Stewart Brand's Blog, page 70

Brian Eno on Light and Time

“I don’t go for scale, I go for length. I just want things that can go on forever.”

In collaboration with the Red Bull Music Academy, m ss ing p eces recently produced a short film about Long Now Board Member Brian Eno’s visual art. Accompanying an exhibit of 77 Million Paintings and a lecture by Eno in New York, the film explores Eno’s experiments with light-focused images as a way of addressing our being in time. In a blend of pictures and words, Eno muses about his interest in conceiving visual processes, rather than products: his aim is to generate organic, ever-growing and ever-changing creations that ask us to surrender to their pace.

“If we look at what gardeners do, they think, well, I’ll put nasturtiums here, and I’ll have narcissus here, and I’ll have peonies over here. But they know that that’s just the start of a garden. A garden grows, and it grows unpredictably. You can specify the starting point, and you can hope that it’s going to turn out in some way that you like. But essentially, you surrender to the project. You surrender to the thing growing in its own way. And there’s a gracefulness in being able to surrender.”

Long Now Salon: Membership Offer for Flask Level Donors (Tuesday)

Long Now is in the process of founding a 21st Century Salon: a social venue that celebrates long-term thinking, showcases our projects, serves delicious beverages, and inspires amazing conversations. Today you can support that effort and Long Now will give you a year’s membership as thanks.

All day Tuesday, if you donate to the Salon at one of our Flask levels or above you get a year’s membership to Long Now (you can also extend an existing membership or assign a gift membership, alternatively). A one-year Stainless Steel Long Now membership includes all you see below…

For the generous tax-deductible gift of $500 you get all of that and more. You are investing in the future of Long Now, as we bring the design of our first dedicated public venue to life. And you will enjoy our Seminars to the fullest with reserved tickets to our events, a real time audio stream, and high quality video that includes our back catalog of amazing speakers.

You also get the great Flask-level benefits including the choice of a Yixing clay-lined tea flask or a Window flask. And at our higher levels you can get a personal reserve of rare tea or Bristlecone Gin and much more. You can see all the details and make a contribution here. This offer is only good for Tuesday, June 25 (until midnight Pacific time).

So whether you are close to us in the Bay Area or on the other side of the world, your gift and membership brings the Long Now to you while also helping us immeasurably in our future progress. You can imagine the programs we will bring you in our new space.

If you’ve been waiting to donate to the Salon then now is the time. Our funds raised by the end of the month will help us get a discounted rate on Salon construction from our builder. So your contribution means even more. After you donate just reply to the confirmation email, letting us know if you want the membership in your name or someone else’s.

On Monday we debuted a new dedicated Long Now Salon twitter (@longnowsalon) and Facebook page for ongoing news and updates. As construction continues we will share finalized design details, fundraising updates, and videos and images of all the particulars on the path to the Salon opening.

We hope you will consider giving today and help us spread the word.

More exciting announcements ahead. Thanks so much for your interest and support of The Long Now Foundation!

Complementary Long Now Membership for Salon “Flask” Level Donors Today

Long Now is in the process of founding a 21st Century Salon: a social venue that celebrates long-term thinking, showcases our projects, serves delicious beverages, and inspires amazing conversations. Today you can support that effort and Long Now will give you a year’s membership as thanks.

All day Tuesday, if you donate to the Salon at one of our Flask levels or above you get a year’s membership to Long Now (you can also extend an existing membership or assign a gift membership, alternatively). A one-year Stainless Steel Long Now membership includes all you see below…

For the generous tax-deductible gift of $500 you get all of that and more. You are investing in the future of Long Now, as we bring the design of our first dedicated public venue to life. And you will enjoy our Seminars to the fullest with reserved tickets to our events, a real time audio stream, and high quality video that includes our back catalog of amazing speakers.

You also get the great Flask-level benefits including the choice of a Yixing clay-lined tea flask or a Window flask. And at our higher levels you can get a personal reserve of rare tea or Bristlecone Gin and much more. You can see all the details and make a contribution here. This offer is only good for Tuesday, June 25 (until midnight Pacific time).

So whether you are close to us in the Bay Area or on the other side of the world, your gift and membership brings the Long Now to you while also helping us immeasurably in our future progress. You can imagine the programs we will bring you in our new space.

If you’ve been waiting to donate to the Salon then now is the time. Our funds raised by the end of the month will help us get a discounted rate on Salon construction from our builder. So your contribution means even more. After you donate just reply to the confirmation email, letting us know if you want the membership in your name or someone else’s.

