of Eurocentrism and Western superiority to place Western nation-states at the pinnacle of human evolution and to provide a justification for colonialism (Morris, 02013, p.2).

During the second half of the 20th century, a neo-evolutionary resurgence resulted in the postulation of societal stages of development that are still in vogue today, such as Elman Service’s scheme of bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states (Service, 01962). While these works abandoned teleological notions, the identification of distinct developmental stages implies that fundamental properties co-occur in societies across time and space. It also suggests that societies stay in equilibrium until they go through a sudden phase shift and rapidly adopt a new set of properties and characteristics.

These assumptions are problematic in two ways. First, societal properties do not necessarily co-evolve, even if societal trajectories can converge to varying degrees due to similar underlying drivers (Auban, Martin and Barton, 02013, p.34). Second, equilibrium-based approaches are inherently static because they assume that changes cancel each other out over the long term. As a result, they regard change as ‘‘noise’’ that must be filtered out to understand the system. These approaches frequently employ reductionist views. This means identifying distinct subsystems, figuring out how these subsystems work, and then aggregating them to understand the behavior of the overall system. In human societies, that could mean identifying a separate economic system, then setting forth to understand that economy, while doing the same for other subsystems like politics, religion, and so on. Finally, by combining the understanding of each subsystem, we come to an understanding of society as a whole. Such top-down, reductionist approaches have strong limitations, as system behavior is not the result of the aggregation of the properties of its components, but rather the result of entirely new properties emerging in a bottom-up fashion. In other words, we must realize that “the whole is more than the sum of its parts.”

Since the 01970s, scholars from a broad range of disciplines, including biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, systems theory and cybernetics, have been grappling with non-linearity, feedback loops, and adaptation across many kinds of systems, giving rise to the new field of complexity theory. Complex systems thinking posits that the fundamental units of social systems are social interactions between people. These interactions generate complex behavior, information processing, adaptation, and non-linear emergence. This means that social complexity is an inherent characteristic of all human societies, not just complex ones.

All human societies need energy and resources to sustain themselves. Beyond these so-called endosomatic needs, societies also have exosomatic needs, that is, energy requirements for material and technological maintenance and development. The social structures necessary for the exploitation of energy and resources can only emerge through the exchange and processing of information for communication, maintaining social connections, sharing knowledge, enabling innovation, and coordinating activities.

I assess social complexity through three main flows:

EnergyResourcesInformation

I define social complexity as the extent to which a social entity can exploit, process and consume flows of energy, resources and information (Daems, 02021). A society is not more complex because it is more civilized, but because it extracts more energy and resources from its environment or transmits information more efficiently. With this definition, complexity is dissociated from both social and environmental sustainability. Societies that manage to extract more energy and resources are not necessarily sustainable. Nor does enhanced information transmission always benefit society, as is so clearly illustrated in today’s struggles with misinformation.

This approach provides a clear answer to what social complexity is, but does not yet explain how it develops. Authors such as Joseph Tainter have posited social complexity as a problem-solving tool (Tainter, 01996). Societies are continuously faced with selection pressures – e.g. subsistence, cooperation, competition, production, demography, etc. – that act as input information for decision-making strategies driving societal development on two levels (Cioffi-Revilla, 02005):

An episodic process of opportunistic decision-making; which feedsA gradual process of socio-political development or decline

Let us take the example of a society faced with a bad harvest. Such a society needs to assess the causes of this situation and define its strategies accordingly. Did the failed harvest stem from bad luck? Crop disease? The wrath of the gods?

Once the situation is assessed, a proper strategy needs to be devised. Do they try again and hope for the best? Experiment with new types of crops? Perform the necessary rituals to appease the wronged gods? Or perhaps they appoint officials to monitor agricultural production. Some strategies can be one-offs, such as a sacrifice or an official inspection. Or they can persist and become entrenched in the social fabric, such as when divine favor becomes indispensable for ensuring successful harvests, or a central government extends its control through a new bureaucratic system. Social structures do not spring forth fully-fledged from one day to the next, but are the result of incremental expansion, addition, and recombination of the outcomes of day-to-day decision-making processes.

As a system grows more complex, it self-organizes into nested groups that can take shape as horizontal networks or vertical hierarchies. When nested units across multiple scales become integrated within the same system, non-linear emergence and feedback loops across scales can generate some of the most powerful outcomes of complex system dynamics. A good example can be found in the process of energized crowding (Bettencourt, 02013; Smith, 02019). Drawn from the field of urban studies, energized crowding is what turns  cities into “social reactors.” This is the idea that  as more people live together in higher densities, more social interactions and exchange of information produces more social outcomes, both positive and negative. Bigger communities tend to proportionally display higher levels of innovation, income, and productivity, but also higher crime and scalar stress. All of the things  drawing us towards the buzz of city life are ultimately born from the interactions between people.

Complexity formation is not without risk. Larger cities or polities tend to draw in population from a larger area. This requires a larger catchment, fulfilled through self-subsistence production, by importing goods, or both. As capital of the Roman empire, Rome grew to a population of over 1,000,000 people. Such a massive concentration of people was unthinkable without the structures of empire such as the ‘Annona’, state-sponsored grain subsidies relying on large-scale grain imports from Egypt, North Africa, and Sicily. Larger societies have a proportionally larger environmental footprint due to higher exosomatic needs. Rome needed not only food to sustain its population, but also resources to maintain its buildings, institutions, artisans, and cultural amenities. Moreover, as societies continue to implement changes over the long term, past measures could trigger future challenges which, in turn, need to be dealt with. Over time, a society builds an “ever denser scaffolding structure of related and interacting institutions” (van der Leeuw, 02016, p.168). The risks of this continued problem-solving process are twofold:

Institutional structures grow more rigid, reducing the capacity of societies to adequately respond to new situational eventsSocieties tend to focus on frequently occurring challenges, increasing the dangers of unknown challenges

Societies generally tend to first use simple and cost-effective efforts with high returns  on investment. As iterations continue, solutions to maintain societal structures become more complicated and costly, with diminishing proportionate marginal returns. Beyond some of the more spectacular causes of the fall of Rome proposed by Gibbon and others, such as large-scale invasions or civil strife, this slow “rigidification” is far less visible, but no less impactful. It is likely no coincidence that waves of administrative reorganizations followed in ever-quickening succession during the Late Roman period. Societies that do not have the expertise or flexibility to deal with new challenges could undergo a “tipping point” leading to drastic societal transformations generally associated with societal collapse. However, collapse only makes sense from a top-down perspective. During the Late Bronze Age (around 1200 BCE), a widespread disintegration of polities across the eastern Mediterranean and Near East occurred, including the Hittites of Anatolia (modern Turkey), Mycenaean Greece, the Egyptian New Kingdom, and the Middle Assyrian Empire (modern Iraq). Recent archaeological research, however, has found abundant evidence for local communities that continued to be inhabited and even thrive.

💡Watch Eric Cline's 02016 Long Now Talk, "1177 B.C.: When Civilization Collapsed," about how these eight advanced societies collapsed simultaneously and almost overnight.

An explanation can be found in another property of complex systems called “near decomposability” (Simon, 01962). This refers to stronger connectivity between units of a similar type and the ability of units to operate semi-independently from others in the system. For example, households share stronger ties and interact more frequently with other households in the same community than with those of another community. Units that make up nested systems can often continue to function even when links to other units break down. If a larger polity, say the Hittite state, were to disintegrate, local or regional levels may have continued largely unaffected. Scalar divisions can therefore act as “fault lines” along which polities can be broken up, apparently collapsed when seen from a top-down perspective, but maintaining a bottom-up continuity.

Social complexity formation is a complicated process drawing on the exploitation, processing, and consumption of interrelated flows of energy, resources, and information. It is neither intrinsically good as was the belief of social evolutionists, nor does it inevitably lead to societal collapse. It is a phenomenon with both positive and negative consequences.

