Long Now

### History-savvy Policy Why do policy makers and historians shun each other? Gavin observed that policy people want actionable information, certainty, and simple explanations. Meanwhile historians revel in nuance, distrust simple explanations and also distrust power and those who seek it. Thus historians keep themselves irrelevant, and policy makers keep their process ignorant. Gavin proposed five key concepts from history that can inform understanding and improve policy dramatically... **Vertical History.** What are the deep causative patterns behind a current situation? For example, America's deep involvement in the Mideast appears to be caused by concern about oil and terrorism and by support of Israel. But none of those elements applied in the mid-60s when we dove into the Mideast. Britain was Israel's keeper in those days and in financial trouble, the US was overextended in Vietnam and in financial trouble, and Soviet influence was the main threat in the Mideast. After the profound shock of the Six-Day War in 1967, Britain withdrew and America took over on the cheap with its "Pillar Strategy"---we would support Israel, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. That arrangement drives everything today, and policy people have almost zero memory of its origins. **Horizontal History.** The interconnecting events of a particular moment---all the things simultaneously on the plate of a decision maker---profoundly affect decisions. For example, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson in the 60s were obsessed with America's balance of payments deficit and had to draw down our troop commitment in Germany, but Europe was obsessed with keeping Germany from building nuclear weapons, and so the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty was invented as a workaround. That situational artifact leads US policy 40 years later. **Chronological Proportionality.** "The New York Times always gets it wrong, and they're the best of the media," Gavin noted. Dramatic events take our attention away from what's really going on. For example, the Vietnam War dominated American attention in the 1960s and still looms large in every policy discussion. But the war was of no real geopolitical consequence, particularly when compared with the huge consequences from other little-noted 60s events---the Six-Day War, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, growing stability in Central Europe, and the thaw in relations between China and America. That raises the question: what is Afghanistan distracting us from these days? **Unintended Consequences.** Suppose America had won in Vietnam? We would have had to commit huge resources to Southeast Asia indefinitely, and China and the USSR would have had to ally in the face of our military presence there. With our humiliating defeat, China and the Soviets split permanently, China and the US became friendly, and America profoundly reassessed and improved its own policies and institutions. So it goes in real life: things turn out differently than we expect. **Policy Insignificance.** What policy people do is often not the main event at all. For example, in the mid-70s policy makers in Washington were trying to fix an America they saw in a steep decline and locked in an endless Cold War. They paid no attention to three events going on in California. Apple's computer in 1976 signaled a coming American dominance in computer and information technology. Also in 1976 a California wine (Stag's Leap) defeated the best French wines in a blind-taste contest, signaling our competitiveness in high culture internationally. And in 1977 "Star Wars" became the highest-grossing film ever, signaling American dominance of world pop culture. America's greatest economic and cultural boom took off, totally without Washington's involvement or even awareness. During the Q&A Galvin noted that Kennedy got the Cuban Missile Crisis right by locking all the dangerous heavy-hitters in a small room for thirteen days while he applied his own "historic sensibility" to finding a back-channel way to defuse the crisis rather than exacerbate it. These days, Gavin observed, policy people are worrying excessively about terrorism and nuclear weapons proliferation when in fact nuclear weapons are on the wane everywhere and have been for decades. Historians, he said, can bring a well supported, authoritative, helpful message to the public discourse and to policy makers at such times: "Don't freak out."

### Imminent fusion power All the light we see from the sky, Moses pointed out, comes from fusion power burning hydrogen, the commonest element in the universe---3/4 of all mass. A byproduct of the cosmic fusion is the star-stuff that we and the Earth are made of. On Earth, 4 billion years of life accumulated geological hydrocarbons, which civilization is now burning at a rate of 10 million years' worth per year. In 1900, 98% of the world's energy came from burning carbon. By 1970, that was down to 90%, but it has not decreased since. It has to decrease some time, because there is only so much coal, oil, and gas. During this century every single existing power plant (except some hydro) will age and have to be replaced, and world energy demand is expected to triple by 2100. To head off climate change, fossil fuel combustion has to end by about 2050. The crucial period for conversion to something better is between 2030 and 2050. The ideal new power source would be: affordable; clean; non-geopolitical; using inexhaustible fuel and existing infrastructure; capable of rapid development and evolution. Moses' candidate is the "laser inertial fusion engine"---acronym LIFE---being developed at Lawrence Livermore. The question, Moses said, is "Can we build a miniature Sun on Earth?" The recipe involves a peppercorn-size target of hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium heated to 200 million degrees Fahrenheit for a couple billionths of a second. To get that micro-blast of heat, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) uses lasers---coherent light---at a massive scale. Laser engineer Moses notes that photons are perfect for the job: "no mass, no charge, just energy." Moses ran a dramatic video showing how a shot at the NIF works. 20-foot-long slugs of amplified coherent light (10 nanoseconds) travel 1,500 yards and converge simultaneously through 192 beams on the tiny target, compressing and heating it to fusion ignition, with a yield of energy 10 to 100 times of what goes into it. Successful early test shots suggest that the NIF will achieve the first ignition within the next few months, and that shot will be heard round the world. To get a working prototype of a fusion power plant may take 10 years. It will require an engine that runs at about 600 rpm---like an idling car. Targets need to be fired at a rate of 10 per second into the laser flashes. The energy is collected by molten salt at 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit and then heats the usual steam-turbine tea kettle to generate electricity. The engine could operate at the scale of a standard 1-gigawatt coal or nuclear plant, or it could be scaled down to 250 megawatts or up to 3 gigawatts. The supply of several million targets a year can be manufactured for under 50 cents apiece with the volume and precision that Lego blocks currently are. Moses said that 1 liter of heavy water will yield the energy of 2 million gallons of gas. Fusion power, like nuclear fission power, would cost less per kilowatt hour than wind (and far less than solar), yet would be less capital intensive than fission. For the constant baseload power no carbon is involved, no waste stream, no possibility of meltdown or weaponization, and there is no such thing as peak hydrogen.

### The anti-state economy Gilman described deviant globalization as "the unpleasant underside of transnational integration." There's nice tourism, and then sex tourism, such as in Thailand and Switzerland. The vast pharmacology industry is matched by a vast traffic in illegal drugs. The underside of waste disposal is the criminal dumping in the developing world of toxic wastes from the developed world. Military activities worldwide are fed by a huge gray market in weapons. Internet communications are undermined by floods of malware doubling every year. Among the commodities shipped around the world are exotic hardwoods, endangered species, blood diamonds, and stolen art worth billions in ransom. Illegitimate health care includes the provision of human organs from poor people---you can get a new kidney with no waiting for $150,000 in places like Brazil, the Philippines, Istanbul, and South Africa. Far overwhelming legal immigration are torrents of illegal immigrants who pay large sums to get across borders. And money laundering accounts for 4-12% of world GDP---$1.5 to 5 trillion dollars a year. These are not marginal, "informal" activities. These are enormous, complex businesses straight out of the Harvard Business Review. The drug business in Mexico, for example, employs 400,000 people. A thousand-dollar kilo of cocaine grows in value by 1400-percent when it crosses into the US---nice profit margin there. The whole phenomenon is driven by state regulators acting on ethical taboos. When we outlaw or tax certain goods and services, we reduce supply while demand increases, and that provides an irresistible opportunity for risk-taking entrepreneurs. Also, historian Gilman points out, international development practices are partially to blame. From 1949 to 1989 the Cold War was played out with the US and USSR trying to create new states like themselves. It mostly failed, and it ended with the end of international Communism. Then came the neoliberal "Washington Consensus" theory of structural adjustment---governments in developing countries must "stabilize, privatize, and liberalize." That sort of worked, but it hollowed out the governments and dismantled their regulatory capacity. People in those countries realized they were on their own, forced to "survival entrepreneurship." In some places like Eastern Europe criminals took over the economy. There is a certain Robin Hood effect on the large scale. Serious money is moving from the rich global north to the poor global south and enriching some people there. Politically, the deviant entrepreneurs don't want to take over the state, just undermine it. For their own communities they often provide state-like services of infrastructure, health care, and even education. They are "post-modern, post-revolutionary, and post-progressive." They resort to violence against the state only when the state suddenly attacks them---as is playing out in Mexico now. What to do? If you try to shut down the deviant economy, you just make the profit margins greater and exacerbate the problem. If you shrug and legalize everything, you condone hateful practices like child sex slavery and the total deforestation of tropical hardwoods. We are left with making judicious choices about which deviant practices to take most seriously, and then dealing with them patiently in a non-sudden way, realizing that the unsavory economy will never be fully eradicated.

### Averting Collapse Civilizations always think they're immortal, Eagleman noted, but they nearly always perish, leaving "nothing but ruins and scattered genetics." It takes luck and new technology to survive. We may be particularly lucky to have Internet technology to help manage the six requirements of a durable civilization: 1\. "Try not to cough on one another." More humans have died from epidemics than from all famines and wars. Disease precipitated the fall of Greece, Rome, and the civilizations of the Americas. People used to bunch up around the infected, which pushed local disease into universal plague. Now we can head that off with Net telepresence, telemedicine, and medical alert networks. All businesses should develop a work-from-home capability for their workforce. 2\. "Don't lose things." As proved by the destruction of the Alexandria Library and of the literature of Mayans and Minoans, "knowledge is hard won but easily lost." Plumbing disappeared for a thousand years when Rome fell. Inoculation was invented in China and India 700 years before Europeans rediscovered it. These days Michelangelo's David has been safely digitized in detail. Eagleman has direct access to all the literature he needs via [PubMed](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed), [JSTOR](http://www.jstor.org/), and [Google Books](http://books.google.com/). "Distribute, don't reinvent." 3\. "Tell each other faster." Don't let natural disasters cascade. The Minoans perished for lack of the kind of tsunami alert system we now have. Countless Haitians in the recent earthquake were saved by [Ushahidi.com](http://www.ushahidi.com/), which aggregated cellphone field reports in real time. 4\. "Mitigate tyranny." The USSR's collapse was made inevitable by state-controlled media and state-mandated mistakes such as Lysenkoism, which forced a wrong theory of wheat farming on 13 time zones, and starved millions. Now crowd-sourced cellphone users can sleuth out vote tampering. We should reward companies that stand up against censorship, as Google has done in China. 5\. "Get more brains involved in solving problems." Undertapping human capital endangers the future. Open courseware from colleges is making higher education universally accessible. Crowd-sourced problem solving is being advanced by sites such as [PatientsLikeMe](http://www.patientslikeme.com/), [Foldit](http://fold.it/portal/) (protein folding), and [Cstart](http://cstart.org/) (moon exploration). Perhaps the next step is "society sourcing." 6\. "Try not to run out of energy." When energy expenditure outweighs energy return, collapse ensues. Email saves trees and trucking. Online shopping is a net energy gain, with UPS optimizing delivery routes and never turning left. We need to expand the ability to hold meetings and conferences online. But if the Net is so crucial, what happens if the Net goes down? It may have to go down a few times before we learn how to defend it properly, before we catch on that civilization depends on it for survival.

### Dot.Gov Noveck began with the example of patents, first devised in Renaissance Florence and Venice to protect techniques such as glass manufacture. In England, conferring a monopoly on a tool or technique became a prerogative of the king. In contemporary America, the process of getting a 20-year monopoly on your invention from the US Patent Office is mired in a morass of litigation costs, a huge backlog, insufficient reviewers with insufficient science education, and what Noveck calls "an outmoded conception of expertise." Her revolutionary approach is to "reengineer institutions to bring in expertise from outside." Thus she developed Peer-to-Patent, which publishes patent applications to the Internet. The online community researches prior art, organizes the most excellent reviewers that emerge, and greatly accelerates and refines the patent review process. A pilot program proved the concept, and it is now being institutionalized at the Patent Office. Noveck describes the methodology as "focussed collaboration" and as a way to move power "downwards and outwards." On President Obama's first day in office he signed a memorandum on Open Government, committing all the departments and agencies to "transparency, participation, and collaboration." They were asked to begin by identifying high-value datasets that could be put online in downloadable form immediately. The result was [Data.gov](http://www.data.gov/), which went public in May 2009 and quickly had 64 million hits for its raw data files. An [IT Dashboard](http://it.usaspending.gov/) of the government's information technology spending got 86 million hits. The White House made its [visitor logs](http://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/disclosures/visitor-records) public. Noveck said the government is replacing its reflex "there's a form for that" habits with "there's an app for that," and a panoply of cloud-based apps, including 165 social media platforms, are on offer at [Apps.gov](https://apps.gov/cloud/advantage/main start_page.do). Just within the Department of Defense, the entire department has adopted (Long Now co-founder) Danny Hillis's [Aristotle](http://www.whitehouse.gov/open/innovations/Dod-Aristotle) software to link all military expertise; the [Army field manuals](http://www.whitehouse.gov/open/innovations/wikifiedArmy) are being wikified---collaboratively updated by soldiers in the field; and troops are encouraged to learn and use social media. The formidable Code of Federal Regulations used to cost $17,000. Now the price is zero for the "[e-CFR](http://ecfr.gpoaccess.gov/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=ecfr&tpl=%2Findex.tpl)." "Loved data lives longer," Noveck declared. She encourages citizens to "adopt a dataset," and to demand ever wider release of government data troves. (One audience member requested that all the aerial photographs ever made by the US Geological Survey be digitized and published.) The Obama administration is finding that the whole process of opening up government digitally doesn't have to wait for perfection. It can move ahead swiftly on the Internet standard of "rough consensus and running code." PS. As a government employee, Noveck is not allowed to plug her book, [_Wiki Government_](http://www.amazon.com/Wiki-Government-Technology-Democracy-Stronger/dp/0815702752/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1267818242&sr=1-1). But I can.

### Humanity's impact, nature's resilience Weisman's book, _The World Without Us_ , grew out of two questions, he said. One was, "How can I write a best-seller about the environment?" The answer to that was the second question: "How would the rest of nature behave without the constant pressure we put on it?" On the border of Ukraine and Belarus is a small intact remnant---500,000 acres---of the primordial forest that once covered Europe from Siberia to Ireland. In the Puszcza Bialowieska, with its towering ash and linden trees and dense growth, Weisman felt he was in the forest of Grimm's tales. "It felt primally familiar. It felt like being home. I realized that people really want that back." Buildings and cities without us around don't last long, his research showed. Water gets into every building, followed by rot, birds, and trees, and pretty soon all that's left is the bathroom tiles. The same with cities. New York is built on top of 40 streams. To keep the subways functioning, 13 million gallons of water have to be pumped out every day. If the water returns, it won't be long before the tall buildings lose their footing and topple. Maintenance people emerged as the heroes of the book, Weisman said. Without their vigilance and toil, everything collapses. They are the bedrock of civilization. At the New York Botanical Garden Weisman found that the 40-acre preserve of carefully protected original forest has transformed itself over the years into a new woods dominated by alien plants such as ailanthus and cork trees. The garden's curator told him something radical: "Maintaining biodiversity is less important than maintaining a functioning ecosystem. What matters is that soil is protected, that water gets cleaned, that trees filter the air, that a canopy generates new seedlings to keep nutrients from draining away into the Bronx River." Plastic, Weisman discovered, is astonishingly durable, gradually accumulating in continent-sized gyres of floating garbage in the oceans. Instead of dissolving, the plastic just gets smaller in size and is ingested harmfully by every scale of animal all the way down to zooplankton. Weisman's message is one of reconciliation. Wherever humanity backs its impact off even a little, nature comes swarming back. From the new part-wolf coyotes taking up residence in New England to the rare and exquisite red-crowned cranes prospering in Korea's Demilitarized Zone, accommodating nature always rewards humans.

### Enduring Value In February 02010, [Brian Eno](../../../../people/board/prospect4/), [Stewart Brand](../../../../people/board/sb1/), and [Alexander Rose](../../../../people/staff/zander/) spoke at the [Long Finance conference](http://www.zyen.com/index.php/long-finance/long-finance-events/633.html) hosted by [Gresham College](http://www.gresham.ac.uk/text.asp?PageId=3) in London. The conversation was moderated by [Faisal Islam](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faisal_Islam), an economics correspondent with Channel 4 news in the UK. [Long Finance](http://www.zyen.com/long-finance.html) is an initiative begun by Professor Michael Mainelli in 02007 to establish a World Centre Of Thinking On Long-Term Finance. The aim of the Long Finance Institute is "to improve society's understanding and use of finance over the long-term".

