Long Now

With her stunning breakthroughs in neural imaging, Mary Lou Jepsen is making the brain readable (and stimulatable) in real time. That will revolutionize brain study and brain medicine, but what about brain communication? Could a direct high-resolution interface to the brain lead to what might be called practical mental telepathy? What are the prospects for brain enhancement? What are the ethics of direct brain reading and intervention? Mary Lou Jepsen founds programs and companies on the hairy edges of physics, invents solutions and takes them to prototype all the way through to high volume mass production. She's done this at Intel, MIT’s Media Lab, One Laptop Per Child, Pixel Qi, Google X, and Facebook (Oculus). She is the founder and CEO of [Openwater](https://www.openwater.cc/), which is "devising a new generation of imaging technologies, with high resolution and low costs, enabling medical diagnoses and treatments, and a new era of fluid and affordable brain-to-computer communications."

An expert on rationality, judgement, and strategy, Julia Galef notes that "our capacity for reason evolved to serve two very different purposes that are often at odds with each other. On the one hand, reason helps us figure out what’s true; on the other hand, it also helps us defend ideas that are false-but-strategically-useful. I’ll explore these two different modes of thought — I call them “the scout” and “the soldier” — and what determines which mode we default to. Finally, I’ll argue that modern humans would be better off with more scout mode and less soldier mode, and I’ll share some thoughts on how to make that happen.” Galef is founder of the Update Project and hosts the podcast [_Rationally Speaking_](http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/).

### War in heaven "The _Book of Revelation_ is war literature," Pagels explained. John of Patmos was a war refugee, writing sixty years after the death of Jesus and twenty years after 60,000 Roman troops crushed the Jewish rebellion in Judea and destroyed Jerusalem. In the nightmarish visions of John’s prophecy, Rome is Babylon, the embodiment of monstrous power and decadence. That power was expressed by Rome as religious. John would have seen in nearby Ephesus massive propaganda sculptures depicting the contemporary emperors as gods slaughtering female slaves identified as Rome’s subject nations. And so in the prophecy the ascending violence reaches a crescendo of war in heaven. Finally, summarized Pagels, "Jesus judges the whole world; and all who have worshipped other gods, committed murder, magic, or illicit sexual acts are thrown down to be tormented forever in a lake of fire, while God’s faithful are invited to enter a new city of Jerusalem that descends from heaven, where Christ and his people reign in triumph for 1000 years." Just one among the dozens of revelations of the time (Ezra’s, Zostrianos’, Peter’s, a different John’s), the vision of John of Patmos became popular among the oppressed of Rome. Three centuries later, in 367CE, Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria confirmed it as the concluding book in the Christian canon that became the _New Testament_. As a tale of conflict where one side is wholly righteous and the other wholly evil, the _Book of Revelation_ keeps being evoked century after century. Martin Luther declared the Pope to be the Whore of Babylon. Both sides of the American Civil War declared the opposing cause to be Bestial, though the North had the better music---"He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword." African-American slaves echoed John’s lament: "_How long_ before you judge and avenge our blood on the inhabitants of the earth?" But like many Christians through the years, Pagels wishes that John’s divisive vision had not become part of the Biblical canon. Among the better choices from that time, she quoted from the so-called "Secret Revelation of John": "Jesus says to John, ‘The souls of everyone will live in the pure light, because if you did not have God’s spirit, you could not even stand up.’ "The other revelations are universal, instead of being about the saved versus the damned."

### Who governs digital trust? Doctorow framed the question this way: "Computers are everywhere. They are now something we put our whole bodies into---airplanes, cars---and something we put into our bodies---pacemakers, cochlear implants. They HAVE to be trustworthy." Sometimes humans are not so trustworthy, and programs may override you: "I can’t let you do that, Dave." (Reference to the self-protective insane computer Hal in Kubrick’s film "2001." That time the human was more trustworthy than the computer.) Who decides who can override whom? The core issues for Doctorow come down to Human Rights versus Property Rights, Lockdown versus Certainty, and Owners versus mere Users. Apple computers such as the iPhone are locked down---it lets you run only what Apple trusts. Android phones let you run only what you trust. Doctorow has changed his mind in favor of a foundational computer device called the "Trusted Platform Module" (TPM) which provides secure crypto, remote attestation, and sealed storage. He sees it as a crucial "nub of secure certainty" in your machine---but only to the extent that it is implemented to allow owners to choose what they trust---not vendors or governments. If it’s your machine, you rule it. It‘s a Human Right: your computer should not be overridable. And a Property Right: "you own what you buy, even if it what you do with it pisses off the vendor." That’s clear when the Owner and the User are the same person. What about when they’re not? There are systems where there is a credible argument for the authorities to rule---airplanes, nuclear reactors, probably self-driving cars ("as a species we are terrible drivers.")---but at least in the case of cars, and possibly in the other two, it will not make us safer; it will make us less safe. The firmware in those machines should be inviolable by users and outside attackers. But the power of Owners over Users can be deeply troubling, such as in matters of surveillance. There are powers that want full data on what Users are up to---governments, companies, schools, parents. Behind your company computer is the IT department and the people they report to. They want to know all about your email and your web activities, and there is reason for that. But we need to contemplate the "total and terrifying power of Owners over Users." Recognizing that we are necessarily transitory Users of many systems, such as everything involving Cloud computing or storage, Doctorow favors keeping your own box with its own processors and storage. He strongly favors the democratization and wide distribution of expertise. As a Fellow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (who co-sponsored the talk) he supports public defense of freedom in every sort of digital rights issue. "The potential for abuse in the computer world is large," Doctorow concluded. "It will keep getting larger."

