Long Now

### How the world keeps ending “This Earth is a story teller,” Childs began. “And it is not a stable place to live. It is always ending. We think of endings as sudden, but it is always a process.” For his book _Apocalyptic Planet_ he sought out some of the world’s most terminal-feeling places, where everything is reduced to fundamental elements in total upheaval or total stasis, and a visitor is overwhelmed by the scale and power of a planet going about its planetary business. In Yosemite Valley, where Childs was the day before he spoke in San Francisco, everyone is awed by the results of massive glacial action. In a sense Yosemite is the future of where he had been the previous week--- a part of Alaska where the ice is 1,000 feet thick, with mountain peaks just visible above the glacial carving. Still further in the past is a classic end-of-the-world---an Ice Age. Childs sampled what that is like with an extended stay on the Greenland ice cap, where all there is for hundreds of miles is ice, sky, and wind. And numbing cold. The ice is 5,000 feet thick, moving under his camp at 1 foot a day, eventually calving off into enormous icebergs. He was in Greenland with a chaos scientist studying climate change, who noted that complex systems like climate sometimes change suddenly, and that’s when you can’t predict what will happen next. “I would like to backpack on Mars,” said Childs. For the local equivalent he hiked across the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, where it never rains. It’s been a desert for 150 million years. You walk across nothing but salt so hard it pings like steel. The sun blasts you all day and at night the water in your pack freezes solid. “You walk for days and you don’t see a single living thing, you’re on a dead planet, and then it gets really strange because pink flamingoes come flying in over your head. They’re there to strain brine shrimp out of water sources. You’re at the end of the world and there are flamingoes! You think, 'Yeah, that’s what this planet is about.'” To experience a world without biodiversity he hiked for days in cornfields in Iowa, where 90 percent of the state is monocrop corn and soybeans. Yet it took just two years for tallgrass prairie to be re-established in a site where corn growing was stopped. In the lava fields of Hawaii he got a sense of planetary beginnings when the magma escapes, flowing like liquid incandescent metal, and everything starts over. Life is reseeded from what are called kipukas, bits of forest missed by the lava. Plunging into some new forest densely regrown on recent lava, he was instantly lost, buried in an orgy of jungle vegetation, no animals yet, and he realized that “The force of the living is more cunning than any devastation, ready to explode on whatever it touches.”

### The last killer asteroid 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: 1. 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. 2. While most SALT talks focus on problems, last night's was extremely focused on a solution. 3. The solution itself is a (workable) long term project, that has a delayed gratification. 4. The problem being solved is neither trivial nor superficial but complicated and existential. It's a big deal. 5. 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](http://b612foundation.org/).

### De-extinction begins The new tools of synthetic biology, I began, are about to liberate conservation in a spectacular way. It is becoming possible to bring some extinct species back to life. A project within Long Now called “Revive & Restore” is pushing to make de-extinction a reality, starting with the fabled passenger pigeon and moving on to the woolly mammoth. The project’s director, Ryan Phelan, organized a series of three conferences bringing together molecular biologists and conservation biologists to see if “resurrection biology” is becoming a field and how it might proceed responsibly. (The most viewable of the conferences was “[TEDxDeExtinction](https://longnow.org/revive/tedxdeextinction/)” in Washington DC this March.) At those conferences we heard about cloning efforts that are already partially successful. Alberto Fernández Arias in Spain temporarily brought back an extinct ibex called the bucardo. Michael Archer, from Australia, reported reviving an early stage embryo of the extinct gastric brooding frog. Using traditional back-breeding, Henri Kerkdijk-Otten, is rebuilding the European aurochs (extinct in 1627) from a variety its descendent modern cattle. William Powell is showing how the nearly extinct beloved American chestnut tree is being brought back by a combination of back-breeding and sophisticated genetic engineering. Robert Lanza (Advanced Cell Technology), Oliver Ryder (The Frozen Zoo), and Michael McGrew (Roslin Institute) showed miracles that can now be accomplished with advanced cloning and induced pluripotent stem cells. Beth Shapiro (UC Santa Cruz) and Hendrik Poinar (McMaster University) explained how complete genomes are being read from the “ancient DNA” of fossils and museum specimens. George Church (Harvard) spelled out his allele replacement technique that will allow editing the genes from an extinct species into the genome of its closest living relative---from the passenger pigeon into the band-tailed pigeon, for example---thereby bringing back to life the extinct animal. Ben Novak is working full-time for Revive & Restore on the passenger pigeon and is now in the thick of sequencing work and comparative genomics in Beth Shapiro’s ancient-DNA lab at UC Santa Cruz. Conservation biologists like Stanley Temple, Kent Redford, and Frans Vera regard de-extinction as “a game-changer for conservation.” On the one hand, it dilutes the stark message “Extinction is forever!” while on the other hand it offers a message of hope that conservation can build on. I concluded, “The fact is, humans have made a huge hole in nature over the last 10,000 years. But now we have the ability to repair some of the damage. We’ll do most of the repair by expanding and protecting wild areas and by expanding and protecting the populations of endangered species. “Some species that we killed off totally, we might consider bringing back to a world that misses them.”

