Stewart Brand's Blog, page 45

Jesse Ausubel Seminar Primer

On Tuesday, January 13, Jesse Ausubel will present Nature is Rebounding: Land- and Ocean-sparing Through Concentrating Human Activities, as part of our monthly Seminars About Long-Term Thinking. Each month the Seminar Primer gives you some background information about the speaker, including links to learn even more.

The stories and scary graphs aren’t hard to find: the global industrialization that has been taking place since the middle of the 19th century has had a disastrous effect on our environment. It has led to massive deforestation, depletion of other natural resources, and a (resulting) rise in greenhouse gases not seen in millions of years.

But Jesse Ausubel counters this gloom with a bit of optimism. He argues that modernity and technology are not necessarily the unusually destructive forces we make them out to be. Humans were impacting the world around them long before we first started burning fossil fuels to power large-scale factories. And the technological progress we’ve made since then, Ausubel suggests, can actually – and might very well – help us diminish our harmful environmental footprint.

Ausubel is an environmental scientist who combines research with an active policy agenda. He has played an important role in bringing environmental, ecological, and climate issues to the attention of governments and scientific agencies, and has been instrumental in the formulation of US and international climate research programs. He helped organize the first United Nations World Climate Conference in 01979 – the event that first brought the issue of global warming to governments’ attention – and served on a variety of federal research agencies throughout the 01980s and 90s.

Through his work with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, where he is a science advisor and former Vice President of Programs, Ausubel has pursued several efforts at documenting and conserving biodiversity. He helped develop the Census of Marine Life, an international mission to study the distribution, diversity, and abundance of life in Earth’s seas and oceans. The census has so far discovered numerous previously unknown species, and species thought to have gone extinct millennia ago. Honoring Ausubel’s efforts, a recently discovered deep-sea lobster was named Ausubel’s Mighty Clawed Lobster (or dinochelus ausubeli).

In addition, Ausubel is a co-founder of the Barcode of Life – an initiative to begin using very short genomic sequences (rather than morphological characteristics) as universal ‘barcodes’ for species identification. He is also founding chair of the Encyclopedia of Life, a wikipedia-like website, first proposed by former SALT speaker E.O. Wilson, that aims to catalog all species of life on earth.

Ausubel is currently Senior Research Associate and Director of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University, where he studies how human technological and economic development interact with the environment. He is considered a founder of the field of Industrial Ecology (and his 01989 textbook, Technology & Environment, is accepted as one of the sub-discipline’s foundational texts).

Ausubel argues that industrial development can help us diminish our harmful environmental footprint, because it always tends toward greater efficiency. As the New York Times reported in 02011,

In a recent interview in his office at Rockefeller University on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Mr. Ausubel explained his view that the environment will be protected, not harmed, by technology. Over the long run, he notes, the economy requires more efficient forms of energy, and these are inherently sparing of the environment. Cities used to use wood for heat and hay for transport fuel. But the required volumes of wood and horse feed soon led to more compact fuels like coal and oil.

Jesse Ausubel : Why Renewables are Not Green from Arcos Films on Vimeo.

As industry evolves, Ausubel argues, it constantly finds ways to use fewer material resources for every unit of production, thus decreasing its consumption of the world’s natural resources, including land. In other words, industrial development follows a path of dematerialization. Ausubel claims it is also on a course of decarbonization: a consistent and gradual replacement of carbon-based fuels by much more efficient hydrogen-based ones. Indeed, Ausubel is an advocate of nuclear power as a highly efficient source of energy, and a useful alternative that can help us spur society’s decarbonization along.