### City-based global governance Sovereign nation states have conspicuously failed to cooperate well enough to deal with increasingly global problems such as climate change, environmental degradation, and organized crime, Barber said. Nations focus on their borders, which are seen as competitive zero-sum games. “But if we shift our gaze, in thinking about global governance, from nation states to cities, things suddenly become possible that seemed impossible. Cities are apart from one another, separated by wide spaces. Their relationships are based on communication, trade, transportation, and culture. They are relational, not in a zero-sum game with one another.” Cities are inherently pragmatic rather than ideological. “They collect garbage and collect art rather than collecting votes or collecting allies. They put up buildings and run buses rather than putting up flags and running political parties. They secure the flow of water rather than the flow of arms. They foster education and culture in place of national defense and patriotism. They promote collaboration, not exceptionalism.” An honoring of all that practicality is shown by polling results of confidence in various levels of government. Only 18 percent of Americans have confidence in the US Congress (“the lowest in a long time”). The Presidency gets 44 percent. Americans have 65 percent confidence in their mayors. They can see clearly that city governments are less distorted by party politics, less responsive to massive lobbying. They see mayors getting things done. New York City’s “hyperactive” mayor Michael Bloomberg says, “I don’t listen to Washington very much. The difference between my level of government and other levels of government is that action takes place at the city level. While national government at this time is just unable to do anything, the mayors of this country have to deal with the real world.” After 9/11, New York’s police chief sent his best people to Homeland Security to learn about dealing with terrorism threats. After 18 months they reported, “We’re learning nothing in Washington.” They were sent then to twelve other cities---Singapore, Hong Kong, Paris, Frankfurt, Rio---and built their own highly effective intelligence network city to city, not through Washington or Interpol. Last year following the meeting in Mexico City on climate, where little progress was made by the national delegations, representatives from 207 cities signed a Global Cities Climate Pact pledging to pursue “strategies and actions aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.” The cities did what the nations could not. There are many existing bodies of robust cooperation among cities---the International Union of Local Authorities, the World Association of Major Metropolises, the American League of Cities, the Local Governments for Sustainability, the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, the United Cities and Local Governments at the UN, the New Hanseatic League, the Megacities Foundation---200 such networking organizations. “They are dull sounding, but they are fashioning global processes that work.” Global governance needs no great edifice with unitary rulers. It can be voluntary, informal, bottom-up. Barber recommends forming a global parliament of cities, because nation states will not govern globally. Cities can. They already are.

### Making plastic even better Plastic is so new, Freinkel began, that among all the objects preserved in the sunken _Titanic_ , none are synthetic plastic, because there was hardly any available in 1912. Natural plastic, however, was a familiar material. Amber was popular. Rubber was essential (all plant cellulose is made of long-chain polymers). Ivory for everything from billiard balls to piano keys was in such high demand that an 1867 paper warned about the looming extinction of elephants. The first synthetic plastic---celluoid---was developed as a substitute for ivory, and the elephants survived. Bakelite was invented in 1907 to replace the beetle excretion called shellac ("It took 16,000 beetles six months to make a pound of shellac."), and was first used to insulate electrical wiring. Soon there were sturdy Bakelite radios, telephones, ashtrays, and a thousand other things. The technology democratized consumption, because mass production made former luxury items cheap and attractive. The 1920s and ‘30s were a golden age of plastic innovation, with companies like Dow Chemical, DuPont, and I. G. Farben creating hundreds of new varieties of plastic for thrilled consumers. Cellophane became a cult. Nylons became a cult. A plastics _trade_ show in 1946 had 87,000 members of the public lining up to view the wonders. New fabrics came along---Orlon and Dacron---as colorful as the deluge of plastic toys---Barbie, the Frisbee, Hula hoops, and Silly Putty. Looking for new markets, the marketers discovered disposability---disposable cups for drink vending machines, disposable diapers ("Said to be responsible for the baby boom"), Bic lighters, soda bottles, medical syringes, and the infinite market of packaging. Americans consume 300 pounds of plastic a year. The variety of plastics we use are a problem for recycling, because they have to be sorted by hand. They all biodegrade eventually, but at varying rates. New bio-based polymers like "corn plastic" and "plant bottles" have less of a carbon footprint, but they biodegrade poorly. Meanwhile, thanks to the efficiencies of fracking, the price of natural gas feedstock is plummeting, and so is the price of plastic manufacture. Some plastics have some chemicals like bisphenol A and phthalates that are toxic. American manufacturers don’t have to list the materials in their products, and there’s no hope of testing every one of the 80,000 industrialized chemicals loose in the world. Freinkel recommends greatly expanding the practice of “green chemistry,” so that every process and product of manufacturing is safe and sustainable from the ground up. She would like to see a stronger regulatory environment and the building of a fully systemic recycling infrastructure. In the Q & A Freinkel recommended a book by Elizabeth Grossman, _Chasing Molecules: Poisonous Products, Human Health, and the Promise of Green Chemistry_.

### Bio-blender Earth Tumultuous effects resulted and continue to result from the massive mixing of the world’s biota when European ships reconnected the American continent to the rest of the world. Mann traced several of the cascading consequences of "the biggest ecological convulsion since the death of the dinosaurs." The first momentous change came from microbial exchange---20 lethal diseases came from Europe to the Americas while only one (syphilis) went the other way. North America, which had been largely cleared by natives with fire and agriculture, reforested when two-thirds to 95% of the native inhabitants died from European diseases---"the greatest demographic catastrophe in human history." That huge reforesting drew down atmospheric carbon dioxide and Europe’s "Little Ice Age" (1550-1800) apparently resulted. Meanwhile the mountain of silver at Potosí, Bolivia, vastly enriched Europe, which "went shopping" worldwide. Trading ships coursed the world’s oceans. One artifact picked up from Peru was the potato---a single variety of the 6,000 available. When potatoes in Europe turned out to provide four times the amount of food per acre as wheat, the previously routine famines came to an end, population soared, governments became more stable, and they began building global empires. After 1843 guano shipped by the ton from coastal Peru for fertilizer introduced high-input agriculture. In Ireland 40% of the exploding population ate only potatoes. Around 1844 a potato blight arrived from Mexico, and a million Irish died in the Great Famine and a million more emigrated. In China, which has no large lakes and only two major rivers, agriculture had been limited to two wet regions where rice could be grown. Two imports from America---maize and sweet potato---could be farmed in dry lands. As in Europe, population went up. Vast areas were terraced as Han farmers pushed westward as far as the Mongolian desert. In heavy rains the terraces melted into the streams, and silt built up in the lowlands, elevating the rivers as much as 40 feet above the surrounding terrain, so when they flooded, millions died. "A Katrina per month for 100 years," as one Chinese meteorologist described it. The constant calamities weakened the government, and China became ripe for foreign colonial takeover. In America two imported diseases---malaria and yellow fever---were selective in who they killed. Europeans died in huge numbers, but Africans were one-tenth as susceptible, and so slavery replaced traditional indentured servitude in all the warm regions that favored mosquito-borne diseases. As one result, four times as many Africans as Europeans crossed the Atlantic and began mixing with the remaining native Americans, giving rise to an endless variety of racial blends and accompanying vitality throughout the Americas. During the Q & A, Mann described a potential fresh eco-convulsion-in-waiting. "There is an area in southeast Asia roughly the size of Great Britain that is a single giant rubber plantation." Where rubber trees originally came from in the Amazon there is now a rubber tree leaf-blight that is starting to spread in Asia. "You could lose all the rubber trees in three to six months. It would be the biggest deforestation in a long time." The entire auto industry, he added, depends on just-in-time delivery of rubber.

