Stewart Brand's Blog, page 38

Long Now Exhibit & Talk at University of St. Thomas in St. Paul Minnesota

University of St. Thomas in St. Paul Minnesota is hosting a new exhibit Designed to Last: A Look at the Projects of the Long Now Foundation through December 18th 02015. The exhibit features a Rosetta Disk, limestone core samples from The Clock site, and the prototype of the Solar Synchonizer of The 10,000 Year Clock. Long Now artifacts rarely travel, so this is a unique opportunity to see these objects outside of California.

On November 3rd, Dr. Laura Welcher will be in travelling to St. Thomas to give a presentation on the Rosetta Project and other projects of The Long Now Foundation. The talk is at 7pm in auditorium 3M, open to the public, with a reception and viewing of the exhibition beginning at 6pm. Long Now Members are invited to both the talk and reception.

This exhibition will also be home to the “UST Library for Civilization,” a collection of books suggested by St. Thomas faculty and staff that is modeled after our own “Manual for Civilization”. Suggested books will be purchased, given a bookmark with the name of the faculty or staff member who suggested it and why they suggested it, and put on display. At the end of the semester, St. Thomas students will be invited to take a book of their choice.

The exhibition itself is open through the end of the fall semester and can be found on the third floor of the Facilities and Design Center building.

 

Live audio stream for Andy Weir at The Interval on October 27, 02015

Long Now members can tune in for a live audio simulcast of this sold out event starting at 7:15 PT, October 27

Andy Weir author of The Martian speaks in Long Now’s “Conversations at The Interval” series this Tuesday. Andy will talk about the real science of a Mars colonization mission. What would Martian colonization really be like? What would it take to get us to the red planet? What would we do to establish a colony once we landed?

Andy will speak live at The Interval, Long Now’s cafe/bar/museum/headquarters in San Francisco. We will stream his talk live (and free) for Long Now members on the member site. Then Long Now’s Peter Schwartz will interview Andy onstage. We’ll have copies of The Martian on sale and Andy will sign books after he speaks.

Tickets to this event sold out quickly, as our Interval talks often do. Due to the huge interest we will be live audio-streaming Tuesday’s talk for members. We also livestream our monthly SALT series as a free benefit for our members.

Long Now members can tune in for a live audio simulcast at 7:15 PT on October 27

Current Long Now members, just login on the member site. You can join Long Now for just $8/month; benefits includes tickets to Seminars, HD video of 12 years of Long Now talks, and many other perks.

While we don’t currently live stream all our Interval event, we hope to do so increasingly in the future. We also plan to release Interval talks as podcasts and video on the Long Now site (similarly to our Seminar series). Long Now is seeking a major sponsor to fund the cost of producing this series to the standard of our Seminar media. Sponsorship inquiries are welcome.

Member Discount for “Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art”

Long Now is proud to be a co-partner with YBCA in showing “Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art”. The film will be shown at 7:30 PM on Thursday October 29 and 2:00 PM on Sunday November 1 at YBCA’s Screening Room.

Troublemakers unearths the history of land art, featuring a cadre of renegades who sought to transcend the limitations of painting and sculpture by producing earthworks on a monumental scale. Iconoclasts who changed the landscape of art forever, these revolutionary, antagonistic creatives risked their careers on radical artistic change and experimentation, and took on the establishment to produce art on their own terms. The film includes rare footage and interviews which unveil the enigmatic lives and careers of storied artists Robert Smithson (Spiral Jetty), Walter De Maria (The Lightning Field), and Michael Heizer (Double Negative). (2015, 72 min, digital)

Long Now Members get $8 discounted tickets to the screening, check your email for instructions on how to reserve your discounted member tickets. Troublemakers will be shown in other cities as well, check here for your local screening.

James Fallows Seminar Media

This lecture was presented as part of The Long Now Foundation’s monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking.

Civilization’s Infrastructure

Tuesday, October 6 02015 – San Francisco

Video is up on the Fallows Seminar page.

*********************

Audio is up on the Fallows Seminar page, or you can subscribe to our podcast.

*********************

Infrastructure investment tricks – a summary by Stewart Brand

All societies under-invest in their infrastructure—in the systems that allow them to thrive. There is hardware infrastructure: clean water, paved roads, sewer systems, airports, broadband; and, Fallows suggested, software infrastructure: organizational and cultural practices such as education, safe driving, good accounting, a widening circle of trust. China, for example, is having an orgy of hard infrastructure construction. It recently built a hundred airports while America built zero. But it is lagging in soft infrastructure such as safe driving and political transition.