Earlier I outlined how direct parallels with biological evolution resulted in social evolutionism and a problematic conceptualization of teleological trajectories of social complexity. Nevertheless, evolution can offer fruitful metaphors to generate deeper insight into social complexity formation. The evolutionary taxonomic space is composed of a near-infinite number of dimensions, each corresponding to a particular characteristic of an organism (Hutchinson, 01978). Yet, organisms are part of nested clusters (species, genus, family, order, etc.) taking up specific portions of this space. This means that even though biological evolution has been at work for millions of years, only a very limited area of the potential space has been actualized (Lewontin, 02019). Exploring the full potential taxonomic space would take millions upon millions of years.

Human societies likewise are clustered within the taxonomic space of all possible societal configurations. Current states are built from past configurations, in combination with the contingent opening of new pathways of development. At its current pace, humankind will not have sufficient time to explore the potential configuration space of societal organizations that will allow us to balance increasing social complexity with a sustainable dynamic within our natural environment. Yet, this should not discourage us from using the necessary long-term perspective to look beyond the edges of the current, toward what might be possible in the future. One thing is clear: Any foray into the future would do well to also have an eye on the past.

References

Auban, J., Martin, A. and Barton, C., 02013. Complex Systems, Social Networks, and the evolution of Social Complexity in the East of Spain from the Neolithic to Pre-Roman Times. In: M. Berrocal, L. Sanjuán and A. Gilman, eds. The Prehistory of Iberia: Debating Early Social Stratification and the State. New York: Routledge.

Bettencourt, L., 02013. The Origins of Scaling in Cities. Science, 340(6139), pp.1438–1441. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1235823

Cioffi-Revilla, C., 02005. A Canonical Theory of Origins and Development of Social Complexity. The Journal of Mathematical Sociology, 29(2), pp.133–153. https://doi.org/10.1080/0022250059092...

Daems, D., 02021. Social Complexity and Complex Systems in Archaeology. London: Routledge.

Hutchinson, G.E., 01978. An Introduction to Population Ecology. New Haven: Yale University Press.

van der Leeuw, S., 02016. Uncertainties. In: M. Brouwer Burg, H. Peeters and W.A. Lovis, eds. Uncertainty and Sensitivity Analysis in Archaeological Computational Modeling, Interdisciplinary Contributions to Archaeology. [online] Cham: Springer International Publishing. pp.157–169. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-278...

Lewontin, R., 02019. Four Complications in Understanding the Evolutionary Process. In: D.C. Krakauer, ed. Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight. SFI Press. pp.97–113.

Morris, I., 02013. The Measure of Civilization: How Social Development Decides the Fate of Nations. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Service, E.R., 01962. Primitive social organization: an evolutionary perspective. New York: Random House.

Simon, H.A., 01962. The Architecture of Complexity. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 106(6), pp.467–482.

Smith, M., 02019. Energized Crowding and the Generative Role of Settlement Aggregation and Urbanization. In: A. Gyucha, ed. Coming Together: Comparative Approaches to Population Aggregation and Early Urbanization. New York: State University of New York Press. pp.37–58.

Tainter, J., 01996. Complexity, Problem Solving and Sustainable Societies. In: R. Costanza, O. Segura and J. Martinez-Alier, eds. Getting Down To Earth: Practical Applications of Ecological Economics. Washington DC: Island Press. pp.61–76.

How to Pitch Long Now

Long Now is accepting pitches of essays, reported features, interviews, book reviews, shorter articles, fiction and poetry for Ideas, our living archive of long-term thinking. Below you'll find information on the kinds of stories we're looking for, how much we pay, and how to pitch us.

There is wisdom and clarity to be gained from taking the long view. Long Now Ideas gives our readers the context they need to take the long view on every issue we cover.  Our stories rise above the ephemeral discourse and contextualize a given topic against a longer temporal backdrop, going further backwards and forwards in time than the typical news story. By ‘further’ we mean decades, at a minimum, and millennia, ideally. How did we get to now, a Long Now story asks, and where might we go from here? The ‘we’ of any Long Now story is ‘civilization.’

Assuming this vantage is not an abdication of the concerns of the here-and-now. On the contrary: we believe that today’s biggest challenges are best solved by understanding their deep origins and possible futures.

We’re after stories that apply this civilizational lens to inspire, educate, and surprise our readers across a variety of subjects and disciplines: climate change and the environment; the preservation of knowledge; the rise and fall of civilizations; the longevity of institutions; biotechnology and artificial intelligence; the history of science and technology; architecture, design and urbanism; the nature of time; space travel; globalization; migration; economics; governance; maintenance; and infrastructure (both physical and intellectual).

About Long Now

"Now" is never just a moment. The Long Now is the recognition that the precise moment you're in grows out of the past and is a seed for the future. The longer your sense of Now, the more past and future it includes.
- Brian Eno, Long Now Co-Founder

The Long Now Foundation is a nonprofit established in 01996 to foster long-term thinking and responsibility. Our work encourages imagination at the timescale of civilization — the next and last 10,000 years — a timespan we call the long now.

We hope to help each other be good ancestors. We hope to preserve possibilities for the future.

Stories to Pitch and Past Examples

Below you’ll find some links to recent stories to give you a sense of our tone, topical range, and what we’re looking for. We’re hoping to expand that topical range — and the kinds of stories we publish — considerably. That’s another way of saying that just because you might not see the kind of story you’d like to pitch represented below does not mean we wouldn’t be interested in publishing it.

Essays

Reported, argument-driven, or photo essays (800 - 1,800 words)

In 19th century Iceland, reframing aggressive nature as a source of belonging shaped a myth that built a more resilient future. We can do the same.If we are going to tackle humanity's biggest challenges, we will need to use our unrivaled ability to think long-term. Understanding how we developed this ability can help us use it to its full potential.Some two billion people now live in countries where the population is smaller each evening than it was in the morning. Are we ready to normalize depopulation?The only continent with no history of human habitation, the vast ice fields of Antarctica have formed a blank slate onto which humanity can project itself: all of itself, from the imperial superego to the conspiratorial id.

Features

Long-form reported narrative features (1,200 - 2,500 words)

A new genetics study is shedding light on the deep legacy of colonization on the people of Brazil.Datasets spanning decades and nature apps are expanding our ecological attention span into the long now.Finland’s nuclear waste experts have, for decades, quietly envisioned distant future ecosystems. Exploring their thinking anthropologically can expand our awareness of time.The national animal of Peru has faced threats to its existence since the Spanish colonization of South America five centuries ago. Now, the reestablishment of an Indigenous Andean tradition might be its best bet for survival.As climate migration pushes wildlife in Zimbabwe’s lush Eastern Highlands to extinction, how can this region find ways to adapt?

Conversations

Interviews with the thinkers, artists, and makers whose projects and ideas foster long-term thinking and responsibility (1,200 - 2,000 words)

To think responsibly and comprehensively about what the future may hold, any good forecaster needs to think beyond precise extrapolations and wander responsibly into the world of speculation. Futurist, science fiction author, and Long Now member Andrew Dana Hudson’s work helps guide us into that world of speculation.Many books have been written about the ideas and projects of Long Now co-founder Stewart Brand. John Markoff’s Whole Earth (02022) is the first about the life of Stewart Brand. The result is a vital, nuanced, and necessary portrait of a human being who has always floated upstream of the mainstream.Vincent Ialenti’s Deep Time Reckoning (02020) describes long-term thinking as an imaginative exercise — a “calisthenics for the mind.”Melodysheep’s viral video, “Timelapse of the Future,” is a cinematic journey that ventures trillions upon trillions of years into the future to explore how the universe ends.

Short-form Science Journalism, News, and History

Articles breaking down the latest long-term thinking news (scientific papers, studies, projects, trends), profiling fascinating and forgotten examples of long-term thinking from the past, or exploring how today’s technological interventions are being applied to the past to make us reconsider what we thought we knew (500 - 1,200 words)

Examples:

The island country of Tuvalu is moving towards the virtual world as climate change threatens its physical territory.Fandom memory offers a lens through which to understand the challenges of knowledge preservation between generations and across technologies.A piscine biomedical tradition stretching from Ancient Egypt to Colonial Guyana helped create the first batteries.A new study sheds light on the precise mechanism through which Stonehenge may have told time.