### The real creation story “History makes no sense without prehistory,“ Wilson declared, “and prehistory makes no sense without biology.” He began by noting that every religion has a different creation story, all of them necessarily based on ignorance of what really happened in the past. Religions thus can’t give valid answers on the meaning of life---Gauguin’s questions: “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?” Philosophy gave up on the questions long ago. The task was left to science, and from science a valid, shareable creation story is now emerging. For the last 65 million years Earth has been dominated by eusocial animals. Ants, termites, and bees in some areas make up half of all biomass. Yet only a few of the million known insect species made the jump to eusociality. One variety of mammal, a tiny set of primates, made a similar jump. Once they began to use their eusocial skills to fan out from Africa 60 thousand years ago, they gradually became far more dominant even than the social insects. “The term ‘eusocial,’“ Wilson said, “means a society based in part on a division of labor, in which individuals act altruistically, that covers two or more generations, and that cares for young cooperatively.” That eusociality is so rare suggests how difficult it is for altruistic traits to evolve. The powerful evolutionary force to make individuals that successfully reproduce has to be overcome by some form of selective pressure which generates altruistic individuals who yield their interests to the interests of the group. How does that occur? Examining near-eusocial species like African wild dogs and snapping shrimp along with primitively eusocial species like sweat bees shows that a crucial step appears to be made when multiple generations linger to defend a constructed nest with valuable access to food. That step can be made with a simple change to a single behavioral gene, silencing the trait for normal dispersal of young to carry out their own independent reproduction. When the young linger to defend the nest and begin to provide for the next generation of young, eusociality begins. All eusocial species appear to have arisen from multi-generational nest defense. Two million years ago our ancestors began using fire for campsites and cooking. At the same time hominid brain size began expanding dramatically. Social traits emerged that have characterized humanity ever since. We love joining groups, and we became geniuses at reading the intentions of each other, a skill we fine-tune incessantly with our enjoyment of gossip. In another distinctively human trait, like ants, we became highly adept at collaborative warfare. Wilson had long been a proponent of William Hamilton’s theory of “kin selection” as an explanation for how altruistic traits could evolve. But as a naturalist he found it did not explain phenomena that he and others were discovering in eusocial species, and he began to favor “group selection” instead---a process where the “target” of evolution was sacrificially collaborative traits, because highly cooperative groups beat poorly cooperative groups, and the “units” of evolution (genes) adjusted accordingly. It is successful groups, more than successful families, that are being selected for. In 2010 Wilson, along with mathematician Martin Nowak and Corina Tarnita formally challenged kin selection with a peer-reviewed paper in Nature. There was, as Wilson put it, “considerable blowback” from kin selection theorists and supporters. Wilson’s alternative he calls “multi-level selection,” where individual selection and group selection proceed together (with kin selection a continuing bit player). In our eusocial species, that mix of traits makes us “permanently unstable, permanently conflicted” between selfish impulses and cooperative impulses. We negotiate these conflicts endlessly within ourselves and with each other. Wilson sees inherent adaptive value in that constant negotiation. Our vibrant cultural life may be driven in part by it. In response to a question about what the next stages of human eusociality might be, Wilson said he hoped for a fading of interest in end-state ideologies and end-time religious creation stories because they so fervently deny negotiation.

### The Quantified Planet “About 74,000 years ago,” Lynas began, “a volcanic event nearly wiped out humanity. We were down to just a thousand or so embattled breeding pairs. We’ve made a bit of a comeback since then. We’re over seven billion strong. In half a million years we’ve gone from prodding anthills with sticks to building a worldwide digital communications network. Well done! But... there’s a small problem. In doing this we’ve had to capture between a quarter and a third of the entire photosynthetic production of the planet. We’ve raised the temperature of the Earth system, reduced the alkalinity of the oceans, altered the chemistry of the atmosphere, changed the reflectivity of the planet, hugely affected the distribution of freshwater, and killed off many of the species that share the planet with us. Welcome to the Anthropocene, our very uniquely human geological era.” Some of those global alterations made by humans may be approaching tipping points---thresholds---that could destabilize the whole Earth system. Drawing on a landmark paper in Nature in 2009 (“[A Safe Operating Space for Humanity](http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol14/iss2/art32/main.html),” by Johan Rockström et al.) Lynas outlined the nine boundaries we should stay within, starting with three we’ve already crossed. 1. Loss of biodiversity reduces every form of ecological resilience. The boundary is 10 species going extinct per million per year. Currently we lose over 100 species per million per year. 2. Global warming is the most overwhelming boundary. Long-term stability requires 350 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; we’re currently at 391 ppm and rising fast. “The entire human economy must become carbon neutral by 2050 and carbon negative thereafter.” 3. Nitrogen pollution. With the invention a century ago of the Haber-Bosch process for creating nitrogen fertilizer, we doubled the terrestrial nitrogen cycle. We need to reduce the amount of atmospheric nitrogen we fix per year to 35 million tons; we’re currently at 121 million tons. Other quantifiable boundaries have yet to be exceeded, but we’re close. 4. Land use. Every bit of natural landscape lost threatens ecosystem services like clean water and air and atmospheric carbon balance. “Already 85% of the Earth’s ice-free land is fragmented or substantially affected by human activity.” The danger point is 15% of land being used for row crops; we’re currently at 12%. 5. Fresh water scarcity. Increasing droughts from global warming will make the problem ever worse. In the world’s rivers, “the blue arteries of the living planet,” there are 800,000 dams with two new large ones built every day. The numeric limit is thought to be 4,000 cubic kilometers of runoff water consumed per year; the current number is 2,600. 6. Ocean acidification from excess atmospheric carbon dioxide is increasingly lethal to ocean life such as coral reefs. The measure here is “aragonite saturation level.” Before the industrial revolution it was 3.44; the limit is 2.75; we’re already down to 2.90. 7. The ozone layer protects the Earth from ultraviolet radiation. One man (Thomas Midgley) invented the chlorofluorocarbon coolant that rapidly reduced stratospheric ozone, and one remarkable agreement (Montreal Protocol, 1987) cut back on CFCs and began restoring the ozone layer. (In Dobson units the limit is 276; before Midgley it was 290; we’re now back up to 283.) Two boundaries are so far unquantifiable. 8. Chemical pollution. Rachel Carson was right. Human toxics are showing up everywhere and causing harm. Coal-fired power plants are one of the worst offenders in this category. (Lynas added that nuclear waste belongs in this category but “the supposedly unsolved problem of nuclear waste hasn’t so far harmed a single living thing.” 9. Atmospheric aerosols---airborne dust and smoke. It kills hundreds of thousands of people annually, the soot causes ice to melt faster, and everyone wants to get rid of it. But one beneficial effect it has is cooling, so Lynas proposes “we could move this pollution from the troposphere where people have to breathe it up to the stratosphere where it can still cool the Earth and no one has to breathe it. That’s called geoengineering.” Lynas proposed that the goal for the future should be to get the whole world out of poverty by 2050 while staying within the planetary boundaries. Among the solutions he proposed are: clean cookstoves for the poor (they cause 1.6 million deaths a year); better GM crops for nitrogen efficiency and concentrated land use; integral fast reactors which run on nuclear waste (a recent calculation shows the UK could get 500 years of clean energy from its present waste, and the resulting IFR waste is a problem for 300 years, not for thousands of years); international treaties, which are crucial for dealing with global problems; carbon capture (everything from clean coal to biochar); and ongoing “dematerialization,” doing ever more with

