Long Now

### Undeniable Progress Hominids had upright walking, stone tools, fire, even language but still remained in profound stasis. What led to humanity's global takeoff, Ridley argues, was the invention of exchange about 120,000 years ago. "That's ten times older than agriculture." The beginnings of trade encouraged specialization and innovation, which encouraged further innovation, specialization, and trade, and the unending virtuous cycle of progress was set in motion. The quality and speed of the progress depends on the size of the population doing the exchanging. "It's not how clever we are but how much in contact we are with each other." Thus the 5,000 Australians who became isolated on Tasmania 10,000 years ago didn't just stop progressing, they forgot how to make and use bone tools and even how to clothe themselves against cold weather. Their individual brains were fine, "but there was something wrong with their collective brains." What really is being exchanged is ideas. The Pill-cam (for shooting video of your gut) was invented, Ridley points out, when a gastroenterologist had a conversation with guided missile designer. The acceleration of progress can be measured in objective terms such as the amount of labor it takes to earn an hour of reading light. In 1997, with CF bulbs, it was half a second. In 1950, with incandescent bulbs, eight seconds. In 1880, with kerosene lamps, fifteen minutes. In 1800, with candles, six hours. In every decade various intellectuals keep saying that progress has stopped or is about to stop, but Ridley showed chart after chart chronicling constant improvement in everything we care about. Life expectancy is increasing by five hours a day. IQ keeps going up by three points a decade. Agriculture gets ever more productive, leaving more land to remain wild. Even economic inequality is decreasing, with poor countries getting rich faster than rich countries are getting richer. On the subject of climate change, Ridley has a similar set of detailed charts showing that sea level has been rising slowly for a long time, but it is not accelerating. The same with the retreat of glaciers. Overall global warming is proceeding slower than was predicted. Humanity has been decarbonizing its energy supply steadily for 150 years as we progressed from wood to coal to oil to natural gas. A few years ago it was thought that only 25 years of natural gas was left, but with the invention of hydrofracking shale gas, the supply is suddenly 250 years worth, and it is a hugely cleaner source than coal. (Among nuclear innovations, Ridley is particularly intrigued by thorium reactors.) "The story of history is of more for less." Paul Ehrlich's formula (I=PAT--- environmental Impact equals Population times Affluence times Technology) is better stated as I=P/AT--- Impact equals Population divided by Affluence times Technology. As affluence and technology increase, and population levels off, environmental impact can go ever down. An historian once wrote, 'On what principle is it that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?" That was English historian Thomas Babington Macaulay in 1830, before the industrial revolution had really had much effect on living standards.

### Parenting Earth The birth of a first child is the most intense disruption that most adults experience. Suddenly the new parents have no sleep, no social life, no sex, and they have to keep up with a child that changes from week to week. "Two ignorant adults learn from the newborn how to be decent parents." Everything now has to be planned ahead, and the realization sinks in that it will go on that way for twenty years. More than with any other animal, human childhood dependency is enormously prolonged. That's a burden on parents and the species, but that long childhood is what makes us so adaptive, so capable of hope and love, so able to think ahead. It makes us the time-binding species. Lately there's been a new development in the human lifecycle---extended adulthood. In the twentieth century human lifespan got thirty years longer. "Increased longevity," Bateson proposed, "may make a difference for the human species as momentous as our long dependent childhood." A whole new stage of life has emerged---what Bateson calls Adulthood II. In the old days a child would be lucky to have one living grandparent. These days kids have seven or eight grandparents of various sorts, and their laps are not available because the oldsters have gone back to school, or eloped with somebody, or started new careers, or are off cruising the world. They say, "I don't feel 60!" That's because they internalized stereotypes of "60" that no longer apply. A lot of cultural baggage about age now has to be thrown out, just as with previous liberation movements---civil rights, women's rights, gay rights. With each new equality comes new participation. Women who fought for the right to work, for example, get insulted afresh by the idea of mandatory retirement. So our elders will be active, but will they be wise? It's not a given. "Experience is the best teacher only if you do your homework, which is reflection," Bateson said. Adulthood II offers most people the time to reflect for the first time in their lives. That reflection, and the actions that are taken based on it, is the payoff for humanity of extended adulthood. Herself reflecting on parenthood, Bateson proposed that the metaphor of "mother Earth" is no longer accurate or helpful. Human impact on nature is now so complete and irreversible that we're better off thinking of the planet as if it were our first child. It will be here after us. Its future is unknown and uncontrollable. We are forced to plan ahead for it. Our first obligation is to keep it from harm. We are learning from it how to be decent parents.