Science Fiction Stories

Imaginative speculations at the timescale of civilization. We’re interested in stories that take unexpected angles on the future and the past, honing in on details that you only see when you take a longer view. (1000 - 4000 words)

In “The Mammoth Steps,” translation technology and norms of interspecies communication make possible a deep friendship between a boy and a de-extincted mammoth.This short story looks towards 02123, imagining a future Pantone Color of the Year that nods to insect sentience: Cochineal Red.

Poems

Work that engages with long-term thinking and time in whatever ways you see fit. No restrictions on form or length.

“Consequences of Perspective” by Eleonor Botoman“Five Poems” by Chivas Sandage“Four Poems” by James SteckPayment

Payment varies depending on the kind of story, the reporting involved, and the time commitment. Payment starts at $600 for features and ranges between $300 - $600 for essays, interviews, book reviews, science journalism, and news articles. We pay $100 for science fiction stories and $25 per poem (with a maximum of four poems per submission).

How to Pitch

For non-fiction pitches: send an email to ideas@longnow.org with “Pitch” in the subject line followed by a proposed headline. In the email, describe what you're hoping to write about and how it's relevant to Long Now's topical and temporal focus. If you're pitching an essay, give us a sense of the argument you're making. If you're pitching a feature, give us a sense of the narrative structure, who you plan to speak to, and any other key logistical details. If your pitch is time-sensitive, let us know. You're welcome to provide relevant bylines and a brief bio.

For fiction and poetry, send an email to ideas@longnow.org with a subject line noting whether your submission is fiction or poetry. Attach a draft of your submission to the email. Feel free to contextualize the work with a sentence or two in the body of the email.

We are a relatively small team of editors and reviewers. While we endeavor to respond to pitches and submissions in a timely manner (within three weeks), we cannot guarantee a response to all inquiries. If you don’t hear from us within a month, it is likely that we are not interested in your submission.

Jared Farmer

Big trees, old trees, and especially big old trees have always been objects of reverence. From Athena’s sacred olive on the Acropolis to the unmistakable ginkgo leaf prevalent in Japanese art and fashion during the Edo period, our profound admiration for slow plants spans time and place as well as cultures and religions. At the same time, the utilization and indeed the desecration of ancient trees is a common feature of history. In the modern period, the American West, more than any other region, witnessed contradictory efforts to destroy and protect ancient conifers. Historian Jared Farmer reflects on our long-term relationships with long-lived trees, and considers the future of oldness on a rapidly changing planet.

Coco Krumme

Coco Krumme traces the fascinating history of optimization from its roots in America's founding principles, to its dominance as the driving principle of our modern world. Optimized models underlie everything and are deeply embedded in the technologies and assumptions that have come to comprise not only our material reality, but what we make of it. How did a mathematical concept take on such outsized cultural shape?

Krumme's work in scientific computation made her aware of optimization's overreach, where she observed that streamlined systems are less resilient and more at risk of failure. They limit our options and narrow our perspectives. Optimal Illusions exposes the sizable bargains we have made in the name of optimization and asks us to consider what comes next.

Long Now Artifacts Play Key Role at New Exhibition at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum

The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum’s One World Connected gallery now features two artifacts from the Long Now Foundation: a prototype of The Clock of The Long Now’s face and a Rosetta Disk. Together, the two artifacts are placed at the end of the gallery, serving as symbols of the need to consider the long-term future in our decision-making in the present.

One World Connected, which opened in the autumn of 02022 as part of the museum’s renovations, focuses on how the aerospace revolution that began in the mid-twentieth century brought about two notable shifts: “the ease in making connections across vast distances and a new perspective of Earth as humanity’s home.” In an interview with Long Now Ideas, Dr. Teasel Muir-Harmony, the exhibit’s curator, said that the gallery’s goal was to show “how aerospace has transformed our experience of Earth” over the past century, contextualizing the aerospace history showcased in the rest of the museum’s galleries in a broader sociological and technological context.

In the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum's One World Connected Exhibit, a face prototype for the Clock of the Long Now and a Rosetta Disk are used as symbols of long-term thinking.

A key part of that transformation were the first images of the whole Earth from space. The One World Connected gallery features a number of items related to those first photographs taken on the Apollo missions, including two issues of the Whole Earth Catalog. The exhibit showcases how our perspective on seeing the whole Earth from space has shifted over time. In the span of a lifetime, images of the Earth from space have gone from “rare and unfamiliar” to “constant and commonplace.”

[For more on how seeing the Earth from space changed everything, read Ahmed Kabil’s 02018 feature on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 8 “Earthrise” photo .]

One of Dr. Muir-Harmony’s aims in designing the gallery was impressing upon visitors that “this transformation happened rapidly” and is still in progress, pointing to recent advances in fields like satellite-driven Earth observation, navigation, and communications as continued shifts in our perspective. In Dr. Muir-Harmony’s view, “space technology is infrastructure,” and our efforts in space must be understood in terms of their effects on human well-being.

With that in mind, bringing in a long-term perspective made perfect sense to the exhibit’s curatorial team. The two Long Now artifacts in the collection “encourage visitors to think about the future,” and prompt them to consider “the risks and possibilities of interconnection” over a longer time frame.

L: Long Now Executive Director Alexander Rose with the prototype face of the Clock of the Long Now. R: The exhibit's detail on the Clock of the Long Now.

Chief among the risks and possibilities identified by Dr. Muir-Harmony is the “exponential growth” of satellites and satellite debris in low-earth orbit —  a development over the past decade or so that has enabled access to satellite-based internet nearly anywhere on Earth, including the furthest reaches of the poles. Yet the ever-growing nexus of satellites above us also raises key questions about national security and personal privacy that remain unanswered. As Dr. Muir-Harmony notes, the gallery’s priority is to get visitors to “step back and think about the long-term perspective [and] how we want to shape the future” in the face of technological advancements.

Becky Chambers & Annalee Newitz

Join us for a thought-provoking conversation between two Hugo award-winning science fiction authors, Becky Chambers and Annalee Newitz. Known for challenging classic science fiction tropes such as war, violence, and colonialism, both authors create vivid and immersive worlds that are filled with non-human persons, peace, and a subtle sense of hope. The authors will discuss what it means to take these alternative themes seriously, delve into their writing & world building process, and explore how science fiction can help us imagine new futures that can make sense of our current civilizational struggles.

Tickets go on sale 2 weeks before the talk.

Reviving the Vicuña

Looking for vicuña is not for the faint of heart, or for those who suffer from car or altitude sickness. After two hours of bouncing along rough dirt roads in an all-wheel drive pickup, I finally spotted a vicuña drinking from a pond at about 17,000 feet above sea level. Then I saw another, and another. Once I knew how to look, the hillside was suddenly spotted with vicuña. Their pale cinnamon backs and white bellies blended in perfectly with the harsh rocky landscape.

The vicuña is the baby-faced, shy cousin of the llama. Their eyes are almost comically large in their delicate faces, with long eyelashes. They are famously shy and run like the wind from any perceived threat. They also have some of the softest fur in the world. That fur earned them a prominent place among the Inca’s pantheon of sacred animals. It’s also what also makes them so valuable today.

Vicuña in Calca Province, Peru. Photographs by Heather Jasper

The finest natural fiber, vicuña fur is a mere nine to twelve microns in diameter. For comparison, cashmere ranges from fourteen to nineteen microns. Each delicate strand is hollow, making it incredibly lightweight and insulating.

Vicuña fur is also difficult to find. Very few companies make garments with vicuña, and they sell to a select few stores. Though the fur comes from Peru, most of what you’ll find in a shop is made in Italy. Only one brand, Kuna, sells products made in Peru. Regardless of where it’s made, a simple scarf costs $1,000 to $3,000 USD, and a full shawl can cost upwards of $10,000 USD. Each garment is sold with a certificate, showing that the fur was harvested ethically in government regulated shearings of wild vicuñas.

