Long Now

### 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.

### Generative play In a dazzling duet Will Wright and Brian Eno gave an intense clinic on the joys and techniques of "generative" creation. Back in the 1970s both speakers got hooked by cellular automata such as Conway's "Game of Life," where just a few simple rules could unleash profoundly unpredictable and infinitely varied dynamic patterns. Cellular automata were the secret ingredient of Wright's genre-busting computer game "SimCity" in 1989. Eno was additionally inspired by Steve Reich's "It's Gonna Rain," in which two identical 1.8 second tape loops beat against each other out of phase for a riveting 20 minutes. That idea led to Eno's "Music for Airports" (1978), and the genre he named "ambient music" was born. Wright observed that science is all about compressing reality to minimal rule sets, but generative creation goes the opposite direction. You look for a combination of the fewest rules that can generate a whole complex world that will always surprise you, yet within a framework that stays recognizable. "It's not engineering and design," he said, "so much as it is gardening. You plant seeds. Richard Dawkins says that a willow seed has only about 800K of data in it." Eno noted that ambient music, unlike "narrative" music with a beginning, middle, and end, presents a steady state. "It's more like watching a river." Wright said he often uses Eno's music to work to because it gets him in a productive trancelike state. Eno remarked that it's important to keep reducing what the music attempts, and one way he does that is compose everything at double the speed it will be released. Slowing it down reduces its busyness. Wright: "How about an album of the fast versions?" Eno: "'Amphetamine Ambient.'" "These generative forms depend very much on the user actively making connections," Eno said. "In my art installations I always have sound and light elements that are completely unsynchronized, and people always assume that they are tightly synchronized. The synchronization occurs in them. " With Eno noodling some live background music, Will Wright gave a demo of his game-in-progress, "Spore." It compresses 3.5 billion years of evolution into a few hours or days of game play, where the levels are Cell, Creature, Tribe, City, Civilization, Space." The game has potent editing tools, so that 30 mouse clicks can build a unique beautiful creature that would take weeks of normal computer generation, complete with breathing, eye blinks, and shrieks. The computer generates a related set of other creatures to meet-- some to eat, some to avoid. Socialization begins, mating, then babies (using a "neonatal algorithm"), and on to tribes and cities with amazing buildings and vehicles the user designs. "You encounter civilizations built by other players, but the players don't have to be there for the civilizations to be alive and responsive." Wright launched his civilization into space, having first abducted some creatures to plant on other planets for terraforming projects. The computer presented him an infinite variety of planets, some already occupied. Wright: "Oops. I seem to have inadvertently started an interplanetary war here." Eno: "Like America." Building models, said Wright, is what we do in computer games, and it's what we do in life. First it's models of how the world works, then it's models of how other humans work. A significant new element in computer games is the profound command, "Restart." You get to explore other paths to take in the same situation. Eno: "That's what we do with everything I call culture, everything not really necessary, from how we wear our hair to how we decorate a cupcake. We try something, surrender to it, and are encouraged to imagine what else might be tried." It's interesting that just one verb is used both for music and for games: "play." PS. For Eno's website for making your own version of his album with David Byrne, "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, " go to: <http://bushofghosts.wmg.com/home.php>. For a glimpse of his new show, "77 Million Paintings by Brian Eno," soon to be fully online, see: <http://markal.org/77_Million_Slideshow/>. For a full Wikipedia article on Wright's "Spore," with lively links, check out: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spore_(game)>

### The power law is the shape of our age You know something is up when an audience member is taking cell phone photos of the presenter's slides for instant transmittal to a business partner. Chris Anderson does have killer slides, full of exuberant detail, defining the exact shape of the still emerging opportunity space for finding and selling formerly infindable and unsellable items of every imaginable description. The 25 million music tracks in the world. All the TV ever broadcast. Every single amateur video. All that is old, arcane, micro-niche, against-the-grain, undefinable, or remote is suddenly as accessible as the top of the pops. "The power law is the shape of our age," Anderson asserted, showing the classic ski-jump curve of popularity-- a few things sell in vast quantity, while a great many things sell in small quantity. It's the natural product of variety, inequality, and network effect sifting, which amplifies the inequality. "Everything is measurable now," said Anderson, comparing charts of sales over time of a hit music album with a niche album. The hit declined steeply, the niche album kept its legs. The "long tail" of innumerable tiny-sellers is populated by old hits as well as new and old niche items. That's the time dimension. For the first time in history, archives have a business model. Old stuff is more profitable because the acquisition cost is lower and customer satisfaction is higher. Infinite-inventory Netflix occupies the sweet spot for movie distribution, while Blockbuster is saddled with the tyranny of the new. Anderson explained that we are leaving an age where distribution was ruled by channel scarcity-- 3 TV networks, only so many movie theater screens, limited shelf space for books. "Those scarcity effects make a bottleneck that distorts the market and distorts our culture. Infinite shelf space changes everything." Books are freed up by print-on-demand (already a large and profitable service at Amazon), movies freed by cheap DVDs, old broadcast TV by classics collections, new videos by Google Videos and You Tube online. Even the newest game machines are now designed to be able to emulate their earlier incarnations, so you can play the original "Super Mario Bros." if so inclined-- and many are. "I'm an editor of a Conde-Nast magazine [Wired] AND I'm a blogger," said Anderson. In other words, he works both in the fading world of "pre-filters" and the emerging world of "post-filters." Pre-filtering is ruled by editors, A&R guys ("artist and repertoire," the talent-finders in the music biz), studio execs, and capital-B Buyers. Post-filtering is driven by readers, recommenders, word of mouth, and buyers. Will Hearst joined Anderson on the stage and noted that social networking software has automated word of mouth, and that's what has "unchoked the long tail of sheer obscure quantity in the vast backlog of old movies, for example." Anderson agreed, "The marketing power of customer recommendations is the main driver for Netflix, and it is zero-cost marketing." "By democratizing the tools of distribution, we're seeing a Renaissance in culture. We're starting to find out just how rich our society is in terms of creativity," Anderson said. But isn't there a danger, he was asked from the audience, of our culture falling apart with all this super-empowered diversity? Anderson agreed that we collect strongly and narrowly around our passions now, rather than just weakly and widely around broadcast hits, but the net gain of overall creativity is the main effect, and a positive one. Questions remain, though. "Digital rights is the elephant in the room of freeing the long tail." Clearing copyright on old material is a profoundly wedged process at present, with no solution in sight. Will Hearst fretted that we may be becoming an "opinionocracy," swayed by TV bloviators and online bloggers, losing the grounding of objective reporting. Anderson observed that maybe the two-party system is a pre-long-tail scarcity effect that suppresses the diversity we're now embracing. Much of how we run our culture has yet to catch up with the long tail.

