Stewart Brand's Blog, page 39

Clock of the Long Now on Display at Deutsches Museum in Munich

For the next twelve months, the first prototype of the Clock of the Long Now will be on display at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany. It forms part of their Welcome to the Anthropocene exhibit – an interactive and multidisciplinary museum experience meant to prompt reflection and discussion about the notion of a ‘human era’.

“Spanning 1400 m2, the world’s first large exhibit on this important issue of the future reviews and surveys the concept of the Anthropocene through an analysis of such themes as urbanism, mobility, nature, evolution, nutrition, and human-machine interaction. The exhibit visualizes the history, present, and future of this human era, intersecting technology and the physical sciences with art and media. Historical exhibits guide us along our way through the Anthropocene, recent scientific discoveries and projects present challenges and potential solutions, and artistic design encourage contemplation.”

This is the first time the Prototype has left London’s Science Museum since it was installed there, and the first time the prototype is on display in continental Europe. To learn more, you can explore the exhibit’s English-language catalog, German-language website, or take a virtual tour. Originally scheduled to run until January, the exhibit has already been extended to September 02016, and can be visited any time during museum opening hours, daily from 9 AM and 5 PM local time.

Long Now’s Laura Welcher Speaks in London on September 25, 02015

Long Now London Meetup

Friday, September 25, 02015

7:00 PM at Newspeak House

133-135 Bethnal Green Road, E2 7DG, London

Languages are works of art, great libraries, how-to guides for living on planet Earth, windows into our minds and inalienable human rights. The Rosetta Project is The Long Now Foundation’s first exploration into very long-term archiving. It serves as a means to focus attention on the problem of digital obsolescence, and ways we might address that problem through creative archival storage methods.

Laura’s talk, titled ‘”The Rosetta Project: Strategies for Very Long-term Archiving” will focus on the Rosetta project and her experience with building this at Long Now. If you are interested hearing Laura speak and meeting fellow long-term thinkers, please RSVP at the Meetup site here.

Laura Welcher Speaking at Long Now London Meetup 9/25

Friday, September 25, 02015

7:00 PM

Newspeak House

133-135 Bethnal Green Road, E2 7DG, London

Languages are works of art, great libraries, how-to guides for living on planet Earth, windows into our minds and inalienable human rights. The Rosetta Project is The Long Now Foundation’s first exploration into very long-term archiving. It serves as a means to focus attention on the problem of digital obsolescence, and ways we might address that problem through creative archival storage methods.

Laura’s talk, titled ‘”The Rosetta Project: Strategies for Very Long-term Archiving” will focus on the Rosetta project and her experience with building this at Long Now. If you are interested hearing Laura speak and meeting fellow long-term thinkers, please RSVP at the Meetup site here.

James Fallows Seminar Tickets

 

The Long Now Foundation’s monthly
Seminars About Long-term Thinking

James Fallows on “Civilization’s Infrastructure”
TICKETS
Tuesday, October 6 02015 at 7:30pm SFJAZZ Center
Long Now Members can reserve 2 seats, join today! General Tickets $15

 

About this Seminar:

Infrastructure decisions—and failures to decide—affect everything about a society for centuries. That long shadow, James Fallows points out, is what makes the decisions so difficult, because “We must choose among options whose consequences we can’t fully anticipate.” What we do know is that infrastructure projects are hugely disruptive and expensive in the short term, and neglecting to deal with infrastructure is even more disruptive and expensive in the long term. What would a healthy civilization do?

These days California is making decisions about high-speed rail, about water supply for agriculture, about driverless cars, about clean energy—all infrastructure issues with long, uncertain shadows. Fallows reminds us that “Everything about today’s California life is conditioned by decisions about its freeway network made 60-plus years ago, and by the decision to tear up the Southern California light-rail network in the decades before that.” (That remark came in a 15-part series of blogs about high-speed rail in California that Fallows posted at theatlantic.com. He approves of the project.)

James Fallows is the journalist’s journalist, covering in depth subjects such as China, the Mideast, flying, the military, Presidential speeches (he once wrote them for Jimmy Carter), journalism itself, and his native California. Based at The Atlantic magazine for decades, he blogs brilliantly and has produced distinguished books such as Postcards from Tomorrow Square, Blind into Baghdad , and Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy.

This will be the first time he speaks about civilization entire.

SALT Summaries Kindle Book Update Available

Since their inception in 02003, the Seminars About Long-term Thinking have featured over 100 speakers from a wide range of disciplines. Curated by Stewart Brand, each of these Seminars address some aspect of long-term thinking. From the ideas presented and discussed in the live event, he crafts a summary which captures and elucidates these ideas.  A few days after a Seminar, this summary gets posted to the SALT list and blog, but we also collect these distillations in a book, “The SALT Summaries”. Every six months we update the Kindle eBook with the most recent Seminars, and we wanted to let our readers know how they can now update their Kindle book.