### Government 4.0 Americans have made major adjustments to our government before, Howard declared. At the beginning of the 20th century a Progressive era ended strict laissez-faire. The New Deal in the 1930s provided social safety nets. In the 1960s Civil Rights came to the fore. Now we need a fourth big change, because our government has managed to paralyze itself with the accretion of decades of excessively detailed laws. In the Eisenhower era the entire Interstate Highway system was installed in about 15 years. That couldn't happen now. Getting permission to build one offshore wind farm near Cape Cod took a decade while 17 agencies studied it, and 18 lawsuits now pending will delay the project another decade. The Interstate Highway Act was 29 pages long. Our new Health Care bill is 2,700 pages. The news laws obsess over methods instead of focussing primarily on goals and responsible institutions. They disable the power of office holders to decide and act because they try to prevent bad choices, and thus they disable the power to make good choices. Liberals want to head off game-playing corporations, and conservatives want to keep government officials from having too much power. The result is broken government and a citizenry maddened by a system that defies common sense. Only real people make things happen, Howard said, not laws alone. We need a framework that enables real people to take responsibility, to have the authority to say "Do it," to say "You're fired," to be accountable and to require accountability. To get there, Howard proposes three modifications of our government's operating system. One, a spring cleaning of all budgetary law. Three-quarters of most budgets are now locked in, so present decision makers have no flexibility and they wind up taking money from schools and parks. We need to create an omnibus sunset law, so all budgetary laws have a requirement to be discarded or revised every ten or fifteen years. Two, laws have to be radically simplified. They must be understandable and revisable. They have to enable the people executing the laws to use their judgement. That means focussing primarily on goals. Three, public employees have to be accountable. Which means: if they fail to perform, they can lose their job. Under the present system government worker unions have captured the apparatus that employs them and made much of it work primarily for them rather than primarily for the public. The system will not fix itself. It is up to the public---us---to mobilize and demand this kind of overhaul, to find leaders who will demand it, and support them.

### Lives of San Francisco "You are the soundtrack," Prelinger told the capacity audience at the Herbst Theater, and they responded to his mostly silent archival films by calling out locations, questions, comments, and jokes. They saw footage of a 1941 Market Street parade of allies---floats representing Malta, Russia, France, Britain---and Kezar Stadium hosting a ferocious mock battle/demonstration of Army cannon, troops, and tanks in 1942 and huge naval ships parked at the waterfront piers in 1945. Sailors cruised the Barbary Coast in 1914 and amateurs piloted gliders from the vast beach dunes of the Sunset district in 1918 (looking just like the hang-gliders of 90 years later). There was a sky tram at the Cliff House and four sets of streetcar tracks busy on Market Street. Impromptu hula dancers drew a crowd on Market in one decade, and flower stands adorned it in another. Artists filled the Montgomery Building. All of Treasure Island could be seen burning, and no one present could remember when it was or what caused it or what happened afterward. "Fictional narratives push out actual narratives," Prelinger said. We remember stories, and what isn't in them, we forget. It takes large archives like his, diligently collected and made public, to free us from selective memory. Constantly reunderstanding the past goes best when grounded in the true strangeness of what used to go on.

### The Missing Science of Biological Longevity Creative photographer Sussman showed beautiful slides of very elderly organisms. The captions were as crucial as the images---naming the species, the place, and the approximate age. You can see many of them here: http://rachelsussman.com/portfolios/OLTW/main.html The series began with the only animal---an eighteen-foot brain coral in the waters of Tobago, thought to be 2,000 years old. An enormous baobob in South Africa might be 2,000 years old. Then there is the astounding welwitschia mirabilis of the Namibian desert, a conifer that feeds on mist, with the longest leaves in the plant kingdom. After 2,000 years it looks like this:  Of course there was a redwood in our Sequoia National Park dated precisely to 2,150 years in age. On a remote Japan island, a two-day hike was needed to track down a gorgeous cedar somewhere between 2,000 and 7,000 years old. In Perthshire, Scotland, a churchyard was long ago build around huge yew tree that now is between 2,000 and 5,000 years old. In Chile the Patagonian cypress gets up to 2,200 years old, and a chestnut tree on the island of Sicily has been there for 3,000 years. On Crete there's an olive tree that might be the oldest in the world---3,000 years. It still bears olives. It may well have been preserved because its hollow trunk served for generations as a chicken coop. Lichen in Greenland grows 1 centimeter every 100 years. So a large specimen could be dated to 3,000 years. In the Atacama Desert at 15,000 feet in Chile, a shrub called La Llareta grows only 1.5 centimeters a year and is so dense you can stand on its leaf structure. They get to 3,000 years old. The bristlecone pines much beloved at Long Now have been dated up to 5,000 years old. Send in the clones. Cloned forests are basically one individual that sends up a multitude of stems from a single extensive, very long-lived root system. Sussman found a clonal forest of spruce in Sweden that is 9,550 years old; box huckleberry in Pennsylvania 13,000 years old; aspens in Utah 80,000 years old; and clonal sea grass off of Spain that is 100,000 years old. So far the age champion is an actinobacteria that lives in Siberian permafrost---alive for 400 to 600,000 years---half a million years. Sussman found all these creatures with the guidance of remarkable field biologists who have never met each other, because biological longevity is not yet a science. Artist Sussman is startled to be its first practitioner. She has two more years to go on this project. Long Now would love to see a conference mustered at the end of her project to bring together all the scientists she's gotten to know, to see what aggregating their knowledge might conjure up. If sponsors are interested, Long Now would be glad to organize the event. Thanks to Tom Lowe for the use of his short film [Timescapes](http://www.timescapes.org/)