In a landmark paper, for which Ausubel won The Breakthrough Institute’s 02014 Paradigm Award, Ausubel concludes:

The builders of the beautiful home of the US National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., inscribed it with the epigraph, “To science, pilot of industry, conqueror of disease, multiplier of the harvest, explorer of the universe, revealer of nature’s laws, eternal guide to truth.” Finally, after a very long preparation, our science and technology are ready also to reconcile our economy and the environment … In fact, long before environmental policy became conscious of itself, the system had set decarbonization in motion. A highly efficient hydrogen economy, landless agriculture, industrial ecosystems in which waste virtually disappears: over the coming century these can enable large, prosperous human populations to co-exist with the whales and the lions and the eagles and all that underlie them–if we are mentally prepared, which I believe we are.

Human culture is poised to realize technology’s potential to liberate the environment, Ausubel suggests: we need simply to pursue our drive toward efficiency and greater convenience. This drive might just allow us to have our cake and eat it, too – a prosperous and growing human society amid a thriving natural environment.

To hear more about Jesse Ausubel’s vision of a prosperous human population co-existing peacefully with a thriving natural world, please join us on Tuesday, January 13 at the SFJAZZ Center.

 

Scotty Strachan: The Great Basin in the Anthropocene @ The Interval January 6 — The Mountains Keep Teaching

Photo by Scotty Strachan

January 6, 02015: Scotty Strachan (University Nevada-Reno)

Long Now’s Nevada: the Great Basin in the Anthropocene

Tickets are still available

This Tuesday a very special event begins our 02015 series of salon talks at The Interval in San Francisco. The Great Basin in the Anthropocene on January 6 will be a night full of science, natural beauty, and Long Now lore.

Scotty Strachan will talk about the natural history of the Great Basin Region. Scotty’s scientific research includes study of the climate and hydrology of the area as well as tree-ring analysis of bristlecone pines. This work has been conducted throughout the region including on Long Now’s property on Mount Washington in Nevada. Alexander Rose, Long Now’s Executive Director, will give a special introduction about Long Now’s history and connection with the area. You can purchase tickets here while they last.

In Stewart Brand’s 02004 TED talk (full video below), he tells some of the story of Long Now’s Mount Washington. It’s a talk Stewart called “How Mountains Teach”.

In 02004 we were considering the mountain as the initial site for the 10,000 Year Clock. And while we are currently building in Texas, we remain committed to this fascinating, important area. Long Now’s property features the largest group of bristlecone pines on private land. Bristlecones are amongst the oldest living things on the planet and are a symbol of The Long Now.

As Stewart says in the talk:

If you go up on top of those cliffs, that’s some of the Long Now land in those trees. And if you go up there and look back, then you’ll get a sense of what the view starts to be like from the top of the mountain. That’s the long view. That’s 80 miles to the horizon. And that’s also timberline and those bristlecones really are shrubs. That’s a different place to be. It’s 11,400 feet and it’s exquisite.

This talk is a great introduction not only to Mt. Washington, but also to the entire Great Basin region. Alexander’s introduction before Scotty’s talk will revisit the story of Long Now’s purchase of the land, and talk about why it means so much to our organization.

Scotty is also a talented photographer. While conducting field research in the mountains and valleys of eastern Nevada, he also takes the time to document the natural beauty of the area. We are thrilled to share dozens of Scotty’s photographs not only during his talk but on video screens at The Interval leading up to and following his talk. Below are just a few examples of Scotty’s work. Tickets and more information about the talk are here.

All photos by Scotty Strachan

The Thing from the Future: Prognostication Can Be Fun

Imagining the future can be daunting, but The Thing from the Future card game makes it fun. While its creators the Situation Lab (a project of artist/designer Jeff Watson and Long Now fellow Stuart Candy) simply call it “an imagination game”, it’s quite an elegant factory for generating alternative futures.

Through collaboratively and competitively describing objects from a range of possible futures, The Thing from the Future players confront questions about the near and long-term future from unconventional vantages that yield creative solutions. Each round of the game begins with a collectively generated creative prompt that describes the type of future a yet-to-be-imagined object comes from, as well as where it fits in a given culture or society, what kind of object it is, and what sort of emotional reaction an observer from the present might have when confronted with it. The player who comes up with the most compelling future scenario wins the round.