### Save Agricultural Biodiversity Humanity’s agricultural legacy is on a par with any of our great cultural legacies, Richardson said, but preserving it is not just a matter of honoring the history and richness of our most fundamental civilization-enabling technology. For the health of future crops and livestock we need the deep genetic reservoir of all those millennia of sophisticated breeding. A million people died in the Irish Potato Famine because the whole nation depended on just two varieties of potato. In Peru, where potatoes originally came from, Richardson visited a field at 14,000 feet where 400 varieties of potato (with names like “Ashes of the Soul” and “Puma Paw”) are grown in just two acres. The local 1,300 varieties of potato are managed by a “Guardian of the Potatoes,” whose job it is in the community to know the story and uses of all the potatoes. The accumulated wisdom in the crops and livestock is profound. We’ve been breeding cattle for 10,000 years, goats for 9,000 years, dogs for 12,000 years, chickens for 8,000 years, llamas for 6,500 years, horses for 6,000 years, camels for 4,000 years. All those millennia we have been in deep partnership with the animals. All of our staple foods are ancient. Wheat has been bred for 11,000 years, corn for 8,000 years, rice for 8,000 years, potatoes for 7,000 years, soybeans for 5,000 years “For 9,900 years,” Richardson said, “we’ve been building up variety in domesticated crops and livestock---this whole wealth of specific solutions to specific problems. For the last 100 years we’ve been throwing it away.” 95% is gone. In the US in 1903 there were 497 varieties of lettuce; by 1983 there were only 36 varieties. (Also changed from 1903 to 1983: sweet corn from 307 varieties to 13; peas from 408 to 25; tomatoes from 408 to 79; cabbage from 544 to 28.) Seed banks have been one way to slow the rate of loss. The famous seed vault at Svalbard serves as backup for the some 1,300 seed banks around the world. The great limitation is that seeds don’t remain viable for long. They have to be grown out every 7 to 20 years, and the new seeds returned to storage. Even with living heirlooms, the rule is Use It Or Lose It. Devotees of exotic cattle say “You have to eat them to save them.” With dramatic photos Richardson compared the livestock shows in Wales with the livestock markets in Ethiopia. You see children adoring the young animals and breeders obsessing on details of excellence and uniqueness. “One guy says, ‘You see that sheep with the heart-shaped spot on his left shoulder? I’ll bet you I can move it to his rump in four generations.’” There’s a sheep called the North Ronaldsay that is bred to live solely on seaweed on the coast. Ethiopia has some specialists, like the Sheko cattle that are resistant to tsetse flies, but unlike in Europe, most of their breeds have to be generalists capable of providing meat, milk, labor (such pulling plows), and warmth in the winter. Helping preserve agricultural biodiversity is open to anyone. The [Seed Savers Exchange](http://www.seedsavers.org) in Decorah, Iowa, has 13,000 members. Their catalog is a cornucopia of heirloom garden delights, and members learn how to produce and store their own seeds and then share them. “It’s a wonderful example of citizens participating in the process.” And we can always acquire a new taste for old foods. Teff! Quinoa! Amaranth! Randall Lineback cows! You have to eat them to save them. PS: Jim Richardson’s beautiful heirloom photos and article may be found [here](http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/07/food-ark/siebert-text).

### Public Funding for Public Elections Larry Lessig gave a rousing performance for the 100th Seminar About Long-Term Thinking. In a lawyerly fashion he laid out evidence of a new type of corruption that is disrupting the American republic, and he offered a remedy for that corruption. Lessig has a very distinctive visual style of using slides that punctuates, word for word, the clear logic of his argument. He said the type of corruption rampant in the US Congress is not the old type of bribery, where congressional representatives had safes in their offices to hold the cash they received for voting in certain directions. That is now illegal and eliminated. This new type of corruption is more subtle, indirect and harder to outlaw. Corporations legally donate money to the election campaigns of legislators, who in turn tend to vote in favor of the interests of those corporations. Non-profits like [Maplight](http://maplight.org/) can graph the evidence that a representative voting in favor of a particular corporate-friendly law will receive 6 or 10 or 13 times the funding than someone who opposes the law. He cited studies that showed the ROI (return on investment) of lobbying to be 1,000%. It was one of the sanest expenses for a corporation. But the distortion is not just one sided. The issue that Congress spent the most time on in 2011 -- a year when US was waging two wars, dealing with a near economic depression, and revamping health care -- was the bank swipe fee. Who should pay the credit card use fee -- the banks or the stores? There were corporations on both sides of this minor argument, but each side was promising campaign funds, so this was the issue that got all the attention of the officials. But the real money to be made in Congress is the relative fortune to be made as a lobbyist after leaving office. The differential in wages between a staff member and a lobbyist has escalated a hundred fold in the past 40 years. Now 43% of staff go on to become lobbyists. The promise of a well-paying job working for corporate interests later is enough to warp voting now. None of this is illegal, but Lessig argues that we have a constitutional argument for eliminating it. The Constitution talks about the republic being "dependent on the people alone." But now it is dependent on corporate funders, and more and more JUST on corporate funders. His solution is to return the republic to being dependent on the people alone. His solution is an innovative kind of campaign finance reform. Give every voter a $50 campaign voucher. The $50 comes from the tax pool. It can be given to any candidate who accepts only money from the vouchers (and maybe a limit of an optional voluntary $100 per single voter). Thus all campaign money would come in very small amounts from The People. Lessig calculates that the total amount of money raised this public way would be 3 times the amount raised by private means in the last election cycles, and therefore more than adequate. But it would break the grip of corporate influence over what is voted up. The result would not be harmonious utopia, but the usual give-and-take compromises of politics -- which the US has not seen in decades. The issues that people cared about would return to the agenda. Lessig spent the remaining time and some of the question and answers talking about the real-politic necessary to pass this reform. A similar public financing scheme works in places like Sweden, where one elected legislator told Lessig he had never had to worry about where his funding came from. But the US has a fierce free-speech component not found elsewhere, and ironically, since spending money is viewed as a type of free speech, this complicates reform. As a free-speech advocate himself, and a constitutional lawyer, Lessig talked candidly about the difficulties of reform. He ended by saying that it would probably be a generational task. Overcoming institutional racism and sexism took more than one generation, and returning the republic to the "people alone" could take just as long, although in this case, the republic might not last that long without reform.