On Monday we debuted a new dedicated Long Now Salon twitter (@longnowsalon) and Facebook page for ongoing news and updates. As construction continues we will share finalized design details, fundraising updates, and videos and images of all the particulars on the path to the Salon opening.

We hope you will consider giving today and help us spread the word.

More exciting announcements ahead. Thanks so much for your interest and support of The Long Now Foundation!

Ed Lu Seminar Media

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

Anthropocene Astronomy: Thwarting Dangerous Asteroids Begins with Finding Them

Tuesday June 18, 02013 – San Francisco

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

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

The last killer asteroid- a summary by Stewart Brand

Kevin Kelly wrote the following about Ed Lu’s Seminar About Long-term Thinking (SALT) titled “Anthropocene Astronomy: Thwarting Dangerous Asteroids Begins with Finding Them”…

Last night’s SALT talk was one of the most important ones we ever hosted. For several reasons:

Nine years ago, SALT hosted Rusty Schweickart’s talk on the long term asteroid problem, wherein he presented the problem and challenge. Now nine years later, Ed Lu presented a very workable solution. There’s an arc of thinking big over a span of time that we participated in.
While most SALT talks focus on problems, last night’s was extremely focused on a solution.
The solution itself is a (workable) long term project, that has a delayed gratification.
The problem being solved is neither trivial nor superficial but complicated and existential. It’s a big deal.
If B612 was not already doing this, it would make a perfect Long Now project.

–KK

I agree. Consider this summary a pitch to donate to the cause. I’ll end with a link to B612’s website.

Lu began by noting that deflecting lethal asteroids is the easy part. We know how to do it and already have the needed technology. Years before a threatening asteroid converges with Earth, we can ram it from behind with a rocket with the precise amount of energy needed to speed it up just enough to miss our planet and keep on missing us in the future.

Funding such a mission will be straightforward. Once you know when (and even where) a catastrophic impact will occur, there will be abundant motivation to pay for heading it off. With good sky reconnaissance, we’ll have years of warning. But that reconnaissance doesn’t exist yet.

Detection of asteroids is the hard part. There are about a million near-Earth objects (NEOs) of dangerous size (over 50 meters), but only one percent of them—10,000—have been located so far.

The best way to locate the rest is with an infrared-detecting telescope following Venus in its orbit around the Sun, looking outward to Earth’s orbit. With the intense radiation of the Sun behind it, the telescope can detect the infrared glow of asteroids and precisely gauge their size and orbits, building a detailed threat map good for centuries.

What are we looking for? Asteroids that Lu calls “city killers” are about the size of a theater—an airburst of one could destroy the whole San Francisco Bay Area. “In our children’s lifetime the chance of impact from one of these is about 30 percent.” In the same period there is a 1 percent chance of an asteroid impact equivalent to all the bombs in World War II times 5; it could kill 100 million people. “We buy fire insurance against risk with lower probability than that.” Then there’s a kilometer-size asteroid, which would destroy all of humanity permanently. The chance of collision with one in our children’s lifetime—.001 percent.

No government has stepped up to detecting asteroids in the detail needed, so astronauts Rusty Schweickart and Ed Lu and their B612 Foundation set about doing it with non-government money and non-government efficiency. The cost and schedule for getting a superb telescope designed, built, and in the orbit of Venus is $200 million, 5 years. The telescope, called Sentinel, has been designed by the world’s best space telescope crafters. Coordination with (highly enthusiastic) NASA has been worked out. Launch is planned for 2018.

Now it’s a matter of funding. The current milestone goal is $20 million. For perspective, Lu reminded his San Francisco audience that the refit of the city’s Museum of Modern Art, now underway, is expected to cost $500 million and be good for about 50 years. At half the cost of a refreshed museum (a worthy cause), the funders of Sentinel can save the whole world, permanently.

B612’s website is here.

Subscribe to our Seminar email list for updates and summaries.

Being Human Conference 02013

On September 28, 02013, the second Being Human conference will he held at the Nourse Theater in San Francisco. With talks by neuroscientists, philosophers, anthropologists and psychologists, this day-long event seeks to probe science’s developing picture of what it means to be human. As the organizers put it,

For most of human history we’ve been trying to understand our lives based on metaphysical, religious, and supernatural concepts. Then the Age of Enlightenment ushered in science and Darwin’s remarkable theory of evolution—a powerful new way to look at ourselves and the world. Now disciplines such as cognitive neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, genetics, anthropology, and philosophy are delivering fascinating new findings which have the potential to radically remake the way we see ourselves. Based on these scientific insights, a more comprehensive view of human nature is now emerging.