The Thing from the Future underscores how the constraints of generative systems can be used to inspire long term thinking. In their 02006 SALT talk Playing with Time, Brian Eno and Will Wright discussed the role of generative systems in their respective fields of music and game design.

“The power of generative systems is you make seeds rather than forests.”

-Brian Eno, June 02006 Playing with Time SALT

Whether a game of chess, a computer simulation of a city, or a piece of music, from a simple set of rules, or “seeds,” complex futures emerge. Changing any one of these rules vastly affects the future outcome. In the case of The Thing From the Future, the constraints are the key to enabling players to break out of traditional patterns of thinking about the future. In that sense, The Thing From the Future evokes Eno’s Oblique Strategies, a card game of aphorisms that the artistically-inclined are encouraged to turn to in moments of creative blockage. For example: “Do nothing for as long as possible.”. “Repetition is a form of change,” reads another.

In a 01980 interview, Eno discussed the inspiration behind the cards:

The Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations when    the panic of the situation – particularly in studios – tended to make me quickly forget that there were other ways of working and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach.

In much the same way that Oblique Strategies inspires “tangential” ways of thinking in moments of creative panic, The Thing from the Future grounds musings about the future and turns them into concrete scenarios.

The Thing From The Future, while intellectually stimulating, is at its core, fun, and meant to be played by anyone. You can buy it online here or stop by and ask to use the deck we keep at The Interval (open daily from 10am-midnight).

 

Oxford’s Oak Beams, and Other Tales of Humans and Trees in Long-Term Partnership

Here at Long Now, we often like to tell the story – or perhaps better said, legend – of the oak beams at New College in Oxford. First told to Stewart Brand by anthropologist Gregory Bateson, this short and simple story epitomizes the tremendous value we can reap from some long-term thinking.

Photo via Tripadvisor

Despite what the name may suggest, New College is one of Oxford’s oldest. Founded in 01379, at its heart lies a dining hall that features expansive oak beams across its ceiling. About a century ago, an entomologist discovered that the beams were infested with beetles and would need replacing. The College agonized over where they might find oaks of sufficient size and quality to make new beams. Then, as Stewart Brand recounts,

One of the Junior Fellows stuck his neck out and suggested that there might be some worthy oaks on the College lands. These colleges are endowed with pieces of land scattered across the country which are run by a college Forester. They called in the College Forester, who of course had not been near the college itself for some years, and asked him if there were any oaks for possible use.

He pulled his forelock and said, “Well sirs, we was wonderin’ when you’d be askin’.”

Upon further inquiry it was discovered that when the College was founded, a grove of oaks had been planted to replace the beams in the dining hall when they became beetly, because oak beams always become beetly in the end. This plan had been passed down from one Forester to the next for over five hundred years saying “You don’t cut them oaks. Them’s for the College Hall.”

In all likelihood, the story is a blend of myth and reality. While the College, in keeping with standard woodland practices in Britain, has always kept groves of oaks intended for construction purposes, it isn’t clear that any particular set of trees was officially designated to replace the beams of the College dining hall.

But as with all good legends, this story conveys a larger truth: that a symbiotic relationship with the natural world around us is a useful and sustainable way to maintain human civilization for centuries to come. Atlas Obscura concludes:

Somewhere on the land owned by the New College are oaks that are, or will one day, be worthy of use in the great hall, assuming that they are managed in the same way they were before. It is in this management by the Forester in which lies the point. Ultimately, while the story is perhaps apocryphal, the idea of replacing and managing resources for the future, and the lesson in long term thinking is not.

There are other stories that, like this one, convey the value of this kind of long-term partnership. For example, NPR recently featured a story on the Bosco Che Suona – the ‘woods that sing’. It’s in this Italian Alpine forest that Antonio Stradivari, Giuseppi Guarneri, and Nicola Amati found the spruce trees from which they made their world-famous violins.