Vicuña fur was exceptionally valuable long before Italian manufacturing. The Inca, who ruled much of South America in the 01400s and 01500s, decreed that only the royal family could wear vicuña fur. Vicuñas were both sacred and protected: hunting one was punishable by death. Despite the Inca’s attachment to the vicuña, they were never domesticated. Thousands of years ago, humans domesticated llamas and alpacas, but the vicuña stayed wild.

During Incan times, the protection afforded the vicuña helped it thrive. When the Spanish arrived in South America, they estimated that about 2 million lived throughout the Andes. That is when the indiscriminate killing of vicuñas began, which decimated the population.

The central statue in Cusco’s Plaza de Armas is of the Inca Pachacutec. Photograph by Heather Jasper

When the Inca lost control of South America, the vicuña lost its protection. In the late 01500s, hunting vicuña went from being a capital crime to being encouraged by the Spanish crown. Change started in 01777, when the Spanish Imperial Court decreed it was illegal to kill a vicuña. Simón Bolívar enacted a similar law in 01825. Neither effort had much effect, and poaching continued. In the 01960s, about 2,000 vicuña remained in Peru, and only 6,000 in all of South America.

In 01969, Peru and Bolivia signed an accord in La Paz that began a new era of protection for the vicuña. Chile and Ecuador joined soon after, followed by Argentina in 01971. After 01969, the population quickly began to recover. A census conducted by Peru’s Ministry of Agriculture in 02012 revealed over 200,000 vicuña in Peru. Convenio de la Vicuña found over 470,000 in all of South America in 02016.

Why were conservation efforts in the 01970s successful when similar laws had failed for the previous 200 years? One likely explanation is who controlled the lands where the vicuña live. Land grants from the Spanish crown to colonizers in the 01600s took control of the lands away from Indigenous Andeans. Even after independence, Peru’s rural areas suffered under a feudal system where Indigenous peoples worked as unpaid serfs, in conditions akin to modern slavery. It wasn’t until the Agrarian Reform in 01969 that Indigenous communities started to regain control of their lands. Ownership of large tracts of land passed from the descendants of Spanish colonizers to the Indigenous communities who live on them.

A vicuña drinking from a pond at about 17,000 feet above sea level, Paucartambo Province, Peru. Photograph by Heather Jasper

Today, most land in Peru’s puna, the high altitude plateau that covers much of southern Peru, is communally owned by rural Indigenous communities, though some is privately owned. According to Santiago Paredes, director of Pampas Galeras National Reserve, regardless of who owns the land, all vicuña must be protected. Any community, person or company that owns vicuña habitat must register a management plan with SERFOR, Peru’s National Forest and Wildlife Service. The plans include specific ways that vicuña will be protected from poaching, as well as how their habitat will be conserved and, if possible, improved.

Even with the population rebounding, vicuñas are still at risk. The biggest threats to their survival are loss of habitat due to climate change, competition for grazing with domestic animals, diseases like mange, and poaching.

Climate models predict decreasing rainfall in the central and southern mountain ranges in Peru, which is precisely where vicuñas live. According to USAID’s Climate Risk Profile for Peru, “temperature increases are forcing lower-elevation ecosystems to move higher, encroaching upon endemic species and ecosystems and increasing risk of extinction of high-mountain species.” As climate change pushes vicuña higher up the peaks, their habitat shrinks and fragments.

Vicuña are significantly smaller than the domesticated llamas that compete for their food sources. Photograph by Heather Jasper

It is legal to graze livestock on vicuña habitat, which decreases their food supply. Contact with domesticated animals and rising temperatures may be causing the increasing mange outbreak among vicuña. While more research is needed, a 02021 study in Peru found that 6.1% of vicuña surveyed were infected. The parasite not only saps the animal’s energy, it destroys their fur, which makes them vulnerable to the extreme cold of the Andes. Mange is now the leading cause of death in vicuñas.

Some of these threats are easier to manage than others. In 02022, Peru’s National Agrarian Health Service (SENASA) began treating vicuña for mange in eleven regions. Enforcement of anti-poaching laws is improving. The nebulous threat of climate change is much harder to combat. Communities now focus on protecting the vicuña’s habitat, hoping that their efforts to improve the vicuña’s food and water supply will compensate for the damages of climate change.

The most important aspects of vicuña habitat are a constant source of water, native grasses for grazing, and an absence of human development. Unlike most camelids, vicuña must drink water every day. They are territorial animals and live in small herds with one alpha male and up to ten females with their offspring. During the day, they spread out in grassy meadows to graze. At night, they climb up rocky hillsides to sleep on bare slopes where predators, such as puma, don’t have enough cover to get close.

Looking for vicuña is not for the faint of heart, or for those who suffer from car or altitude sickness. Photograph by Heather Jasper

All of this makes harvesting their fur quite complicated. Centuries ago, Andean civilizations developed the chaccu, a ritual gathering of vicuña herds to shear the fur before releasing the animals to the wild. In the 01990s, the population had grown enough to bring back the ancient tradition. 

During a chaccu, people spread out in a loose circle up to a mile from a vicuña herd. They close in slowly, clapping their hands and making noise to concentrate the vicuñas in the center of the circle. Small chaccus may capture a dozen animals in one day, while larger ones can capture hundreds over a few days.

Today, chaccu isn’t exactly the same as it was five hundred years ago. An Incan ruler no longer presides over the ceremony. Communities now have trucks to drive out into the puna to get close to vicuña herds, trips that would previously have taken days or even weeks on foot. Shearing is now done quickly, with electric shears. Also, the fur is no longer kept for the royal family. It’s sold to international companies, many of which export it to Italy.

Chaccu organizers register the date and location with their local government. Three government officials plus a veterinarian oversee each event and ensure that all vicuña protection protocols are followed correctly. SENASA’s plan to treat vicuña for mange relies on chaccu.

Veterinarian Óscar Áragon has worked with vicuña for years and comes from a family that has raised alpaca for at least six generations. He has a master’s degree in South American camelids from the National Altiplano University in Puno, Peru.

“There are three steps to a modern chaccu,” Áragon explains. “When a vicuña is caught, the veterinarian first checks it for disease and draws blood samples. If it is sick, it’s treated. If not, it’s sent to the second stage, where somebody checks the length of the fur. It must be at least seven centimeters long so they can shear off five centimeters. It takes two or three years for their fur to grow that long. If the fur is long enough, then the animal is taken to the shearing station.”

Vicuña scarves and shawls made in Italy are displayed for sale at Awana Kancha, near the town of Pisac, Peru. Photograph by Heather Jasper

In the early 02000s, a kilo of uncleaned vicuña fur could sell for as much as $600 USD. According to biologist Felix de la Cruz Huamani, the price has been dropping steadily since, which could pose a threat to this ancestral practice. A large chaccu takes hundreds of people several days’ of work to carry out. Most communities hold chaccu as a cultural tradition and use the money they earn from selling the fur to subsidize the event.

As the price of vicuña fur plummets, some communities have started to appeal to the Peruvian government for help, asking for funding to continue holding chaccus. Ongoing political chaos in Peru has hampered efforts to get needed support from the government. If the government won’t help, the second line of defense is tourism.

In 02022, two communities in the north of the Ayacucho region, Ocros and Santa Cruz de Hospicio, invited tourists to participate in chaccu. Armando Pariona Antonio grew up in Ayacucho and has worked with vicuña for over fifteen years. He created the company Vicunga Travel, named for the scientific name of the vicuña, to bring tourists to communities in Ayacucho. There are a lot of challenges, he says, to making chaccu a tourist activity.

“They hold chaccus wherever the vicuña are, and that’s always a remote place at high altitude. Also, communities need a lot of training on how to work with tourists.” Despite the challenges, Pariona Antonio is determined to help communities continue the tradition.

Two vicuña graze on shrubs, Calca Province, Peru. Photograph by Heather Jasper

Felix de la Cruz Huamani believes we can look at the challenge of protecting the vicuña from a different angle.