### Native guidance What does it mean to be human and alive? The thousands of different cultures and languages on Earth have compellingly different answers to that question. "We are a wildly imaginative and creative species," Davis declared, and then proved it with his accounts and photographs of humanity plumbing the soul of culture, of psyche, and of landscape. He began with Polynesians, the wayfinders who mastered the Pacific ocean in the world's largest diaspora. Without writing or chronometers they learned 220 stars by name, learned to read the subtle influence of distant islands on wave patterns and clouds, and navigated the open sea by a sheer act of integrative memory. For the duration of an ocean passage "navigators do not sleep." In the Amazon, which used to be thought of as a "green hell" or "counterfeit paradise," living remnants may be found of complex forest civilizations that transformed 20 percent of the land into arable soil. The Anaconda peoples carry out five-day rituals with 250 people in vast longhouses, and live by stringent rules such as requiring that everyone must marry outside their language. Their mastery of botany let them find exactly the right combination of subspecies of plants to concoct ayahuasca, a drug so potent that one ethnobotantist described the effect of having it blown up your nose by a shaman as "like being shot out of a rifle barrel lined with Baroque paintings and landing in a sea of electricity." In the Andes the Incas built 8,500 miles of roads over impossibly vertical country in a hundred years, and their descendents still run the mountains on intense ritual pilgrimages, grounding their culture in every detail of the landscape. In Haiti, during the four years Davis spent discovering the chemical used to make real-life zombies, he saw intact African religion alive in the practice of voodoo. "The dead must serve the living by becoming manifest" in those possessed. It was his first experience in "the power of culture to create new realities." The threat to cultures is often ideological, Davis noted, such as when Mao whispered in the ear of the Dalai Lama that "all religion is poison," set about destroying Tibetan culture. The genius of culture is the ability to survive in impossible conditions, Davis concluded. We cannot afford to lose any of that variety of skills, because we are not only impoverished without it, we are vulnerable without it. PS. Wade Davis' SALT talk was based on his five Massey Lectures in Canada in 02009, which are collected in a book, [_The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World_](http://www.anansi.ca/titles.cfm?pub_id=1359).

### Gas Stations, Not Flowers The fourth incarnation of _Lost Landscapes of San Francisco_ played to a sold out house at the Herbst Theater with the chanteuse Suzanne Ramsey opening the evening with a selection of historical San Francisco songs including the 01926 gem [Masculine Women Feminine Men](http://www.heptune.com/masculin.html). Rick Prelinger prefaced the footage with a brief introduction to his archive, process, and most of all a request to go into your mother's attic to pull out any films that feature San Francisco or the Bay Area. The archive needs your footage. Prelinger then queued up over seventy minutes of historic San Francisco footage starting with a heart stopping landing by an auto-gyro in City Hall Plaza. As always the audience was encouraged to participate by shouting both questions and answers posed by each segment. This year they were also bolstered by a trio of San Francisco city history buffs: [Gray Brechin](http://www.graybrechin.com/), [Ed Holmes](http://laughingsquid.com/31st-annual-saint-stupids-day-parade-on-april-1st-in-san-francisco/) and [Woody LaBounty](http://www.carville-book.com/author.php), each with a particular angle on the city. New to the collection this year was wonderful multi-generational family footage from the Gee family who were also in the audience. In the question period at the end Stewart Brand asked what we should be doing now for the archivists of the future, Ricks answer, "shoot gas stations not flowers". Most archives and libraries put up access barriers in response to copyright laws. In contrast Rick has attacked the vast amount of work that is either out of copyright, or left in the ambiguous gray zones, like home movies. We have always been told that there is no economic case for archives, the [Prelinger Archive](http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger) and [Library](http://www.prelingerlibrary.org/) not only upends that notion, but proves that access is the key, not protection. Rick Prelinger's archive contains hundreds of historical films showing San Francisco and Northern California history, the history of technology and industry, and everyday life. For future Lost Landscapes programs, he's looking for films and footage showing San Francisco and Northern California history, especially home movies and material shot by hobbyists or amateurs. He's interested in material that can become part of his archives, and will consider paying to copy footage of historical interest. He's reachable at [email protected].

### History of Innovation The development of human mental ability can be tracked through the progressive crafting of stone tools, Van der Leeuw explained. First we learned to shape an edge---a line---then the surface, then the whole volume of the tool, then the sophisticated sequence required to make a superb spear point. It took 2 million years. But by 300,000 years ago the human brain had developed a sufficiently complex short-term working memory to keep 7 (plus-or-minus 2) considerations in mind at once. We could handle problems of multi-dimensionality. The brain has not progressed since then, nor has needed to. The skills of innovation moved on from the biological brain to social constructs and modes of communication and information processing. That bootstrapping process continues to this day. The cave paintings show that cognitive agility reached the point of being able to reduce 3 dimensions to a representative 2 dimensions, for instance. By the Neolithic revolution of 10,000 years ago, we developed the ability to shape voids---the interior of pots, baskets, and houses. Tools could be made by assembling parts instead of just paring down blanks of stone or wood. Problem solving in agriculture began to span time, to be a form of investment. Towns and then cities became humanity's innovation engine. Symbols recorded in material form---tokens, accounting, and writing---spanned time and space. Unruly cities disciplined themselves with laws and administration. Then empires developed the ability to harvest the bounty of far-flung communities in the form of treasure, and that led to overreach. The Roman Empire was the first to degrade its world at the local climate level, and it collapsed. Around 1800, in Europe, energy constraints were finally conquered by the harvesting of fossil fuels. Humans only need 100 watts to survive, but every human now commands 10,000 watts. With that leverage we built a global civilization. The innovative power of urbanity has multiplied yet further with the coming of the Internet. But we have become "disturbance dependent." As our cities and density of communications grow, they create ever more difficult problems, for which we have to innovate ever more sophisticated solutions. Technology is "the biggest Ponzi scheme of all." As we become ever more adept at solving short-term problems, we shift the risk to long-term problems---such as climate change---which do not match the skills we have developed and know how to reward. We are headed into a trap of our own devising. To get out of it, if we can, will require a "battle with ourselves" to wholly redefine our social structures and institutions to master the long term.

### Globalizing Green Brand built his case for rethinking environmental goals and methods on two major changes going on in the world. The one that most people still don't take into consideration is that power is shifting to the developing world, where 5 out of 6 people live, where the bulk of humanity is getting out of poverty by moving to cities and creating their own jobs and communities (slums, for now). He noted that history has always been driven by the world's largest cities, and these years they are places like Mumbai, Lagos, Dhaka, Sao Paulo, Karachi, and Mexico City, which are growing 3 times faster and 9 times bigger than cities in the currently developed world ever did. The people in those cities are unstoppably moving up the "energy ladder" to high quality grid electricity and up the "food ladder" toward better nutrition, including meat. As soon as they can afford it, everyone in the global South is going to get air conditioning. The second dominant global fact is climate change. Brand emphasized that climate is a severely nonlinear system packed with tipping points and positive feedbacks such as the unpredicted rapid melting of Arctic ice. Warming causes droughts, which lowers carrying capacity for humans, and they fight over the diminishing resources, as in Darfur. It also is melting the glaciers of the Himalayan plateau, which feed the rivers on which 40% of humanity depends for water in the dry season---the Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra, Mekong, Irrawaddy, Yangtze, and Yellow. Global warming has to be slowed by reducing the emission of greenhouse gases from combustion, but cities require dependable baseload electricity, and so far the only carbon-free sources are hydroelectric dams and nuclear power. Brand contrasted nuclear with coal-burning by comparing what happens with their waste products. Nuclear spent fuel is tiny in quantity, and you know exactly where it is, whereas the gigatons of carbon dioxide from coal burning goes into the atmosphere, where it stays for centuries making nothing but trouble. Brand declared that geological sequestering of nuclear waste has been proven practical and safe by the ten years of experience at the WIPP in New Mexico, and he paraded a series of new "microreactor" designs that offer a clean path for distributed micropower, especially in developing countries. Moving to genetically engineered food crops, Brand noted that they are a tremendous success story in agriculture, with Green benefits such as no-till farming, lowered pesticide use, and more land freed up to be wild. The developing world is taking the lead with the technology, designing crops to deal with the specialized problems of tropical agriculture. Meanwhile the new field of synthetic biology is bringing a generation of Green biotech hackers into existence. On the subject of bioengineering (direct intervention in climate), Brand suggested that we will have to follow of the example of beneficial "ecosystem engineers" such as earthworms and beavers and tweak our niche (the planet) toward a continuing life-friendly climate, using methods such a cloud-brightening with atomized seawater and recreating what volcanoes do when they pump sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, cooling the whole world. Green aversion to technologies such as nuclear and genetic engineering resulted from a mistaken notion that they are somehow "unnatural." "What we call natural and what we call human are inseparable," Brand concluded. "We live one life." PS. Long Now likes to include a pointer to related reading. As it happens, the whole ["Recommended Reading"](http://web.me.com/stewartbrand/DISCIPLINE_footnotes/Recommended_Reading.html) section of my book [_Whole Earth Discipline_](http://www.amazon.com/Whole-Earth-Discipline-Ecopragmatist-Manifesto/dp/0670021210/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1255368079&sr=8-1/lono0a-20) is online, with 50 recommendations for books, magazines, and websites, with live links. It's at: [www.sbnotes.com](http://web.me.com/stewartbrand/DISCIPLINE_footnotes/Contents.html) **Interviews and Media** * Stewart Brand and Amory Lovins' debate about Nuclear Power on [NPR's _On Point_](http://onpoint.wbur.org/2009/10/21/brand-vs-lovins-on-nuclear-power) * Stewart Brand on [Newsweek's _Techtonic Shifts_](http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/techtonicshifts/archive/2009/10/21/stewart-brand-an-icon-of-environmentalism-talks-about-embracing-nuclear-power.aspx) * Review of __Whole Earth Discipline__ on [Worldchanging](http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/010701.html) * Interview with Stewart Brand on [Huffington Post](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jesse-kornbluth/what-stewart-brand-creato_b_329851.html)

### Dancing chairs "You follow the feeling of the piece," Ganson explained, "and then wrestle it into physicality." As long as the idea is nonphysical, it is permanent; it becomes temporary as a physical device; and then it becomes permanent again in the mind of the viewer. As Ganson spoke, a tiny chair walked meditatively around and around on a rock on the right side of the stage, projected live onto a video screen. ([Thinking Chair](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-xx-tnxgKM&feature=channel).) No part in any of his kinetic art pieces is superfluous, he pointed out; everything functions. The piece should be crystal clear and also completely ambiguous. That's what allows each viewer to create their own story. He showed a video of "[Machine with Concrete](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5q-BH-tvxEg)." On the left an electric motor drives a worm gear at 212 revolutions a minute. A sequence of twelve 50-to-1 gear reductions slows the rotation so far that the last gear, on the right, is set in concrete. It would take over two trillion years for that gear to rotate. "Intense activity on one end, quiet stillness on the other," Ganson said. "It's a duality I feel in my own being." The next video, "[Cory's Yellow Chair](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFG-Lk9c2CI)," showed a chair exploding into six pieces, which hover at a distance, then gently reassemble, and instantly explode again. Ganson said he wanted the chair pieces to explode at infinite speed, rest in stillness at the extreme, then reassemble gradually. The piece is stab at the question of "when is now?" Now is when the chair coalesces, but it doesn't last. Some of Ganson's machines inspire people to sit and watch them for hours. "[Machine With Oil](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__GhJl_UQg0)" does nothing but drench itself with lubrication all day long. In "[Margot's Other Cat](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6aicIcQJvc)" a soaring chair is set in random motion by an unsuspecting cat. The cat's motion is utterly determined; the chair has its own life. During the Q&A, Alexander Rose asked the full-house audience how many of them of were makers of things. Ninety percent raised their hands in joy.

### The Smithsonian's long now [Note for those who mentally enunciate words while reading: the last name is pronounced "Cluff."] Secretary Clough reminded the audience that we own the Smithsonian, and what that amounts to is 19 museums and galleries containing 137 million objects, plus the National Zoo and 20 libraries. Each year the Smithsonian has 27 million visitors. In addition there are numerous research centers with activities in 88 countries. That's the Smithsonian's short now--it's current profile to fulfill its abiding mission to help society understand and remember itself. The Institution's long now reaches back quite a ways and hopes to reach into the future well beyond the 300 years of national history it represents so far. The greatest temporal reach comes from the one-sixth of all Smithsonian employees who engage in astronomy and astrophysics, operating such tools as the Kepler Telescope launched into orbit last March to discover remote planets that might harbor life and the Giant Magellan Telescope being built in Chile that will have the ten times the resolving power of the Hubble Space Telescope and may be able to examine the earliest remnants of the Big Bang fourteen billion years ago. Much of our understanding of current climate hazards is coming from paleoclimatology. Ice core studies give us 800,000 years of data, but stratigraphic study of leaves is yielding crucial information about what happened 55 million years ago when the Earth warmed drastically and suddenly in what is called the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). Clough described his visit with Smithsonian researcher Scott Wing doing field work in Bighorn Basin, Wyoming, where he saw evidence of palm trees growing in the area when the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was three times what we have now, and the newly evolving horse was the size of cat because hot climates make for smaller animals. Clough sees the long-term role of the Smithsonian as working with the constant tension between the permanent and the ephemeral and the full exploration of what he called "collaborative long-term thinking." He ended with a quote from Smithsonian curator David Shayt: "There's an accurate perception that we are forever…, that we will care for and honor an object eternally. That perception of immortality is very precious to people."

### Engineered organic Organic farming teacher Raoul began the joint presentation with a checklist for truly sustainable agriculture in a global context. It must: Provide abundant safe and nutritious food…. Reduce environmentally harmful inputs…. Reduce energy use and greenhouse gases…. Foster soil fertility…. Enhance crop genetic diversity…. Maintain the economic viability of farming communities…. Protect biodiversity…. and improve the lives of the poor and malnourished. (He pointed out that 24,000 a day die of malnutrition worldwide, and about 1 billion are undernourished.) Organic agriculture has made a good start on these goals, he said, with its focus on eliminating harmful pesticides, soluble synthetic fertilizers, and soil erosion. Every year in the world 300,000 deaths are caused by the pesticides of conventional agriculture, along with 3 million cases of harm. Organic farmers replace the pesticides with crop rotation, resilient varieties of plants, beneficial insects, and other techniques. But organic has limitations, he said. There are some pests, diseases, and stresses it can't handle. Its yield ranges from 45% to 97% of conventional ag yield. It is often too expensive for low-income customers. At present it is a niche player in US agriculture, representing only 3.5%, with a slow growth rate suggesting it will always be a niche player. Genetically engineered crops could carry organic farming much further toward fulfilling all the goals of sustainable agriculture, Raoul said, but it was prohibited as a technique for organic farmers in the standards and regulations set by the federal government in 2000. At this point plant geneticist Pam took up the argument. What distinguishes genetic engineering (GE) and precision breeding from conventional breeding, she said, is that GE and precision breeding work with just one or a few well-characterized genes, versus the uncertain clumps of genes involved in conventional breeding. And genes from any species can be employed. That transgenic capability is what makes some people nervous about GE causing unintended harm to human or ecological health. One billion acres have been planted so far with GE crops, with no adverse health effects, and numerous studies have showed that GE crops pose no greater risk of environmental damage than conventional crops. Genetic engineering is extremely helpful in solving some agricultural problems, though only some. Pam gave three examples, starting with cotton. About 25% of all pesticide use in the world is used to defeat the cotton bollworm. Bt cotton is engineered to express in the plant the same caterpillar-killing toxin as the common soil bacteria used by organic farmers,_Bacillus thuringiensis_. Bt cotton growers use half the pesticides of conventional growers. With Bt cotton in China, cases of pesticide poisoning went down by 75%. India's cotton yield increased by 80%. Pam pointed out that any too-successful technique used alone encourages pests to evolve around the technique, so the full panoply of "integrated pest management" needs always to be employed. Her second example was papayas in Hawaii, where the entire industry faced extinction from ringspot virus. A local genetic engineer devised way to put a segment of the virus genome into papayas, thereby effectively inoculating the fruit against the disease. The industry was saved, and most of the papayas we eat in California are GE. Rice is Pam's specialty at her lab in Davis. Half the world depends on rice. In flood-prone areas like Bangladesh, 4 million tons of rice a year are lost to flooding--enough to feed 30 million people. She helped engineer a flood-tolerant rice (it can be totally submerged for two weeks) called Sub1. At field trials in Asia farmers are getting three to five times higher yield over conventional rice. The cost of gene sequencing and engineering is dropping rapidly (toward $70 a genome), and our knowledge about how food crops function genetically is growing just as rapidly. That accelerating capability offers a path toward truly sustainable agriculture on a global scale. Returning to the stage, Raoul doubted that certified organic farmers would ever be allowed to use GE plants, and so he proposed a new certification program for "Sustainable Agriculture," that would include GE.