### Languages are Parallel Universes "To have a second language is to have a second soul," said Charlemagne around 800 AD. "Each language has its own cognitive toolkit," said psychologist/linguist Lera Boroditsky in 2010 AD. Different languages handle verbs, distinctions, gender, time, space, metaphor, and agency differently, and those differences, her research shows, make people think and act differently. Take a sentence such as "Sarah Palin read Chomsky's latest book." In Russian, the verb would have to indicate whether the whole book was read or not. In Turkish the verb would signify whether the speaker saw the event personally, or it was reported, or it was inferred. Russians have two words for blue, and when those words are present in their mind, they can distinguish finer gradations of the color than English speakers can. Gender runs deep in some languages, affecting nouns (including number words and days of the week), adjective endings, pronouns and possessives, and verb endings. And that affects how people think about every named thing. In German the Sun is female and the Moon male; it's the reverse in Spanish. In French, "liberty" and "justice" are each female, and thus the Statue of Liberty is a female, and so is the blindfolded lady of justice in American courtrooms. "'Time' is the most common noun in the English language," said Boroditsky. (Followed by "person," "year," "way," and "day.") Time is often expressed as travel in space: "We're coming up on Christmas." But some languages put the future in front of us, and others put it behind us. For Aborigines that Boroditsky studied in north Australia, time and sequence gets blended into their profound orientation to the cardinal directions. They don't use relative terms like "left" and "right," but absolute compass terms ("There's an ant on your southwest leg"), and they have extraordinary orientation skills. When Boroditsky asked these aborigines to place a sequence of photos (a progressively eaten apple) in sequential order, they did not do it like English speakers (left to right) or Hebrew and Arabic speakers (right to left), they did it by the compass: from east to west. "These are not differences of degree," said Boroditsky, "but a parallel universe." Different languages assign blame (agency) differently. English is uncommonly agentive, and so Dick Cheney had difficulty distancing himself from the fact that he shot his friend in a hunting accident: "Ultimately I'm the guy who pulled the trigger that fired the shot that hit Harry." In Spanish, accidents are expressed in terms such as "The vase broke" rather than "John broke the vase." Political distancing language such as "Mistakes were made" doesn't sound awkward in Spanish. Fate looms larger. Thus, "learning new languages can change the way you think," said Boroditsky. Multilingual speakers have more mind.

**This is one conversation out of the 19 that took place as part of the Long Conversation.[Media links for the other Conversations are available here.](https://longnow.org/seminars/02010/oct/16/long-conversation/)** Long Conversation, an epic relay of one-to-one conversations among some of the Bay Area's most interesting minds, took place over 6 hours in San Francisco on Saturday October 16, 02010. Interpreting the Long Conversation in real time was a data visualization performance by Sosolimited; an art and technology studio out of M.I.T. Long Conversation was presented with a live performance of 1,000 minutes of composer Jem Finer's [Longplayer](https://longnow.org/longplayer/).

**This is one conversation out of the 19 that took place as part of the Long Conversation.[Media links for the other Conversations are available here.](https://longnow.org/seminars/02010/oct/16/long-conversation/)** Long Conversation, an epic relay of one-to-one conversations among some of the Bay Area's most interesting minds, took place over 6 hours in San Francisco on Saturday October 16, 02010. Interpreting the Long Conversation in real time was a data visualization performance by Sosolimited; an art and technology studio out of M.I.T. Long Conversation was presented with a live performance of 1,000 minutes of composer Jem Finer's [Longplayer](https://longnow.org/longplayer/).

**This is one conversation out of the 19 that took place as part of the Long Conversation.[Media links for the other Conversations are available here.](https://longnow.org/seminars/02010/oct/16/long-conversation/)** Long Conversation, an epic relay of one-to-one conversations among some of the Bay Area's most interesting minds, took place over 6 hours in San Francisco on Saturday October 16, 02010. Interpreting the Long Conversation in real time was a data visualization performance by Sosolimited; an art and technology studio out of M.I.T. Long Conversation was presented with a live performance of 1,000 minutes of composer Jem Finer's [Longplayer](https://longnow.org/longplayer/).

**This is one conversation out of the 19 that took place as part of the Long Conversation.[Media links for the other Conversations are available here.](https://longnow.org/seminars/02010/oct/16/long-conversation/)** Long Conversation, an epic relay of one-to-one conversations among some of the Bay Area's most interesting minds, took place over 6 hours in San Francisco on Saturday October 16, 02010. Interpreting the Long Conversation in real time was a data visualization performance by Sosolimited; an art and technology studio out of M.I.T. Long Conversation was presented with a live performance of 1,000 minutes of composer Jem Finer's [Longplayer](https://longnow.org/longplayer/).