Held at the historic Castro Theater, almost 1,400 enthusiastic San Francisco history buffs packed in to partake of guerrilla archivist Rick Prelinger’s annual ritual. The audience learned from, laughed at, quizzed and heckled the lovingly curated footage of their city’s past. New material this year (presented for the first time in HD) included San Francisco's lost cemeteries in color, unique drive-through footage of the Produce Market (now Embarcadero Center and Golden Gateway), rides along the now destroyed Embarcadero Freeway, back streets in working-class North Beach, the sand-swept Sunset before its dunes were covered, wild automobile rides through downtown in the 1920s, newly-rediscovered Kodachrome Cinemascope footage of Playland and the Sky Tram, and much more.

### All knowledge, to all people, for all time, for free Universal access to all knowledge, Kahle declared, will be one of humanity's greatest achievements. We are already well on the way. "We're building the Library of Alexandria, version 2. We can one-up the Greeks!" Start with what the ancient library had---books. The [Internet Library](http://www.archive.org/) already has 3 million books digitized. With its Scribe Book Scanner robots---29 of them around the world---they're churning out a thousand books a day digitized into every handy ebook format, including robot-audio for the blind and dyslexic. Even modern heavily copyrighted books are being made available for free as lending-library ebooks you can borrow from [physical libraries](http://www.archive.org/)\---100,000 such books so far. (Kahle announced that every citizen of California is now eligible to borrow online from the Oakland Library's "[ePort](http://oakland.lib.overdrive.com/B5827532-F62F-49BC-8C8E-8BF0DDBD600A/10/644/en/Default.htm).") As for music, Kahle noted that the 2-3 million records ever made are intensely litigated, so the Internet Archive offered music makers free unlimited storage of their works forever, and the music poured in. The [Archive audio collection](http://www.archive.org/details/etree) has 100,000 concerts so far (including all the Grateful Dead) and a million recordings, with three new bands every day uploading. Moving images. The 150,000 commercial movies ever made are tightly controlled, but 2 million other films are readily available and fascinating---600,000 of them are accessible in the [Archive](http://www.archive.org/details/movies) already. In the year 2000, without asking anyone's permission, the Internet Archive started recording 20 channels of TV all day, every day. When 9/11 happened, they were able to assemble an [online archive of TV news](http://www.archive.org/details/911) coverage all that week from around the world ("TV comes with a point of view!") and make it available just a month after the event on Oct. 11, 2001. The Web itself. When the Internet Archive began in 1996, there were just 30 million web pages. Now the [Wayback Machine](http://www.archive.org/web/web.php) copies every page of every website every two months and makes them time-searchable from its 6-petabyte database of 150 billion pages. It has 500,000 users a day making 6,000 queries a second. "What is the Library of Alexandria most famous for?" Kahle asked. "For burning! It's all gone!" To maintain digital archives, they have to be used and loved, with every byte migrated forward into new media every five years. For backup, the whole Internet Archive is mirrored at the new [Bibliotheca Alexandrina](http://www.bibalex.org/Home/Default_EN.aspx) in Egypt and in Amsterdam. ("So our earthquake zone archive is backed up in the turbulent Mideast and a flood zone. I won't sleep well until there are five or six backup sites.") Speaking of institutional longevity, Kahle noted during the Q & A that nonprofits demonstrably live much longer than businesses. It might be it's because they have softer edges, he surmised, or that they're free of the grow-or-die demands of commercial competition. Whatever the cause, they are proliferating.

### Eco-continuity in California California ecology used to be much more driven by floods and fires, Cunningham said, showing with her paintings how the Great Valley would become a vast inland sea, like a huge vernal pool progressing each year from navigable water to intense flower displays to elk-grazed grassland. Lake Merritt in Oakland was a salt water inlet. On the Albany mudflats grizzly bears would tunnel into a beached humpback whale for food, joined by California condors. Every fall at the Carquinez Strait a million four-foot-long Chinook salmon headed inland to spawn. Only 300 years ago the whole Bay Area was grasslands, routinely burned by the local Indians. There were oaks in the valleys, redwoods in the Berkeley Hills, and extensive oak savannahs inland. The hills were greener more of the year than now, with fire-freshened grass attracting elk, and native perennial grasses drawing moisture with their deep roots. Cunningham researched the ancient landscapes using old maps, photos, paintings, scientific reports, sundry local experts, and 30 years of fieldwork. She witnessed the last wild condors feeding on a calf carcass, chasing off a golden eagle. (The condors are now back in the wild, spotted as far north as Mt. Hamilton.) To learn about the behavior and ecological effects of wolves and grizzly bears, she studied them in Yellowstone Park. (The California golden bear was enormous, up to 2,200 pounds.) Along the Pacific shore there used to be 10-ton Steller's sea cows (extinct in 1768), a giant petrel with an 8-foot wingspan, and a flightless diving goose that ate mussels. Further back, in the Ice Ages before 12,000 years ago, the ocean was lower, and San Francisco Bay was a savannah occupied by huge bison (6 feet at the shoulder), a native full-sized horse similar to the African quagga (Cunningham shows it with quagga-like stripes), Columbian mammoths, and the giant short-faced bear (10 feet tall standing up). For current Californians Cunningham encourages local restoration of old ecosystems, perhaps learning to live with more flood and fire. With her multi-millennial perspective, she's pretty relaxed about climate change. As much as long-term ecology is about continuity, it is about change.