Long Now Board Member David Eagleman is among the presenters – he’ll lead the day’s final session, “The Future of Being Human.” At last year’s inaugural Being Human, he discussed the vast complexity of the human brain:

Discounted early registration is available until July 1st.

Long Now Members can also get a 10% discount via a promotional code that you’ll find in your email.

Long Now Salon Funding Update

A week ago we announced that construction of the Long Now Salon has begun along with a new phase of fundraising to support the project. The salon is a venue for small events and big ideas, contemplation and conversation about long-term thinking, deep thoughts and inspiring beverages.

We wanted to give you an update on how things are going so far.

We’ve raised more than $14,000 this first week, bringing our overall total past the $180,000 mark, and over 100 people have contributed to the campaign so far. There has been great enthusiasm for the Salon on social networks, as you can see from the tweets below.

There’s a lot of excitement about the rare vintage Pu’erh tea we are offering to Founders Tea Club donors and our partnership with Samovar Tea Lounge to provide great tea for our Salon menu.

Many Long Now members and other supporters have contributed at the $100 level and received a special Long Now Challenge Coin. You can see one of these below:

This hefty stainless steel coin features an engraved image of a Bristlecone Pine on one side and our Carpe Millennium logo on the other. Challenge Coins have a fascinating tradition. More on that soon.

Overall the project will cost nearly a half million dollars, to stay on schedule we want to reach the $250,000 mark by the end of June. And we’d love your help, both by spreading the word on social networks and by considering a tax-deductible contribution of anywhere from $10 to $25,000.

More information is in the video below. Will you help us build it?

Making in Italy/Making in USA

Long Now Executive Director Alexander Rose and former SALT Speaker Chris Anderson will appear this weekend in an event that seeks to bring together Italian artisanal design with Silicon Valley innovation.

Innovating with Beauty runs through June 24th and features symposia, workshops and exhibitions exploring the possibilities of collaboration between Italy’s design community and Silicon Valley technologists and makers.

Chris Anderson will give the opening speech for a symposium called From Taylorism to Tailor Made on Saturday June 22nd beginning at 2:00pm. Other participants in the symposium include MAKE’s Dale Doherty and Long Now’s Alexander Rose. The event will be at San Francisco’s Academy of Art University. The public are welcome to attend this free symposium and can view the event’s details here.

Other events include the opening of “The New Italian Design,” an exhibition at the Academy of Art University and “From Made in Italy to Make in Italy”, a workshop and exhibition featuring Italian designers and engineers.

Long Now Salon: Founders Tea Club

There’s no reason long-term drinking has to be limited to handcrafted spirits. For our Long Now Salon we will serve artisan coffee and tea during the day, but we were looking for something really special, ideally with a relation to time. Neither coffee nor tea tend to improve with age.

Jesse Jacobs, creator of San Francisco’s Samovar Tea Lounge, found us a Long Now-suited exception to the rule: Pu-erh tea, a fermented (non-alcoholic) tea from the Yunnan province of China. The distinctive flavor of Fine Pu-erh actually improves with age, and it pairs nicely with long conversations, because its flavor persists over up to 20 (lightly caffeinated) infusions.

The rare 01989 Suncha Pu-erh that Jesse helped us find for the Salon is literally the last of its vintage. This Pu-erh is a unique blend of cooked tea and the traditionally fermented type.

Those who donate $1,500 or more to the construction of the Salon can reserve a vessel of this rare 01989 vintage Suncha Pu-erh. As it gets better with time, we will keep your 15-20 servings of tea here for you to be steeped whenever you visit. ($500 refill) You also get a Challenge Coin and a special Yixing Clay Tea Flask.

Jesse created Samovar in order to offer people a place, in his words,

“to slow down, unplug, and wake up.”

We’ll be working with Samovar for all the fine teas at the Salon, as that’s exactly the kind of thinking that matches our goal of creating a place for conversation.

Pu-erh Tea for the Long Now Salon by Samovar from The Long Now Foundation on Vimeo.