“Landowners who have a land management plan for vicuña are required to protect and improve the ecosystem as part of their commitment to protect the vicuña,” explained de la Cruz Huamani. “We know that the vicuña’s habitat is rich in water. If we focus on the benefits of the ecosystem, we see that cities in Peru all depend on the water that comes from the vicuña’s habitat.” As the climate changes and water becomes more scarce, focusing national attention on the conservation of the vicuña’s habitat as a water source may have a bigger impact on protecting the vicuña than tourism or selling fur.

Peru’s environmental goals for 02030 include strategies for improving species conservation and reducing ecosystem damage. However, political instability is a significant challenge in meeting these targets. The Ministry of Environment, which is responsible for the 02030 goals, had four different ministers in 02022.

During the Inti Raymi celebrations every June 24th, Peruvian actors represent historical figures during the festivities in Cusco's Qorikancha, Plaza de Armas and Sacsayhuaman Archeological Site. Left: Actors playing the Inca and his generals. Right: An actress playing the Coya, the Inca’s wife. Photographs by Heather Jasper

In the end, what is most likely to save the vicuña from all the threats it faces is its strong cultural bond with Indigenous Andeans. Now that they have reestablished the tradition of chaccu, communities that coexist with wild vicuña are determined to not lose the practice again.

“Nowhere else in the world do people have this kind of interaction with wild animals,” Pariona Antonio said. “It is a unique practice that comes to us from our Wari ancestors, the civilization that was in Ayacucho before the Inca conquered them.”

Peru’s Indigenous Andeans who honor their ancestral traditions may be the vicuña’s best bet for survival.

The Heresy of Decline

News that the number of living humans had passed eight billion in November 02022 sparked predictable arguments between people inclined to celebrate this milestone and those who worry about the planet’s carrying capacity.

Amid the torrent of commentary, Long Now cofounder Stewart Brand posted a characteristically contrarian tweet:

“The ‘drop dramatically’ I still expect. But it won’t be from my predicted 8 billion.”

Brand was referring to a Long Bet he made 14 years ago, in 02009:

“Human population of the world will peak at or below 8 billion in the 02040s and then drop dramatically.”

The bet was based on the fact that fertility rates all over the world have been decreasing steadily for 60 years. Even as the total human population continues to rise, fertility in most countries has dipped below the “replacement rate” of 2.1 children per woman, and the downward trend is accelerating. Brand overestimated the speed of this transition, but he is sticking with the view held by many demographers that the human tide will start to ebb in the second half of this century.

Although most people are aware of declining birthrates, the idea of outright depopulation remains “fantastically counter-intuitive,” says Phillip Longman, author of The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity and What to Do About It (02004). We can easily conceptualize the temporary population losses caused by war, famine, disasters, or disease, partly because we know that our species has always surged back after these setbacks. But the notion that humanity might voluntarily pause, pivot, and retreat — by having fewer children — seems implausible, if not absurd. When the New York Times publishes a feature on the effects of falling birthrates, for example, readers respond with a mix of skepticism and outrage. Their comments could be summarized as shouting “In an age of rapacious consumption, collapsing ecosystems and massive emigration, do you really expect us to believe that fewer people are a problem?”

The overpopulation story is old, visceral and hard to refute. Each day brings fresh signs of our heavy footprint on a visibly crowded planet. Fretting about the eventual reversal of this phenomenon, WIRED magazine recently declared, “is like someone in the year 1000 worrying about the Y2K bug.”

Is it really too early to contemplate this possibility? Nineteen years ago, the Long Now Foundation invited Longman to give a presentation about his book. At the time, Longman was a fellow at the New America Foundation, a left-of-center think tank in Washington, where he was researching the impact of aging on entitlement programs. When he and his late wife were unable to conceive a child, Longman began to study fertility trends. The Empty Cradle, the result of that study, synthesized decades of research showing that in many rich countries, fertility rates were so low that they threatened to create a self-reinforcing cycle of depopulation that would be extremely difficult to reverse. He cited the work of numerous demographers and economists who warned that such a cycle could be profoundly destabilizing.

In a recent interview, Longman said that the book received a chilly reception from progressive organizations and media outlets, who saw it as a veiled attack on gender equality, reproductive rights, and the sustainability goals of Paul R. Ehrlich (author of The Population Bomb) and other environmentalists.

Reactions from conservatives were somewhat warmer. Longman was invited to speak by Focus on the Family and other religious organizations, as well as by governments in Russia, Japan and Poland that wanted his advice on increasing birthrates. But when parts of his book began to be selectively cited by people with nationalist and far-right agendas, Longman decided to step away and move on to other research topics.

In the years since The Empty Cradle was published, the discussion around demographic decline has become ever more fraught. Pope Francis laments that “selfish” people prefer dogs and cats to having children, provoking a furious backlash from pet lovers. Elon Musk warns that depopulation threatens civilization, to which WIRED shoots back:  “Elon Musk Is Totally Wrong About Population Collapse.” Forbes magazine broods over the economic impact of “Death Spiral Demographics,” while broadcaster David Attenborough uses his nature documentaries to argue that biodiversity can only be preserved if humans stop multiplying.

Amid this cacophony, the demographer Lyman Stone recently observed that demographic decline has become “too broad even to discuss: it means too many old people, too many brown people, too many disabled people, or not enough people […] it is all things to all people, a stick with which to beat today’s bogeyman.”

Nevertheless, it should be possible to determine the extent to which depopulation is actually taking place—and to see whether Longman’s warning was prescient or misguided. A close reading of the 02022 report published by the United Nations Population Division, whose forecasts are widely cited by demographers, offers a useful starting point.

An invisible decline

When the United Nations first began issuing periodic population forecasts in 01950, sub-replacement fertility — the necessary prelude to depopulation — was extremely rare. In the 01970s and 01980s, a handful of industrialized countries dropped below that threshold, and soon countries in Asia and Latin America began to join their ranks. Today, the United Nations data show that seven out of ten people live in countries with sub-replacement birth rates. (See graphs, “Which countries are depopulating?”)

Above-replacement fertility is now largely limited to the world’s poorest and least developed countries. Population growth in this group, which totals around 2.2 billion people, is expected to continue for a long time. In fact, the United Nations estimates that nearly all the population growth forecast for the rest of this century will take place in these countries. However, fertility levels in this group are similar to what they were in Latin America and Asia just one or two generations ago, and they could drop just as quickly as they did in those regions.

On the sub-replacement side, countries can be further divided into three categories. The first consists of countries that are still registering what demographers call momentum-driven growth. Some 2.8 billion people live in this group, which includes India, Bangladesh, Brazil, Mexico, Iran, Vietnam, Turkey and Malaysia.

Like a locomotive that suddenly runs out of fuel while steaming uphill, population in these countries will keep climbing for a short time thanks to the “momentum” provided by girls and young women who have yet to enter their reproductive years. But as those women reach middle age, the locomotive will stop, start rolling backwards, and then gain reverse momentum. The United Nations forecasts that Brazil’s population will shrink by 45 million people by the end of the century. Bangladesh could end up with 30 million people fewer than at its peak. Even India, which will keep growing till around 02060 because of its enormous cohorts of young people, is on track to lose at least 200 million people between 02070 and 02100.

The second sub-replacement category is made up of around 800 million people in countries that rely on immigrants to supplement natural growth rates that are already negative (Germany, Spain) or barely above zero (Canada and the United States). Assuming they continue to take in immigrants in large numbers, the United Nations forecasts that these countries will either shrink slightly (France) or grow anemically (the United Kingdom) between now and 02100.

The third category consists of countries that are already depopulating. When Longman published his book, this group was still tiny. Actual depopulation — where deaths consistently outnumber births — was concentrated in Russia and Eastern European countries that together accounted for less than 4 percent of the global population. But in the years since then Japan, Italy, South Korea, Taiwan, Greece and Portugal, among others, have joined this category. The government in China recently acknowledged that it began to depopulate in 02022.