### Learning to learn fast To acquire "the meta-skill of acquiring skills," Ferriss recommends approaching any subject with some contrarian analysis: "What if I try the opposite of best practices?" Some conventional wisdom---"children learn languages faster than adults" (no they don't)---can be discarded. Some conventional techniques can be accelerated radically. For instance, don't study Italian in class for a year before your big Italy trip; just book your flight a week early and spend that week cramming the language where it's spoken. You can be fluent in any language with mastery of just 1,200 words. That's what Ferriss calls the "minimum effective dose" for learning a language. The equivalent with any skill or goal is worth identifying. A regular 5 minutes of kettlebell swinging can tone the body rapidly; 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking makes your slow-carb diet effective; just 20,000 "early evangelists" for your book in its first 2 weeks guarantees it becomes a best seller. With any skill, "solve for extremes and anomalies." Look at who's best and how they do it, but especially look for those who are surprisingly good---the wispy girl who can deadlift 405 pounds---because they're doing it with technique rather than genes, and technique is learnable. How do you manage the self-discipline to bear down on learning a skill? Ferriss suggests you begin by treating your new regime as a trial (vowing permanence can be discouraging)--- give it 2 weeks or 5 serious sessions. By that point early rewards from the discipline will keep you going. You have to measure to detect the rewards ("What gets measured gets managed"--Peter Drucker), and score-keeping lets you make your progress a competitive game with others---which becomes its own motivation. Make public bets about your specific goals, where you'll pay painfully if you fail. "Loss aversion" is a surprisingly powerful incentive. You can get profound effects in an amazingly short time, Ferriss concluded. "Doing the unthinkable is easier than you think." PS: [ A collection of all of these summaries of the SALT talks](http://www.amazon.com/Summaries-Condensed-Long-term-Thinking-ebook/dp/B005I57M4O/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1316213727&sr=1-1) is available on the Kindle for $3. Foreword by Brian Eno.

### Superlinear Cities "It's hard to kill a city," West began, "but easy to kill a company." The mean life of companies is 10 years. Cities routinely survive even nuclear bombs. And "cities are the crucible of civilization." They are the major source of innovation and wealth creation. Currently they are growing exponentially. "Every week from now until 2050, one million new people are being added to our cities." "We need," West said, "a grand unified theory of sustainability--- a coarse-grained quantitative, predictive theory of cities." Such a theory already exists in biology, and you can build on that. Working with macroecologist James Brown and others, West explored the fact that living systems such as individual organisms show a shocking consistency of scalability. (The theory they elucidated has long been known in biology as Kleiber's Law.) Animals, for example, range in size over ten orders of magnitude from a shrew to a blue whale. If you plot their metabolic rate against their mass on a log-log graph, you get an absolutely straight line. From mouse to human to elephant, each increase in size requires a proportional increase in energy to maintain it. But the proportion is not linear. Quadrupling in size does not require a quadrupling in energy use. Only a tripling in energy use is needed. It's sublinear; the ratio is 3/4 instead of 4/4. Humans enjoy an economy of scale over mice, as elephants do over us. With each increase in animal size there is a slowing of the pace of life. A shrew's heart beats 1,000 times a minute, a human's 70 times, and an elephant heart beats only 28 times a minute. The lifespans are proportional; shrew life is intense but brief, elephant life long and contemplative. Each animal, independent of size, gets about a billion heartbeats per life. (West added that human bodies run on 100 watts---2,000 calories of food a day. But our civilizational energy use adds up 11,000 watts per person. We're like blue whales walking around.) Does such scalability apply to cities? If you plot, say, the number of gas stations against the size of population of metropolitan areas on a log-log scale, it turns out you get another straight line. Ditto with the length of electrical lines, carbon footprint, etc. Per capita, big city dwellers use less energy than small town dwellers. As with animals, there is greater efficiency with size, this time at a 9/10 ratio. Energy use is sublinear. But unlike animals, cities do not slow down as they get bigger. They speed up with size! The bigger the city, the faster people walk and the faster they innovate. All the productivity-related numbers increase with size---wages, patents, colleges, crimes, AIDS cases---and their ratio is superlinear. It's 1.15/1. With each increase in size, cities get a value-added of 15 percent. Agglomerating people, evidently, increases their efficiency and productivity. Does that go on forever? Cities create problems as they grow, but they create solutions to those problems even faster, so their growth and potential lifespan is in theory unbounded. (West pointed out that there is a bit of variability between cities worth noticing. On the plot of crimes/population, Tokyo has slightly fewer crimes for its size, and Osaka has slightly more. In the U.S., the most patents per capita come from Corvalis, Oregon, and the least from Abiline, Texas. Such variations tend to remain constant over decades, despite everyone's efforts to adjust them. "Exciting cities stay exciting, and boring cities stay boring.") Are corporations more like animals or more like cities? They want to be like cities, with ever increasing productivity as they grow and potentially unbounded lifespans. Unfortunately, West et al.'s research on 22,000 companies shows that as they increase in size from 100 to 1,000,000 employees, their net income and assets (and 23 other metrics) per person increase only at a 4/5 ratio. Like animals and cities they do grow more efficient with size, but unlike cities, their innovation cannot keep pace as their systems gradually decay, requiring ever more costly repair until a fluctuation sinks them. Like animals, companies are sublinear and doomed to die. What is the actual mechanism of difference? Research on that continues. "Cities tolerate crazy people," West observed, "Companies don't."

### Environmentalism for THIS Century Kareiva began by recalling the environmental "golden decade" of 1965-75, set in motion by the scientist Rachel Carson. In quick succession Congress created the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act---which passed the Senate unanimously. Green influence has been dwindling ever since. A series of polls in the US asked how many agreed with the statement, "Most environmentalists are extremists, not reasonable people." In 1996, 32% agreed. In 2004, 43% agreed. Now it's over 50% who think environmentalists are unreasonable. Kareiva noted that as the world is urbanizing, ever fewer people grow up in contact with nature---current college freshman have less than a tenth of the childhood experience of nature as previous generations. And there's a demographic shift toward multiethnicity, with whites already a minority in California and soon to be a minority in the whole country. Asked to describe a typical environmentalist, current grade school students say it's a girl, white, with money, preachy about recycling, nice but uptight, not sought as a friend. In general, environmentalist have earned the reputation of being "misanthropic, anti-technology, anti-growth, dogmatic, purist, zealous, exclusive pastoralists." Kareiva gave several examples of how that reputation was earned. In Green rhetoric, everything in nature is described as "fragile!"---rivers, forests, the whole planet. It's manifestly untrue. America's eastern forest lost two of its most dominant species---the American chestnut and the passenger pigeon---and never faltered. Bikini Atoll was vaporized in an H-bomb test that boiled the ocean. When National Geographic sent a research team there recently, they found 25% more coral than was ever there before. The Deepwater Horizon oil disaster last year caused dramatically less harm to salt marshes and fisheries than expected, apparently because ocean bacteria ate most of the 5 million barrels of oil. The problem with the fragility illusion is that it encourages a misplaced purism, leaving no room for compromise or negotiation, and it leads to "fortress conservation"---the idea that the only way to protect "fragile" ecosystems is to exclude all people. In Uganda, when a national park was established to protect biodiversity, 5,000 families were forced out of the area. After a change in government, those families returned in anger. To make sure they were never forced out again, they slaughtered all the local wildlife. In the 1980s, Kareiva was a witness in Seattle for protecting old growth forest (and spotted owls). At the courtroom loggers carried signs reading: "You care about owls more than my children." That jarred him. When genetically engineered crops (GMOs) came along, environmentalists responded with "knee-jerk anti-technology religiosity," Kareiva said. How to feed the world was not a consideration. Lessening the overwhelming impact of agriculture on natural systems was not a consideration. Instead, the usual apocalyptic fears were deployed in the usual terms: EVERYTHING'S GOING TO BE DEAD TOMORROW! When Kareiva was working on protecting salmon, he saw the same kind of language employed in a 1999 New York Times full-page ad about dams in the Snake River: TIMELINE TO EXTINCTION! He knew it wasn't true. Salmon are a weedy species, and the re-engineered dams were letting the fish through. The Nature Conservancy---where Kareiva is chief scientist working with the organization's 600 scientists, 4,000 staff, and one million members in 37 countries---promotes a realistic approach to conservation. Instead of demonizing corporations, they collaborate actively with them. They've decided to do the same with farmers, starting an agriculture initiative within the Conservancy. For the growing cities they emphasize the economic value of conservation in terms of valuable clean water and air. They started a program taking inner-city kids out to their field conservation projects not to play but to work on research and restoration. An astonishing 30% of those kids go on to major in science. Kareiva sees conservation in this century as a profoundly social, cooperative undertaking that has to include everyone. New social networking tools can be in the thick of it. For instance, people could use their smartphones to photograph (and geotag, timestamp, and broadcast) the northernmost occurrence of bird species, and the aggregate data could be graphed in real time, showing the increasing effects of global warming on the natural world. When everyone makes science like that, everyone owns it. They've invested.