### A world of convergence In education, Negroponte explained, there’s a fundamental distinction between "instructionism" and "constructionism." "Constructionism is learning by discovery, by doing, by making. Instructionism is learning by being told." Negroponte’s lifelong friend Seymour Papert noted early on that debugging computer code is a form of "learning about learning" and taught it to young children. Thus in 2000 when Negroponte left the Media Lab he had founded in 1985, he set out upon the ultimate constructionist project, called "One Laptop per Child." His target is the world’s 100 million kids who are not in school because no school is available. Three million of his laptops and tablets are now loose in the world. One experiment in an Ethiopian village showed that illiterate kids can take unexplained tablets, figure them out on their own, and begin to learn to read and even program. In the "markets versus mission" perspective, Negroponte praised working through nonprofits because they are clearer and it is easier to partner widely with people and other organizations. He added that "start-up businesses are sucking people out of big thinking. So many minds that used to think big are now thinking small because their VCs tell them to ‘focus.’" As the world goes digital, Negroponte noted, you see pathologies of left over "atoms thinking." Thus newspapers imagine that paper is part of their essence, telecoms imagine that distance should cost more, and nations imagine that their physical boundaries matter. "Nationalism is the biggest disease on the planet," Negroponte said. "Nations have the wrong granularity. They’re too small to be global and too big to be local, and all they can think about is competing." He predicted that the world is well on the way to having one language, English. Negroponte reflected on a recent visit to a start-up called Modern Meadow, where they print meat. "You get just the steak---no hooves and ears involved, using one percent of the water and half a percent of the land needed to get the steak from a cow." In every field we obsess on the distinction between synthetic and natural, but in a hundred years "there will be no difference between them."

In this engaging discussion, historian of computing George Dyson, known for his work 'Turing's Cathedral,' explores the expanding 'digital universe' that humanity has created. He delves into the paradox of pursuing artificial intelligence amidst modern distractions and reflects on historical figures like Alan Turing and John von Neumann. The conversation touches on the ethical implications of computing in warfare, the intricacies of time in the digital age, and the fascinating parallels between technology and biological evolution. Dyson challenges us to consider the future in light of our digital past.