### New Cities with New Rules This talk was the first in a series of public discussions of an idea that Romer has been working on for two years. His economic theory of history explains phenomena such as the constant improvement of the human standard of living by looking primarily at just two forms of innovative ideas: technology and rules. Technologies rearrange materials with ingenious recipes and formulas. More people create more technologies, which in turn generates more people. In recent decades technology has enabled the "demographic transition" which lowers birthrates and raises income per person even higher as population levels off. Rules structure the interactions between people. As population density increased, the idea of ownership became an important rule. A supporting rule for managing violations replaced the old idea of deadly vengeance with awarding damages instead: simply shifting value replaced destroying value. For the idea of open science, recognition replaced ownership as the main event, which means that whoever publishes first is most rewarded, and that accelerates science. Rules can amplify or stifle technological progress. China was the world leader in inventing new technologies until about a thousand years ago, when centralized dynastic rules slowed innovation almost to a stop. Romer notes that business keeps evolving as new companies introduce new rule sets. The good ideas are copied, and workers migrate from failing companies to the new and old ones where the new rules are working well. The same goes for countries. Starting about 1970, China took some of the effective rules of Hong Kong (which was managed from afar by England) and set up four special economic zones along the coast operating as imitation Hong Kongs. They worked so well that China rolled out the scheme for the whole country, and its Gross Domestic Product took off. "Hong Kong was the most successful economic development program in history." Romer suggests that we rethink sovereignty (respect borders, but maybe create new systems of administrative control); rethink citizenship (allowing perhaps for voice without residency as well as residency without voice); and rethink scale (instead of focussing on nations, focus on new cities.) If nations are willing to experiment along these lines, they can create new places, places that can give more people access to the kind of rules that they would like to live and work under, and places that can sustain the historical process of entry and innovation in national systems of rules. The idea is getting some traction in the developing world. This summer Romer will launch an institute and website for further exploration and eventual application of the idea. One miracle of cities is that they sometimes renew themselves brilliantly. This could be a whole new form of that.

### Making farmers cool again Farming has become an occupation and cultural force of the past. Michael Pollan's talk promoted the premise - and hope - that farming can become an occupation and force of the future. In the past century American farmers were given the assignment to produce lots of calories cheaply, and they did. They became the most productive humans on earth. A single farmer in Iowa could feed 150 of his neighbors. That is a true modern miracle. "American farmers are incredibly inventive, innovative, and accomplished. They can do whatever we ask them, we just need to give them a new set of requirements." The benefit of a reformed food system, besides better food, better environment and less climate shock, is better health and the savings of trillions of dollars. Four out of five chronic diseases are diet-related. Three quarters of medical spending goes to preventable chronic disease. Pollan says we cannot have a healthy population, without a healthy diet. The news is that we are learning that we cannot have a healthy diet without a healthy agriculture. And right now, farming is sick. Pollan outlined what this recovery for American farmers and food producers should be. First a post-modern food system should be "resolarized." Right now it takes 10 calories of fossil fuel to manufacture 1 calorie of food on average, and 55 calories to produce 1 calorie of beef. If any industry should be solar-based it should be food, which was the "original solar economy." Instead, right now "we are eating oil." Cheap oil and farm policies subsidize the 5 main crops (and only those crops), upon which the rest of our cheap food system is based. These main crops are planted as monocultures, which require cheap pesticides and fertilizers and produce wastes that are all problems in themselves. Pollan's solution is not to dismantle the food system but to redirect it. Because of the long-term planning and learning that stewarding land requires, he believes subsidies of some type are essential for agriculture. Agriculture, he stated, should not be a freemarket. By picking the proper incentives we can re-localize, re-solarize, and revive the healing power of balanced farms and wholesome gardens. Governments should reward farmers for diversifying away from monocultures. Pollan gave a few examples of where this has worked at scale. They should be rewarded for growing cover crops with the benefit of reducing erosion. Rewarded for returning animals to the mix. Rewarded for the amount of carbon they sequester in soil. Rewarded for halting urban sprawl by keeping farmland intact. In fact farmland should find a similar status as wetlands; developers and communities get "credit" for retaining farmland. Farmers should be rewarded for localize food provision. If only 2% of government contracts for food (as in school lunch programs, or government-run hospitals) required that the food be produced within 100 miles, it would transform the food system. How might such change happen? Only if consumers and citizens demand it. One thing that might help is if web cams and images of the actual feed lot, or slaughterhouse, were required to be available for food that flowed through it. Imagine getting a carton of milk that showed not a metaphorical alpine meadow, but the real cages of the real dirty cows that produced that liter of milk. Or put a second calories count on labels, this one showing how many calories of energy it takes to deliver the item to you. The major problem with his vision? He says there are simply not enough farmers. Only 1 million now feed the US and other people of the world. Many more people, many more college educated people, many more innovators and entrepreneurs, and many more backyard gardeners need to produce this new food system. Start in educational programs, such as one promoted by Alice Waters, where kids learn to grow food, cook, and eat smarter. "Make lunch an academic subject." Follow the lead of Michelle Obama and make turning lawns into organic gardens fashionable, respectable. Make farms and farmers cool again.

### Sustainable Cities Mayor Newsom began with how moved he was by hosting the UN's World Environment Day in San Francisco in 2005. For that event, which was called "Green Cities - Plan for the Planet!", he invited 120 mayors from around the world. Days of intense discussion led to the publication of 21 policy principles for building permanently sustainable cities, in the areas of energy, waste, design, nature, transportation, health, and water. Cities, Newsom said, consume 75% of natural resources and are responsible for 75% of pollution. He became determined to help make San Francisco the Greenest city in the world. That can be accomplished only with a plethora of highly specific programs. The city's renewable energy portfolio, for example, includes highly demanding Green building standards (LEED); conversion to biodiesel and the recycling of "fats, oils, and grease;" generous rebates for solar; and plans for collecting energy from tidal-flow turbines below the Golden Gate and wave generators off of Ocean Beach. He wants San Francisco to be the world leader in electric vehicles, starting with plug-in hybrids and moving to fully electric. They have half the moving parts of gas vehicles and much higher efficiency. The batteries can charge in off-peak hours, and gas stations can convert to "switch stations," where you simply swap in charged batteries in less time than it takes to fill up with gas. The way cellphone time is sold in minutes, vehicle charging can be sold in miles. He would like to see parking meters used for charging, and San Francisco is developing congestion-price parking meters that cost more during peak congestion hours, and that sense and can broadcast when they're empty. To encourage urban density, which is inherently Green, the city is building more highrises, and California's coming high-speed rail system will leave from the heart of downtown. Newsom noted with glee that there is now intense competition between cities to out-Green each other. Portland, San Francisco, Manhattan, Amsterdam, Vancouver, Singapore and countless others vie in the quest for Green bragging rights. They borrow ideas and deploy comparative shame: "How can sunless Berlin have more solar power than any American city?"

### Language Revolution The Piraha tribe in the heart of the Amazon numbers only 360, spread in small groups over 300 miles. An exceptionally cheerful people, they live with a focus on immediacy, empiricism, and physical rigor that has shaped their unique language, claims linguist Daniel Everett. The Piraha language has no numbers or concept of counting (only terms for "relatively small" and "relatively large"); no kinship terms beyond immediate children and parents; no "left" and "right" (only "upriver" and "downriver"); no named distinction of past and future (only near time and far time); no creation stories or myths; and---most important for linguists---no recursion. A recursive sentence like "The boy who was fishing owned the dog" does not occur in the Piraha language. They would say, "The boy was fishing" and "The boy owned the dog." The eminent linguist Noam Chomsky has declared that recursion is an essential part of human language and is innate. Chomsky's former student Everett says that the Piraha language proves otherwise. The resultant controversy is profound. The Piraha language is the simplest in the world. Speaking it and singing it are the same, and it can be hummed or even whistled, yet it can convey enormous richness. Among other things, the wide variety of verb forms are used to account for the directness of evidence for a statement. Everett originally went to the Piraha in 1977 as a Christian missionary. They challenged him to provide evidence for the existence of Jesus, and lost interest when he couldn't. Eventually so did he. The Piraha made him an atheist. And the through him the Piraha revolutionized how we think about language. Some 40 percent of the world's 6,912 known languages are endangered, says Everett, and that endangers science. When we lose a language, we lose a whole way of life, a whole set of solutions to problems, a whole classification system and body of knowledge about the natural world, a whole calendar system, a whole complex of myths, folktales, and songs. Everett spelled out what it takes to preserve a living language that is endangered. The land where the speakers live must be preserved, and their health should be protected. The language needs to be documented in detail. And you could do worse than make a donation to the [Foundation for Endangered Languages](http://www.ogmios.org/home.htm).

### Managing social collapse With vintage Russian black humor, Orlov described the social collapse he witnessed in Russia in the 1990s and spelled out its practical lessons for the American social collapse he sees as inevitable. The American economy in the 1990s described itself as "Goldilocks"--just the right size--when in fact is was "Tinkerbelle," and one day the clapping stops. As in Russia, the US made itself vulnerable to the decline of crude oil, a trade deficit, military over-reach, and financial over-reach. Russians were able to muddle through the collapse by finding ways to manage 1) food, 2) shelter, 3) transportation, and 4) security. Russian agriculture had long been ruined by collectivization, so people had developed personal kitchen gardens, accessible by public transit. The state felt a time-honored obligation to provide bread, and no one starved. (Orlov noted that women in Russia handled collapse pragmatically, putting on their garden gloves, whereas middle-aged men dissolved into lonely drunks.) Americans are good at gardening and could shift easily to raising their own food, perhaps adopting the Cuban practice of gardens in parking lots and on roofs and balconies. As for shelter, Russians live in apartments from which they cannot be evicted. The buildings are heat-efficient, and the communities are close enough to protect themselves from the increase in crime. Americans, Orlov said, have yet to realize there is no lower limit to real estate value, nor that suburban homes are expensive to maintain and get to. He predicts flight, not to remote log cabins, but to dense urban living. Office buildings, he suggests, can easily be converted to apartments, and college campuses could make instant communities, with all that grass turned into pasture or gardens. There are already plenty of empty buildings in America; the cheapest way to get one is to offer to caretake it. The rule with transportation, he said, is not to strand people in nonsurvivable places. Fuel will be expensive and hoarded. He noted that the most efficient of all vehicles is an old pickup fully loaded with people, driving slowly. He suggested that freight trains be required to provide a few empty boxcars for hoboes. Donkeys, he advised, provide reliable transport, and they dine as comfortably on the Wall Street Journal as they did on Pravda. Security has to take into account that prisons will be emptied (by stages, preferably), overseas troops will be repatriated and released, and cops will go corrupt. You will have a surplus of mentally unstable people skilled with weapons. There will be crime waves and mafias, but you can rent a policeman, hire a soldier. Security becomes a matter of local collaboration. When the formal legal structure breaks down, adaptive improvisation can be pretty efficient. By way of readiness, Orlov urges all to prepare for life without a job, with near-zero burn rate. It takes practice to learn how to be poor well. Those who are already poor have an advantage.

### The Terawatt World Engineer Griffith said he was going to make the connection between personal actions and global climate change. To do that he's been analyzing his own life in extreme detail to figure out exactly how much energy he uses and what changes might reduce the load. In 2007, when he started, he was consuming about 18,000 watts, like most Americans. The energy budget of the average person in the world is about 2,200 watts. Some 90 percent of the carbon dioxide overload in the atmosphere was put there by the US, USSR (of old), China, Germany, Japan, and Britain. The rich countries have the most work to do. What would it take to level off the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at 450 parts per million (ppm)? That level supposedly would keep global warming just barely manageable at an increase of 2 degrees Celsius. There still would be massive loss of species, 100 million climate refugees, and other major stresses. The carbon dioxide level right now is 385 ppm, rising fast. Before industrialization it was 296 ppm. America's leading climatologist, James Hanson, says we must lower the carbon dioxide level to 350 ppm if we want to keep the world we evolved in. The world currently runs on about 16 terawatts (trillion watts) of energy, most of it burning fossil fuels. To level off at 450 ppm of carbon dioxide, we will have to reduce the fossil fuel burning to 3 terawatts and produce all the rest with renewable energy, and we have to do it in 25 years or it's too late. Currently about half a terawatt comes from clean hydropower and one terawatt from clean nuclear. That leaves 11.5 terawatts to generate from new clean sources. That would mean the following. (Here I'm drawing on notes and extrapolations I've written up previously from discussion with Griffith): "Two terawatts of photovoltaic would require installing 100 square meters of 15-percent-efficient solar cells every second, second after second, for the next 25 years. (That's about 1,200 square miles of solar cells a year, times 25 equals 30,000 square miles of photovoltaic cells.) Two terawatts of solar thermal? If it's 30 percent efficient all told, we'll need 50 square meters of highly reflective mirrors every second. (Some 600 square miles a year, times 25.) Half a terawatt of biofuels? Something like one Olympic swimming pools of genetically engineered algae, installed every second. (About 15,250 square miles a year, times 25.) Two terawatts of wind? That's a 300-foot-diameter wind turbine every 5 minutes. (Install 105,000 turbines a year in good wind locations, times 25.) Two terawatts of geothermal? Build 3 100-megawatt steam turbines every day-1,095 a year, times 25. Three terawatts of new nuclear? That's a 3-reactor, 3-gigawatt plant every week-52 a year, times 25." In other words, the land area dedicated to renewable energy ("Renewistan") would occupy a space about the size of Australia to keep the carbon dioxide level at 450 ppm. To get to Hanson's goal of 350 ppm of carbon dioxide, fossil fuel burning would have to be cut to ZERO, which means another 3 terawatts would have to come from renewables, expanding the size of Renewistan further by 26 percent. Meanwhile for individuals, to stay at the world's energy budget at 16 terawatts, while many of the poorest in the world might raise their standard of living to 2,200 watts, everyone now above that level would have to drop down to it. Griffith determined that most of his energy use was coming from air travel, car travel, and the embodied energy of his stuff, along with his diet. Now he drives the speed limit (and he has passed no one in six months), seldom flies, eats meat only once a week, bikes a lot, and buys almost nothing. He's healthier, eats better, has more time with his family, and the stuff he has he cherishes. Can the world actually build Renewistan? Griffith said it's not like the Manhattan Project, it's like the whole of World War II, only with all the antagonists on the same side this time. It's damn near impossible, but it is necessary. And the world has to decide to do it. Griffith's audience was strangely exhilarated by the prospect.

### Four Dimensional Cities Cities are designed and built in three dimensions. Watching Prelinger's historic footage of San Francisco last night (to a more than overflowing crowd) reminds us however that one of the most compelling dimensions to a city is its fourth dimension - time. The crowd gasped at an incomplete 280 freeway, and watched in amazement as horse and buggies dodged in and out of cable car traffic on Market Street in 01905. We sat silent watching the homeless of the forties, and cheered to see _Playland by the Beach_ and [Laughing Sal](http://museemecaniquesf.com/). Rick reminded us, "The past is not passé, it is prologue." Most archives and libraries put up access barriers in response to copyright laws. In contrast Rick has attacked the vast amount of work that is either out of copyright, or left in the ambiguous gray zones, like home movies. We have always been told that there is no economic case for archives, the [Prelinger Archive](http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger) and [Library](http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger_library) not only upends that notion, but proves that access is the key, not protection. Rick started out in 01982 as an amateur collector of the un-collected. He began by collecting film out-takes, esoteric commercial films, and all the other ephemera that is usually discarded by archives and libraries. Today he is a professional archivist who funds his collections by selling commercial access, AND giving it away. Rick pointed out that his archival sales go up the more he provides free access. The film student who uses a clip in film school often becomes a professional who buys the content later. Most interesting in seeing this historic content was the contrast that it draws to our modern sense of place, and the dramatic increase in documentation now going on. Today's Google Maps Street View shot is tomorrow's "Lost Landscape".