### What's time to a virus? "Everything about viruses is extreme," Zimmer began. The number of viruses on Earth is estimated to be 1 followed by 31 zeroes. Small as they are, if you stacked them all up, the stack would reach 100 million light years. They are the planet's most abundant organism by far. They're fast. We take decades to reproduce. A flu virus can generate billions of itself in us within hours. And they evolve 10,000 times faster than us, because they're creatively sloppy about making copies of their genomes, and they readily combine genes among varieties when jointly infecting a cell. Each of us has four trillion viruses on board, in 1,500 all-too-fungible varieties. Yet they can also be "time stealthy." You may have a bout of childhood chickenpox that is over in days, but the viruses may hide in your nervous system and emerge decades later as shingles. HIV spreads inexorably because of the lag of months or years between infection and visible symptoms. The earliest record of a virus in human history is the smallpox marks you can see on the mummified face of Ramses V, who died in 1145 BCE. Viruses leave no fossils, but in a sense they ARE fossils, with the ancient gene sequences of retroviruses buried in the genomes of every creature they've infected over the ages. About 8 percent of our genome---some 100,000 elements---comes from viruses, and some of those genes now work for us (enabling the mammalian placenta, for instance). One French scientist revived from our genome a functioning 2-million-year-extinct virus just by deducing the original code from the current variety in that stretch of DNA. For billions of years the planet's life consisted solely of bacteria and their viruses, the bacteriophages. They became a planet force, and remain so today, determining the makeup of the atmosphere, among other things. Every day half of all the bacteria in the oceans are killed by phages. Some of the carbon from the bodies sinks to the bottom, some is freed up to fertilize other life. Ocean viruses cart around and transmit genes for photosynthesis to previously incapable microbes---10 percent of oceanic photosynthesis happens that way. If some day we have to geoengineer the atmosphere to manage climate change, we may want to employ the viruses that are already doing it. Virology will be revolutionizing science for decades to come. One body of investigation suggests that the so-called giant viruses may be a whole fourth domain of life (added to bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes). As the ultimate parasite, viruses were assumed to come along after life evolved, but they might an instrument of that evolution. One hypothesis is that viruses took primordial RNA and generated DNA to better protect the genes. They might have created life as we know it, a long time ago.

### Wallace beats Darwin The great insight of natural selection was published simultaneously by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace in 1858, Flannery pointed out, but their interpretations of the insight then diverged. Darwin's harsh view of "survival of the fittest" led too easily to social Darwinism, eugenics societies, neo-classical economics, and an overly reductionist focus on the "selfish gene." Wallace, by contrast, focussed on the tendency of evolution to generate a world of complex co-dependence, and he became an activist for social justice. At the age of 80 in 1904 Wallace published a book titled _Man's Place in the Universe_ , which proposed that Earth was the only living planet in the Solar System. Flannery regards it as "the foundation text of astrobiology" and, with its view that the atmosphere is an instrument of life, a direct precursor of James Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis and Earth System Science. The study of Earth systems, in turn, revealed that the atmosphere is 99 percent an artifact of life (minus only the noble gases), that the makeup of the oceans is life-driven (toxic heavy metals were concentrated into ore bodies), and that the whole, in Flannery's terms, constitutes a "commonwealth of virtue," using "geo-pheromones" such ozone, methane, atmospheric dust, and dimethyl sulfide from algae to regulate the stability of a livable planet. It acts like a loosely connected superorganism. The first tightly connected superorganism came 100 million years ago when cockroaches invented agriculture and the division of labor and became termites, building complex skyscrapers with air-conditioning, highways, and garbage dumps. Only 10,000 years ago, humans did the same, inventing agriculture and the division of labor in cities, becoming the most potent superorganism yet. One cause of that, Flannery opined, may be our astonishing genetic uniformity, caused by a near-extinction 70,000 years ago, when only 1,000 to 10,000 breeding pairs of humans survived. The 7 billion of us now alive have less genetic diversity than any random sample of 50 chimpanzees in West Africa. Flannery finds cause for hope in the increasing pace of global agreements to manage the global commons. There was the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1996, the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants in 2001, and worthy of an annual holiday on September 16, the 1987 signing of the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer. Flannery, who now works full time on climate issues, even takes hope from the last-minute Copenhagen Accord that emerged from the UN climate meeting in 2009, because it brought developing nations into the global project to reduce greenhouse gases. In Flannery's view, Gaia is an infant still. Even if it is the only Gaian planet in the galaxy, with growing skills and rudimentary space travel, it could invest the whole galaxy with life in just 5 to 50 million years---an instant in light of Earth's 4.5 billion years and the universe's 14 billion years. Tim Flannery is the author of _[Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet](http://www.amazon.com/Here-Earth-Natural-History-Planet/dp/080211976X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1304535603&sr=8-1)_.