### Desktop manufacturing changes world We’re now entering the third industrial revolution, Anderson said. The first one, which began with the spinning jenny in 01776, doubled the human life span and set population soaring. From the demographic perspective, "it’s as if nothing happened before the Industrial Revolution." The next revolution was digital. Formerly industrial processes like printing were democratized with desktop publishing. The "cognitive surplus" of formerly passive consumers was released into an endless variety of personal creativity. Then distribution was democratized by the Web, which is "scale agnostic and credentials agnostic." Anyone can potentially reach 7 billion people. The third revolution is digital manufacturing, which combines the gains of the first two revolutions. Factory robots, which anyone can hire, have become general purpose and extremely fast. They allow "lights-out manufacturing," that goes all night and all weekend. "This will reverse the arrow of globalization," Anderson said. "The centuries of quest for cheaper labor is over. Labor arbitrage no longer drives trade." The advantages of speed and flexibility give the advantage to "locavore" manufacturing because "Closer is faster." Innovation is released from the dead weight of large-batch commitments. Designers now can sit next to the robots building their designs and make adjustments in real time. Thus the Makers Movement. Since 02006, Maker Faires, Hackerspaces, and TechShops (equipped with laser cutters, 3D printers, and CAD design software) have proliferated in the US and around the world. Anderson said he got chills when, with the free CAD program Autodesk 123D, he finished designing an object and moused up to click the button that used to say "Print." This one said "Make." A 3D printer commenced building his design. Playing with Minecraft, "kids are becoming fluent in polygons." With programs like 123D Catch you can take a series of photos with your iPhone of any object, and the software will create a computer model of it. "There is no copyright on physical stuff," Anderson pointed out. The slogan that liberated music was "Rip. Mix. Burn." The new slogan is "Rip. Mod. Make." I asked Anderson, "But isn’t this Makers thing kind of trivial, just trailing-edge innovation?" "That’s why it’s so powerful," Anderson said. "Remember how trivial the first personal computers seemed?"

### Easter Island reconsidered In the most isolated place on Earth a tiny society built world-class monuments. Easter Island (Rapa Nui) is 1,000 miles from the nearest Pacific island, 3,000 miles from the nearest continent. It is just six by ten miles in size, with no running streams, terrible soil, occasional droughts, and a relatively barren ocean. Yet there are 900 of the famous statues (moai), weighing up to 75 tons and 40 feet high. Four hundred of them were moved many miles from where they were quarried to massive platforms along the shores. Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo began their archeological work on Easter Island in 2001 expecting to do no more than add details to the standard morality tale of the collapse of the island’s ecology and society---Polynesians discovered Rapa Nui around 400-800AD and soon overpopulated the place (30,000 people on an island the size of San Francisco); competing elites cut down the last trees to move hundreds of enormous statues; after excesses of “moai madness” the elites descend into warfare and cannibalism, and the ecology collapses; Europeans show up in 1722. The obvious lesson is that Easter Island, “the clearest example of a society that destroyed itself“ (Jared Diamond), is a warning of what could happen to Earth unless we learn to live with limits. A completely different story emerged from Hunt and Lipo’s archaeology. Polynesians first arrived as late as 1200AD. There are no signs of violence---none of the fortifications common on other Pacific islands, no weapons, no traumatized skeletons. The palm trees that originally covered the island succumbed mainly to rats that arrived with the Polynesians and ate all the nuts. The natives burned what remained to enrich the poor soil and then engineered the whole island with small rocks (“lithic mulch”) to grow taro and sweet potatoes. The population stabilized around 4,000 and kept itself in balance with its resources for 500 years until it was totally destroyed in the 18th century by European diseases and enslavement. (It wasn’t _Collapse_ ; it was _Guns, Germs, and Steel_.) What was up with the statues? How were they moved? Did they have a role in the sustainable balance the islanders achieved? Hunt and Lipo closely studied the statues found along the moai roads from the quarry. They had D-shaped beveled bottoms (unlike the flat bottoms of the platform statues) angled 14 ° forward. The ones on down slopes had fallen on their face; on up slopes they were on their back. The archeologists concluded they must have been moved upright---”walked,” just as Rapa Nuians long had said. No tree logs were required. Standard Polynesian skill with ropes would suffice. “Nova” and National Geographic insisted on a demonstration, so a 5-ton, 10-foot-high “starter moai” replica was made and shipped to Hawaii. After some fumbling around, 18 unskilled people secured three ropes around the top of the statue---one to each side for rocking the statue, one in the rear to keep it leaning forward without falling. “Heave! Ho! Heave! Ho!” they cry in the video, the statue rocks, dancing lightly forward, and the audience at Cowell Theater erupts with applause. Progress was fast, even hard to stop---100 yards in 40 minutes. A family could move one. Stone statues to ancestors are common throughout Polynesia, but the enormous, numerous moai of Easter Island are unique in the world. Were they part of the peaceful population control and conservative agriculture regime that helped the society “optimize long-term stability over immediate returns” in a nearly impossible place to live? During the Q & A, Hunt and Lipo were asked how their new theory of Easter Island history was playing on the island itself. Shame at being the self-destructive dopes of history has been replaced by pride, they said. Moai races are being planned. Polynesians were the space explorers of the Pacific. They completed discovering every island in the huge ocean by the end of the 13th century, colonized the ones they could, and then stopped. Easter Island is not Earth. It is Mars.