### Terms of Biocontainment "I want to develop tools that make biology easy to engineer," Drew Endy began. The first purpose is better understanding fundamental biological mechanisms through "learning by building." The toolkit of Synthetic Biology starts with DNA construction and ascends through DNA parts, to devices, to standardized systems. An organism's DNA code, and therefore the organism, can be digitally uploaded, stored, distributed, and downloaded. Life forms are programmable. So far 3,500 standard "BioBrick" parts have been developed for free distribution, and the number is growing geometrically. The number of amateur and student bioengineers also is growing geometicallly. "There are 20,000 edible plant species," Endy noted. "At present we eat only 30." Synthetic biology can help diversify agriculture. Or how about engineering a gourd that can grow into a living house? Endy concluded with five questions… Should teenagers practice genetic engineering? (Yes.) Should military weapons involve biotechnology? (No.) Should BioBrick parts be patented or freely shared? (Free.) Will biohackers be good or bad? (Good, if we help.) Should genetic engineers sign their work and publish it? (Yes.) Jim Thomas asked Endy how he would defend against commercial interests locking up Synthetic Biology with patents? Endy said the best hope is building an open-source community that grows faster than businesses and out-innovates them. Thomas began his statement by pointing out that it usually takes a whole generation to understand a new technology, so he urges moving slowly and cautiously, but Synthetic Biology is advancing at breakneck speed, and the window of opportunity to have effective public discussion and control is closing. He cited the history of synthetic chemicals, which began in mid-19th century. The technology quickly became highly concentrated in an oligarchy of monopolistic companies, and then it was easily commandeered by government in wartime. I.G. Farben supplied the poison gas for the death camps. "Powerful technology in an unjust world is likely to exacerbate the injustice." Thomas said he worries when he hears comments like, "Anything that can be made by a plant can be made by a microbe." If that's played out, it means the death knell for everyone who works in agriculture, a vast economic restructuring. There's so much novelty coming so fast from Synthetic Biology, no predictive models or regulatory models can hold them. He recommends these new tools be strictly contained so there is no release of new life forms into the biosphere, and there should be no commercialization of the technology at all. Endy asked Thomas if it's okay to make anything in a bioreactor vat? Thomas said, "Yes, beer." For different reasons, both debaters wanted to see Synthetic Biology kept from domination by commercial patents. For Thomas, it would lead to unjust monopoly answering only to profit. For Endy, it would paralyze open-ended research.

### Green Plans Green Plans, said Johnson, are government-run environmental programs that rise to the scale and longevity of environmental problems. Instead of acting piecemeal, they are comprehensive, systemic, integrated, and accountable. Instead of pursuing an energy policy, an air policy, and a water policy separately, you have to have one policy that covers them all. He singled out three shining examples of how to make Green Plans work--Holland, New Zealand, and California's Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (AB 32). In 1988 Queen Beatrix used her Christmas speech to tell the people of the Netherlands that "the earth is slowly dying," and the nation would disappear back under the sea if it did not solve its own environmental problems and inspire the rest of the world to do the same. The business community led the response, asking the government to set standards. The NGOs (which receive a third of their revenue from government grants) were expected to keep everybody's feet to the fire. The Dutch comprehensive Green Plan basically rewrote the nation's social contract. It took on every problem simultaneously with a trans-generational, trans-border approach. Environmental taxes replaced labor taxes. No waste was allowed to leave the country. The National Environmental Policy Plan is evaluated formally every four years and adjusted. New Zealand in 1987 began research on what would become the biggest reform in its history, the Resource Management Act, which became law in 1991. Under the guiding principle of sustainability, the Act covers everything--air, water, soil, biodiversity, the coasts, and the full gamut of land use planning. The governance principle is "devolution," meaning that most of the action covered by the Act takes place in regional, district, and city councils. California's famous AB 32 is our most important legislation in a century, said Johnson. The goal of taking the state's greenhouse gas emissions back down to the 1990 level by 2020 requires radical action in every sector of the state's economy, including cars, mass transit, shipping, building materials, city design, and a cap-and-trade market for greenhouse gas emissions. The state is coordinating with six other western state and three provinces in Canada under what is called the Western Climate Initiative. In the Q&A Johnson was asked what single action would do the most to improve environmental responsibility from the federal government. "Campaign finance reform," he said. The corruption of elected officials by special interest campaign donations makes them beholden to the wrong people for the wrong goals. Johnson also has a low opinion of term limits. The great co-author of AB 32, Fran Pavley, was termed out after just six years in the State Assembly. If elected officials are always new in the capitol, they are easily manipulated by lobbyists and others who have been in town forever and have it wired.

### Beyond Audacious Pursuing the idea of “revolution through competition” via huge-purse prizes was inspired for Peter Diamandis by reading about the Orteig Prize. In 1927 $25,000 was offered to the first person to fly non-stop from New York to Paris. Nine teams spent $400,000 in the competition. A 25-year-old named Lindbergh won the prize. Within 18 months air passengers had multiplied 30-fold from 6,000 to 180,000, the number of aircraft increased four-fold, and aviation stocks soared. A lifelong space nut, Diamandis created out of thin air the Ansari X Prize. $10 million would go to the first team to make a 3-person reusable space vehicle that could reach 100 kilometers in altitude twice in two weeks. From 7 countries 26 teams competed, spending $100 million on the project. The success in 2004 of SpaceShipOne (now in the Smithsonian) launched a space tourism industry. With the help of Google, the X Prize became a foundation to generate a series of competitions for “audacious and achievable goals.” The attributes for a good Prize competition are: very large cash prize; clear objective and simple rules; a defined problem rather than defined solution; a target that had become stuck; something that attracts maverick thinkers; something whose success will change people’s sense of what is possible. Currently operative X Prizes include one for extremely cheap genome sequencing and one for a race of 100-mile-per-gallon cars. An example of how the prize process is learning is the Google Lunar X Prize to launch, land, and operate a rover on the Moon’s surface. Diamandis wants the event to have time duration, not just be a flash in the pan, because duration is what persuades people that something new is real. And he wants more mechanisms that help create an industry in the wake of the event. Thus the $30 million purse for this prize will be divided—$20 million to the first-place winner, $5 million to second place, and $5 million each for bonus goals such as photographing man-made objects on the Moon, surviving a lunar night, and detecting ice in a crater. So far the race has 15 registered teams competing. X Prizes in the past have been for goals that could be achieved in a 3 to 8 year time frame. Now Diamandis wants to reach further in time and further into the realm of the seemingly impossible. He noted that only a short while ago a number of things were understood by everybody to be impossible: heavier-than-air flight; instant communications at a distance; transplanting a heart; space travel; cloning of a mammal; eradicating smallpox. What things are in that category now? And what would it take to get things moving in their direction? Diamandis calls them Mega-X Prizes. They would have a purse of $100 million to $1 billion. (Not implausible; there are 1,200 billionaires in the world now.) As an example of how the economics could make sense, Diamandis points out that the current cost of AIDS is $80 billion a year, $800 billion a decade. A successful $1 billion X Prize for a cure for AIDS would be a hugely efficient economic event as well as a massive humanitarian breakthrough. To conclude the evening, Diamandis offered the audience a list of 35 potential Mega-X Prize goals. Circle your top three choices, he said, and we’ll tally the results. Rather than tell you what that particular audience chose, I’ll pass on the list to you. What are your top three choices? What would you add to the list?… * First (private) Human on Mars * Faster-than-light Communications * Organ Replacement * First Baby Born off Earth * Babelfish - Instant universal translator * Flying cars * Artificial Intelligence: Build a machine that passes the Turing Test * Self-replicating (non-biological) machines * Longevity: Double the length of the healthy human lifespan * Cancer: Be able to detect any cancer at the 100-cell stage and Zap-it * Predict Earth Quakes with >1 hour / >1 day notice * Cure for AIDS * Identify extra-solar life-bearing planet: Any type of replicating life from, single cell or greater * SETI - Proof of extra-terrestrial intelligence * NY to Paris in 30 min * Private, fully-reusable, Orbital Spaceship * Human to orbit for <$100,000 * Apollo 8: Privately fly 1 person around the moon and safely back to Earth. * Robot Sports: (1) beat Tiger; (2) beat a championship soccer team; (3) beat a Formula-1 team * Humans in Deep Ocean: 3 people to ocean bottom twice in 3 days. * Image 100% of the Ocean Floor * Backup the Biosphere: Create a data backup of the Internet and the top 10,000 species on Earth * Replicator: create out of energy and raw materials anything. * Energy Extraction - e.g. ZeroPoint; Cold Fusion * Hot Fusion -- Sustained, net-energy positive * Vision Restoration: Wire up a false eye for a blind person to gain 20:20 vision * First brain transplant: full functioning of memory and motorfunction and lives > 1 day * Download brain to a computer with all memory intact * Brain to brain communication that are more t

### _Anathem_ book launch Neal Stephenson's nearly thousand page tome [_Anathem_](https://longnow.org/anathem/) was inspired in part by Long Now's [10,000 Year Clock](https://longnow.org/projects/clock/) project, and so a collaboration on the launch event was a natural fit. With over 900 in attendance the evening began with a performance of the [elaborate math based chanting](https://longnow.org/shop/longnow-merch/) created for the book by composer David Stutz. Neal Stephenson then took the stage to read the first few pages of _Anathem_ , and afterward he was joined on stage by Stewart Brand and Danny Hillis for a discussion about the book and Long Now. Stephenson has been a friend of Long Now since its inception, even contributing some [early ideas](https://longnow.org/clock/other-ideas/) for the Clock itself. He has travelled to both Clock sites with Stewart Brand, Danny Hillis and Alexander Rose to get as much back story on the project as possible. _Anathem_ takes place in another literary world entirely, but Stephenson does use much of the actual mechanisms that we have designed, and spins out a world in which 10,000 year clocks are not just an idea, but part of the civilizational fabric. Long Now's primary reason for building a monument scale icon to long-term thinking has always been to inspire new myths. Having one of the first of those myths created by Stephenson has not only been an honor, but a real instruction in how such a world might play out. The evening also included a demonstration of "shovel-fu" a new martial arts form invented within the pages of _Anathem_ , as well as a mathematical chanting exercise run by David Stutz at the end of the night. You can read more about the connections between _Anathem_ and Long Now on [our site.](https://longnow.org/anathem/)

### Bot-dominated Reality [Daniel Suarez, originally published as Leinad Zaurus, delivered a talk on the themes developed in his (originally self published) book __Daemon__. The book is now scheduled to be released in hard cover in January 02009 by Dutton.] Forget about HAL-like robots enslaving humankind a few decades from now, the takeover is already underway. The agents of this unwelcome revolution aren't strong AIs, but "bots"- autonomous programs that have insinuated themselves into the Internet and thus into every corner of our lives. Apply for a mortgage lately? A bot determined your FICA score and thus whether you got the loan. Call 411? A bot gave you the number and connected the call. Highway-bots collect your tolls, read your license plate and report you if you have an outstanding violation. Bots are proliferating because they are so very useful. Businesses rely on them to automate essential processes, and of course bots running on zombie computers are responsible for the tsunami of spam and malware plaguing Internet users worldwide. At current growth rates, bots will be the majority users of the Net by 2010. We are visible to bots even when we are not at our computers. Next time you are on a downtown street, contemplate the bot-controlled video cameras watching you, or the bots tracking your cellphone and sniffing at your Bluetooth-enabled gizmos. We walk through a gauntlet of bot-controlled sensors every time we step into a public space and the sensors are proliferating. Bots are at best narrow AI, nothing that would make a cleric remotely nervous. But they would scare the hell out of epidemiologists who understand that parasites don't need to be smart to be dangerous. Meanwhile, the Internet and the complex of processing, storage and sensors linked to it is growing exponentially, creating a vast new ecology for bots to roam in. Bots aren't evolving on their own -- yet. Left unchecked, bots will trap the human race because the automation they enable will make it possible for a few people to run humanity while the rest of us are unable to make decisions of any consequence. Bots are thus vectors for despotism, with the potential to create a world where only a small group of people understand how society works. In the worst case, the controls over bots disappear -- for example, the only person who knows the password to a corporate bot dies- and the bots become autonomous. We are in a Darwinian struggle with narrow AI, and so far at least the bots are winning. But there is a solution: build a new Internet hard-coded with democratic values. Start with an encrypted Darknet into which only verifiably human users can enter. Create augmented reality tools to identify bots in the physical world. Enlist the aid of a few tame bots to help forge a symbiotic relationship with narrow AI. Stir in some luck, and perhaps we can avoid the fate of the Sorcerer's Apprentice who rashly enchants a broom to do his tedious chores and ends up terrorized by his imperfect creations. We had better succeed, for unlike the fable, there is no Master Sorcerer ready to return to break the spell and save us from our folly.

### Stone Ink Gallery Photographer Edward Burtynsky made a formal proposal for a permanent art gallery in the chamber that encloses the 10,000-year Clock in its Nevada mountain. The gallery would consist of art in materials as durable as the alloy steel and jade of the Clock itself, and it would be curated slowly over the centuries to reflect changing interests in the rolling present and the accumulating past. Photographs in particular should be in the 10,000-year Gallery, Burtynsky said, "because they tell us more than any previous medium. When we think of our own past, we tend to think in terms of family photos." But photographic prints, especially color prints, degrade badly over time. Burtynsky went on a quest for a technical solution. He thought that automobile paint, which holds up to harsh sunlight, might work if it could be run through an inkjet printer, but that didn't work out. Then he came across a process first discovered in 1855, called "carbon transfer print." It uses magenta, cyan, and yellow inks made of ground stone--the magenta stone can only be found in one mine in Germany--and the black ink is carbon. On the stage Burtynsky showed a large carbon transfer print of one of his ultra-high resolution photographs. The color and detail were perfect. Accelerated studies show that the print could hang in someone's living room for 500 years and show no loss of quality. Kept in the Clock's mountain in archival conditions it would remain unchanged for 10,000 years. He said that making one print takes five days of work, costs $2,000, and only ten artisans in the world have the skill, at locations in Toronto, Seattle, and Cornwall. Superb images can be made on porcelain (or Clock chamber walls), but Burtynsky prefers archival watercolor paper, because the ink bonds deep into the paper, and in the event of temperature changes, the ink and paper would expand and contract together. The rest of the presentation was of beautiful and evocative photographs from three demonstration exhibits for the proposed gallery--"Museum of the Mundane" by Vid Ingelvics; "Observations from a Blue Planet" by Marcus Schubert; and "In the Wake of Progress" by Burtynsky himself. A typical Burtynsky photograph showed a huge open pit copper mine. A tiny, barely discernible black line on one of the levels was pointed out: "That's a whole railroad train." Alberta tar sands excavation tearing up miles of boreal forest. China's Three Gorges Dam. Mine tailing ponds beautiful and terrible. Expired oil fields stretching to the horizon. Michelangelo's marble quarry at Carrera, still working. "This is the sublime of our time," said Burtynsky, "shown straight on, for contemplation." Indeed worth studying for centuries.