Infrastructure always looks unattractive to investors because the benefits: 1) are uncertain; 2) are delayed; and 3) go to others—the public, in the future. And the act of building infrastructure can be highly disruptive in the present. America for the last forty years has starved its infrastructure, but in our history some highly controversial remarkable infrastructure decisions got through, each apparently by a miracle—the Louisiana Purchase, the Erie Canal, the Gadsden Purchase, the Alaska Purchase, National Parks, Land Grant colleges, the GI Bill that created our middle class after World War II, and the Interstate highway system.

In Fallows’ view, the miracle that enabled the right decision each time was either an emergency (such as World War II or the Depression), stealth (such as all the works that quietly go forward within the military budget or the medical-industrial complex), or a story (such as Manifest Destiny and the Space Race). Lately, Fallows notes, there is a little noticed infrastructure renaissance going in some mid-sized American cities, where the political process is nonpoisonous and pragmatic compared to the current national-level dysfunction.

By neglecting the long view, Fallows concluded, we overimagine problems with infrastructure projects and underimagine the benefits. But with the long view, with the new wealth and optimism of our tech successes, and expanding on the innovations in many of our cities, there is compelling story to be told. It might build on the unfolding emergency with climate change or on the new excitement about space exploration. Responding to need or to opportunity, we can tell a tale that inspires us to reinvent and build anew the systems that make our society flourish.

Subscribe to our Seminar email list for updates and summaries.

Saul Griffith Seminar Media

This lecture was presented as part of The Long Now Foundation’s monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking.

Infrastructure & Climate Change

Monday September 21, 02015 – San Francisco

Video is up on the Griffith Seminar page.

*********************

Audio is up on the Griffith Seminar page, or you can subscribe to our podcast.

*********************

Green infrastructure – a summary by Stewart Brand

Griffith began with an eyeroll at the first round of responses in the US to reducing greenhouse gases, a program he calls “peak Al Gore.” Some activities feel virtuous —becoming vegetarian, installing LED lights, avoiding bottled water, reading news online, using cold water detergent, and “showering less in a smaller, colder house”—but they demand constant attention and they don’t really add up to what is needed.

Griffith’s view is that we deal best with greenhouse gases by arranging our infrastructure so we don’t have to think about climate and energy issues every minute. Huge energy savings can come from designing our buildings and cars better, and some would result from replacing a lot of air travel with “video conferencing that doesn’t suck.“ Clean energy will mostly come from solar, wind, biofuels (better ones than present), and nuclear. Solar could be on every roof. The most fuel-efficient travel is on bicycles, which can be encouraged far more. Electric cars are very efficient, and when most become self-driving they can be lighter and even more efficient because “autonomous vehicles don’t run into each other.” Sixty percent of our energy goes to waste heat; with improved design that can be reduced radically to 20 percent.

Taking the infrastructure approach, in a few decades the US could reduce its total energy use by 40 percent, while eliminating all coal and most oil and natural gas burning, with no need to shower less.

Subscribe to our Seminar email list for updates and summaries.

Live audio stream for John Markoff at The Interval on September 29, 02015

Long Now members can tune in for a live audio simulcast of this sold out event starting at 7:15 PT, September 29

Veteran technology writer John Markoff speaks in Long Now’s “Conversations at The Interval” series this Tuesday. He will discuss his new book Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots which covers the birth of artificial intelligence in the 1950s all the way up to the consumer and industrial robotics innovations of today. Long Now’s Paul Saffo will interviewed Markoff onstage.

Tickets to this talk sold out very quickly, as our Interval events often do. Due to the huge interest in this event, Long Now will be live audio-streaming Tuesday’s talk for members.

You can join Long Now for just $8/month which includes tickets to Seminars, HD video of 12 years of Long Now talks, and many other benefits.

Current Long Now members, just login on the member site. The stream will begin at 7:15pm Pacific.

Machines of Loving Grace is the first comprehensive study to place [robots] in the context of the cloud-based intelligence

—George Dyson, author of Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

In recent years, the pace of technological change has accelerated dramatically, posing an ethical quandary. If humans delegate decisions to machines, who will be responsible for the consequences? Drawing on his forty years covering the tech industry, Markoff conducted numerous interviews and extensive research to assemble this history and poise key questions about how we will cohabitate with our robotic creations.

Long Now members can tune in for a live audio simulcast at 7:15 PT on September 29

This will be the third time we have live streamed an Interval event. Due to our limited resources, it is not possible to do so for most talks. We do plan to release Interval talks as podcasts and video on the Long Now site (similarly to our Seminar series).

We also plan to stream the talk by Andy Weir author of The Martian which takes place at The Interval on October 27, 02015. Tickets will go on sale for that talk two weeks beforehand and we expect it will sell out quickly.

Long Now is looking for a major sponsor to fund the cost of producing the series to the standard of our Seminar media. We are also seeking a sponsor to support more regular streaming of Interval events. Sponsorship inquiries are welcome.