### Community-built content rules Vision is one of the most powerful forms of long-term thinking. Jimmy Wales, founder and president of the all-embracing online encyclopedia Wikipedia, examines how vision drives and defines that project and its strategy-- and how it fits into the even larger world and prospects of "free culture." "The design of Wikipedia," said its founder and president Jimmy Wales, "is the design of community." When Wikipedia was started in 2001, all of its technology and software elements had been around since 1995. Its innovation was entirely social-- free licensing of content, neutral point of view, and total openness to participants, especially new ones. The core engine of Wikipedia, as a result, is "a community of thoughtful users, a few hundred volunteers who know each other and work to guarantee the quality and integrity of the work." Wikipedia, already enormous, continues to accelerate its growth. It is one of the top 20 websites, with 5 billion page views monthly. As an encyclopedia, it is larger than Britannica and Encarta combined and is now in so many languages, only 1/3 of the total Wikipedia is in English. When Wales went to Taiwan last week, strangers recognized him on the train, and 1,200 came to his talk. (One attraction to a Chinese audience is that Wikipedia takes the position of "no compromise with censors, ever.") The free licensing of Wikipedia content means that it is free to copy, free to modify, free to redistribute, and free to redistribute in modified forms, with attribution links. This is in service to the Wikipedia vision "to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language." One byproduct is that Wikipedia's success is helping shift the terms of the copyright debate, in a public-good direction. The secret of Wikipedia's content-generating process, Wales explained, is the nurturing and shaping of trust, instead building everything around distrust. He said that most social software systems are designed around expected problems. "Suppose you ran a restaurant that way. If you serve steak, that means steak knives, which are really dangerous in the wrong hands, so you need to put barriers between the tables." "If you prevent people from doing bad things, you prevent them from doing good things, and it eliminates opportunities for trust." Thus every page of Wikipedia has an open invitation to edit it, and the operational motto is "Be bold." The expectation is that most edits will be improvements, and they are. Problems are dealt with completely post facto. There is an all-recent-changes page watched by hundreds of people, and another page proposing "Articles for Deletion." Regular users set up watch lists for Wikipedia articles they care about, so they are notified immediately of new edits. Besides the edit history and text comparison features of the wiki itself, many users employ IRC (Internet Relay Chat) to discuss ongoing issues, from article details to general policy. The court of last resort to resolve fraught issues is a benign emperor, Jimbo Wales. Wales continually fights the programmers to keep them from automating matters he thinks must remain social. Issues are decided not by voting but by dialogue, in which some voices have more weight because they are recognized to have earned it. Yet users do not get formal ratings. "Suppose you had to go around wearing a badge that says how many people like you." In support of the Wikipedia rule to welcome new contributors, programmers would like to install the ability to automatically send a welcome note to anyone who has made eight contributions. Wales insists that only people can welcome people. The best way to keep Wikipedia deeply radical, Wales feels, is to keep its process deeply conservative. Wikipedia is a window into further realms of free culture. What else can be done with wiki-enhanced communities? "A library is bigger than an encyclopedia." So alongside the nonprofit Wikipedia Wales has set up the for-profit Wikia-- a general purpose wiki community enabler, drawing its income from Google ads. Most leaders, in my experience, focus on their organization's product. Jimmy Wales focuses with exceptional clarity and insight on Wikipedia's process, and therein lies its magic.

### Recursion drives science The co-founding editor of “Wired” magazine and author of _Out of Control_ is working on a new book on “what technology wants.” His research led to the first-ever history of scientific methodology. Starting from this long-term view of science’s past transformation, he speculates on how the practice of science will change in the future. Science, says Kevin Kelly, is the process of changing how we know things. It is the foundation our culture and society. While civilizations come and go, science grows steadily onward. It does this by watching itself. Recursion is the essence of science. For example, science papers cite other science papers, and that process of research pointing at itself invokes a whole higher level, the emergent shape of citation space. Recursion always does that. It is the engine of scientific progress and thus of the progress of society. A particularly fruitful way to look at the history of science is to study how science itself has changed over time, with an eye to what that trajectory might suggest about the future. Kelly chronicled a sequence of new recursive devices in science… * 2000 BC - First text indexes * 200 BC - Cataloged library (at Alexandria) * 1000 AD - Collaborative encyclopedia * 1590 - Controlled experiment (Roger Bacon) * 1600 - Laboratory * 1609 - Telescopes and microscopes * 1650 - Society of experts * 1665 - Repeatability (Robert Boyle) * 1665 - Scholarly journals * 1675 - Peer review * 1687 - Hypothesis/prediction (Isaac Newton) * 1920 - Falsifiability (Karl Popper) * 1926 - Randomized design (Ronald Fisher) * 1937 - Controlled placebo * 1946 - Computer simulation * 1950 - Double blind experiment * 1962 - Study of scientific method (Thomas Kuhn) Projecting forward, Kelly had five things to say about the next 100 years in science… **1)** There will be more change in the next 50 years of science than in the last 400 years. **2)** This will be a century of biology. It is the domain with the most scientists, the most new results, the most economic value, the most ethical importance, and the most to learn. **3)** Computers will keep leading to new ways of science. Information is growing by 66% per year while physical production grows by only 7% per year. The data volume is growing to such levels of “zillionics” that we can expect science to compile vast combinatorial libraries, to run combinatorial sweeps through possibility space (as Stephen Wolfram has done with cellular automata), and to run multiple competing hypotheses in a matrix. Deep realtime simulations and hypothesis search will drive data collection in the real world. **4)** New ways of knowing will emerge. “Wikiscience” is leading to perpetually refined papers with a thousand authors. Distributed instrumentation and experiment, thanks to miniscule transaction cost, will yield smart-mob, hive-mind science operating “fast, cheap, & out of control.” Negative results will have positive value (there is already a “Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine”). Triple-blind experiments will emerge through massive non-invasive statistical data collection— no one, not the subjects or the experimenters, will realize an experiment was going on until later. (In the Q&A, one questioner predicted the coming of the zero-author paper, generated wholly by computers.) **5)** Science will create new levels of meaning. The Internet already is made of one quintillion transistors, a trillion links, a million emails per second, 20 exabytes of memory. It is approaching the level of the human brain and is doubling every year, while the brain is not. It is all becoming effectively one machine. And we are the machine. “Science is the way we surprise God,” said Kelly. “That’s what we’re here for.” Our moral obligation is to generate possibilities, to discover the infinite ways, however complex and high-dimension, to play the infinite game. It will take all possible species of intelligence in order for the universe to understand itself. Science, in this way, is holy. It is a divine trip. PS… Kevin Kelly’s book in progress on all this, and much more, is being written online and is visitable and discussable at <http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/index.php>.