### Becoming a Benign Dominant To track how humans became Earth's dominant animal, Ehrlich began with a photo of a tarsier in a tree. The little primate had a predator's binocular vision and an insect-grabber's fingers. When (possibly) climate change drove some primates out of the trees, they developed a two-legged stance to get around on the savanna. Then the brain swoll up, and the first major dominance tool emerged--language with syntax. About 2.5 million years ago, the beginnings of human culture became evident with stone tools. "We don't have a Darwin of cultural evolution yet," said Ehrlich. He defined cultural evolution as everything we pass on in a non-genetic way. Human culture developed slowly-the stone tools little changed from millennium to millennium, but it accelerated. There was a big leap about 50,000 years ago, after which culture took over human evolution--our brain hasn't changed in size since then. With agriculture's food surplus, specialization took off. Inuits that Ehrlich once studied had a culture that was totally shared; everyone knew how everything was done. In high civilization, no one grasps a millionth of current cultural knowledge. Physicists can't build a TV set. Writing freed culture from the limitations of memory, and burning old solar energy (coal and oil) empowered vast global population growth. Our dominance was complete. Ehrlich regretted that we followed the competitive practices of chimps instead of bonobos, who resolve all their disputes with genital rubbing. "The human economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Earth's natural systems," said Ehrlich, and when our dominance threatens the ecosystem services we depend on, we have to understand the workings of the cultural evolution that gave us that dominance. The current two greatest threats that Ehrlich sees are climate change (10 percent chance of civilization ending, and rising) and chemical toxification of the biosphere. "Every cubic centimeter of the biosphere has been modified by human activity." The main climate threat he sees is not rising sea levels ("You can outwalk that one") but the melting of the snowpack that drives the world's hydraulic civilizations-- California agriculture totally dependent on the Sierra snowpack, the Andes running much of Latin America, the Himalayan snows in charge of Southeast Asia. With climate in flux, Ehrlich said, we may be facing a millennium of constant change. Already we see the outbreak of resource wars over water and oil. He noted with satisfaction that human population appears to be leveling off at 9 to 10 billion in this century, though the remaining increase puts enormous pressure on ecosystem services. He's not worried about depopulation problems, because "population can always be increased by unskilled laborers who love their work." The major hopeful element he sees is that cultural evolution can move very quickly at times. The Soviet Union disappeared overnight. The liberation of women is a profound cultural shift that occurs in decades. Facing dire times, we need to understand how cultural evolution works in order to shift our dominance away from malignant and toward the benign. In the Q & A, Ehrlich described work he's been doing on cultural evolution. He and a graduate student in her fifties at Stanford have been studying the progress of Polynesian canoe practices as their population fanned out across the Pacific. What was more conserved, they wondered, practical matters or decoration? Did the shape of a canoe paddle change constantly, driven by the survival pressure of greater efficiency, or did the carving and paint on the paddles change more, driven by the cultural need of each group to distinguish itself from the others. Practical won. Once a paddle shape proved really effective, it became a cultural constant.

### Making Money WITH the Poor When Iqbal Quadir applied to US colleges from his home town in Bangladesh he was surprised to discover that not all American universities were found in Washington, DC. That's how it was in Bangladesh, where everything of importance was centralized in the capital city, Dacca. He later realized that Bangladesh was not unique; in most developing countries, the infrastructure is concentrated in one or two cities, leaving the rural areas almost blank. As he acquired degrees and experience in finance, he realized that this centralization is not only a mark of poorer countries, it is probably a cause of their poverty. Quadir presented this broad outline of development in order to give context for his belief that technology can alleviate poverty. He reminded us that 500 years ago, when the western countries were still "developing" their own societies, their political systems were no better, and often worse, than the instable corrupt regimes of many developing countries today. England had a series of kings who were impeached, arrested, ousted, or beheaded for their crimes. It was only after citizens were empowered by economic markets did the balance of power shift from the central king to decentralized citizens. All steps that devolve power away from a central authority -- including laws, trade, and education -- will raise democracy. In Quadir's view, it's not that centralization per se creates poverty. Poverty is the natural beginning state of all societies, east or west. Rather, decentralization is the engine that removes poverty and brings wealth. To the degree that infrastructure, education, and trade can be decentralized, wealth will rise in proportion. To the degree that infrastructure, education and trade are centralized, poverty will remain. Whereas many of us in the west, particularly the digital west, agree with this intuitively, we act contrary to this observation when we give large-scale aid to poor countries. As Quadir's colleague William Easterly argues in his book The Elusive Quest for Growth, the billions and billions of dollars spent on aid for developing countries has not only *not* helped, it has set them back decades. Aid, as we know it, kills development. This harm occurs because almost all previous aid has funneled through a central government or semi-governmental organizations and that official route tightens centrality. Even if the governments were saintly, and they are definitely not, the scale of money flowing through these centralizing nodes prohibits the distribution of resources, infrastructure, trade, and education. The more aid that arrives, the less development can actually happen. Technology is the escape from this quandary. Quadir came to see that "technologies that connect" could liberate productivity. He matched his experience in Bangladesh as a 13-year-old boy having to walk 10 kilometers to get medicine, only to find out the medicine man he sought was not home, and then walking back empty handed, having wasted a day -- all because there was no connection between his home and the pharmacist. Many years later in New York he wasted a day at work when there was no electricity to run phones or computers. Productivity required connectivity. If connectivity could be decentralized then it would lead to increased wealth. Quadir settled on the cell phone as a way to decentralized connectivity. In the early 1990s cell phones were big, dumb, and very expensive. Calls were $3 per minute. Only the rich could afford them. But he wanted the poorest people in the world to get them. How would this be possible? First, he believed in Moore's Law: that the phones would decrease in price and increase in power every year. That seemed inevitable to him. He said he could see "micro-chips marching toward the poor." He was right about that. Second, he piggybacked his hopes on a remarkable invention of another Bangladeshi, Mohammad Yunus, who developed micro-financing (and later won a Nobel prize for this invention). In Yunus' scheme a woman who owned virtually nothing could get a loan of $200 to purchase a cow. She would then sell the surplus milk of the cow to pay back the loan, earn both milk and an income for her family, and maybe buy another cow. Ordinarily, no bank would have lent her this trifling amount because she had no collateral, no education, and the costs of overseeing such a small loan with small gains, would have been prohibitive. Grameen Bank, Yunus' creation, discovered that these illiterate peasants were actually more likely to repay these small loans, and were very happy to pay good interest rates, and so that in aggregate, these micro-loans were more profitable than loaning to large industrial players. Quadir proceeded to ask, what if the women could rent a cell phone instead of a cow? Grameen Bank could make a micro-loan to the poor for the purchase a cell phone, which they then could sell/

### Past vs. Future In what turned out to be a riveting evening, historian Niall Ferguson and futurist Peter Schwartz fire-hosed each other with enough ideas, frames of reference, ripostes, and eloquences to lead to a clear conceptual divergence. At the same time, the two were discovering, live in front of an audience, new ways they might work together on future projects. Ferguson began by pointing out that while we face many futures, there is only one past, and its residents outnumber us--- only 6 percent of all humans are now alive. Historians, he said, "commune with the dead. We re-enact their thoughts, in their context and ours." Historians look for rough regularities, such as he found in his analysis of the wars and hatred played out in the 20th Century. In his book, _The War of the World_ , he describes how the combination of economic volatility, ethnic conflict, and failing empire always led to spirals of lethal violence. The advance of science and technology has not eliminated the possibility of violence but may have made it more powerful than ever. The three causes are still in play. "Our job is to keep them from coinciding again." Ferguson ended with a critique of Schwartz's book on scenario planning, _The Art of the Long View_ , which he thought showed signs of "heuristic bias." When Schwartz asked Ferguson to expand on that idea, Ferguson pointed out there was a whole chapter in the book about "The Global Teenager," which seemed spurious. It merely reflected Schwartz's personal experience: "You were a teenager when teenagers mattered. " Historians also have heuristic biases, Ferguson added, such as their expectation that "great events should have great causes." Historians have much to learn from complexity theory and evolution, he said. His own work with "counter-factual history" helps expose critical moments in history and provides a way to "think about what didn't happen." The counter-factual technique is an application of scenario thinking to the past. In Schwartz's opening remarks, he said that his plans to write a book titled _The Case for Optimism_ were derailed by reading Ferguson's _The War of the World_. He's been grappling with the issues Ferguson raised for 18 months. "You do alternative pasts, I do alternative futures. Where historians commune with the dead, futurists have imaginary friends." Schwartz characterized Ferguson's view of history as basically down, with an upside possibility, whereas his own view was of history as basically up, with always the possibility of getting things wrong. For Schwartz, the second half of the 20th Century showed an upside momentum, with a fraction of the violent deaths---5% of humans killed violently in the first half, 0.2 % in the second half. The Cold War ended quietly. Women were liberated. China took off. Prosperity accelerated. Everything from Wikipedia to cellphones empowered the grassroots. In response, Ferguson noted Schwartz's "faith in technology" and proposed it reflected his training as an engineer. "Aren't you like the pre-1914 people who said that war was impossible because of all the new technology and commerce?" Schwartz agreed that the parallel is worrying. Ferguson said, "I think our difference is that I'm a pessimist and you're an optimist. You're Pangloss and I'm Cassandra." Schwartz noted that since his parents were in slave-labor camps in World War II, and he was born in a displaced-person camp after the war, "It would be churlish not to be an optimist." Ferguson said, "That would make me skeptical about technology. The world leader in science and technology in 1940 was Nazi Germany." Questions from the audience ended with one asking whether optimism or pessimism was a more useful way to think about the future. Schwartz said, "Optimism lets you imagine how you can overcome problems, and those possibilities motivate change." Ferguson said, "You must always focus on worst-case scenarios, and history will teach them to you."

### Decoding and recoding life To really read DNA accurately and understand it thoroughly, you need to be able to write it from scratch and make it live, Venter explained. His sequencing the first diploid human genome (with the genes from both parents) last year showed there is much more genetic variation between humans than first thought. His current goal is to fully sequence 10,000 humans and bring the price for each sequence down to $1,000. With that data, his says, "We'll begin to really learn what's nature and what's nurture." "Microbes make up one half of the Earth's biomass." Venter's shotgun sequencing of open-ocean microbial samples revealed that every milliliter of ocean has one million bacteria and archaea and ten million viruses even in supposedly barren waters. Taking samples on a round-the-world sailing trip showed that every 200 miles the genes in the microbes are 85% different. "Microbes dominate evolutionary diversity," Venter said. Some 50,000 major gene families have been discovered. Humans and other complex animals have a small fraction of that in our own genes, but the "microbiome" of our onboard microbes carry the full richness. Only 1/10th of the cells in a human are human; the rest are microbes. There are 1,000 species in our mouths, another 1,000 in our guts, another 500 on our skins, and those with vaginas have yet another 500 species. Analysis has shown that a tenth of the chemicals used in our body come to us via our gut microbes. "We are what we feed our bacteria and what they give us." In an effort to determine what is the minimum gene set for life, Venter's team took a 500-gene bacteria and began knocking out genes. They got the viable set down to 400 and realized that the only way they are going to understand the complexity is by mimicking it. They would need to synthesize a working genome artificially, first on a computer and then with assembled base pairs and "boot it up" in a living cell, making a new, unique species. They devised techniques that repaired errors during synthesis, and they demonstrated that a genome from one kind of bacteria could be implanted in another and come to life there, changing one species into another. "It was true identity theft." "This software builds its own hardware," Venter marveled. He emphasized that synthetic biology does not re-do Genesis, but it does offer a kind of Cambrian explosion, building on 3.5 billion years of evolution to go in an infinity of possible directions. The range of possibilities is indicated by an existing organism that can take 1.75 million rads of radioactivity in 24 hours, which explodes its genome. It can reassemble the shattered genome and live on. It can go dormant for millions of years, and live on. That means life may already have migrated between planets. Venter proposed that our current energy and climate situation requires truly disruptive technology. One project he's working on would use altered microbes to metabolize coal in the ground and generate methane, for a tenfold increase in carbon efficiency. Another project proposes a "4th generation biofuel," where engineered algae directly convert CO2 into hydrogen in bioreactors. "Ten million genes are the design components of the future," Venter concluded. "With combinatorial genomics and casette-based construction, we can make millions of genomes per day." During the Q & A I asked Venter why he spends so much of his time speaking in public, 150 talks a year. He said he sees that as part of his scientific work, to prepare the public for the big changes coming. He wants to avoid repeating the mistakes made with genetically modified crops (GMOs), where there was insufficient transparency and regulation, and irrational opposition by environmentalists, which crippled a crucial field. The public should feel it is included in every stage of genetic science and emerging biotechnology.

### Dispatches from Extremistan A "black swan," Taleb explained, is an event which is 1) Hard to predict; 2) Highly consequential; 3) Wrongly retro-predicted. We pretend we know why the big event happened, and so entrench our inability to deal with the next world-changing improbable event. Examples: Viagra, 9/11, Harry Potter, First World War, Beatles, the PC, Google, and the rise of any successful religion. History is dominated by sudden, lasting changes wrought by deeply unexpected events. Part of the problem is that we ignore the "silent evidence" of the nonobserved and nonobservable. We compute probability from the success of survivors. No one writes or reads a book titled "How I Lost a Million Dollars." Another problem is that we revise our own predictions and intentions unconsciously to match what actually happens. We disguise having been wrong by pretending we were right. This is "confirmation bias." There are TWO kinds of randomness, two realms in which events happen… Mediocristan is dominated by the average-- one new observation won't change much. If you are measuring the weight of a large sample of humans, adding the heaviest person in the world won't change the result, whereas measuring the average wealth of a large sample of humans would be transformed by adding the wealthiest person. Mediocristan is the realm of the Law of Large Numbers and of the Gaussian Bell Curve. Extremistan is dominated by extremes. Every year 16,000 novels are published in English. A handful of best-sellers absolutely dominate. This is the realm of the power-law curve and the Long Tail. Extremistan defies prediction. You can say there will be a few monsters and lots of midgets and the world will be changed by the monsters, and that's all you can say. Benoit Mandelbrot convinced Taleb that the main dynamic of Mediocristan is energy, and the main dynamic of Extremistan is information. Anything social is Extremistan. Thus there are two kinds of experts. A souffle chef really is an expert and can be trusted. An economist is a pseudo-expert. "Never take advice from someone wearing a tie." All you get from a Council of Economic Advisors is an illusion of control. Stock market analysts have proved to be worse than nothing. Don't focus on probability. Focus on consequences. Black Swans will come. Prepare against the negative ones; be ready to soar with the positive ones. Pay attentive heed to tradition and old people-- they have experienced more Black Swans. PS… All of the SALT speakers perform for free. Taleb added the further generosity of insisting on paying for his travel and lodging. Extra thanks to him for that.

### Rules of Forecasting Reflecting on his 25 years as a forecaster, Paul Saffo pointed out that a forecaster's job is not to predict outcomes, but to map the "cone of uncertainty" on a subject. Where are the edges of what might happen? (Uncertainty is cone-shaped because it expands as you project further into the future-- next decade has more surprises in store than next week.) Rule: Wild cards sensitize us to surprise, and they push the edges of the cone out further. You can call weird imaginings a wild card and not be ridiculed. Science fiction is brilliant at this, and often predictive, because it plants idea bombs in teenagers, which they make real 15 years later. Rule: Change is never linear. Our expectations are linear, but new technologies come in "S" curves, so we routinely overestimate short-term change and underestimate long-term change. "Never mistake a clear view for a short distance." "Inflection points are tiptoeing past us all the time." He saw one at the DARPA Grand Challenge race for robot cars in the Mojave Desert in 2004 and 2005. In 2004 no cars finished the race, and only four got off the starting line. In 2005, all 23 cars started and five finished. Rule: Look for indicators- things that don't fit. At the same time the robot cars were triumphing in the desert, 108 human-driven cars piled into one another in the fog on a nearby freeway. A survey of owners of Roomba robot vacuum cleaners showed that 2/3 of owners give the machine a personal name, and 1/3 take it with them on vacations. Rule: Look back twice as far. Every decade lately there's a new technology that sets the landscape. In the 1980s, microprocessors made a processing decade that culminated in personal computers. In the 1990s it was the laser that made for communication bandwidth and an access decade culminating in the World Wide Web. In the 2000s cheap sensors are making an interaction decade culminating in a robot takeoff. The Web will soon be made largely of machines communicating with each other. Rule: Cherish failure. Preferably other people's. We fail our way into the future. Silicon Valley is brilliant at this. Since new technologies take 20 years to have an overnight success, for an easy win look for a field that has been failing for 20 years and build on that. Rule: Be indifferent. Don't confuse the desired with the likely. Christian end-time enthusiasts have been wrong for 2,000 years. Rule: Assume you are wrong. And forecast often. Rule: Embrace uncertainty. Saffo ended with a photo he took of a jar by the cash register in a coffee shop in San Francisco. The handwritten note on the jar read, "If you fear change, leave it in here." PS… You can find different rules and a more strait-laced presentation by Saffo in his Harvard Business Review article, "_Six Rules for Effective Forecasting_ ," [here](http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/hbsp/hbr/articles/article.jsp?ml_action=get-article&articleID=R0707K&ml_issueid=BR0707&ml_subscriber=true&pageNumber=1&_requestid=37598).