### Geographical determinism Historians and others who try to explain the world dominance by the West since the 18th century usually put it down to long-term lock-in or short-term accidents, said Morris. The lock-in theories are belied by the dominance of the East from 550 to 1750 CE. The accidents approach is undermined by clear patterns that emerge when you look for them in a rigorous way. Morris has devised a quantitative "social development index" based on evaluating a civilization's energy capture, organization (size of largest cities), information management, and war-making capability. (The details of his method are online here.) When you graph human progress since the last ice age 15,000 years ago, the results show that the West led for all the millennia up till the 6th century CE, fell behind for 1,200 years, then leapt ahead again up to the present day. (The "West" for Morris is the civilizational core that developed agriculture and then cities and empires in the eastern Mediterranean, later spreading across Europe and North America. The "East" is China.) Geography determines how and when regions develop, but new societal capabilities keep redefining what geography means. At first agriculture was limited to regions with reliable rainfall, but once societies grew able to manage large-scale irrigation, the empires of parched regions like Mesopotamia and Egypt could take off, and their rivers became trade routes. The vast steppes of north-central Asia long separated Western and Eastern empires, but once their riches became worth plundering, mounted nomads from the steppes invaded repeatedly, defeating the agrarian armies and carrying germs that unleashed waves of epidemics. The West had the advantage of a trade highway in the Mediterranean that wasn't matched in the East until the 6th century, when the Sui emperors built the Grand Canal 1,500 miles long linking north and south China. Everything then changed with the invention of ocean-going ships and guns in the 13th and 14th centuries. (The gun innovation took only 40 years to spread from China to Europe.) Suddenly the most important geographic fact was the differing sizes of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Europeans had only 3,000 miles to travel to conquer the Americas; the Chinese (who had capable ships) faced a 6,000 mile barrier. Atlantic trade gave Europe the wealth and science to start the industrial revolution, and with that the West unleashed a global economy, within which players in the East are now flourishing rapidly. Extending the story to the rest of this century, Morris says that if present trends merely continue, the East will retake leadership by the end of the century. But the accelerating pace of social development may make geography irrelevant. By his index, societies have risen to an index value of 900 during the past fifteen millennia. They are likely to be at a level of 5,000 by century's end, meaning there will be five times as much progress (or catastrophe) in this 100 years as in the past 15,000 years. Books about the future, Morris noted, nearly always portray the future as much like the present. "That," he said, "won't happen." Ian Morris is the author of [_Why the West Rules - For Now_](http://www.amazon.com/Why-West-Rules-Now-Patterns/dp/0374290024).

Alexander Rose, Long Now Executive Director and project manager for the Clock of the Long Now, discussed lessons learned in multi-millennial site design. Rose covers his trip to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault as well as other sites and precedents like the Mormon Genealogical Vault and the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste site.

### 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/).

**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/).

**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/).

**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/).

**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/).

### Cosmic Life The pace of astronomic discovery, said the Astronomer Royal, keeps increasing with the constant improvement in our sensing technology. The recent discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe (dark energy) revolutionized cosmology, and with the launch of the Kepler Telescope in 2009, we are beginning to detect and study Earth-sized planets around distant stars. Since the Moon landings, humans in space have done little of scientific interest, but unmanned probes have delivered revelations from the planets and moons of the solar system, with much more to come. The best prospects for finding life elsewhere in our solar system appear to be on Mars, on Saturn's moon Titan, or on Jupiter's moon Europa. (Human space exploration is best pushed by private individuals such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson, rather than governments, Rees feels. Governments aren't allowed to be realistic about the dangers of space travel.) "We are the nuclear waste of stellar fusion," Rees noted, the ash from long-dead stars all over the galaxy exchanging their gases in a complex ecology, and the galaxies show a mega-structure of density contrasts generated by gravity. Poised midway in scale between atoms and stars, biological life appears to be the peak of complexity in the universe---a flea is more complicated than a star. Since we don't know how our own life emerged and haven't discovered any elsewhere, we still have no idea whether life is common in the universe or if we are unique. We can be certain that we are not the culmination of life forms here, because we are less than halfway through the Sun's lifespan. In the six billion years to come, there are likely to be creatures as far beyond humans as we are beyond microbes, and science as far beyond our present understanding as quantum theory is remote to a chimpanzee. Now that we are stewards of this planet, we are responsible for maintaining life's possibilities in this cosmic neighborhood.

### Gaming the World In a glee-filled evening, Schell declared that games and real life are reaching out to each other with such force that we might come to a condition of "gamepocalypse---where every second of your life you're playing a game in some way. He expects smart toothbrushes and buses that give us good-behavior points, and eye-tracking sensors that reward us for noticing ads, and subtle tests that confirm whether product placement in our dreams has worked. The reason games are so inviting is that they offer: clear feedback, a sense of progress, the possibility of success, mental and physical exercise, a chance to satisfy curiosity, a chance to solve problems, and a great feeling of freedom. Accelerating technology has made some people give up on predicting the future, Schell said, but in fact it should make us much better predictors, because we get so much practice in finding out so quickly whether our predictions are right or wrong. He feels confident in predicting a number of driving forces that will make games subsume all other media and occupy ever more of real life. They are: * Nooks & crannies---new niches for games in people's time, in specialty groups, in various world cultures. * Microtransactions---which will really take off when they blend with social networking. * New sensors---tilty smart phones are a glimpse of what disposable sensors everywhere might bring. * New screens---live displays on everything. * REM-tainment---lucid dreams as a play field. * AdverGaming---commercialization money drives powerful innovation. * Beauty---everything is getting gorgeous. * Customization---you can already get personalized M&Ms. * Eye and face tracking---universal face recognition is coming, and so is having your avatar reflect your real-face expressions. * The curious will win---games so reward curiosity and fast learning that the incurious will be left behind. * Authenticity---"real" constantly pushes toward real. * Social networking---Facebook! * Transmedia worlds---Pokemon showed the way, embracing a game, TV, cards, and toys. * Speech recognition---soon you will have to persuade a computer character to do something. * Geotracking---the real world becomes the screen. * Sharing---Wikipedia showed its power. * Quantitative design---detailed real-time analysis of what works in games drives exquisite adaptation. * Extrinsic rewards---gold stars everywhere, but Schell recommends the book Punished by Rewards and believes that intrinsic rewards are better to promote because they last. * Whole life tracking---the endpoint is immersion. Hopefully in what James Carse calls "the infinite game"---where the point is not in winning but in always improving the game. Asked in the Q&A about short versus long games, Schell noted that massive multiplayer games have such scale and scope and offer such endless new goals and progress along with their social intensity that World of Warcraft now has 10 million players. We may well be passing our avatars on to our children and grandchildren.