### Hidden order in the Balinese "religion of water" With lucid exposition and gorgeous graphics, anthropologist Stephen Lansing exposed the hidden structure and profound health of the traditional Balinese rice growing practices. The intensely productive terraced rice paddies of Bali are a thousand years old. So are the democratic subaks (irrigation cooperatives) that manage them, and so is the water temple system that links the subaks in a nested hierarchy. When the Green Revolution came to Bali in 1971, suddenly everything went wrong. Along with the higher-yield rice came "technology packets" of fertilizers and pesticides and the requirement, stated in patriotic terms, to "plant as often as possible." The result: year after year millions of tons of rice harvest were lost, mostly to voracious pests. The level of pesticide use kept being increased, to ever decreasing effect. Meanwhile Lansing and his colleagues were teasing apart what made the old water temple system work so well. The universal problem in irrigation systems is that upstream users have all the power and no incentive to be generous to downstream users. What could account for their apparent generosity in Bali? Lansing discovered that the downstream users also had power, because pests can only controlled if everybody in the whole system plants rice at the same time (which overloads the pests with opportunity in one brief season and starves them the rest of the time). If the upstreamers didn't let enough water through, the downstreamers could refuse to synchronize their planting, and the pests would devour the upstreamers' rice crops. Discussion within the subaks (which dispenses with otherwise powerful caste distinctions) and among neighboring subaks takes account of balancing the incentives, and the exquisite public rituals of the water temple system keep everyone mindful of the whole system. The traditional synchronized planting is far more effective against the pests than pesticides. "Plant as often as possible" was a formula for disaster. It seems clear how such "perfect order" can maintain itself, but how did it get started? Was there some enlightened rajah who set down the rules centuries ago? Working with complexity scientists at Santa Fe Institute, Lansing built an agent-based computer model of 172 subaks planting at random times, seeking to maximize their yields and paying attention to the success of their neighbors. The system self-organized! In just ten years within the model the balanced system seen in Bali emerged on its own. No enlightened rajah was needed. (Interestingly, the very highest yields came when the model subaks paid attention not just to their immediate neighbors but to the neighbors' neighbors as well. If they paid attention primarily to distant subaks, however, the whole system went chaotic.) In Balinese language and understanding, "rice paddies" equals "jewel" equals "mind." One result of Lansing's work is that in the 1980s the Balinese government threw out the "plant often" and pesticide parts of the Green Revolution and renewed respect for the water temple system. It kept the providentially higher yield rice. Unfortunately, it also kept pouring on the fertilizer. Balinese water is so naturally nutrient-rich, the extra fertilizer just passes through the watershed out to the sea, where it is destroying the coral reefs with algal blooms. So far, the water temple system does not reach that far downstream. Lansing ended with a suggestion for Long Now about the perception and practice of time. In the standard western perspective, time is long but thin-- just past, present, future. In Bali, he said, time is dense. The Balinese have ten kinds of weeks operating concurrently-- solar, lunar, and 7-day, 6-day, on down to a one-day week ("Today is always luang.") It's like the difference between the shimmering density of polycyclic gamelan music versus western romantic narrative music-- beginning, middle, end. The Long Now Foundation should figure out how to introduce Balinese time density to the time-impoverished West, Lansing said.

### Climate change and nuclear prospects Given the power to decide who would go first-- anti-nuke Ralph Cavanagh from Natural Resources Defense Counsel or pro-nuke Peter Schwartz from Global Business Network-- the large audience Friday night voted for Schwartz to make the opening argument. It is the threat of "abrupt climate change" that converted him to support new emphasis on nuclear power, Schwartz said. Gradual global warming is clearly now under way, and there is increasing reason to believe that human activity is driving it, mostly through the burning of coal and oil. If warming is all that happens, it will be an enormous problem, but some regions of the Earth would gain (Russia, Canada) while many others would lose. In the event of abrupt climate change, though, everyone loses. The most likely change would be a sudden (in one decade) shift to a much colder, drier, and windier world. The world's carrying capacity for humans would plummet, driving human population from the current 6.5 billion to as low as 2 billion, with most of the losses from war. It would be a civilization-threatening catastrophe. From research Schwartz has led for the Pentagon as well as from his own training in fluid dynamics, he thinks that continuation of the current warming is very likely to trigger the kind of radical climate instability that has been the norm in Earth's past, except for the last 10,000 years of uncharacteristically stable climate. Therefore everything must be done to head off the shift to climate instability. Meanwhile, Schwartz said, world demand for energy will continue to grow for decades, as two billion more people climb out of poverty and developing nations become fully developed economies. China and India alone will double or quadruple their energy use over the next 50 years. We will run out of oil in that period. That leaves coal or nuclear for electricity. Conservation is crucial, but it doesn't generate power. Renewables must grow fast, but they cannot hope to fill the whole need. Nuclear technology has improved its efficiency and safety and can improve a lot more. Reprocessing fuel will add further efficiency. The discussion format called for Cavanagh to quiz Schwartz for ten minutes, drawing out his views further. Cavanagh asked, "What about the storage of nuclear waste?" "We defined the problem wrong," Schwartz said. "Storage for thousands of years is not needed. The present storage on site in concrete casks is working, and the 'waste' is available as a further energy source with later technology." In the discussion Schwartz also pointed out that new reactor sites are not needed in the US, since all the existing sites are expandable. The format called for Cavanagh to now summarize Schwartz's argument. He did so to Schwartz's satisfaction, adding a point Schwartz missed-- recent findings indicating that the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is now the highest it has been in 25,000 to 400,000 years. It was Ralph Cavanagh's turn to present for 15 minutes, striding the front of the stage. He began by agreeing that messing with the atmosphere and thus the climate is a "suicidal" experiment for humanity to be conducting, and it has to be stopped. He agreed that nuclear should not be considered taboo and should be included as a candidate clean power source, but its history is not encouraging. No new reactors have built in the US since 1973. Nevada has stonewalled on waste storage at Yucca Mountain. The nuclear industry has all manner of government subsidies, loan guarantees, and protections from liability. It has never competed in the open market with other energy sources. California, Cavanagh said, has led the way in developing a balanced energy policy. Places like China are paying close attention. PG&E has become the world's largest investor in efficiency, led by Carl Weinberg (who was in the audience and got a round of applause). And now there are signs that California may become the leader in setting limits to carbon emissions. Within limits like that, then the private sector can compete with full entrepreneurial zest, and may the best technologies win. Nuclear would have to compete fairly with new forms of biofuels and with ever improving renewables. Schwartz asked Cavanagh about the large government subsidies for solar research while there have been none for nuclear (except fusion). Cavanagh said the subsidies were declining, and should. There should be more funding for R&D in biofuels and other alternatives, but the main role for government should be in setting emission standards and then let the private sector duke it out for the best solutions. Schwartz summarized Cavanagh's argument to his satisfaction (many later reported they liked that feature of the evening), and then a host of written questions came from the audience. Asked for a catalog of desirable new technologies, Schwartz wanted