This means that in all, more than 2.1 billion people — a quarter of humanity — now live in countries that are smaller each evening than they were in the morning. Because it is diffused throughout millions of people, this phenomenon is essentially invisible to the public, but the numbers are startling in aggregate. Each month, Russia’s population diminishes by around 86,000 people (not including casualties from the war in Ukraine), Japan’s by around 50,000, and Italy’s by at least 20,000. Fertility in these countries has been so low for so long that depopulation is cemented into their future, regardless of any near-term recovery in birthrates. Overall, the UN anticipates that their populations will shrink by between 20 percent and 50 percent by the end of the century. Other studies anticipate much larger and faster declines.

Where’s the floor?

In short, the United Nations data show that Longman’s predictions were entirely correct. Twenty years ago, depopulation or immigration-dependency were demographic oddities; today, they are the norm for virtually all wealthy and technologically advanced nations. Within a single generation (by around 02050), they will be a feature of most of the world’s societies, as unremarkable as universal literacy or high obesity levels are today.

The forces that have brought us to this point — economic development, urbanization, access to education and contraception, changing gender roles — are not likely to be reversed. None of the countries whose fertility has dropped below replacement levels has subsequently returned to sustained growth. As Joseph Chamie, a former director of the United Nations Population Division, recently put it: “Once a nation’s fertility rate falls below the replacement level, it tends to stay there.” The question is no longer whether most countries will depopulate, but at what pace they will do so.

Longman was also right about many of the downsides of this phenomenon. Companies in mature economies are indeed struggling to find employees amid the shrinking number of working-age people. Pension systems are buckling under the weight of longer life expectancies and worsening ratios of contributors to beneficiaries. Xenophobia has risen in many of the wealthy, aging countries that are most dependent on immigration. South Korea has been forced to close nearly 4000 schools for lack of students. Universities in the US, where the number of college students has been falling since 02010, are bracing for an “enrollment cliff” starting in 02025. And in Europe, the “one euro house” phenomenon has become a cliché for the extreme tactics needed to prevent the proliferation of rural ghost towns.

If this sounds like old news — and not quite a catastrophe — it is because expectations and behaviors have been quietly shifting to accommodate the reality of depopulation. Indeed, The Empty Cradle (like Fewer, The Coming Population Crash, Empty Planet, and other books in this category) can all be faulted for underestimating how quickly humanity will adapt to this predicament — just as we have adapted to countless other slow-moving challenges. Japan, which began to depopulate around 02010, is a case in point. After three decades of fruitless efforts to boost birth rates, it has embarked on a more pragmatic policy of “aging gracefully.” Although its economic growth has been lackluster since the 01990s, Japan has continued to improve overall quality of life for its citizens, while achieving unemployment and inequality indicators superior to those of many European countries.

Yet even as these adaptations take place, public discourse around depopulation is firmly anchored in the previous century. On the Right, depopulation is still reflexively described as an aberration, a symptom of moral decay, or a signal of impending economic doom. On the Left, it is too often dismissed as a non-issue or welcomed as a step toward degrowth – one whose environmental benefits will surely outweigh any social costs. Policymakers and academics tend to avoid the topic, wary of its proximity to the agendas of authoritarian regimes and culture war battlegrounds around abortion or immigration.

That is unfortunate, because the era of depopulation poses new dilemmas that require fresh thinking and open debate. Twenty years ago, for example, many demographers still believed that the very low fertility rates then prevalent in Europe were a temporary phenomenon, and that fertility would eventually bounce back and converge close to two children per woman. The assumption was that growing gender equality and rising standards of living would make it easier for women in developed countries to reconcile their career goals with their stated desire to have children. Although a few rich countries subsequently achieved modest fertility gains, most of those increases have evaporated in the last ten years. Fertility is plummeting in places as varied as Jamaica, Uruguay, South Africa, Iran and the United States. And in China and South Korea, it has dropped to levels that were previously considered impossible for large countries.

These trends have given new urgency to the question of just how far fertility can descend before it imposes unmanageable strains on a society. Wolfgang Lutz, an Austrian demographer and founder of the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital, is one of a small number of academics who have openly grappled with this issue. Lutz acknowledges that “nobody knows” whether fertility rates will recover or continue to fall, because demography lacks a theoretical framework for determining whether a fertility “floor” exists. In the absence of a testable hypothesis, demographers have relied on surveys that ask people to state their ideal family size. For decades, these surveys provided a reassuringly consistent benchmark: across almost all cultures and income levels, large majorities of women reported two or more children as their ideal.

Now, that benchmark has also begun to slide. In some countries, studies show that the number of children that women actually intend to have is lower than their stated ideal family size. In others, social norms appear to be shifting towards a new ideal that is far below two children. Tomas Sobotka, a colleague of Lutz’s at the Wittgenstein Center, says that South Korea offers the most striking example of this trend. “A combination of rapid economic development, very high levels of education among young adults, very competitive labor market, long work hours, unaffordable housing, traditional gender norms and persistent gender inequalities in work and family life have created a perfect storm — conditions that make it very difficult for young people to marry and pursue their fertility plans,” Sobotka said via email. “The question is what happens if young Koreans get accustomed to living single and childfree lives. The research I have been conducting with my colleagues shows that the appeal of marriage and having children has been vanishing among the young adults and many of them are likely to stay unmarried, childfree and without a partner.”

Maria Rita Testa, a professor of demography at Luiss University in Rome, sees a similar pattern in Italian society. In a forthcoming paper, she and two colleagues find that projections of Italy’s future population continue to assume that fertility rates will return to levels substantially higher than they are today. Given that fertility in Italy has stayed between 1.2 and 1.4 children per woman for the last 40 years, “it is anything but obvious that fertility will recover in Italy,” Testa wrote in response to questions about her paper. After such a long period, what were once unusual reproductive behaviors have come to be perceived as normal, and she sees no reason to believe that this will change in the near future.

Escaping the low fertility trap

The consequences of these shifting norms could be enormous, because tiny differences in sub-replacement fertility rates have outsize effects on the pace of depopulation. To illustrate this, Sobotka offers four scenarios for anticipating the number of children that could be born in the future of a hypothetical country where there is no immigration. At a fertility rate of 1.85, the process is so gradual that it can take more than two centuries for the number of newborns to shrink by half. But at lower fertility rates, depopulation accelerates because of reverse momentum. At a fertility rate of 1.6, it takes around 90 years for the number of newborns to drop by half. At 1.3, it takes some 50 years. And at a fertility rate of one child per woman — a level already common in many parts of Asia — it can take less than 30 years: each generation has half as many children as the previous one.

Lutz anticipated this risk in a widely cited 02007 paper where he posited a “Low Fertility Trap Hypothesis.” He challenged fellow researchers to consider whether the combination of demographic, cultural and economic forces that had already driven fertility down in Europe were becoming self-reinforcing and irreversible. In the years since then, social scientists have not offered a plausible alternative to this hypothesis. In fact, the whole question of how depopulating countries can hope to end or at least slow down this process seems oddly under-investigated, given what is at stake. One of the few recent books to directly engage the issue is Decline and Prosper! Changing Global Birth Rates and the Advantages of Fewer Children by Norwegian population economist Vegard Skirbekk. He argues that by adjusting pension systems, health services and infrastructure to suit the needs of aging communities, depopulating countries can continue to thrive. It is a refreshing alternative to the apocalyptic drumbeat surrounding this topic, but it does not offer a way out of the low-fertility trap.

In the political sphere, depopulation remains perennially stuck beyond the pertinent time horizon, because even promising actions (such as a new subsidy for first-time parents) take least a quarter century to pay dividends (the time between the birth of a child and her emergence as a tax-paying worker and potential parent). The rare policymaker who does take up this banner soon learns that evidence on the effectiveness of pronatalist policies is sparse — and sobering. Russia has used lavish “cash-for-babies” programs and housing subsidies to achieve modest upticks in fertility, but these have been ephemeral. South Korea, which has spent $200 billion in the last 16 years on programs to encourage childbirth, now has the world's lowest fertility rate. Most experts agree that instead of trying to boost birth rates, governments should stick to the fundamental work of improving overall well-being.