Photo via Trivago.it

Centuries later, artisan luthiers still come to these woods to source their raw material – and it is in large part due to this ongoing use that the Bosco continues to thrive. In partnership with local foresters, instrument makers select trees they think produce high-quality violins. The felled tree in turn makes room for new saplings, and the many months required for the production of a single instrument ensures that these young trees have time to grow up. NPR writes:

Before a tree hits the chopping block, Mazzucchi looks around to see if there are any tiny saplings struggling to grow nearby. If so, removing an adult tree will let more sun in and actually help the babies mature.

Bruno Cosignani, the head of the local forest service, explains that light is the limiting factor on tree growth.

“As soon as a tree falls down, those who were born and suffering in the shadows can start to grow more quickly,” he says.

And centuries from now, those trees, too, might become musical instruments.

Photo via Wikipedia

Elsewhere in the Mediterranean, forests of cork oak likewise thrive in large part because of their utility to human industry. For centuries, possibly even millennia, the bark of these trees has been used to make the cork stoppers that keep wine (or any other liquid) inside a bottle. Because only the outer coating is harvested, the trees are left to stand – and thus continue to sustain both local ecosystems and human economies. As a feature in the Huffington Post explains,

Clearly, the environment supports rural livelihoods (and diets). But it also provides substantial ecosystem services. By resisting both fire and drought, cork oaks stabilize the region’s sandy soils and hold a line against creeping desertification. The trees, which are neither irrigated nor treated with herbicides or fertilizers, store carbon. (Because a harvested tree needs to regenerate its bark, it absorbs up to five times more carbon than an unharvested tree.) They also provide plant and animal habitat, absorb rainfall and prevent soil erosion, thus protecting the watershed that supplies two thirds of Lisbon’s drinking water.

Photo via Portuguese American Journal

By harvesting material sustainably, the cork industry supports, rather than endangers, these forests. In fact, the largest threat to the Mediterranean cork oaks in recent decades has been the advent of aluminum screw caps and plastic corks. Without utility for the wine industry, there is little economic incentive to help sustain these cork groves.

Photo by Michelle Chaplow

These three different stories share a common message: by making responsible use of natural resources, we actually allow them to thrive, in turn ensuring their availability for centuries to come. In each of these three instances, humans have developed a symbiosis with trees that is uniquely long-term in approach. Whether out of respect for their lengthy lifespans, a recognition of their vital importance to aerobic life, or simply for utilitarian reasons, humans in each of these three instances make use of trees in ways that deliberately foster their longevity. Long-term thinking can be difficult for us short-lived humans, but perhaps trees can help us make a leap beyond the horizon of our own lifespans. Like the 10,000 Year Clock, trees – alive like us, but for so much longer – can help us imagine a time scale, and thus a world, that exceeds our own.

Rick Prelinger: Lost Landscapes of San Francisco (02013) — Seminar Flashback

Rick Prelinger photo by Cory Doctorow

In December 02013 film archivist Rick Prelinger presented Lost Landscapes of San Francisco 8 for our Seminars About Long-term Thinking series. It’s been an annual tradition in our series since 02008. Click here to watch the full video. We do not publish audio podcasts for Lost Landscapes events because of their reliance on visuals.

Rick, the founder of the Prelinger Archives, curates a vintage filmic view of San Francisco to show our audience each December at the historic Castro Theater. He includes some industrial films and Hollywood “B roll”, but primarily Rick showcases home movies by amateur San Francisco filmmakers of decades past. As most footage is silent, Rick always begins the night by reminding the sold-out audience that “You are the soundtrack!”

From Stewart Brand’s summary of the event (in full here):

Rick’s film this time featured the China Clipper taking off from the water next to the World’s Fair on Treasure Island; another float plane hopping along the water from Oakland to San Francisco as a ferry; the now outlawed traditional downtown blizzard of calendar pages drifting down from highrise offices celebrating the last day of work every December; the dirt roads of Telegraph Hill leading to Julius’ Castle; one of the 80,000 Victory Gardens in the city during World War 2; the bay filled with war ships (no one was supposed to photograph them); a tourist promotion film lauding San Francisco’s “invigorating sea mists”; a drive down historic middle Market Street, with the audience crying out a landmark: There’s the Twitter Building!