### Artibodies Art, like the antibodies in our immune system, creates alien forces in service of the whole. It anticipates threats and models them. It is a diversity agent. Two forms of that process were explained and shown by Ippolito and Blais: perversion, and execution. One example of the perverse is the software called "Shredder" that takes any Web page and turns it inside out, making obvious what is hidden (the code) and small what is large (the surface images). You can try it [here](http://www.potatoland.org/shredder/) \- give it a web page URL. Another example is works of the Yes Men, a group of culture jammers whose art consists of what they call "identity correction." One successful hoax was taking the guise of a Dow Chemical spokesman and announcing on BBC World that Dow was going to liquidate Union Carbide and use the 12 billion dollars to compensate everyone who had been harmed by the Bhopal disaster in India 20 years before. Dow's stock plummeted, and the company had to announce it had no apology or payment to offer for Bhopal. With the coming of code and the Web, art moves beyond being representational to something that can execute, can make things happen. For example, when the algorithm protecting DVDs was reverse engineered and offered publicly, the magazine 2600 was sued by the film industry. The defense that code was a form of speech protected by the First Amendment was unsuccessful in court. But on the Web the descrambling code was distributed in a variety of speech-like forms that may be seen on the "Gallery of CSS Descramblers" [site](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/%7Edst/DeCSS/Gallery/) including a dramatic reading, a haiku, a T-shirt, a tie, a movie, and a version of the DVD logo containing the descrambling code.

### Principles against panic "Everything looks like a failure in the middle." Any new enterprise, Kanter explained, encounters roadblocks. As the obstacles multiply, the situation looks hopeless. That's when deeply held principles and the long view are most needed to get you past the panic. To characterize America's current winter of discontent she quoted Woody Allen: "One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly." Panic leads to abandoning principles, and that is how successes end. Kanter commends three principles in particular for renewal of the faltering American enterprise… * Open minds. In the clash between orthodoxy and creativity, opt for the spirit of discovery and progress. * Higher purpose and sense of meaning. Kanter noted the emergence of "values-based capitalism." One example she knows from her own consulting work is IBM. Shortly after the new CEO Sam Palmisano took over in 2002, he instituted an online "ValuesJam" with 300,000 employees. The result was a declaration that IBM stands for "Innovation that matters-- for our company and for the world." She has seen that value played out in IBM public service activities such as the World Community Grid, which engages idle CPU time on computers connected to the Internet (740,000 so far) to solve scientific problems in HIV-AIDS, cancer, muscular dystrophy, and human genomics. * Common ground. Inclusiveness and shared responsibility is a particularly American principle first noted and celebrated by Alexis de Tocqueville. It is reflected in Bill Clinton's observation, "Big government is being replaced by big citizens." There's been enough panic and winter in America, Kanter concluded. It's time for some endless summer. Get out and connect with the street, with nature, with the world.

### Mapping Life "All life is imperfectly transmitted code," Enriquez began, "and it is promiscuous." Thus discoveries like the one last month of an entire bacterial genome inside the DNA of a fruitfly is exploding the old tree-of-life models of evolution. The emerging map replaces gene lineages with gene webs. "There is a whole genomic continent to discover, and we've just mapped part of the coastline so far." Noting that his friend Craig Venter has just transplanted the DNA from one microbe into a different one, and booted it up there, Enriquez said that humans are going to be increasingly designing and controlling the code of life. "We'll do with bacteria what we do with our pets." Likewise new maps of brain function are raising questions such as, "Can we model the brain, can we download it, can we transplant it, can we reboot it?" Prostheses such as robotic arms used to be driven by muscle signals, but now they are being controlled directly from the brain. Enriquez noted that some nations are charging ahead with such technology and the education that drives it while others cripple themselves by holding back. Portugal had colonies throughout the world, he said, but they never respected the natives enough to help educate them, and so left intellectual blight behind them and at home. London and Paris are full of Indian and Chinese restaurants, but there are none in Portugal. He showed a photo of a billboard that read: "Portugal-- We were a world power for about 15 minutes." The new maps of life, he said, will profoundly affect countries, business, religion and ethics. Being alive in the midst a scientific renaissance like this is Christmas every day. During Q&A Enriquez lamented that the pharmacology industry has retreated to doing just marketing now instead of discovery, haven been driven into a defensive crouch by public misapplication of the "Precautionary Principle" that all new technologies are guilty until proven innocent, and innocence is impossible to prove. Thus the potential death of tens is used to head off treatments that could save tens of thousands. I asked him, "What would you call the opposite of the Precautionary Principle?" Kevin Kelly offered from the audience, "How about the Pro-actionary Principle?"

### Nuclear Footprint In the early 1980s Gwyneth Cravens was one of the protesters against the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant on Long Island, and also participated in ban-the-bomb rallies. After 15 years of deepening familiarity with nuclear power, she says she still would ban the bomb, but she now regrets that the Shoreham reactor was shut down. Who changed her mind was a nuclear expert at Sandia Labs in Albuquerque, D. Richard Anderson, known as "Rip." "Here was someone who thinks in thousands of years, about climate, about nuclear waste storage," she said. "He applies to nuclear issues the same probabilistic risk assessment that helps us understand what we're facing with climate change." One concept that altered Cravens' perspective was realizing what "baseload" requires. Rip Anderson, on the stage with her, explained that baseload is the fundamental currency of grid power. It is massive power constantly available 24/7. It comes from only three sources-- fossil fuels, hydro-electric dams, and nuclear. Hydro is maxed out. Fossil fuels have to be cut back to slow global warming. That leaves only nuclear growth to handle the expected doubling of energy demand in the world by 2030. Anderson added that his first scientific discipline was oceanography, so one of his greatest concerns about CO2 loading of the atmosphere is that the resulting carbonic acid in the oceans is dissolving the calcifying organisms and could effectively end the crucial carbon sink that oceans provide. Cravens went into detail about the harm brought by coal, which currently provides 51% of US electricity (while hydro is 7%, nuclear 20%). Estimates are that coal pollution causes 24,000 deaths a year in the US, 400,000 a year in China (not counting the 5,000 who die annually in Chinese coal mines). She also mentioned the still-incomplete science of the effects of low radiation-- the amounts below 10,000 millirems. People encounter much higher levels of natural radiation at higher elevations and in some radon-rich areas, but there is no indication of higher cancer rates in those places. The fears of long-lingering cancer effects in the Chernobyl region have not proven out. Comparing the environmental footprint of nuclear versus coal was the most persuasive mind-changer for Cravens. Coal involves vast quantities of mine spoil, vast quantities of fuel, vast quantities of pollution (including mercury and uranium), and vast quantities of carbon dioxide poured into the atmosphere. Nuclear, by contrast, uses the most concentrated form of energy in the world, the plants are small, and the waste amounts to one Coke can per person's lifetime of energy use. There is said to be no geological repository for nuclear waste yet, but Rip Anderson pointed out that the WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant) in a deep salt formation in New Mexico has been operating since 1999. It now handles only military waste, but there is no reason except political that it could not take all of our civilian spent fuel. Two questions from the audience addressed possible limitations on fast growth of nuclear energy in the world. One was, "Won't we quickly run out of uranium?" Anderson said that 10% of US electricity currently comes from recycled Soviet nuclear warheads, and we haven't begun to draw the energy from decommissioned US warheads. The price for uranium ore has been so low in recent decades that mines closed and discovery stopped. Now that the price is rising, mines are reopening and new reserves are being found. (They're mostly in Canada and Australia, some in the US.) Meanwhile, spent fuel in the US still has 98% of its energy in it. Once we reprocess the spent fuel the way the rest of the world does, we will extract more of that energy, and the final amount of waste will be drastically smaller. Second question: "Are there enough nuclear engineers in the pipeline to deal with a worldwide nuclear renaissance?" Answer: No. That's the most limiting resource at this point. Gwenyth Cravens is the author of [_Power to Save the World_.](http://www.amazon.com/Power-Save-World-Nuclear-Energy/dp/0307266567/ref=sr_1_1/102-7773207-6916907?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1190047587/lono0a-20)

### A Series of Information Explosions As usual, microbes led the way. Bacteria have swarmed in intense networks for 3.5 billion years. Then a hierarchical form emerged with the first nucleated cells that were made up of an enclosed society of formerly independent organisms. That's the pattern for the evolution of information, Alex Wright said. Networks coalesce into hierarchies, which then form a new level of networks, which coalesce again, and so on. Thus an unending series of information explosions is finessed. In humans, classification schemes emerged everywhere, defining how things are connected in larger contexts. Researchers into "folk taxonomies" have found that all cultures universally describe things they care about in hierarchical layers, and those hierarchies are usually five layers deep. Family tree hierarchies were accorded to the gods, who were human-like personalities but also represented various natural forces. Starting 30,000 years ago the "ice age information explosion" brought the transition to collaborative big game hunting, cave paintings, and elaborate decorative jewelry that carried status information. It was the beginning of information's "release from social proximity." 5,000 years ago in Sumer, accountants began the process toward writing, beginning with numbers, then labels and lists, which enabled bureaucracy. Scribes were just below kings in prestige. Finally came written narratives such as Gilgamesh. The move from oral culture to literate culture is profound. Oral is additive, aggregative, participatory, and situational, where literate is subordinate, analytic, objective, and abstract. (One phenomenon of current Net culture is re-emergence of oral forms in email, twittering, YouTube, etc.) Wright honored the sequence of information-ordering visionaries who brought us to our present state. In 1883 Charles Cutter devised a classification scheme that led in part to the Library of Congress system and devised an apparatus of keyboard and wires that would fetch the desired book. H.G. Wells proposed a "world brain" of data and imagined that it would one day wake up. Teilhard de Chardin anticipated an "etherization of human consciousness" into a global noosphere. The greatest unknown revolutionary was the Belgian Paul Otlet. In 1895 he set about freeing the information in books from their bindings. He built a universal decimal classification and then figured out how that organized data could be explored, via "links" and a "web." In 1910 Otlet created a "radiated library" called the Mundameum in Brussels that managed search queries in a massive way until the Nazis destroyed the service. Alex Wright showed an [astonishing video of how Otlet's distributed telephone-plus-screen system worked](https://youtube.com/watch?v=qwRN5m64I7Y). Wright concluded with the contributions of Vannevar Bush ("associative trails" in his Memex system), Eugene Garfield's Science Citation Index, the predecessor of page ranking. Doug Engelbart's working hypertext system in the "mother of all demos." And Ted Nelson who helped inspire Engelbart and Berners-Lee and who Wright considers "directly responsible for the generation of the World Wide Web."

### Democracy versus Culture Francis Fukuyama began by describing the four most significant challenges to the thesis in his famed 1992 book,_[The End of History and the Last Man](http://www.amazon.com/End-History-Last-Man/dp/0743284550/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-4300234-8355129?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1183410555/lono0a-20)_. In the book he proposed that humanity's economic progress over the past 10,000 years was driven by the accumulation of science and technology over time. That connection is direct and reliable. Less direct and reliable, but very important, is the sequence from economic progress to the adoption of liberal democracy. Political modernization accompanies economic modernization. This is a deep force of history, the book claims. Fukuyama describes the rise of the idea of human rights in the West as a secularization of Christian doctrine. That led to accountability mechanisms-- "You can't have good governance without feedback loops." Once there is a propertied middle class, they demand political participation. The threshold for that demand appears to about $6,000 per capita per year. It's hard to get to, but hundreds of millions of people in the world are making that climb right now. China and Russia will be a test of his thesis, Fukuyama said. They are getting wealthier. If they democratize in the next twenty years, he's right. If they remain authoritarian, he's wrong. Fukuyama is most intrigued by a challenge that comes from his old teacher and continuing friend, Samuel Huntington, author of _The Clash of Civilizations_. Culture can trump modernization, says Huntington-- current radical Islam is an example. Fukuyama agrees that people at the fringe of modernization feel a sense of onslaught, and they can respond as Bolsheviks and Fascists did in the 20th century. "A Hitler or a Bin Laden proclaims, 'I can tell you who you are.'" A second challenge to the universalism of liberal democracy is that it does not yet work internationally. Fukuyama agrees, noting that the major current obstacle is America's overwhelming hegemony. He expects no solution from the UN, but an overlapping set of international institutions could eventually do the job. A third challenge is the continuing poverty trap for so many in the world. Fukuyama says it takes a national state with the rule of law and time to learn from mistakes before you get economic takeoff. He sees later colonialism, done on the cheap (instead of with the patient institution building that England did in India), as a major source of the world's current failed and crippled states. The final challenge that impresses Fukuyama is the possibility that technology may now be accelerating too fast to cure its own problems the way it has done in the past. Climate change could be an example of that. And Fukuyama particularly worries that biotechnology might so transform human nature that it will fragment humanity irreparably. While he sees meaning in history, Fukuyama said it's not a matter of iron law. Human agency counts. History swerves on who wins a battle or an election. We are responsible. Two further angles on Fukuyama's thesis emerged at dinner. One concerned how society's morality should express itself in dealing with the threat/promise of biotechnology. Conservative Fukuyama promoted strict government regulation while the liberals (and libertarians) in the room said the market and Internet should sort it out. Kevin Kelly asked Fukuyama, "Do you think human nature is as good as it can be?" I proposed to Washington-based Fukuyama that he was in the midst of a classic argument between the coasts. East Coast says, "Ready, aim, don't fire." West Coast says, "Fire, aim, ready." Then there's the European Union. In his talk Fukuyama praised it as the fullest realization of his theory. At dinner he acknowledged his concern that Europe may be headed toward permanent conflict with its growing immigrant populations, whose first allegiance continues to be to their own cultures.

### Humanity's immune system The title of Paul Hawken's talk, "The New Great Transformation," has two referents, he explained. Economist Karl Polanyi's 1944 book, _The Great Transformation_ , said that the "market society" and modern nation state emerged together in Europe after 1700 and divided society in ways that have yet to be healed. Karen Armstrong's 2006 book, _The Great Transformation_ , explores "the Axial Age" between 800 and 200 BC when the world's great religions and philosophies first took shape. They were all initially social movements, she says, acting on revulsion against the violence and injustice of their times. Both books describe conditions in which "the future is stolen and sold to the present," said Hawken-- a situation we are having to deal with yet again. His new book, [_Blessed Unrest_](http://www.amazon.com/Blessed-Unrest-Largest-Movement-Coming/dp/0670038520/lono0a-20), was inspired by the countless business cards that earnest environmentalists would hand him after his lectures all over the world. After a while he had 7,000, and he wondered, "How many environmental groups are there in the world?" He began actively building a now-public database, [WiserEarth.org](http://www.wiserearth.org/), which includes social justice and indigenous rights organizations because he found they indivisibly overlap in their values and activities. The database now has 105,000 such organizations. The still-emerging taxonomy of their "areas of focus" has 414 categories, amounting to a "curriculum of the 21st century"-- Acid Rain, Living Wages, Tropical Moist Forests, Peacemaking, Democratic Reform, Sustainable Cities, Environmental Toxicology, Watershed Management, Human Trafficking, Mountaintop Removal, Pesticides, Climate Change, Refugees, Women's Safety, Eco-villages, Fair Trade… Extrapolating from carefully inventoried regions to those yet to be tallied, he estimates there are over 1,000,000 such organizations in the world, adding up to the largest and fastest growing Movement in history. The phenomenon has been overlooked because it lacks the customary hallmarks of a movement-- no charismatic leaders, no grand theory or ideology, no "ism," no defining events. The new activist groups are about dispersing power rather than aggregating power. Their focus is on ideas rather than ideology-- ideologies are clung to, but ideas can be tried and tossed or improved. The point is to solve problems, usually from the bottom up. The movement can never be divided because it is already atomized. What's going on? Hawken wondered if humanity might have some collective intelligence that we don't yet understand. The metaphor he finds most useful is the immune system, which is the most complex system in our body-- more complex than the entire Internet-- massive, distributed, subtle, ingenious, and effective. The opposite of a hierarchical army, its power is in the density of its network. It deals with problems not through frontal attack but complex negotiation and rapprochement. Much of the new movement, Hawken said, was inspired, at root, by the slavery abolitionists and by the Transcendentalists Emerson and his student Thoreau. Emerson declared that "everything is connected," and Thoreau wound up going to jail (and making it cool) by taking that idea seriously in social-justice terms. Now, as in the Axial Age, activism comes from acting on the realization that "all life is sacred."