Leaders in depopulating countries have also noticed that the general public is not clamoring for action. A casual review of news headlines from South Korea and Italy shows that people there, like their counterparts everywhere, are focused on immediate headaches such as inflation, housing costs or employment. Few things are more tangible than the anguish of an individual who is thwarted in their efforts to become a parent or form a family. But large-scale depopulation remains a sort of creeping abstraction, too vague and too gradual to engage our jittery attention spans. In fact, it may fall into what some ecologists have called the “invisible present,” a space where we fail to detect slow changes in our surroundings and are unable to interpret effects that lag years behind their causes.

If research and policy won’t bridge the strange void surrounding this topic, perhaps artists and comedians will. With his caustic riff on three reasons not to have kids, Ricky Gervais legitimizes the queasy ambivalence felt by many potential parents. In “What Tsunami?”, Hallie Cantor satirizes the arguments that grandmothers-in-waiting use to badger their daughters. And in innumerable ways, contemporary television series remind audiences of the trade-offs and stresses that make parenting so complicated.

But few writers have attempted to fully flesh out the world that depopulation will bequeath us. In an essay entitled “Why Are There So Few SFF Books About the Very Real Issue of Population Decline?,” the critic James Davis Nichol points out that science fiction writers are traditionally eager to play with wildly speculative ideas:

“Just not this idea. I can easily name more books that delve into the implications of wormholes, which probably do not exist, and faster-than-light travel, which most definitely does not, than I can books dealing with the demographic transition, whose effects are all around us […] One would think that such a process (enormous, world-wide, moving like a glacier, slow but unstoppable) should make for enthralling fiction. For the most part, however, it hasn’t.”

The one notable exception to this rule, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, devotes a single sentence to explaining the demographic origins of its dystopia:

“There was no one cause, says Aunt Lydia… [pointing to] a graph, showing the birth rate per thousand, for years and years: a slippery slope, down past the zero line of replacement, and down and down.”

It is left to us, the readers, to imagine the intricate web of private choices and external forces that could gradually produce the society that Atwood brings memorably to life. And it is also up to us to start telling an alternative story, to fill it with persuasive characters, to imbue them with credible motives, and to plot their journey towards a different ending.

The Truth About Antarctica

“Can we see what’s beyond the ice wall?” “Quick question is there land beyond the ice wall?” “Record the ice wall :)”

The comments sections of Dr. Peter Neff’s TikToks are filled with this sort of stuff. He’s a glaciologist and ice scientist, stationed in Antarctica over the summer and conducting vital experiments on Antarctica’s vast ice sheets and glaciers. He responds to many of these comments with humor. At the same time, he doesn’t give them too much thought.

“[My videos] are more just to show people the reality, rather than actually address the ridiculous conspiracy theories,” Neff told me, calling from McMurdo Station on the tail end of his field season in Antarctica. “They don't really deserve much air in my mind.”

The “ice wall,” or the idea that Antarctica is not a continent at the bottom of the globe but really a wall that circumscribes the Flat Earth, is a common refrain; as is the concept that “nobody is allowed” to go to Antarctica: that “they” (shady government agents) will prevent anyone from visiting, in order to keep whatever lies behind the ice wall hidden.

Photograph by Christopher Michel.

At the turn of the 20th century, Antarctica was still largely unknown. As Apsley Cherry-Garrard observed in the introduction to his classic book The Worst Journey In The World (01922): ​​“Even now the Antarctic is to the rest of the earth as the Abode of the Gods was to the ancient Chaldees, a precipitous and mammoth land lying far beyond the seas which encircled man’s habitation.” But despite the hundred-plus years of exploration, habitation, and documentation since then, Antarctica remains utterly Other. It’s far away, it’s unlike anywhere else on the planet, and most people will never go there. They’ll only see pictures, and watch classic films like The Thing (01982) which project an image of peril and isolation onto the public consciousness.

Photograph by Christopher Michel.

Where gaps in public knowledge exist, conspiracies spring into life. Any post by a scientist or public figure about Antarctica will inevitably rack up comments accusing the original poster of “hiding” something, or of working for the government. Today’s landscape of Antarctic conspiracies is a tangled web — comprising everything from AI-generated Lovecraftian images purporting to be from turn-of-the-century expeditions, Nazis and UFOs, global warming denial, and flat-earthery. It’s a locus of conspiratorial thinking from all corners of the political compass, all converging, like lines of longitude, on the ice.

Abraham Ortelius’ 01570 map. Present-day Antarctica appears as Terra Australis Nondum Cognita at the bottom (“the southern land not yet known”).

These sentiments might seem strange, but they're just the latest in a long history of projecting fantasies onto the southern continent. While the Arctic, thanks to its relative proximity to seafaring civilizations, was explored beginning in the Age of Discovery in the 01500s, the terra australis incognito at the bottom of the earth remained mysterious for far longer. The circumnavigations of Captain Cook in the 01770s proved that the area was frozen and uninhabitable, and fringed by seemingly impenetrable pack-ice. The reports that he brought back probably inspired Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner (01798), which launched tropes of the frigid Antarctic into the wider cultural consciousness.

The HMS Endurance trapped in pack-ice during the Shackleton Expedition, February 01915. Photograph by Frank Hurley.

The southern continent itself was not observed until the 01820s, when adventurous whaling captains spotted it and added it to their charts. The simultaneous voyages of Ross (Britain), D’Urville (France), and Wilkes (USA) in 01839 added much to the world’s stock of knowledge of the Antarctic, but after that, investigation did not resume for over 50 years. When the North’s mysteries ceased to hold appeal, the world’s attention turned south to the Antarctic in the 01890s. Suddenly the region seemed to hold immense promise for scientific investigation, the claiming of new territories, and perhaps even the exploitation of mineral resources. The ensuing openly imperial Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration segued into the slightly more covert geopolitical jockeying of the mid-20th century. This reached a fever pitch with the International Geophysical Year of 01957-58, resulting in the Antarctic Treaty of 01959, which officially demilitarized the continent and set it aside as the exclusive preserve of scientific activity.

Blizzard at Cape Denison, Antarctica, 01912. Photograph by Frank Hurley. 

Many of the favored points for conspiracists have to do with government and military operations during this Cold War era. Neff points out the importance of the military presence on Antarctica, specifically the US military: “Their ability to operate their logistical capabilities are what give us the greatest scientific capability in Antarctica of basically any country.”

Union Glacier, Antarctica. Photograph by Christopher Michel.

Despite Antarctica being “the continent of science,” with all military operations being banned since the Antarctic Treaty of 01959, the ongoing game of international geopolitics forms the underlying purpose of activity in the region. While military activity qua activity is verboten, it is the planes and personnel of various militaries which provide the structural capacity for people to live and work there.  

Sara Wheeler, in her transformational Antarctic travel book Terra Incognita (01996), succinctly defines that paradox: “Collective consciousness must believe in the deification of science on the ice, otherwise it would have to admit that the reason for each nation’s presence in Antarctica is political, not scientific.”

Photograph by Christopher Michel.

That isn’t to say the vital climatic science done on Antarctica is in any way false or tainted. Scientists like Neff just want to be transparent about how it is they get to do the things they do, and go to the places they go. “It’s so hard to access these places, and the best way to get to them from a science perspective is through organized government programs,” he says. The mantling of the truth, though, is something that perhaps the conspiracists can sense, but are unable to understand or articulate, and so seek explanation in the outlandish. So the communal cooperative fantasy fails, and through the cracks come the crackpots.

A great deal of Antarctic theories, whether their proponents are aware of it or not, have roots in the original polar conspiracy of John Cleve Symmes Jr. Symmes was a US Army officer from Cincinnati who devoted his life to promoting his theory of the “hollow earth.” His claims changed over time, but the central thrust of the idea was that the earth was a hollow shell 800 miles thick, with thousand-mile-wide openings at both of the poles, through which a fertile interior could be accessed by intrepid explorers. In the late 01810s he confined his ideas to privately printed circulars and pamphlets, but by 01820 had begun lecturing around the country. He became somewhat well known, with his theories gaining traction after publication in outlets like the National Intelligencer; and it was his disciple Joshua Reynolds who helped drum up government support to launch the Wilkes Exploring Expedition of 01839, America’s first official venture to Antarctica.