Video of the twelve most recent Long Now Seminars is free for all to view. Lost Landscapes of San Francisco 8 is a recent SALT talk, free for public viewing until February 02014. The most recent 12 currently also includes Lost Landscapes of San Francisco 9 (from December 4, 02014). Long Now members can see all Seminar videos in HD including the five previous years of Rick’s “Lost Landscapes”.

Rick Prelinger is an archivist and filmmaker based in San Francisco. In 01983 Rick founded the Prelinger Archives which focus on home movies and industrial films. With his wife Megan Prelinger he runs The Prelinger Library in San Francisco: an independent research library with regular public hours. His film project No More Road Trips? is assembled from hundreds of home movies dating back to the 1920s. It has screened at the New York Film Festival and SXSW. Rick serves on the Board of The Internet Archive.

The Seminars About Long-term Thinking series began in 02003 and is presented each month live in San Francisco. It is curated and hosted by Long Now’s President Stewart Brand. Seminar audio is available to all via podcast.

Everyone can watch full video of the last 12 Long Now Seminars (including this video until February 02015). Long Now members can watch the full ten years of Seminars in HD. Membership levels start at $8/month and include lots of benefits.

You can join Long Now here.

Salt Crystals and Selfies: Curiosity after the Seven Minutes of Terror

In October 02013, NASA engineer Adam Steltzner spoke to the Long Now about landing the Curiosity rover on Mars. A decade of exhausted alternatives led Seltzner’s team to take the unconventional approach of a mini-rocket “sky crane” controlled by artificial intelligence to guide the rover to the Martian surface. Because the crane could not be tested on Earth, NASA would have to brave a $2.5 billion attempt on Mars to know it was successful. A 4×12 mile landing target at the Gale Crater left virtually no margin for error. It was a tense moment for martian space travel, which historically has a 42% mission success rate.

It also made for compelling entertainment. Curiosity’s successful landing in August 02012 was a global event witnessed by millions, aided no doubt by a NASA social media campaign that included Curiosity video games, humorous tweets delivered in first-person by the rover, and “seven minutes of terror” ads that framed the descent as a high-stakes action film unfolding live before viewers’ eyes.

Guess who just got an “attitude adjustment”? My mood’s fine; I needed to reposition my medium-gain antenna for Earth communication

— Curiosity Rover (@MarsCuriosity) July 19, 2012

A tweet from @MarsCuriosity ahead of landing on Mars.

28 Months on Mars, a new visual storytelling project from the New York Times, provides a window into what Curiosity has been up to since the dramatic landing. An HTML5 multimedia timeline weaves together patchwork snapshots taken by the rover with three-dimensional renderings of the martian landscape, immersing viewers in the bumpy twists and turns of Curiosity’s journey through the dried lakebed of the Gale Crater as it seeks to answer whether Mars could ever have supported life.

Wheels show gashed wear and tear after five miles on the unforgiving Gale Crater terrain. An unexpected week-long hiatus occurs when Curiosity has to troubleshoot a software update downloaded from Earth. Drilling samples at the Mojave rock outcrop reveal rice-shaped salt crystals (picture above) that suggest a past cycle of wet and dry conditions necessary for supporting microbial life. And at each noteworthy moment, Curiosity takes a selfie.

The project is part of a growing trend in space exploration to use social media and short-form visual storytelling to engage the public and make the challenges and rewards of decades-long space missions more accessible.