Ancient Venture Capitalism and its Lessons for the Modern Economy

Our understanding of ancient civilizations can be spotty. Because not all cultural artifacts withstand the test of time, we have to piece together our portraits of these societies with partial clues, making inferences where needed to cover gaps in the archaeological record.

But one of these clues offers a remarkably detailed picture of economic life in an Assyrian market town. As a recent feature in the New York times explains, archaeologists have discovered an uncharacteristically complete set of records kept by businessmen who ran importing enterprises in Kanesh, an ancient trading hub in what is now Turkey.

Dating back to the 19th century BC, these records have allowed Assyriologists to construct an intimate and detailed portrait of the lives these traders led, and the socio-economic policies that shaped their businesses.

The picture that emerged of economic life is staggeringly advanced. The traders of Kanesh used financial tools that were remarkably similar to checks, bonds, and joint-stock companies. They had something like venture-capital firms that created diversified portfolios of risky trades. And they even had structured financial products: People would buy outstanding debt, sell it to others and use it as collateral to finance new businesses. The 30 years for which we have records appear to have been a time of remarkable financial innovation.

It’s impossible not to see parallels with our own recent past. Over the 30 years covered by the archive, we see an economy built on trade in actual goods – silver, tin, textiles – transform into an economy built on financial speculation, fueling a bubble that then pops. After the financial collapse, there is a period of incessant lawsuits, as a central government in Assur desperately tries to come up with new regulations and ways of holding wrongdoers accountable … The entire trading system enters a deep recession lasting more than a decade. The traders eventually adopt simpler, more stringent rules, and trade grows again.

But as the quote above implies, these records – as does much of history – also contain lessons for the present. The comparison of this ancient market to our modern-day economy offers a rare opportunity to assess what features are inherent to the nature of trading systems, and what is the product of specific cultural or political forces.

The remarkable similarities between this ancient market and the contemporary global economy suggest that most attempts at trade regulation may be ineffective: fluctuations in things like the volume of trade, or the distribution of profits, may ultimately be part of the nature of trading systems. But what we can do is anticipate and regulate the impact of global trade on our local economy.

That, in fact, is what the [Assyrians] did, 4,000 years ago … Trade brought enormous wealth to a dozen or so families. But rather than hold all of it for themselves, the wealthy were made to redistribute a high percentage of their earnings through taxes and religious foundations that used the money for the public good. This way, the wealth created by trading with Kanesh made nearly everybody – at least every free citizen – better off.

Saul Griffith Seminar Media

This lecture was presented as part of The Long Now Foundation’s monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking.

Infrastructure & Climate Change

Monday September 21, 02015 – San Francisco

Audio is up on the Griffith Seminar page, or you can subscribe to our podcast.

*********************

Subscribe to our Seminar email list for updates and summaries.

Mount Tambora Eruption in 01815 Reverberated Across the Planet

In April of 01815, Mount Tambora - an active volcano in what is now Indonesia - erupted after a few hundred years of dormancy. For several days, it spewed hot lava and ash into the air, casting its environment in pitch black darkness. The largest observed eruption in recorded history, it was heard and felt as far as 1,600 miles away, and produced tsunami waves of up to 4 meters across the Indonesian archipelago. The explosion caused part of the volcano itself to cave in, and killed tens of thousands of people.

A year later, England noted the coldest winter of its recorded history, and the Eastern United States reported an uncharacteristically short summer. In 01817, Germany suffered a famine, and India a cholera epidemic. Though never linked back to the Tambora eruption at the time, a new book by Gillen D’Arcy Wood shows how the explosion in Indonesia reverberated across the planet, producing colder weather and dark storm clouds – followed by crop failure – for several years following the event.

Tambora’s impact can be traced through European cultural history: it is memorialized in J.M.W. Turner’s fiery sunsets – caused by particles of ash that spread across the planetary atmosphere – and even in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which was inspired by a gloomy summer that forced England’s gentry to keep itself entertained with indoor activities.

There is a lesson in this retrospective connection of the dots, Wood argues:

… the revelation of global volcanic ruin – a portrait 200 years in the making – offers a kind of meditation on the difficulty of uncovering the subtle effects of climate change, whether its origins lie in nature’s fury or the invisible byproducts of human civilization.

Moreover, Wood’s analysis reminds us that even the most subtle (and temporary) climatic changes can have a profound impact on global civilization.

 

Wire Cutters Short Film

Wire Cutters is a short animated film created by artist Jack Anderson. It concerns two robots who run into each other while mining on a desolate planet and then fight over their minerals. The film is too long to be considered a Long Short for our Seminar series, but nonetheless exemplifies long-term thinking.