### On necessary heresy With gentle demeanor and tight argument, Sam Harris carried an overflow audience into the core of one of the crucial issues of our time: What makes some religions lethal? How do they employ aggressive irrationality to justify threatening and controlling non-believers as well as believers? What should be our response? Harris began with Christianity. In the US, Christians use irrational arguments about a soul in the 150 cells of a 3-day old human embryo to block stem cell research that might alleviate the suffering of millions. In Africa, Catholic doctrine uses tortured logic to actively discourage the use of condoms in countries ravaged by AIDS. "This is genocidal stupidity," Harris said. Faith trumps rational argument. Common-sense ethical intuition is blinded by religious metaphysics. In the US, 22% of the population are CERTAIN that Jesus is coming back in the next 50 years, and another 22% think that it's likely. The good news of Christ's return, though, can only occur following desperately bad news. Mushroom clouds would be welcomed. "End time thinking," Harris said, "is fundamentally hostile to creating a sustainable future." Harris was particularly critical of religious moderates who give cover to the fundamentalists by not challenging them. The moderates say that all is justified because religion gives people meaning in their life. "But what would they say to a guy who believes there's a diamond the size of a refrigerator buried in his backyard? The guy digs out there every Sunday with his family, cherishing the meaning the quest gives them." "I've read the books," Harris said. "God is not a moderate." The Bible gives strict instructions to kill various kinds of sinners, and their relatives, and on occasion their entire towns. Yet slavery is challenged nowhere in the New or Old Testaments; slave holders in the old south used the Bible to defend their practice. The religious texts have power because they are old, but they are also hopelessly out of date because they are old. It's taboo among religious moderates to compare religions, said Harris, but we must. "Where are the Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers? For that matter, where are the Palestinian Christian suicide bombers-- they're as Arab and aggrieved as anyone." The fundamental beliefs of Islam really are a problem. "Martyrdom in jihad is not a fringe doctrine; it is believed by millions of Muslims." It's not a question of ignorance-- two-thirds of al Qaeda operatives are college educated. "We have no reason to expect to survive our religious differences indefinitely. Faith is intrinsically divisive. We have a choice between conversation and war." It was conversation that ended slavery, not faith. "Faith is a declaration of immunity to conversation. To make religious war unthinkable, we have to undermine the dogma of faith. The continuance of civilization requires not moderation, but reason." Harris ended by lauding meditation and mysticism as a form of experiential science, and observed, "The wisdom of contemplative life is not evenly distributed. The East has more than the West."

### Categories go nova It is fortunate that the leading thinker in "social software" is one of the best speakers in the high-tech world, a hot ticket at any conference that can get him. Clay Shirky gave one of his dazzling presentations Monday, Nov. 14, examining a new dimension in one of the most vexed problems in the digital world-- how the hell do we keep anything digital usable beyond ten years? When a whole civilization goes digital, as we are, loss of continuity becomes a crucial issue, fit subject for a Seminar About Long-term Thinking. Thus… Clay Shirky is an adjunct professor at New York University and, among other provocations, runs a mailing list on "Networks, Economics and Culture" at <http://tinyurl.com/a6mt6> . Sample Shirkyism: "The only group that can categorize everything is everybody." That defies 3,000 years of intellectual practice (Library of Congress, etc.), and it obviously can't work, but it blithely does work in a Googlized world, and over time it's the only thing that can work, but time introduces other problems. "THIS is what the Internet has been straining to become," said Clay Shirky Monday night, both joking and meaning it. He was referring to a category ("tag") that emerged from users on the photo-sharing site Flickr. The category is "cats in sinks." Growing use of the unlikely seeming tag exposed something that a lot of cats do and a lot of people feel compelled to photograph… Shirky pointed out that "cats in sinks" has none of the limitations of former category systems such as the Dewey Decimal System or the Library of Congress scheme or Yahoo's hierarchical category structure. There is no need for a category "cats" with subcategory "in sinks," nor a category "sinks" with subcategory "cats in". The specificity of the category precisely fits its content, its traffic, and its currency. (Unlike the Dewey Decimal system which has 10 categories under "Religion," 8 of them about Christianity and one for "Other Religions. And unlike the Library of Congress system, which retains outdated categories like "Former Soviet Union" and gives equal value to the categories "Asia" and "the Balkans.") "The only group that can categorize everything is everybody," said Shirky. And that's what web services like Google, Flickr, and Del.icio.us makes possible. Flickr links up users, photos, and tags. Del.icio.us links up users, websites, and tags. All you need for a comprehensive category system to emerge is links and tags! There is all manner of overlap, but that's not a problem (thanks to global search). Instead it's a virtue. A high degree of overlap (or redundancy, or "degeneracy" as Shirky called it) makes the system far more robust against disruption and against the erosion of time. An example of the virtue of overlap is the Rosetta Stone. Having the same text in three written languages was the breakthrough for decoding Egyptian Hieroglyphics, whereas the meaning of Inca knotted-string language and Easter Island's Rongorongo remain lost because there is no overlapping text. The title of Shirky's talk was "Making Digital Durable: What Time Does to Categories." While he had good news, and deep news, on the category front, he was less encouraging about digital preservation in general. "We don't know yet how bad the problem is," he said. He pointed out that there are an alarming number of levels between preserving bits (which is easy) and preserving essence (which is at best expensive and at worst impossible). To make the Bits express the Essence over time, you have to preserve (or accurately translate forward) the Medium; and the Format; and the Interpreter; and various Dependencies; and the Operating System; and the Architecture; and the Power system (is 110 A.C. power forever?) Any of that missing or corrupted or misblended, and all is lost. In 1995 Shirky published a book called _Voices From the Net_. Though written and printed with digital files, neither the author nor the publisher Ziff-Davis have a working digital version of the book's text, but Shirky's posts in sundry Usenet flame wars from that same period are preserved intact to embarrass him apparently indefinitely. Why did one form of his writing survive and the other not? The book was written and printed with an expensive, brittle system with few users, whereas Usenet is a cheap, flexible system with a vast number of users. Cheap and big always wins. But for how long? "Preservation is an outcome," said Shirky. You don't know if it is working until afterward. All you can do is reduce the risk of loss. Making digital durable, he said, is a "wicked" problem, meaning it can't actually be solved. It will be an endless process of negotiation.