Other recent efforts show the potential of short-form media to bring out the long-term narrative of extended scientific endeavors in space: NASA’s Global Selfie campaign for Earth Day 02014 resulted in over 50,000 submissions from 113 countries, and Astronomy Pic of the Day, a NASA project that shares daily photographs of the cosmos, has upwards of a million followers on Twitter. Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield became a pop culture phenomenon through his social media dispatches from the International Space Station; and the European Space Agency has said November 02014’s Rosetta Comet landing (whose hashtag, #cometlanding, was trending globally for days) marked a “watershed” in the agency’s efforts to connect with the public.

Experience 28 Months on Mars here: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/09/science/space/curiosity-rover-28-months-on-mars.html?_r=1

Long Now’s Nevada and Artists with Lasers: January 02015 at The Interval

We have just announced our lineup of upcoming events at The Interval for 02015. The first four months of the year will feature talks on art, science, history, technology and long-term thinking. Tickets are on sale now for the first two:

January 6, 02015

Scotty Strachan: The Great Basin in the Anthropocene

environmental researcher at University Nevada-Reno

Scotty will talk about his scientific research in the Great Basin region including the Long Now owned site on Mount Washington in Nevada
January 20, 02015

Mathieu Victor: Artists with Lasers

artist, technology consultant (formerly of Jeff Koons studio)

first in a series on art, time, and technology talks produced with ZERO1

Space is limited at these events and tickets will sell out. So get yours early. If you make a tax-deductible donation to The Interval you’ll be added to our list for early notice about Interval event tickets. More information on these events below.

When we opened The Interval in June 02014 one of our goals was to host great events in our cafe/bar/museum space at Fort Mason in San Francisco. It was important that these talks complement our larger format Seminars About Long-term Thinking series which we produce for audiences of several hundred in San Francisco each month and are enjoyed around the world via podcast.

So The Interval’s “salon talk” series events are more frequent (2 or 3 times a month) and intimate: fewer than 100 people attend and have the chance to meet and converse with our speaker afterward. So far we’ve produced 14 events in this series and all of them have sold out. They are being recorded and will eventually become a podcast of their own. But we don’t yet have a timeline for that, so your best bet is to attend in person.

Scotty Strachan speaks at The Interval on January 6, 02015

Tuesday January 6, 02015:

Scotty Strachan: Long Now’s Nevada: the Great Basin in the Anthropocene

Our first Interval salon talk of 02015 features geographer Scotty Strachan discussing the Great Basin region of eastern Nevada. Amonst his other work Scotty conducts research on Long Now’s Mount Washington property. Scotty has done extensive work with bristlecone pine trees which are amongst the oldest organisms on the planet often living for several thousand years. He will discuss his work in eastern Nevada and put it in perspective with climate science efforts worldwide.

Mathieu Victor speaks at The Interval on January 20, 02015

Tuesday January 20, 02015:

Mathieu Victor: Artists with Lasers. Art, Tech, & Craft in the 21st Century

A creator, art historian and technologist, Mathieu Victor has worked for artists, galleries, and leading design studios. Mathieu’s study of past practice matched with his experience in executing extraordinary contemporary projects give him a unique perspective on how art in the physical world benefits from the digital age.

Other highlights of the 02015 salon talk schedule that we’ve announced: The Interval’s architect/design team Because We Can and Jason Scott of the Internet Archive will speak in February; and Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Rhodes will talk about his new book on the Spanish Civil War in March. More talks will be announced soon. We hope you’ll join us at The Interval soon.

Jesse Ausubel Seminar Tickets

 

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

Jesse Ausubel presents “Nature is Rebounding: Land- and Ocean-sparing through Concentrating Human Activities”
TICKETS
Tuesday January 13, 02015 at 7:30pm SFJAZZ Center
Long Now Members can reserve 2 seats, join today! General Tickets $15

 

About this Seminar:

Jesse Ausubel is an environmental scientist and program manager of a number of global biodiversity and ecology research programs. Ausubel serves as Director and Senior Research Associate of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University.

He was instrumental in organizing the first UN World Climate Conference which was held in Geneva in 01979, and is one of the founders of the field of Industrial Ecology.