After you login to your Amazon account, go to the Manage Your Kindle page. On that page, you should see the cover of the book with an update option hovering above it. If you click update, the update should transfer to all of your devices. Thank you for supporting the Seminars About Long-term Thinking.

 

 

Sara Seager Seminar Media

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

Other Earths. Other Life.

Monday August 10, 02015 – San Francisco

Video is up on the Seager Seminar page.

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

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To find living exoplanets – a summary by Stewart Brand

Thanks to recent exoplanet research, Seager began, we now know that nearly all of our galaxy’s 300 billion stars are accompanied by planets, and a unexpectedly high number of them are rocky like Earth, and many of those orbit in a “habitable” range—meaning that they could harbor liquid water and perhaps life. How can we detect that life?

(To learn about the 4,700-plus planets so far discovered, Seager recommended an exciting dynamic map and encyclopedia from NASA called “Eyes on Exoplanets.” Seager predicts that “If an Earth 2.0 exists, we have the capability to find and identify it by the 02020s.”)

The way to discover life from a distance is to search for spectrographic evidence of “biosignature gases” such as oxygen or methane in the planetary atmosphere. To do that we have to acquire direct imaging of the rocky planets, but we can’t because our telescopes are blinded by the brilliance of the planet’s star, a billion times brighter than the planet. “It’s like looking for a firefly next to a searchlight, from thousands of miles away,” Seager said. Even the next planet-discovery telescope, called TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), which is coming in 02018, will not be able to study exoplanet atmospheres.

The solution that Seager has been working on is called Starshade. To perfectly occult a star with a perfectly dark, hard-edged shadow, it will be deployed tens of thousands of kilometers from its telescope. It will be a disk 15 to 20 meters in diameter, with a perimeter of exotically shaped “petals” to defeat the effect of light diffracting around the edges of the disk. The edges have to be geometrically exact and machined to razor sharpness. The Starshade would fly in formation with a telescope located at the stable Lagrange point called L2, a million miles from Earth in the direction away from the Sun. The cost, including launch, will be about $650 million—not currently budgeted by NASA.

Now that we know planets are extremely common, one of the profoundest questions is whether life is also common in our galaxy, or is it extremely rare? Seager thinks that life abounds out there, and we will be able to point to examples in this century.

Subscribe to our Seminar email list for updates and summaries.

Alexander Rose speaking in Portland September 17th

On Thursday, September 17th, Alexander Rose (Executive Director of Long Now) will give a talk on how to design for 10,000 years, including how he approached many of the unique design challenges of The Clock.

Thursday, September 17th

5:30 – 7:30 pm

Lincoln Recital Hall (PSU)

1620 SW Park Avenue
General Admission: $10

Tickets available here!

 

2,000-Year Old Termite Mounds Found in Central Africa

Much like ants, termites are a testament to the adage that a whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A single termite is an almost translucent creature, no more than a few millimeters long. But put several thousand of them together, and they become capable of building expansive structures, some reaching up as high as 17 feet.

Moreover, a recent discovery suggests that some termite mounds are not only very tall, but also very old. A joint Belgian-Congolese team of geologists carbon-dated a set of four mounds in the Congo’s Miombo Woods, and found them to be between 680 and 2200 years old. Though the oldest of these had been abandoned centuries ago, the researchers infer from their findings that some species of termites can inhabit one and the same structure for several hundreds of years. This far exceeds the lifespan of any one colony (which matches that of its queen), suggesting that a kind of intergenerational inheritance passes the mound from one queen to the next.

Swarm intelligence, it seems, leads not only to highly organized labor and solid engineering, but also to long-term thinking.

Marie’s Dictionary

This short documentary tells the story of Marie Wilcox, the last fluent speaker of the Wukchumni language and the dictionary she created in an effort to keep her language alive. Long Now’s PanLex project collects dictionaries such as these with the goal of creating a universal translation engine and fighting language extinction.

Paul Saffo Featured on Singularity Hub’s Ask An Expert Series

This week’s episode of Singularity Hub’s Ask an Expert features Long Now Board member Paul Saffo.

Ask an Expert is a new web series in which, well, experts answer tweeted questions about the future of technology. In this episode, Paul discusses virtual reality, weighs in on the word ‘disrupt’, and considers the possibility of having a wooly mammoth for a pet – with a quick shout-out to Long Now’s Revive & Restore project.

To see more videos in the Ask an Expert series, you can visit this page. And if you have a question of your own, you can tweet it to @singularityu with the hashtag #AskSU.