### Finessing the future Instead of one podium there were four chairs on the stage of Wednesday's seminar. In three seats, three Dysons: Esther, George and Freeman. They were appearing together on stage for the first time. The fourth held Stewart Brand who led the three through an evening of queries. The questions came from Stewart himself, from the audience, and from one Dyson to another Dyson -- a first for this format in a Long Now seminar. George introduced his dad with an exquisite slideshow of Freeman's prime documents. He began with a scan of a first grade school paper Freeman wrote on "Astronimy." Besides the forgivable misspellings, the essay was full of fantasy. Freeman did not just copy material from an encyclopedia. He imagined what should be and wrote it as fact. George then showed a later blue-book essay of Freeman's fiction, but it was studded with numbers and calculations. Right there was the pattern for Freeman's many other publications (first pages shown by George): speculations built upon calculations. We saw one paper inscribed by Freeman with the note: "From one crackpot to another!" His most famous speculation is for a solar system-sized enclosure around a sun now called a Dyson Sphere. George's presentation on Freeman ended with a video clip of a Star Trek episode where the befuddle Captain Piccard ponders a mysterious hollow solar-sized ball blocking their way and gasps, "Could it be a dyson-sphere?!!" Freeman followed this with a few minutes of musing on the difficulty of long term predictions. When Von Neumann and others were working on the first computers, none of them could imagine they would be used in toys for 3-year olds. In a theme that he would return to the rest of the evening, Freeman compared that surprise with the coming surprises we'll see in biotech. He said, "It is unfortunate that Von Neumann used the first computers to build nuclear weapons, because computers became associated with institutional destruction. The same thing is happening now with biotech. It is unfortunate that the first biotech is being used for institutional destruction of weeds, but soon biotech will become smaller scale, user-friendly, and employed by gardeners, naturalists, and kids to make their own creations. People's feelings about biotech will also change." "I misjudged a lot of things. Like nuclear power took much longer than I thought. We also thought we had a wonderful spaceship that was going to take us to Saturn (we were really going to go ourselves). The hardest thing to foresee is how long things take." Freeman sang the praises of science fiction as hugely important for science. "It's where the most radical ideas come from first." He wishes he read more of it, a sentiment echoed by George and Esther. Esther chimed in with her interpretation of future study. Freeman, she said, tried to understand things now by speculating on their future, while George mined the past to try to understand the future. She, on the contrary, wasn't interested in understanding the future. She chiefly wanted to affect it. "What good is it to have a conference about future technologies unless you can in some way make things happen?" What won't change? That was a question from the audience. George told about spying inhabited islands off the coast of the northwest 30 years ago and expecting that technology would transform them into places full of humans. But they are still deserted; cities are ever more enticing. The early native tribes he studied would have 12 good friends and 30 close acquaintances. He says that if you check people's cell phones they have on average 12 intimate friends always allowed to ring and 30 names to call out. We haven't changed much. Freeman continued that thread saying he is a skeptic of the singularity notion. "My mother saw more change in her life than I have. She went from traveling in a pony cart to flying across the ocean in a jet. I don't see things going faster. It is an illusion." I asked, "What have you changed you mind about?" Esther said she changed her mind about anonymity. She used to think it was hugely important, but now she believes everything works out better when there is transparency, including in people. "We may become more tolerant because everything is visible." Freeman admitted he was a skeptic on global warming. His problem was not change in the climate. "In the long view we ARE changing the climate." He felt that climate was hugely complex, that we understand very little of it and many people are reducing this unknown complexity into one data point -- the average temperature somewhere. Until we understand what kind of changes we are making in our "solutions" he says he believes the best action on global climate change right now is inaction. Of course this is only a sample of the

### Escape velocity Attempts to think long term, Ray Kurzweil began, keep making the mistake of imagining that the pace of the future is like the pace of the past. Pondering the next ten years, we usually begin by studying the last ten years. He recommends studying the last twenty year for clues about the rate and degree of change coming in the next ten years, because history self-accelerates. That's Kurzweil's Law of accelerating returns: "technology and evolutionary processes progress in an exponential fashion." Thus, since the rate of progress doubles every ten years or so, we will see changes in the next 90 years equivalent to the last 10,000 years, and in the next 100 years changes equivalent to the last 20,000 years. It is always the later doublings where the ferocious action is. The many skeptics about the Human Genome project being done in 15 years thought they were being proved right at year 10. They were astounded when the project came in on schedule. "People look at short sections of an exponential growth curve and imagine they are straight lines," said Kurzweil. Noticing that his audience was astute as well as large (650 in the Herbst), the speaker gave a dense, fast-moving talk. He said that as an inventor and entrepreneur he found that "you have to invent for when you finish a project, not when you start-- you need to figure out what enabling factors will be in place when your product comes to market." That was what started him studying trends in technology. In rapid succession he showed on the screen graphs of technological advance in microprocessors per chip (Moore's Law), microprocessor clock speed, cheapness of transistors, cheapness of dynamic random access memory, amount and cheapness of digital storage, bandwidth, processor performance in MIPS, total bits shipped, supercomputer power, Internet hosts and data traffic, and then on into biotech with cheapness of genome sequencing per base pair, growth in Genbank, and further on into nanotech with smallness of working mechanical devices, and nanotech science citations and patents. They ALL show exponential growth rates, with no slowing in overall progress, since new paradigms always arise to keep up the pace, as transistors replaced vacuum tubes in computers, and 3D molecular computing and nanotubes will replace transistors. "Everything to do with information technology is doubling every 12 to 15 months, and information technology is encompassing everything." I was impressed that the growth curves ignore apparent shocks. The 1990s dot-com boom and subsequent bust seemed like a big event, but it doesn't even show up as a blip on Kurzweil's exponential growth curve of e-commerce revenues in the US. At dinner with Long Now sponsors after the talk, he proposed that the stringent American regulations on stem cell research will not slow the pace of breakthroughs in that field, because there are so many political (overseas, for example) and technological workarounds. The fate of individual projects is always unknowable, but the aggregate behavior over time of massive and complex arrays of activity is knowable in surprising detail. Kurzweil expects this century to provide dramatic events early and often. "With the coming of gene therapy, before we see designer babies we'll see designer baby-boomers." By 2010 he expects computers to disappear into our clothing, bodies, and built environment. The World Wide Web will be a World Wide Mesh, where all the linked devices are also servers, so massive supercomputing can be ubiquitous. Images will be project right onto retinas, helping lead toward true immersion virtual reality. Search engines won't wait to be asked to offer information. By 2030 he presumes that nanobots will occupy and enhance our nervous systems. The brain will have been reverse engineered so that we will understand the real structure of intelligence. A thousand dollars of machine computation will exceed human brain capacity by a thousand times. Shortly after that intelligence begins to break completely free of its biological constrictions and carries humanity into suffusing energy and matter toward potentially cosmic scale (IF the restricting barrier of the speed of light can be worked around). Kurzweil noted that among "singularitarians" he is known as somewhat conservative, expecting a "soft takeoff" instead of hard takeoff. In the Q & A he dealt with the usual "but what about limitations of resources?" questions with predictions that nanotech would increase efficiencies and make materials so fungible that what are seen now as severe limitations will fall away. Only one question made him pause, and a very long pause it was, sort of a stunned silence. I asked him (through Kevin Kelly), "As everything goes faster and faster, is there anything that will or should remain slow?" Finally Kurzweil said, "Well. Y