Ferreting the Genome

Revive & Restore Unveils Open Genomics for Conservation Initiative

Revive & Restore is embarking on its first open-access science initiative – Ferreting the Genome: Open Genomics for Conservation. The initiative will enlist the help of the public to understand how the black-footed ferret gene pool has changed from the founding population to the current generation. The goal is to determine, through this understanding, how genetic rescue techniques might be applied to conserve the species.

The black-footed ferret is a model species for this research; information from this initiative will aid the designs of captive breeding programs worldwide. From the website anyone can link to the first fully sequenced black-footed ferret nuclear genomes and participate in the analysis and interpretation of the data.

If open-access science for genetic rescue emerges as a successful method for gaining relevant insight into a large genomic dataset, it too could become a model method for finding genomic conservation solutions for endangered species.

Why the Black-footed Ferret?

Photo by J. Michael Lockhart, USFWS

The past 25 years of captive breeding have led to a loss of genetic diversity. Genetic diversity has been shown in conservation to be directly related to the health, or long-term survival/adaptability, of a species. For the black-footed ferret, genetic rescue means finding ways to bring back the diversity lost from inbreeding. The Black-footed Ferret Recovery Program has already pioneered genetic rescue techniques with advanced reproductive technologies, producing ferrets from “cryogenic artificial insemination” using 20-year-old cryopreserved spermatozoa to fertilize living females. These ferrets, born from parents spanning 20 years of generations, may bring back lost genetic diversity. The continuing decline of genetic variability in the black-footed ferret’s gene pool urgently needs a solution.

Dr. Oliver Ryder, Adjunct Professor of Behavior and Evolution at UC San Diego and Director of Genetics, Kleberg Chair at the San Diego Zoo Global will blog from time to time about the progress of this exciting initiative and respond to comments. Read his blog here.

Cryogenic artificial insemination is a powerful tool, but may be aided by other advanced reproductive strategies and de-extinction techniques; the first stage in diversifying genetic rescue methods lies in the genomes of ferrets both present and past – this is where our initiative begins. DNA samples of two living ferrets born in captivity – Cheerio and Balboa – were provided by the Black-footed Ferret Recovery Team and cell cultures from two additional ferrets – an unnamed male wild-caught at Meeteetse between 1985-1987 and Willa, wild-caught at Meeteetse between 1985-1987 – were provided by the San Diego Frozen Zoo.

Cofactor Genomics, sponsored by Revive & Restore, sequenced the DNA samples provided by the US Fish & Wildlife Service and the San Diego Frozen Zoo. The closely related domestic ferret is used extensively for human medical research, and its genome has been thoroughly sequenced and analyzed by the Broad Institute. That data is linked from the website and offers an excellent reference genome for the black-footed ferret material: as much as 92% of the black-footed ferret genome can be mapped and analyzed with the domestic ferret genome.

Please join us to conserve this endangered species. Send your comments or questions to revive+ferreting@longnow.org.

“Wanderers” Short Film Gives Glimpse of Our Possible Future in Space

“Wanderers“, a short film by director Erik Wernquist, depicts a not-so-far future in which humanity has expanded throughout the solar system. The film starts with a panorama of humans 10,000 years ago at the dawn of civilization, a key point of reference in Long Now’s own intellectual ecosystem.

There are two specific aspects that set the video apart: the carefully researched hard science behind each shot of the video and the generally optimistic depiction of the future. To make the video, director Erik Wernquist made composite shots from images from different space missions and then filled in the rest. This image gallery gives a breakdown of the sources and science behind each shot in the film.

The generally optimistic tone of the film is in contrast with much of contemporary science fiction, which as a general rule shows dystopian scenarios in our near future. The call for more optimistic visions of our future has become a major point of discussion in the science fiction community, with author (and Interval donor) Neil Stephenson launch of Project Hieroglyph, an initiative that challenges science fiction authors to imagine optimistic hard-science futures.