### Light and beauty “The naturalist’s task,” Warshall began, “is to observe without human-centered thoughts and human-centered agendas, to observe with a Gaian perspective and with the perspective of the organisms you’re watching. The naturalist considers all species in space/time as equally beautiful.” There’s a connection between art and science---between the poetic organization of thought and the pragmatic organization of thought. Light operates at a distance. That inspires anticipation, which becomes yearning, which becomes desire, which becomes hope, which generates transcendence. When an image becomes transcendent for you, it becomes part of how you perceive. “The Sun is the initiator of all sugars.” Starting 250 million years ago, life rebelled and began generating its own light. There are 40 different kinds of bioluminescence, used for mate attraction, for baiting prey, for deceit. “Danger and beauty always go together. Deceit---not truth---is beauty. A term some art critics use is ‘abject beauty.’” Humans began the second light rebellion by harnessing fire a million years ago. Then came electric lights in the 1880s, and we transformed the light regime and hence behavior of many species. Artists like James Turrell shifted art from reflected light to emitted light, and that is increasingly the norm as we spend our days with screens radiating information into our eyes. Our eyes are pockets of ocean that let us perceive only a portion of the Sun’s spectrum of light. Bees, with their crystal eyes, see in the ultraviolet. Snakes perceive infrared, and so do some insects that can detect the heat of a forest fire from 40 miles away. Bowerbird males create elaborate art galleries, even devising forced perspective, to impress females. Young male bowerbirds watch the process for four years to learn the art. Throughout nature, watch for bold patterns of white, black, and red, which usually signal danger. Every day there is a brief time without danger. At twilight---as daylight shifts to night---all life pauses. “That moment has a contemplative beauty that we cherish. It is a moment of Gaian aesthetic.” Warshall’s talk, and his life, have been a convergence of art and science. Asked about how scientists could learn more about art, Warshall suggested they go to an art class and learn how to draw. As for how artists can learn more of science, he had two words: “Outdoors. Look.”

### Preservation Without Permission Their video showed clandestine urban “infiltration” (trespassing) at its most creative. Paris’s Urban Experiment group (UX), now in their fourth decade, have a restoration branch called Untergunther. They evade authorities to carry out secret preservation projects on what they call “nonvisible heritage.” Being clandestine, they do not reveal their activities except for instances that become publicized in the media; then they reveal everything to set the record straight (and embarrass the media along with the authorities). In the video presented by Untergunther member Lazar Kunstmann and translator Jon Lackman, we see a hidden underground screening room and bar beneath the Trocadero in Paris’s Latin Quarter. When police discover it and shut it down, the equipment is surreptitiously removed to a site deeper in the city’s vast network of underground passages, where film showings continue to this day. One year the group’s annual film festival was staged and performed overnight in one of Paris’s great monuments, the Panthéon, built in 1790. In the video (excerpt [here](http://ugwk.org/2010-10-28_Pantheon_users_guide_Trailer.html)) we see a small boy slipping through newly crafted underground passageways, picking a lock, opening the cupboard with all the Panthéon‘s keys, and gliding on his skateboard beneath the great dome across the ornate marble floors by Foucault’s original pendulum as film enthusiasts set up a temporary theater and have a clandestine film festival---gone without a trace by dawn. Elsewhere in the Panthéon the explorers found a neglected old clock displaying stopped time to the public. In 2005 they decided to repair it. They converted an abandoned room high in the monument into a clock shop and hangout. With clockmaker (and UX member) Jean-Baptiste Viot they spent a year completely reconditioning the 1850 works of the clock. Now that it worked again, they thought it should keep time and chime proudly, but someone needed to wind it. They approached the Director of the Panthéon, Bernard Jeannot, who didn’t even know that the monument had a clock. At first dumbfounded, Jeannot publicly embraced the project and applauded Untergunther. Jeannot’s superiors at the Centre des Monuments Nationaux accordingly fired him (early retirement) and brought suit against Untergunther. The court determined that fixing clocks is not a crime, and in France trespassing on public property is, in itself, not a crime. Case dismissed. Spitefully, the new Director of the Panthéon has made sure the clock remains unwound, and he disabled it by removing an essential part. Lazar Kunstmann explained (through Jon Lackman) Untergunther’s perspective on cultural heritage, particularly “minor” heritage---the countless objects that embody cultural continuity but don’t attract institutions to protect them. Who is responsible for such “nonvisible” heritage? The protectors should be local, self-appointed, and nonvisible themselves, because exposure of the value of the objects attracts destructive tourists. Preservation without permission works best without visibility. Since 2005, Untergunther’s new precautions against discovery have successfully kept its ongoing preservation projects hidden. As for the Panthéon clock, that essential part the Director removed to disable it has been purloined to safekeeping with Untergunther. Someday authorities may allow the clock to tick again. In the meantime it is in good repair.