### Consilience defeats miasma Steven Johnson began his long zoom survey with the "prior art" of Joyce's Stephen Daedalus locating himself in himself, his neighborhood, Dublin, on out to the universe. The value of a long zoom is in identifying and employing every scale between the very large and very small, noticing how they change each other when held in the mind at the same time. Johnson's core story (and current book) concerned London in 1854, when it was the largest city in the world and in history with 2.5 million people. London famously stank. Cesspools filled basements, slaughterhouses were anywhere, garbage piled up. Medicine at the time held that disease was caused by "miasma," foul air, noxious vapors. "All smell is disease," declared a Doctor Chadwick. The authorities decided that the way to cure the frequent cholera epidemics in London was to get rid of the bad odor-- pump the sewage into the Thames, which people drank. The cholera got worse. Johnson's goal with his book, [_The Ghost Map_](http://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Map-Steven-Johnson/dp/1594489254/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-6115062-9930528?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1179248667/lono0a-20), was to figure out why the wrong theory of disease lingered so long, and what it took to correct it. The answer, he proposes, is in the perspective of the long zoom. The celebrated story goes that John Snow discovered the polluted-water cause of cholera by drawing a "ghost map" of the cholera deaths concentrated around the Broad Street pump in Soho. What really happened is more interesting. Snow had been publishing his theory of water pollution causing cholera for five years. In August of 1854, a horrifying 10% of his neighborhood in Soho perished from the disease. Then he drew up the map, drawing on public statistics provided by the city, and on the street savvy of a popular vicar named Rev. Henry Whitehead. The map confirmed his theory and persuaded the medical establishment and city authorities. In just 12 years, cholera was completely eradicated from London. In Johnson's view, one long zoom had displaced another. The miasma theory of cholera embraced a nested set of scales ranging, from large to small:_cultural traditions - urban development - technology - contemporary politics - "great men" \- human sensory system_. Bad smell, bad people, bad disease. With John Snow's map, a different long zoom took over:_cities - data systems - neighborhood - humans - organs - microbes_. The combination of city density and open-source data about the epidemic made the ghost map possible and persuasive. Doctor Snow noticed that the bodily symptoms of cholera looked like they were caused by something swallowed rather than something inhaled. The data had to be extremely strong to overcome the bias of human sensory apparatus-- our alarm system of smell can detect minute amounts of contagion, but we cannot see them. It took a neighborhood map to defeat what the nose thought it knew. Johnson proposed that another word for the long zoom perspective is "consilience"-- a fine old word, revived by Edward O. Wilson, that links multiple disciplines and multiple levels into a whole body of knowledge with extra benefits the separate disciplines lack. Science and culture can blend rigorously. What is discovered in consilience is not just scales of distance or time but nested systems. Johnson moved on to contemporary popular culture, drawing on his research for his brain book ([_Emergence_](http://www.amazon.com/Emergence-Connected-Brains-Cities-Software/dp/0684868768/ref=sr_1_3/102-6115062-9930528?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1179248720/lono0a-20)) and his book on video games and TV ([_Everything Bad Is Good For You_](http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Bad-Good-Steven-Johnson/dp/B000O17CYM/ref=sr_1_2/102-6115062-9930528?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1179248720/lono0a-20)). Back in the three-network days of "Gilligan's Island," the guiding principle was "least objectionable programming." Now with DVDs and TiVo, the guideline is "most repeatable programming"-- material that will reward you if you study it again and again. Thus a current hit TV series about a very different island, "Lost," has a whole horde of characters and purveys many-leveled complexities and mysteries embracing _geography - economics - technology - sociology - biology - ontology_. Viewers are invited to wonder, among a great many other things, whether the whole damn thing is a dream, and, if so, whose? Our brain is wired with "seeking circuitry" and relishes exercising "the regime of competence." TV shows like "Lost" and video games like "World of Warcraft" are addictive because they reward exploration. Instead of employing narrative arcs, they keep you in a state of being always challenged but not quite overwhelmed as you ascend from skill level to skill level.

### The deep past in the remote present It began on a New Jersey beach. Frans Lanting was photographing horseshoe crabs for a story about how they are being ground up for eel bait and at the same time their blood is used for drug testing--a $100 million industry. The crabs have primordial eyesight, which they employ mainly for finding sex partners. Photographing the horseshoes having a spawning orgy one spooky twilight, Lanting felt like he was suddenly back in the Silurian, 430 million years ago… So Lanting and his wife Chris Eckstrom set out in search of "time capsules," places on the present Earth where he could find and photograph all the ancient stages of life. A two-year project expanded to seven years. On a live volcano in Hawaii he found the naked planet of 4.3 billion years ago-- molten rock flowing, zero life. "Your boots melt. You smell early Earth." On the western coast of Australia he shot a rare surviving living reef of stromatolites, made of the cyanobacteria that three billion years ago transformed the Earth by filling the atmosphere with oxygen. Lanting took pains to photograph without blue sky in the background, because the sky was not blue until the cyanobacteria had generated a planet's worth of oxygen. Life's journey through time is a story of innovations, Lanting said. Lichens were the first to colonize land, followed by shelled creatures that could carry ocean inside them-- crabs, turtles, and snails. In Australia Lanting photographed mudskippers--amphibious fish that use their pectoral fins to crawl around on mud and even climb trees. Dinosaurs once browsed on land plants that defended themselves with ferocious spiky leaves. A survivor of that battle is the Araucaria tree in Chile. Lanting planted one in his garden near Santa Cruz and photographed it there. Study of the first feathered reptile, the archaeopteryx, suggested that the contemporary bird with the most similar flight style is the frigate bird, and Lanting photographed one looking like an airborne fossil in the Galapagos Islands. Asteroids and climate change made new niches and new innovations. Following the Cretaceous extinction 65 million years ago, mammals deployed their toothed jaws. Drier climate 25 million years ago created grasslands. When the forests dried, some apes took to walking upright in the savannahs of Africa. And some of those got around to analyzing DNA and noticing that life's entire history is written there. Lanting ended his dazzling show with two demonstrations. One was an 8-minute segment of an hour-long orchestral version of "Life's Journey Through Time," composed by Philip Glass, with a brilliant multi-media version of Lanting's photos. The music and the image dynamics gain complexity stage by stage in synch with the growing complexity of life. (It would be glorious to see this performed locally with the San Francisco Symphony. The ideal occasion would be the opening of the new California Academy of Sciences building in Golden Gate Park next year.) Lanting also did a quick demo of the timeline version of his photos (and videos) on his website. The level of its sophistication drew cheers and applause from the Web-savvy San Francisco audience. See for yourself: <http://www.lifethroughtime.com/experience.html> The take home version of this talk is Lanting's book, [_Life: A Journey Through Time_](http://www.amazon.com/Life-Journey-Through-Frans-Lanting/dp/3822839949/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-8919416-0579929?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1177966282/lono0a-20), and is a stunning oversized edition published by Taschen. P.S. Lanting's presentation in particular is worth seeing in high-quality video.

### Catastrophic drought is coming back There are two kinds of historians, Brian Fagan says, parachutists and truffle hunters. Parachutists command an overview of the landscape, while truffle hunters dig deeply to uncover marvelous treasures. Fagan is a parachutist. In his talk Fagan emphasized a wide view of human history as it unrolls in the landscape of climate. In our lookout from the parachute, we can see evidence from ice cores, tree rings, fossil pollen, and historical records, all pointing to the conclusion that people in the past have suffered through global warming periods before. So what happened? Using data from truffle-hunting historians, Fagan told of how vineyard harvest records in Europe show that England became so warm during the period between 800-1250 AD that England not only had vineyards in its central provinces but it also exported wine to France. The medieval warm period had repercussions throughout society. Iceland and Scandinavia warmed up enough to grow cereal crops, tree lines elevated in mountain areas, and there were longer growing seasons everywhere on the continent. This warming up of agriculture initiated the first vast clear-cutting of European forests. In the short 200 years between 1100 and 1300, from one-third to one-half of European wooded wilderness was deforested to make way for fields and pastures -- shaping the lovely farm scenes we now associate with Europe. (Today only Poland has any remaining virgin forests). Fagan says the myth of the medieval warm period is that it was warm. There were all kinds of weather extremes. In 1315 it started to rain for seven years. The newly cleared and naked hills eroded, dams burst, disease spread, and prolonged drought followed. And not just in Europe. Mesoamerica was jolted by long droughts. The Mayan pyramids at Tikal were engineered to act as water collection reservoirs. The collapse of their empire, and others in South America such as the Inca in Peru, are correlated to prolonged droughts. Indeed, says Fagan, the elephant in the climate room is drought. As recently as the 1800s, prolonged droughts killed 20-30 million people in India during the British Raj period. We have a tendency to believe that modern technology has alleviated our susceptibility to drought, and it has -- except for the billions of people on earth today who are living as subsistence farmers. It is upon these people that Fagan wanted us to focus our attention and care, because it is upon these people that the most serious consequences of global warming will fall. Referring to his own experience of many years as an archeologist in Africa, he painted a vivid image of what a severe drought entails and how a drought can act like a cascading disruption and rapidly destroy a vibrant culture to the point where it disappears completely. Forget the rocketing "hockey stick" of global warming, he urges. Even mild climate warming produces prolonged droughts, and we should expect more of them. There's already been a 25% increase in droughts globally since 1990. In the next 100 years, we can expect the number of people to be affected by droughts to rise from 3% of the world's population to 30%. The lesson Fagan wanted us to leave with was that the effects of global warming will be felt greatest on marginal land and marginal peoples -- many far from the sea and rising sea levels - and that because of their marginality, the consequences of prolonged drought will not just be inconvenient, but devastating. In the question and answer period, he was asked what the stricken people can do about it? "Move," he said, "is the only option." If the world is heating up, where would he move to? "Canada. It will be dryer, much warmer, and their politics are reasonable."

### Non-Singularity scenarios Vinge began by declaring that he still believes that a Singularity event in the next few decades is the most likely outcome-- meaning that self-accelerating technologies will speed up to the point of so profound a transformation that the other side of it is unknowable. And this transformation will be driven by Artificial Intelligences (AIs) that, once they become self-educating and self-empowering, soar beyond human capacity with shocking suddenness. He added that he is not convinced by the fears of some that the AIs would exterminate humanity. He thinks they would be wise enough to keep us around as a fallback and backup-- intelligences that can actually function without massive connectivity! (Later in the Q&A I asked him about the dangerous period when AI's are smart enough to exterminate us but not yet wise enough to keep us around. How long would that period be? "About four hours," said Vinge .) Since a Singularity makes long-term thinking impractical, Vinge was faced with the problem of how to say anything useful in a Seminar About Long-term Thinking, so he came up with a plausible set of scenarios that would be Singularity-free. He noted that they all require that we achieve no faster-than-light space travel. The overall non-Singularity condition he called "The Age of Failed Dreams." The main driver is that software simply continues failing to keep pace with hardware improvements. One after another, enormous billion-dollar software projects simply do not run, as has already happened at the FBI, air traffic control, IRS, and many others. Some large automation projects fail catastrophically, with planes running into each. So hardware development eventually lags, and materials research lags, and no strong AI develops. To differentiate visually his three sub-scenarios, Vinge showed a graph ranging over the last 50,000 and next 50,000 years, with power (in maximum discrete sources) plotted against human populaton, on a log-log scale. Thus the curve begins at the lower left with human power of 0.3 kilowatts and under a hundred thousand population, curves up through steam engines with one megawatt of power and a billion population, up further to present plants generating 13 gigawatts. His first scenario was a bleak one called "A Return to MADness." Driven by increasing environmental stress (that a Singularity might have cured), nations return to nuclear confrontation and policies of "Mutually Assured Destruction." One "bad afternoon," it all plays out, humanity blasts itself back to the Stone Age and then gradually dwindles to extinction. His next scenario was a best-case alternative named "The Golden Age," where population stabilizes around 3 billion, and there is a peaceful ascent into "the long, good time." Humanity catches on that the magic ingredient is education, and engages the full plasticity of the human psyche, empowered by hope, information, and communication. A widespread enlightened populism predominates, with the kind of tolerance and wise self-interest we see embodied already in Wikipedia. One policy imperative of this scenario would be a demand for research on "prolongevity"-- "Young old people are good for the future of humanity." Far from deadening progress, long-lived youthful old people would have a personal stake in the future reaching out for centuries, and would have personal perspective reaching back for centuries. The final scenario, which Vinge thought the most probable, he called "The Wheel of Time." Catastrophes and recoveries of various amplitudes follow one another. Enduring heroes would be archaeologists and "software dumpster divers" who could recover lost tools and techniques. What should we do about the vulnerabilities in these non-Singularity scenarios? Vinge 's main concern is that we are running only one, perilously narrow experiment on Earth. "The best hope for long-term survival is self-sufficient off-Earth settlements." We need a real space program focussed on bringing down the cost of getting mass into space, instead of "the gold-plated sham" of present-day NASA. There is a common critique that there is no suitable place for humans elsewhere in the Solar System, and the stars are too far. "In the long now," Vinge observed, "the stars are not too far." **(Note: Vinge's detailed notes for this talk, and the graphs, may be found online at:****[http://rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/ vinge /longnow/index.htm](http://rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/longnow/index.htm) ** **)**

### Ignore confident forecasters "What is it about politics that makes people so dumb?" From his perspective as a psychology researcher, Philip Tetlock watched political advisors on the left and the right make bizarre rationalizations about their wrong predictions at the time of the rise of Gorbachev in the 1980s and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. (Liberals were sure that Reagan was a dangerous idiot; conservatives were sure that the USSR was permanent.) The whole exercise struck Tetlock as what used to be called an "outcome-irrelevant learning structure." No feedback, no correction. He observes the same thing is going on with expert opinion about the Iraq War. Instead of saying, "I evidently had the wrong theory," the experts declare, "It almost went my way," or "It was the right mistake to make under the circumstances," or "I'll be proved right later," or "The evilness of the enemy is still the main event here." Tetlock's summary: "Partisans across the opinion spectrum are vulnerable to occasional bouts of ideologically induced insanity." He determined to figure out a way to keep score on expert political forecasts, even though it is a notoriously subjective domain (compared to, say, medical advice), and "there are no control groups in history." So Tetlock took advantage of getting tenure to start a long-term research project now 18 years old to examine in detail the outcomes of expert political forecasts about international affairs. He studied the aggregate accuracy of 284 experts making 28,000 forecasts, looking for pattern in their comparative success rates. Most of the findings were negative-- conservatives did no better or worse than liberals; optimists did no better or worse than pessimists. Only one pattern emerged consistently. "How you think matters more than what you think." It's a matter of judgement style, first expressed by the ancient Greek warrior poet Archilochus: "The fox knows many things; the hedgehog one great thing." The idea was later expanded by essayist Isaiah Berlin. In Tetlock's interpretation, Hedgehogs have one grand theory (Marxist, Libertarian, whatever) which they are happy to extend into many domains, relishing its parsimony, and expressing their views with great confidence. Foxes, on the other hand are skeptical about grand theories, diffident in their forecasts, and ready to adjust their ideas based on actual events. The aggregate success rate of Foxes is significantly greater, Tetlock found, especially in short-term forecasts. And Hedgehogs routinely fare worse than Foxes, especially in long-term forecasts. They even fare worse than normal attention-paying dilletantes -- apparently blinded by their extensive expertise and beautiful theory. Furthermore, Foxes win not only in the accuracy of their predictions but also the accuracy of the likelihood they assign to their predictions-- in this they are closer to the admirable discipline of weather forecasters. The value of Hedgehogs is that they occasionally get right the farthest-out predictions-- civil war in Yugoslavia, Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, the collapse of the Internet Bubble. But that comes at the cost of a great many wrong far-out predictions-- Dow 36,000, global depression, nuclear attack by developing nations. Hedgehogs annoy only their political opposition, while Foxes annoy across the political spectrum, in part because the smartest Foxes cherry-pick idea fragments from the whole array of Hedgehogs. Bottom line… The political expert who bores you with an cloud of "howevers" is probably right about what's going to happen. The charismatic expert who exudes confidence and has a great story to tell is probably wrong. And to improve the quality of your own predictions, keep brutally honest score. Enjoy being wrong, admitting to it and learning from it, as much as you enjoy being right. (Iraq footnote. I asked Tetlock to opine on which experts were most right about how things have gone in the Iraq War. He said the most accurate in this case were the regional experts, who opposed the invasion, and what they are predicting now is a partition of Iraq into Kurdish, Shia, and Sunni areas.)