### The culminating human right What does it take to change human habits of cruelty (such as slavery, genocide) and humiliation (racism, sexism)? What do past and present efforts for human rights tell about their future?… Robert Fuller is author of the ground-breaking _Somebodies and Nobodies: Overcoming the Abuse of Rank_. "Personal is political," Robert Fuller began, and he recounted his experience as president of Oberlin College in the early 1970s. It was the time when a number of movements were coming to a focus to empower women, blacks (and native Americans and Latinos), gays, and the disabled. As it happened, Oberlin had dealt with anti-Semitism a half-century earlier, so that was not in the mix but served as an example of how to make things better. Fuller wondered if all the movements have something in common and eventually concluded that they do. Each is a specific instance of a generic wrong-- the abuse of rank. Rank itself is fine, indeed necessary to any functioning hierarchy. The abuse is taking advantage of rank to deal out humiliation. "Rankism ranges all the way from hurt feelings to genocide," said Fuller. Misusing rank defeats what value there is in rank. Organizations and societies that indulge in it are only partially functional. What can be done about it? "The Golden Rule needs teeth." Fuller observed that in the past it always took someone in the oppressor class to get action moving. Once a movement is under way, it has to just keep bearing down over time. You stand down the bullies one by one. Criminal executives, he noted, are now going to jail, even though most people predicted none would. In time politicians who indulge in ad hominem insults of their opponents should be voted out. Rankists in business should find their careers blighted. Television shows that bank on humiliation ("reality" TV, political wrath programs) should lose their advertisers. Humiliation worked as a tool in previous movements-- women ridiculing sexist men-- but it can't work in this one. "If you sneer at someone for driving an obnoxious Hummer, he'll just go out and buy a bigger Hummer." To be treated with dignity you have to treat others with dignity. That was Martin Luther King's genius, and why he won. Fuller observed that enormous changes in what is assumed to be human nature can be accomplished in just a few generations. His great-grandparents would have participated in a lynching; his children date interracially. Democracy, one of the tools for defeating rankism, has been growing exponentially since the Magna Carta in 1215. Rankist behavior could be in full retreat in this century. It will take wide and steady effort. But there no guarantee. If society breaks down from a catastrophic pandemic, climate change, or nuclear war, everything goes backward.

### On failing to think long-term Sophisticated societies from time to time collapse utterly, often leaving traces of a civilization that was at a proud peak just before the fall. Other societies facing the same dangers figure out how to adapt around them, recover, and go on to further centuries of success. Tonight the author of _Collapse_ examines the differences between them… To an overflow house (our apologies to those who couldn't make it in!), Jared Diamond articulately spelled out how his best-selling book, _Collapse_ , took shape. At first it was going to be a book of 18 chapters chronicling 18 collapses of once-powerful societies-- the Mayans with the most advanced culture in the Americas, the Anasazi who built six-story skyscrapers at Chaco, the Norse who occupied Greenland for 500 years. But he wanted to contrast those with success stories like Tokugawa-era Japan, which wholly reversed its lethal deforestation, and Iceland, which learned to finesse a highly fragile and subtle environment. Diamond also wanted to study modern situations with clear connections to the ancient collapses. Rwanda losing millions in warfare caused by ecological overpressure. China-- "because of its size, China's problems are the world's problems." Australia, with its ambitions to overcome a horrible environmental history. And Diamond's beloved Montana, so seemingly pristine, so self-endangered on multiple fronts. He elaborated a bit on his book's account of the Easter Island collapse, where a society that could build 80-ton statues 33 feet high and drag them 12 miles, and who could navigate the Pacific Ocean to and from the most remote islands in the world, could also cut down their rich rain forest and doom themselves utterly. With no trees left for fishing canoes, the Easter Islanders turned to devouring each other. The appropriate insult to madden a member of a rival clan was, "The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth!" The population fell by 90% in a few years, and neither the society nor the island ecology have recovered in the 300 years since. Diamond reported that his students at UCLA tried to imagine how the guy who cut down the LAST tree in 1680 justified his actions. What did he say? Their candidate quotes: "Fear not. Our advancing technology will solve this problem." "This is MY tree, MY property! I can do what I want with it." "Your environmentalist concerns are exaggerated. We need more research." "Just have faith. God will provide." The question everyone asks, Diamond said, is, How can people be so dumb? It's a crucial question, with a complex answer. He said that sometimes it's a failure to perceive a problem, especially if it comes on very slowly, like climate change. Often it's a matter of conflicting interests with no resolution at a higher level than the interests-- warring clans, greedy industries. Or there may be a failure to examine and understand the past. Overall, it's a failure to think long term. That itself has many causes. One common one is that elites become insulated from the consequences of their actions. Thus the Mayan kings could ignore the soil erosion that was destroying their crops. Thus the American wealthy these days can enjoy private security, private education, and private retirement money. Thus America itself can act like a gated community in relation to the rest of the world, imagining that events in remote Somalia or Afghanistan have nothing to do with us. Isolation, Diamond declared, is never a solution to long-term problems. I'll add two items to what Diamond said in his talk. One good sharp question came from Mark Hertzgaard, who asked the speaker if he agreed "with Stewart Brand's view that the threat of climate change justifies adopting more nuclear power." To my surprise, Diamond said that he was persuaded by last year's "Bipartisan Strategy to Meet America's Energy Challenges" to treat nuclear as one important way to reduce the production of greenhouse gases. (In the commission's report, the environmentalist co-chair John Holdren wrote: ""Given the risks from climate change and the challenges that face all of the low-carbon and no-carbon supply options, it would be imprudent in the extreme not to try to keep the nuclear option open.") While I was driving Jared Diamond back to the El Drisco hotel, we got talking about how to separate the good actors from the bad actors among corporations. He said that third-party validation was absolutely essential. For instance, he studied the exemplary environmental behavior of Chevron in Papua New Guinea and reported on it in "Discover" magazine. As a result of that favorable report, validated by the World Wildlife Fund (where Diamond is a director), Chevron was able to land an immensely valuable contract with Norway, who was demanding environmentally respon

### World squatter reality Humanity is urbanizing at a world-changing pace and in a world-changing way. A billion squatters are re-inventing their lives and their cities simultaneously. One of the few to experience the range of the phenomenon first hand is Robert Neuwirth, author of _Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World_. He took up residence in the scariest-seeming parts of squatter cities in Rio, Nairobi, Istanbul, and Mumbai. They vary profoundly. What Neuwirth found in the new "slums" is the future via the past. Hence his title: "The 21st-century Medieval City," Robert Neuwirth, For his talk "The 21st-century Medieval City," Robert Neuwirth took an overflow audience to "the cities of tomorrow," the developing-world shanty-towns where a billion people live now, and three billion (a third of humanity) are expected to be living by 2050. With vivid stories and slides (shown for the first time publicly), Neuwirth detailed how life works for the squatters in Rio, Nairobi, Istanbul, and Mumbai. It's hard for new arrivals-- 1.4 million a week around the world, 70 million a year. They throw together mud huts and make do with no water, no electricity, no transportation, no sewage, and barely room to turn around amid square miles of dense crowding. What brings them from the countryside is the hope of economic activity, and it abounds. Restaurants, beauty shops, bars, health clinics, food markets. No land is owned, but a whole low-cost real estate economy takes shape, managed without lawyers or government approval. (Hernando de Soto is wrong about land ownership being necessary for growth.) People build their house, a wall at a time when they have a bit of money, and then sell their roof space for another family to build a home there, and so on up, story after story. Devoid of legal land title there are prospering department stores and car dealerships in the older squatter towns of Istanbul. Forty percent of Istanbul, a city of 12 million, is squatter built. Rio is a famously dangerous city, for tourists and natives alike, except in the squatter neighborhoods where no police go. There security is provided by drug gangs, who have become surprisingly communitarian, building day care facilities and soccer fields along with providing safety on the "streets"-- narrow stairways kinking up the steep mountainside amid overhanging upper stories looking indeed medieval. There are wires and pipes everywhere carrying stolen electricity and water. (Enlightened power companies realized the thieves are potential customers and are making it easy for them to buy into legitimate service.) Neuwirth pointed out that squatters "do more with less than anybody." All that the rest of us have to do is meet them halfway for their new cities to thrive. There are two crucial ingredients for success. One is what the UN calls "security of tenure"-- confidence that you will not be arbitrarily evicted. The second is access to politics-- some avenue to growing legitimacy and participation in the larger city. This is the historic process, after all. All the great cities, including San Francisco, began as dense warrens of illegal huts. "It is a legitimate form of urban development."