Stewart Brand at SF Premiere of Pandora’s Promise – June 14th, 02013

Pandora’s Promise, a new documentary by filmmaker Robert Stone, takes a look at nuclear power as a possible player in the mix of technologies we’ll need to meet energy demand without pushing atmospheric CO2 beyond safe levels. Long Now co-founder Stewart Brand and other former SALT speakers Mark Lynas, Gwyneth Cravens and Richard Rhodes are interviewed in the film.

Pandora’s Promise premiers in San Francisco (and in many other locations) on Friday June 14th. The 7:25 showing that evening will conclude with a Q&A session with Director Robert Stone and Stewart Brand.

Long Now Associate (and Laughing Squid blogger) Mikl Em got a chance to see an early screening of the film and says:

Pandora’s Promise is full of surprising revelations: from seeing Maggie Thatcher speak presciently in 1989 about the coming danger of CO2 levels to watching John Kerry proudly championing the shuttering of a scientifically exemplary nuclear power research facility. Veteran documentary filmmaker Robert Stone presents firsthand accounts from five high-profile environmentalists including Stewart Brand, who all now urge reexamination of the case for nuclear power. It’s a reminder to everyone that first instinct are not always right, that facts should be valued over pride, that popular momentum has no taste for subtleties, and that we need to get to work to fix our energy problems.

In support of long-term thinking, Long Now seeks to consider solutions to climate change and other long-term issues, but to leave advocacy of particular solutions to policy makers and activists. Brand and the others speak for themselves in Pandora’s Promise, not for Long Now. Nuclear power, whether one supports it or not, represents an issue that spans generations and deserves a serious long-term dialogue.

Long Now Salon Begins Construction

With your help construction will be starting soon! Our new Long Now Salon Page now features six additional giving options starting at $10.  We’ve also added gifts and recognitions to show our appreciation to all contributors in a distinctive Long Now style.

You can see all the new stuff at: https://longnow.org/salon/

 Please consider supporting the Salon with a tax-deductible gift at any level. If you’ve been waiting to give, now is the time as we are trying to get the work done while we have a discount with the construction company. We have begun to move out and start demolition, so now is the most important time to help us make the Salon a reality.

We would be honored if you can share the link and spread the word through your social networks, we have already eceived some great tweets from past speakers and friends of Long Now:

“Kickstarter for the Long Now Foundation’s new salon, one of SF’s most interesting institutions. longnow.org/salon/”

— Michael Pollan (@michaelpollan) June 8, 2013

“This @longnow project is amazing. longnow.org/salon/”

— Tim Ferriss (@tferriss) June 7, 2013

“Nice project: @longnow foundation is doing a “brickstarter” to fund their new salon space at Fort Mason longnow.org/salon/”

— Tim O’Reilly (@timoreilly) June 8, 2013

“Help kickstart a drinking salon at the amazing Long Now SF HQ. Just imagine the parties! longnow.org/salon/”

— Chris Anderson (@chr1sa) June 8, 2013

 

Salon Project and Fundraising Update:

We are announcing Samovar Tea of San Francisco as our partner in providing fine tea at the Salon. In addition to a range of on-menu teas, Samovar’s founder Jesse Jacob has helped us source a 01989 vintage Suncha Pu-erh tea to add to our rare beverage offerings. Pu-erh is unusual because it improves over time and each serving can be enjoyed for up to 20 infusions–with changing taste characteristics over those many cups. This tea is a perfect fit with Long Now and our Salon’s goal to be a place for conversation. There is a limited supply of this unique tea, in fact, we have the very last of this vintage in existence.

We have created a special fundraising level to showcase this tea. For a $1,500 Founders Tea Club level gift, Long Now will keep this tea on-hand for you at the Salon, ready to be steeped when you visit. The tea will only be served at the Salon and will not be available on our regular menu. We are thrilled to be working with Samovar and for their help with this wonderful addition to our offerings and campaign.

Meanwhile, construction work on the Salon is imminent. Our architect and building team have been hard at work, our prototypes and museum contents are already going into temporary storage, and our staff will relocate for several months while the construction is underway. There’s a lot going on, and we are excited about the progress.

Since launching our campaign in the fall, we’ve raised over $170K for the Salon. That’s right on schedule and sets us up for this next important phase of the campaign.

If you have questions about the Salon or the giving options, please contact us at donate@longnow.org and we’ll be glad to help.

Thanks from all of us for supporting the Long Now Salon Project.

We can’t wait to see you here.