### 2nd Life takes off What is real life coming to owe digital life? After a couple years in the flat part of exponential growth, the steep part is now arriving for the massive multi-player online world construction kit called "Second Life." With 1.7 million accounts, membership in "Second Life" is growing by 20,000 per day. The current doubling rate of "residents" is 7 months, still shortening, which means the growth is (for now) hyperexponential. For this talk the founder and CEO of "Second Life," Philip Rosedale, tried something new for him-- a simultaneous demo and talk. His online avatar, "Philip Linden," was on the screen showing things while the in-theater Philip Rosedale was conjecturing about what it all means. "This is a game of 'Can I interest you more in what I'm saying than what's going on on the screen?'" He showed how new arrivals go through the "gateway" experience of creating their own onscreen avatar, explaining that because intense creativity is so cheap, easy, and experimental, the online personas become strongly held. "You can have multiple avatars in 'Second Life,' but the overall average is 1.25 avatars per person." The median age of users is 31, and the oldest users spend the most time in the world (over 80 hours per week for 10 percent of the residents). Women are 43 percent of the customers. The on-screen Philip Linden was carrying Rosedale's talk notes (handwritten, scanned, and draped onto a board in the digital world). Rosedale talked about the world while his avatar flew ("Everyone flies-- why not?") to a music club in which a live song performance was going on (the real singer crooning into her computer in real time from somewhere.) The singer recognized Philip Linden in the on-screen audience and greeted him from the on-screen stage. "More is different," Rosedale explained. People think they want total and solitary control of their world, but the result of that is uninteresting. To get the emergent properties that make "Second Life" so enthralling, it has to be one contiguous world with everyone in it. At present it comprises about 100 square miles, mostly mainland, with some 5,000 islands (all adding up to 35 terrabytes running in 5,000 servers). Defying early predictions, the creativity in "Second Life" has not plateaued but just keeps escalating. Everybody is inspired to keep topping each other with ever cooler things. There are tens of thousands of clothing designers. Unlike the aesthetic uniformity of imagined digital worlds like in the movie "The Matrix," "Second Life" is suffused with variety. It is "the sum of our dreams." The burgeoning token economy in "Second Life" is directly connected to the real-world economy with an exchange rate of around 270 Linden dollars to 1 US dollar. There are 7,000 businesses operating in "Second Life," leading this month to its first real-world millionaire (Metaverse real estate mogul Anshe Chung). At present "Second Life" has annual economic activity of about $70 million US dollars, growing rapidly. As Jaron Lanier predicted in the early '90s, the only scarce resource in virtual reality is creativity, and it becomes valued above everything. Freed of the cost of goods and the plodding quality of real-world time, Rosedale explained, people experiment fast and strange, get feedback, and experiment again. They orgy on the things they think they want, play them out, get bored, and move on. They get "married," start businesses with strangers-- "There are 40-person businesses made of people who have never met in real life." Real-world businesses hold meetings in "Second Life" because they're more fun and encourage a higher degree of truth telling. Pondering the future, Rosedale said that every aspect of the quality of shared virtual life will keep improving as the technology accelerates and the number of creators online keeps multiplying. ("Second Life" is now moving toward a deeper order of creativity by releasing most of its world-building software into open source mode.) Real-world artifacts like New York City could become regarded like museums. "As the fastest moving, most creative stuff in our society increasingly takes place in the virtual world, that will change how we look at the real world," Rosedale concluded.

### Philanthropic stamina 10,000 families in the US, Katherine Fulton reported, have assets of $100 million or more. That's up from 7,000 just a couple years ago. Most of that money is "on the sidelines." The poor and the middle class are far more generous in their philanthropy, proportionally, than the very wealthy. Philanthropy across the board is in the midst of intense, potentially revolutionary, transition, she said. There's new money, new leaders, new rules, new technology, and new needs. Where great wealth used to come mainly from inheritance and oil, now it comes from success in high technology and finance-- and ideas and expectations from those business experiences inform (and sometimes over-simplify) the new philanthropy. Some of the great older institutions like the Rockefeller Foundation are radically reorganizing around new ideas and opportunities. But still the greatest amount comes from individuals, many of whom are now "giving while living" instead of handing over the task to heirs. One major new instrument for philanthropy are the community foundations, "the mutual funds of philanthropy, where donors can outsource their strategy." There are 1,000 such organizations in the world, 700 of them in the US, led by innovators such as Acumen Fund, Social Venture Partners, New Profit Inc., and Women's Funding Network. Online giving is growing rapidly, including the development of philanthropic marketplaces for direct, selective, fine-grain giving. Give India, for example, is a national marketspace of charity exchange. "By 2020," Katherine predicted, "we will see a headline, OPEN SOURCE PHILANTHROPIC PORTAL TOPS $1 BILLION IN GIFTS." Katherine drew a matrix to classify kinds of philanthropy, with Short-term & Responsive on the left, Long-term & Systemic on the right; Personal & Local on the bottom, Global on the top. An important trend is from the lower left to upper right, from local and short-term toward global and systemic, exemplified by Bill Gates's move from bringing computers to American schools to bringing health to Africa. "Philanthropy is how we make the long now personal," she said. The trait most often missing in philanthropy, including the new philanthropy, is stamina, patience. "Instead of rewarding success with continued funding, the givers get bored and look for something new. Really effective giving requires deep contextual understanding and tolerance for ambiguity. My advice to new donors is, 'Pick at least one difficult and complex issue and stick with it, and join with others to work on it.'" The greatest needs require philanthropic stamina but will also reward it. She quoted Danny Hillis: "There are problems that are impossible if you think about them in two-year terms-- which everyone does- but they're easy if you think if fifty-year terms." Richard Rockefeller and Larry Brilliant joined Katherine on the stage, and discussion got going that wound up lasting to 1am at dinner with the sponsors of the Seminar series. One subject was the isolation that often comes with great personal wealth. Katherine emphasized that donors have to visit up close with whatever they're giving toward. Dr. Rockefeller supported that, describing how different his view was of Doctors Without Borders once he had worked with the physicians in the field in Peru and Nigeria. He said that direct experience helps free you from lots of theories that are just wrong, and from philanthropy that is a projection of your own neuroses. Questions from the audience revealed a continuing problem with the whole social sector, which is the lack of clear mechanisms of self-correction and accountability. Government has checks and balances. Business has the bottom line. But "it's hard to speak truth to philanthropy," Katherine said. Richard said he looked closely at a $20 million effort by the Robert Wood Johnson to evaluate its programs and was unimpressed by the result. Larry Brilliant added, "And the new philanthropy is even less accountable than the old." Over dinner the subject came back to the 10,000 families with over $100 million dollars, most of it inactive. One problem is that giving really large grants is harder than small grants. Only universities are well geared to attract and receive the multi-million dollar gifts that result in named buildings and additions to already bloated endowments. New institutions and mechanisms are needed for directing large grants in new directions. And something generational is going on, Katherine mused. The generation of Andrew Carnegie and Richard's great grandfather John D. Rockefeller had a strong religious tradition that inspired them to public generosity and inventiveness. Those who came of age in the 1960s and early '70s had their experience with political activism as a driver for later philanthropy. "But I n

### Welcome to the Anthropocene The graphs we see these days, John Baez began, all look vertical-- carbon burning shooting up, CO2 in the air shooting up, global temperature shooting up, and population still shooting up. How can we understand what really going on? "It's like trying to understand geology while you're hanging by your fingernails on a cliff, scared to death. You think all geology is vertical." So, zoom out for some perspective. An Earth temperature graph for the last 18,000 years shows that we've built a false sense of security from 10,000 years of unusually stable climate. Even so, a "little dent" in the graph of a drop of only 1 degree Celsius put Europe in a what's called "the little ice age" from 1555 to 1850. It ended just when industrial activity took off, which raises the question whether it was us that ended it. Nobel laureate atmospheric scientist Paul Crutzen suggests that the current geological era should be called the "Anthropocene," because it is increasingly dominated by human-caused effects. Baez noted that oil companies now can send their tankers through a Northwest Passage that they may have created, since it is fossil fuel burning that raised the CO2 that raised the summer temperatures in the Arctic that melts the polar ice away from the land. Zoom out further still to the last 65 million years. The temperature graph shows several major features. One is the rapid (every 100,000 years) wide swings of major ice ages. When they began, 1.35 million years ago, is when humans mastered fire. But almost all of the period was much warmer than now, with ferns growing in Antarctica. "Now it's cold. What's wrong with a little warming?" Baez asked. The problem is that the current warming is happening too fast. Studies of 1,500 species in Europe show that their ranges are moving north at 6 kilometers a decade, but the climate zones are moving north at 40 kilometers a decade, faster than they can keep up. The global temperature is now the hottest it's been in 120,000 years. One degree Celsius more and it will be the hottest since 1.35 million years ago, before the ice ages. Baez suggested that the Anthropocene may be characterized mainly by species such as cockroaches and raccoons that accommodate well to humans. Coyotes are now turning up in Manhattan and Los Angeles. There are expectations that we could lose one-third of all species by mid-century, from climate change and other human causes. Okay, to think about major extinctions, zoom out again. Over the last 550 million years there have been over a dozen mass extinctions, the worst being the Permian-Triassic extinction 250 million years ago, when over half of all life disappeared. The cause is still uncertain, but one candidate is the methane clathrates ("methane ice") on the ocean floor. Since methane is a far worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, massive "burps" of the gas could have led to sudden drastic global heating and thus the huge die-off of species. Naturally the methane clathrates are being studied as an industrial fuel for when the oil runs out in this century, "which could make our effect on global warming 10,000 times worse," Baez noted. "Zooming out in time is how I calm myself down after reading the newspapers," Baez concluded. "A mass extinction is a sad thing, but life does bounce back, and it gets more interesting each time. We probably won't kill off all life on Earth. But even if we do, there are a hundred billion stars in our galaxy, and ten billion galaxies in the observable universe."

### Giant contradictions “China is the most unresolved nation of consequence in the world,” Orville Schell began. It is defined by its massive contradictions. And by its massiveness— China’s population is estimated to be 1.25 to 1.3 billion; the margin of error in the estimate is greater than the population of France. It has 160 cities with a population over one million (the US has 49). It has the world’s largest standing army. No society in the world has more millennia in its history, and for most of that history China looked back. Then in the 20th century the old dynastic cycles were replaced by one social cancellation after another until 1949, when Mao set the country toward the vast futuristic vision of Communism. That “mad experiment” ended with Deng Xiaoping’s effective counter-revolution in the 1980s, which unleashed a new totalistic belief, this time in the market. So what you have now is a society sick of grand visions, in search of another way to be, focussed on the very near term. These days you cannot think usefully about China and its potential futures without holding in your mind two utterly contradictory views of what is happening there. On the one hand, a robust and awesomely growing China; on the other hand a brittle China, parts of it truly hellish. **ROBUST CHINA** * Peaceful borders in all directions * Economic, non-threatening engagement with the entire world, including with societies the US refuses to deal with * 200 million Chinese raised out of poverty * Private savings rate of 40 percent (it’s 1 percent in the US) * 300 million people with cell phones, and the best cell phone service in the world * A superb freeway system built almost overnight * New building construction everywhere, and some of it is brilliant * 150 million people online * 350,000 engineering graduates a year * One-third of the world’s direct investment * Huge trade surplus * And an economic growth rate of 9 to 12 percent a year! For decades. but also… **BRITTLE CHINA** * Not much arable land, so a growing dependence on imported food * Two-thirds of energy production is from dirty coal, by dirty methods, growing at the rate of 1-2 new coal-fired plants per week * 30 percent of China has acid rain; 75 percent of lakes are polluted and rivers are polluted or pumped dry * Of the 20 most polluted cities in the world, 16 are in China; you don’t see the sun any more * Some industrial parts of China are barren, hellish wastes * Driven by environmental horrors and by widespread corruption, there were 87,000 instances of social unrest last year, going up every year * The population is aging rapidly, with no pension or welfare, and a broken healthcare system * The stock markets are grossly manipulated * Public and official amnesia about historical legacies such as Tiananmen Square in 1989 How can such contradictions be reconciled? The best everyone can hope for is steady piecemeal change. For the Chinese the contradictions don’t really bite so long as they have continued economic growth to focus on and to absorb some of the problems. But what happens when there’s a break in that growth? It could come from inside China or from outside (such as a disruption in the US economy). It’s hard to look at the China boom now without thinking about the Japan boom in the 1970s and ’80s, remembering how everyone knew the Japanese were going dominate the US and world economy, and we all had to study Japanese methods to learn how to compete. Then that went away, and it hasn’t come back. The leadership of China is highly aware of the environmental problems and is enlightened and ambitious about green solutions, but that attitude does not yet extend beyond the leadership, and until it does, not much can happen. That’s China: huge, consequential for everybody, and profoundly unresolved.

### Only connect John Rendon, head of The Rendon Group, is a senior communications consultant to the White Houses and Departments of Defense. His subject in this talk is how to replace tactical, reactive response to terror with long-term strategic initative. I think that people were expecting a silver-tongued devil, an accomplished spin-meister, arrogant but charming, who would dance them into some new nuanced state of understanding. What they got instead from John Rendon was an earnest, soft-spoken message of such directness and scope that it apparently came across to some in the audience as dissembling. Polarization rules in Washington these days, Rendon said, and in the country. Moderates are made voiceless. Civilized discourse is nearly impossible. And everyone is consumed with the pace of the news cycle, displacing any sense of the long view. Meanwhile in the world the US has a severe “credibility deficit,” especially with the people in other nations. He said that his organization, The Rendon Group, has done detailed research on how the United States is perceived in Islamic countries. The universal message from Muslims was, “You look at us but you do not see us.” As for whether they felt positive or negative about the US, three groups emerged. Those who had some direct or even indirect contact with American people felt largely positive about the US. Those with more distant contact thought of the US only in terms of its corporations, such as McDonald’s, and had a more negative view. Those with no contact at all thought of the US strictly in terms of its government, and had the most negative view of all. “This is the key,” Rendon said. “The strength and credibility of the American people must be reflected in our government.” “There are really two campaigns against terror,” Rendon said (he doesn’t like the term “war on terror”). The one being conducted against existing terrorists by the military and intelligence people, and by 76 countries, is going pretty well. But a second campaign, against potential terrorists, terrorists that we are creating, is barely understood. “When we say that our war is with ‘Islamic fundamentalists,’ 1.2 billion people think we mean them.” “We need to turn Islamic street into an active ally, not a passive observer.” He gave an example of the kind of advice he gives US policy makers. When we focussed all our public attention on terrorist individuals, such as Bin Laden and Mullah Omar, we made just heroes of them. Focussing on the various named groups of terrorists has the same effect. But focus on specific terrorist tactics— such stopping a bus and then shooting everyone with a certain kind of name (as happened in Iraq)— puts world attention on something that might lead to changes of mind. Rendon’s greatest fear is that the US could go isolationist at the very time we need most to engage the rest of the world, when we need for people everywhere “to feel that we care more about them than their own governments do.” For that strategic-level approach to policy he had a number of specific proposals: * Let the third year of high school be mandatory overseas. * US newspapers should partner out to the world, swapping journalists. * College alumni programs should emphasize international students. * Humanitarian assistance needs to be more enduring, as with Peace Corps programs. * There should be a global endowment for education, and a global endowment for health care. * Getting a visa to visit the US should be made welcoming instead of humiliating, as it is now. * The US government needs to engage overseas “more as an enabler than as an actor.” * We need to be a better example of democracy by encouraging a convergent rather than divisive public discourse here at home. It comes down to “networks and narratives,” Rendon concluded. Five years from now what will be the narrative about the current five years taught in schools throughout the Islamic world and elsewhere? “The nature of that narrative will determine whether the conflict winds down in seven years or so, or it goes on for a hundred years.” I’ll add one thing that emerged from the long and sometimes contentious questioning from the audience (download the audio this week for the full exercise). One question was, “Since weapons of mass destruction turned out to be nonexistent in Iraq, what is America’s REAL agenda there and in the so-called war on terror? Is it oil, wealth, power, or what?” Rendon had nothing very satisfactory to offer in reply. At dinner after the talk, Danny Hillis suggested to Rendon what might be the root cause of the mutual bafflement. “People see a lot of seemingly irrational behavior and they assume there must be some hidden agenda driving it. What they don’t realize is that having an agenda requires long-term thinking, and there isn’t any going on.” That is pretty much John Rendon’s point. When US policy consists mainly of a sequence of short-term reactions, the aggregate result is massive frustration.