### A world made of cities Cities are the human organizations with the greatest longevity but also the fastest rate of change. Just now the world is going massively and unstoppably urban (governments everywhere are trying to stop it, with zero success). In a globalized world, city states are re-emerging as a dominant economic player. Environmental consequences and opportunities abound. As the author of _How Buildings Learn_ I kept getting asked to give talks on "How Cities Learn." With a little research I found that cities do indeed "learn" (adapt) impressively, but what cities mainly do is teach. They teach civilization. I started with a spectacular video of a stadium in Philadelphia being blown up last year. The announcer on the video ends it, "Ladies and gentlemen, you have just witnessed history!" Indeed demolition is the history of cities. Cities are humanity's longest-lived organizations (Jericho dates back 10,500 years), but also the most constantly changing. Even in Europe they consume 2-3% of their material fabric a year, which means a wholly new city every 50 years. In the US and the developing world it's much faster. Every week in the world a million new people move to cities. In 2007 50% of our 6.5 billion population will live in cities. In 1800 it was 3% of the total population then. In 1900 it was 14%. In 2030 it's expected to be 61%. This is a tipping point. We're becoming a city planet. One of the effects of globalization is to empower cities more and more. Communications and economic activities bypass national boundaries. With many national governments in the developing world discredited, corporations and NGOs go direct to where the markets, the workers, and the needs are, in the cities. Every city is becoming a "world city." Many elites don't live in one city now, they live "in cities." Massive urbanization is stopping the population explosion cold. When people move to town, their birthrate drops immediately to the replacement level of 2.1 children/women, and keeps right on dropping. Whereas children are an asset in the countryside, they're a liability in the city. The remaining 2 billion people expected before world population peaks and begins dropping will all be urban dwellers (rural population is sinking everywhere). And urban dwellers have fewer children. Also more and more of the remaining population will be older people, who also don't have children. I conjured some with a diagram showing a pace-layered cross section of civilization, whose components operate at importantly different rates. Fashion changes quickly, Commerce less quickly, Infrastructure slower than that, then Governance, then Culture, and slowest is Nature. The fast parts learn, propose, and absorb shocks; the slow parts remember, integrate, and constrain. The fast parts get all the attention. The slow parts have all the power. I found the same diagram applies to cities. Indeed, as historians have pointed out, "Civilization is what happens in cities." The robustness of pace layering is how cities learn. Because cities particularly emphasize the faster elements, that is how they "teach" society at large. Speed of urban development is not necessarily bad. Many people deplored the huge Levittown tracts when they were created in the '40s and '50s, but they turned out to be tremendously adaptive and quickly adopted a local identity, with every house becoming different. The form of housing that resists local identity is gated communities, with their fierce regulations prohibiting anything interesting being done by home owners that might affect real estate value for the neighbors (no laundry drying outside!). If you want a new community to express local life and have deep adaptivity, emphasize the houses becoming homes rather than speculative real estate. Vast new urban communities is the main event in the world for the present and coming decades. The villages and countrysides of the entire world are emptying out. Why? I was told by Kavita Ramdas, head of the Global Fund for Women, "In the village, all there is for a woman is to obey her husband and family elder, pound grain, and sing. If she moves to town, she can get a job, start a business, and get education for her children. Her independence goes up, and her religious fundamentalism goes down." So much for the romanticism of villages. In reality, life in the country is dull, backbreaking, impoverished, restricted, exposed, and dangerous. Life in the city is exciting, less grueling, better paid, free, private, and safe. One-sixth of humanity, a billion people, now live in squatter cities ("slums") and millions more are on the way. Governments try everything to head them off, with total failure. Squatter cities are vibrant places. They're self-organized and self-constructed. Newcomers find whole support communities of family, neighbors

### The rainforests of home Spencer Beebe is founder and head of Ecotrust, the Portland-based organization that is setting in motion a permanently prosperous conservation economy for the entire Pacific Coast from San Francisco north to Alaska-- the temperate rain forest also known as "Salmon Nation." Spencer Beebe began his Seminar About Long-term Thinking last night with some quotes. First was from Janine Benyus, with her evoking of Nature as model, as measure, and as mentor for proper human biomimicry. Then came quotes from Jane Jacobs insisting that humans are so embedded in nature we can't imitate it, but only use its methods. (Spencer observed, "Nature not only bats last, it owns the stadium.") Finally, Dave Foreman of Earth First! once was asked what's the best thing an individual can do for the environment, and his advice was "Stay home." (That was challenged later.) Our home, said Spencer, is a coastal temperate rain forest, the largest in the world (they're rare.) It is 2,000 miles long north to south, spanning far more latitudes than any other uniform environment. (That may help make it robust against climate change.) It has more standing biomass than any other natural system, three to four times that of tropical rain forests. Temperate rain forests are shaped by rain through 80% of the year, with no summer drought, hence few fires, hence huge and old trees. A red cedar can live 1,500 years. Since the forest is relatively recent, just 5,000 years old, that's just five generations of cedars. It is all salmon country. Ecotrust has named the region "Salmon Nation." Spencer noted that European impact on the region has been to drastically reduce the forests, the salmon, and the native tribes, with a gradient of damage from south to north, from here to Alaska. The greatest damage comes from clear-cutting the forest. With vivid pictures and economic analysis he showed the much greater long-term yield that can be accomplished with biomimetic forest practices, expanding on the storm-damage patchiness that occurs naturally. Thus selective logging with patch cuts and thinning brings out plenty of marketable timber but leaves a fully intact and healthy forest producing an ever-growing harvest of jobs, clear water, carbon capture, and rich biodiversity. Ecotrust has an astonishing array of projects-- working with the Haisla tribe in Canada to permanently protect the only remaining unlogged watershed on the Pacific coast; working with the variety of groups in Clayaquot Sound in BC to convert the area to an "eco-economy;" spending $12-million on rebuilding a historic warehouse in Portland, Oregon, to generate an urban center for eco-activities; running vast geographic inventories of the whole region; publishing an array of inspirational and technical works (our book table sold out all the Ecotrust publications)… "Societies do what societies think," said Spencer. He quoted Jane Jacobs and Kevin Kelly to the effect that "Systems make themselves up as they go along. That means you don't have to figure out everything in advance, you can just jump in." In the Q & A, Paul Hawken asked how Ecotrust was able to so quickly win the trust and active collaboration of tribal groups like the Haisla. Spencer said, "You just listen. I went fishing with them. They've been here for ten or twelve thousand years. You respect that knowledge and work with it." Later at dinner Kevin Kelly disputed Spencer's assumption that humans are wholly immersed in Nature-- "I think we're just partly immersed, and that's what makes us human and effective." I linked Kevin's question to mine wondering about the "Stay home" admonition. Spencer brought passionate perspective and array of skills to saving the "rainforests of home" by having LEFT his five-generation home in Oregon, to work first as a Peace Corps volunteer in Central America, then as a professional environmentalist saving tropical rain forests for decades. He didn't just think globally, he acted globally, THEN returned and acted locally to great and satisfying effect.