Left: John Cleve Symmes declares his belief in a “hollow earth.” Right: A depiction of Symmes’s “hollow earth” in the October 01882 issue of Harper’s.

The presence of Symmes’s theories in the public consciousness is visible in Edgar Allan Poe’s novella The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (01838), in which the titular character is carried in an open boat below the Antarctic Circle to a tropical land populated by dark-skinned subhumans, and thence to a frigid whirlpool at the North Pole, seemingly leading to some kind of mysterious interior space, inhabited by a giant shrouded figure: “And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.”

The desire for polar and Antarctic space to be indeterminate and undiscovered, for something beyond human understanding to be hiding underneath or within the ice, is a common underlying feature to Antarctic conspiracies.

Mount Vinson, Antarctica. Photograph by Christopher Michel.

In the mid-20th century, after the fervor of the Heroic Age of Shackleton and Scott died down, and the old school of isolated cross-continental man-hauling through ice and wind had been made obsolete by motors, planes, and radios, it was the Antarctic flights of Richard Byrd that captured the world’s imagination. Byrd, a decorated officer in the US Navy, was a pioneer of early flight. He claimed to be the first person to fly over the North Pole in 01926 (though that claim has since been disputed, thanks to evidence belatedly discovered in Byrd’s diary) and led five separate expeditions to the Antarctic from the 01920s through the 01950s. While the first two of these expeditions were independent, the latter three were conducted by the US government. Operation Highjump, the 01946-7 expedition led by Byrd, established a research base on the Ross Ice Shelf known as Little America IV; and Operation Deep Freeze of the 01950s under his direction was a massive operation which saw the first permanent American bases being constructed at McMurdo and the South Pole by Navy Seabees.

An aerologist with the Byrd Antarctic Expedition barely escapes a fall into the sea after the collapse of the outer edge of an ice shelf, 01929. Photograph courtesy of the U.S. National Archives.

These expeditions, and Byrd himself, form the nucleus of a galaxy of conspiracies. The comments section of a newsreel video about Byrd’s explorations are filled to the brim with assertions about what he “really” saw down there. In the Ancient Aliens segment about Byrd’s “discoveries,” one common version of the tale is described, ostensibly recorded in a recently-recovered “lost diary.” Byrd, on his flight over the continent, enters a fertile hollow earth and meets a race of UFO-flying inhabitants who express disappointment in humanity’s recourse to nuclear power. Alternatively: he met and fought with Nazi-piloted flying saucers, which is why Operation Highjump necessitated such a large expeditionary force being brought back to Antarctica.

Nazis in Antarctica? Well, there’s a kernel of truth there. In 01939, the Third Reich sent an expedition to explore and claim part of Antarctica. The Schwabenland was equipped with planes, which dropped thousands and thousands of iron swastikas over the ice as they surveyed — none of which have ever been recovered.

A German map of Antarctica showing the Nazi territorial claim of New Schwabenland, 01941.

The claim, in the remote sector of Dronning Maud Land already claimed by the Norwegians, was abandoned by the end of the war, but the concept of a Nazi base in the Antarctic lived on, messily pleated into the greater world of Antarctic conspiracy. Uncountable variations on the “Antarctic Nazis” myth have proliferated, including many versions in which Hitler and other senior Nazis did not die but sought shelter at an underground Antarctic base in New Schwabenland, and others that incorporate advanced Nazi technology in the form of UFOs and weapons.

On one of Neff’s TikToks, a commenter pleads: “The earth is hallow [sic], there’s entrances at the north and south pole where it suddenly gets warmer. if you can prove me wrong and go to the south pole could you try? i’ve been heavily convinced it’s hallow and it drives me crazy man [...]”

Being reduced to seeking confirmation of one’s conspiracy in the comments of a scientist is unfortunate. But it is also an example of how intoxicating the otherworldly potential of Antarctica is.

Union Glacier, Antarctica. Photograph by Christopher Michel.

It may not be the location of the entrance to a hollow earth, but it is, in fact, hallow(ed). The only continent with no history of human habitation, the vast ice fields of Antarctica have formed a blank slate onto which humanity can project itself: all of itself, from the heroic, imperial superego to the conspiratorial id. It has attracted pilgrims and truth-seekers, scientists and artists, writers and soldiers.

Detail of Urbano Monte’s 01587 planisphere, featuring a giant merman off the coast of Venezuela. Image courtesy of the David Rumsey Map Center.

Mapmakers of the early modern period placed monsters in the unknown corners of their charts: hic sunt dragones (“here be dragons”). The beasts were pushed further and further to the margins of the mappa mundi as the globe was explored, and eventually off the maps altogether, but the impulse to assign familiar, fire-breathing forms of danger and mystery to what would otherwise be unforgiving, cold, quiet places remain. The heated excitement of Antarctic conspiracies are the dragons of today.

[Read: Ahmed Kabil’s 02018 Long Now Ideas essay on early modern maps and the tendency for mapmakers to imagine monsters in uncharted regions]

Polar scholar Hester Blum, in her book The News At The Ends Of The Earth (02019), suggests that John Cleves Symmes’ conception of the hole at the bottom of the earth, the “polar verge,” with its five concentric spheres inside folding in on each other like a planetary Russian doll, is a fantasy about climactic extremities: a dream of impossible warmth and life where one would expect mundane cold and death.

Union Glacier, Antarctica. Photograph by Christopher Michel.

So too, then, might be the fantasy of Byrd’s Symmesian discoveries, and the crystal cities and advanced beings inside the earth; or, as Joe Rogan associate Sam Tripoli frames it on an episode of Rogan’s popular podcast, “some time-traveling Nazi shit” involving a worldwide “spiritual war” centering on New Schwabenland. As the cultural geographer Denis Cosgrove puts it in Apollo's Eye (02001), “there seems to be an unwillingness to contemplate these global regions without anxiety.” In the face of endless reports of the Earth’s climactic demise issuing from Antarctic research, many might find it easier to believe that the official line of doom and gloom disguises awesome and awful spectacles of aliens, Nazis, and denizens of a hollow (or flat) earth.

Union Glacier, Antarctica. Photograph by Christopher Michel.

And let’s not forget that Antarctica is the planet’s most concentrated record of deep time. It is, as many scholars have noted, an archive in and of itself, stretching back eons, documenting changes to Earth’s atmosphere going back long past the last ice age. Human activity on the continent constitutes barely the smallest sliver of that time — and only on the fringes of the coasts and at a few minimal inland stations. The vastness of Antarctica is untouched and implacable; difficult to comprehend from a limited human perspective. Like the Shoggoths and Old Ones which inhabit the ancient, abandoned Antarctic of Lovecraft’s imagination in “At The Mountains of Madness,” the continent itself is apt to induce a sort of insanity, even for those who are not physically present.

Union Glacier, Antarctica. Photograph by Christopher Michel.

But of course, there are people at this moment trying to comprehend it more fully and objectively. Way out on the ice, at the remote Dome C location on the Antarctic Plateau, scientists are beginning a project to retrieve ice core samples that are over one million years old. It will take them five years to retrieve the oldest samples which lie miles down, against the bedrock of the continent, but scientists will begin to analyze samples right away, seeking evidence of atmospheric shifts in the distant past, which can then be used to predict those that are coming in the near future.

Neff, and other environmental scientists and educators, were recruited by TikTok during the pandemic to make educational content for the platform. He sees the broad channels afforded by social media as a vital tool for environmental awareness. “We’re trying to share useful information, to keep people's baseline understanding of climate change up, rather than trying to save the people who have just been terribly misled,” he says. He is tentatively excited about the possibilities for Starlink and other new connectivity technologies to help communicate the realities of the Antarctic to the public.

But as climate scientists and communicators know all too well, just because evidence is provided doesn’t mean people will believe it. The inextricability of Antarctic history and military history is always going to induce skepticism amongst those already primed to distrust the establishment. There will always be people who dream at a distance of a “polar verge” and the secrets lurking beyond it.