### The Long Peace “Nothing can be more gentle than man in his primitive state,” declared Rousseau in the 18th century. A century earlier, Thomas Hobbes wrote, “In the state of nature the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The evidence shows that Rousseau was wrong and Hobbes was right, said Pinker. Forensic archaeology (“CSI Paleolithic”) reveals that 15 percent of prehistoric skeletons show signs of violent trauma. Ethnographic vital statistics of surviving non-state societies and pockets of anarchy show, on average, 524 war deaths per 100,000 people per year. Germany in the 20th century, wracked by two world wars, had 144 war deaths per 100,000 per year. Russia had 135. Japan had 27. The US in the 20th century had 5.7. In this 21st century the whole world has a war death rate of 0.3 per 100,000 people per year. In primitive societies 15 percent of people died violently; now 0.03 percent do. Violence is 1/500th of what it used to be. The change came by stages, each with a different dynamic. Pinker identified: 1) The Pacification Process brought about by the rise and expansion of states, which monopolized violence to keep their citizens from killing each other. 2) The Humanizing Process. States consolidated, enforcing “the king’s justice.” With improving infrastructure, commerce grew, and the zero-sum game of plunder was replaced by the positive-sum game of trade. 3) The Humanitarian Revolution. Following ideas of The Enlightenment, the expansion of literacy, and growing cosmopolitanism, reason guided people to reject slavery, reduce capital crimes toward zero, and challenge superstitious demonizing of witches, Jews, etc. Voltaire wrote: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” 4) The Long Peace. Since 1945 there has been zero use of nuclear weapons, zero combat between the Cold War superpowers, just one war between great powers (US and China in Korea, ending 1953), zero wars in western Europe (there used to be two new wars a year there, for 600 years), and zero wars between developed countries or expansion of their borders by conquest. 5) The New Peace is the spreading of the Long Peace to the rest of the world, largely through the decline of ideology, and the spread of democracy, trade, and international organizations such as the UN. Colonial wars ended; civil wars did flare up. 6) The Rights Revolution, increasingly powerful worldwide, insists on protection from injustice for blacks, women, children, gays, and animals. Even domestic violence is down. Such a powerful long-term trend is the result of human ingenuity bearing down on the problem of violence the same way it has on hunger and plague. Something psychologists call the “circle of empathy” has expanded steadily from family to village to clan to tribe to nation to other races to other species. In addition, “humanitarian reforms are often preceded by new technologies for spreading ideas.” It is sometimes fashionable to despise modernity. A more appropriate response is gratitude. In the Q & A, one questioner noted that violence is clearly down, but fear of violence is still way up. Social psychologist Pinker observed that we base our fears irrationally on anecdotes instead of statistics---one terrorist attack here, one child abduction there. In a world of 7 billion what is the actual risk for any individual? It is approaching zero. That trend is so solid we can count on it and take it further still.