### Ancient American politics Roger Kennedy, the former head of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History and former Director of the US National Park Service, is so eloquent that Walt Kelly based a "Pogo" character on him (the bear P.T. Bridgeport, whose speech balloons are circus posters). Roger Kennedy's most driving current interest is the long-term effects of long-term abuse of natural systems, and he means seriously long term. Kennedy knows politics. For decades a major player himself in Washington DC, he has written redefining biographies of Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and Aaron Burr. Kennedy knows history. Besides writing and hosting a number of television series on American history, he wrote _Rediscovering America_ and _Hidden Cities: The Discovery and Loss of Ancient North American Civilization_. And Kennedy knows natural systems. As a highly popular Director of the National Park Service, he pushed the whole Park System toward greater emphasis on science. Roger Kennedy also found the mountain in Nevada where The Long Now Foundation aims to build the 10,000-year Clock. In this talk he defines the continental frame of the Clock. Most of Roger Kennedy's audience Friday night had no idea that a multi-millennia sequence of major cultures, cities, and earth monuments of enormous size once occupied the Mississippi valley and areas in Ohio and the Southeast. They had never heard of the vast ruins at places such as Poverty Point and Cahokia. But American founding fathers Washington and Jefferson knew of the ancient works and honored them with new-made earth mounds at Mt. Vernon and Monticello. The continent was seething with activity before whites arrived. The native woodland farmers of the Great Lakes who were driven west into the plains by the Chippewayan tribes were transforming into fierce horseback warriors known as the Sioux. The Iroquois League was building into a major military empire. Apaches and Navahos were streaming down from the northwest and challenging the dry farming Pueblo tribes. From time to time whole areas, such as Ohio, had their carrying capacity exceeded and emptied out of people and were afterward known as "cursed" regions. Misuse of natural systems was common of old on the continent. It has accelerated lately. Roger focussed in particular on the new levels of hazard to people from wildfire, caused by "sprawling into danger"-- the growth of human habitation (often government subsidized) into known highly flammable environments. The situation is akin to what was finally figured out about flood plains. Roger expects some disasters with thousands killed unless the mechanisms of prudence are figured out. Every small increment of climate warming will greatly increase the danger. At the intense dinner with Sponsors later, Roger urged a tax revolt against the government paying for people's losses to wildfire. If private insurers won't give coverage in some flammable areas, the government should not either. Roger jolted the San Francisco audience with frequent Christian quotes and allusions, noting the MORAL reverence of natural systems advocated by Genesis, by Saint Francis, and by the great New England pilgrim preacher Jonathan Edwards. Roger noted that Americans occasionally get their nerve up and change the nation's behavior at a profound level. In 1830 most American men went to bed drunk. By a decade later, the alcoholism had been cut by 60%, without draconian laws. In the 1860s moral force overcame economic force, and slavery was abolished, at great cost eventually deemed wholly worth it. Yet another gathering of nerve is needed, Roger opined, to deeply adjust our behavior in relation to the continent's natural systems. He sees signs that the moral strength needed is indeed building.

### Finite and infinite games Countless readers have been hooked by the opening line of James P. Carse's [_Finite and Infinite Games_](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0345341848/qid=1105811409/lono0a-20) -- "There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other, infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play." Readers become rereaders; the tiny book rewards close study. I used Carse's ideas for the concluding chapter of my own book on long-term thinking. Meanwhile we seem to be flirting these days with the prospect of a global religious war. "War is the ultimate finite game. Religion is the ultimate infinite game," said Jim Carse last night. "Evil does exist: it is when an infinite game is absorbed utterly in a finite game. All evil is an attempt to eliminate evil." Carse's talk, "Religion War in Light of the Infinite Game," drew on the work he's doing toward a new book, to be titled _Higher Ignorance: The Religious Case Against Belief_. Belief, he said, assumes that nothing can happen later to change your belief. It is the opposite of the long now. It is a right-now that never changes. Such end-of-history thinking can be extremely vicious. Communism, for example, had a merciless logic behind its purges. Believers require non-believers and are always thinking about them. But living religions, he said, can never be fully defined. They are like a reverse black hole that endlessly generates provocation. They are profoundly "horizonal"--wonder driven-- as opposed to bounded. Finite games require boundaries in space, time, and psychology. Infinite players prefer to live within horizons--boundaries that expand as you approach them. And rather than seeking to defeat the opponent, "an infinite player has the talent to see when someone is about to lose and is eager to change the rules to get them back in the game." The copies of Carse's book [_Finite and Infinite Games_](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0345341848/qid=1105811409/lono0a-20) we had on hand sold out (that's never happened before with a speaker). [You can get your own copy at this LINK.](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0345341848/qid=1105811409/lono0a-20)

### What long life means Ken Dychtwald gave a terrific talk Friday evening to a standing-room audience on "The Consequences of Human Life Extension." The growing--and soon overwhelming--prevalence of the old in developed nations is leading to a "new old." Ken described meeting a bright-eyed apparent 70-year-old who talked about his gym workouts. "I asked when he started, and he told me, 'Oh, a couple years ago when I was 100. I'm getting in shape for the Senior Olympics.' When he competed he not only won every event he entered, he set the World Record. He was alone in his age category-- a two-foot shot put was the best ever. That's typical. Everything the new old do is a first in human history." Ken gave an expertly graphic presentation, but much is quotable… "Of all the human who have ever lived over 65, two-thirds are now alive now." "I went to a conference of cosmetic surgeons. All their wives looked identical." "Heart disease kills more people than all the other leading causes of death put together, including cancer. Cure heart disease and you create 20 million demented people. Our health system is not geared for chronic disease." "In the US the old used to be the poorest segment of society. Now they're the richest. For instance, they buy 80% of luxury travel. So why are they still getting discounts?" "People vote their age. 30% of 30-year-olds vote. 50% of 50-year-olds vote. 70% of 70-year-olds vote. We have a gerontocracy." "The old do the least volunteering of any age group, and for every 11 cents that children get from government, the old demand and get a dollar. The concept of giving back is still foreign to them. If the now-aging Baby Boomers decide to reverse that, they'll earn the title, "The Grandest Generation." "What people really want, and what they're going to get, is longer HEALTH span. We should be asking now, What is the PURPOSE of longer life?"

### Ever longer life Our germline cells (eggs and sperm) are already immortal. What if the rest of the cells of our body could acquire the same ability? Tissue by tissue, one degenerative disease after another, it could gradually happen in the course of one or two human generations. When it does happen, what we mean by "generation" changes completely. Thanks to Proposition 71, which funds embryonic stem cell research, California is now the frontier of the key technology for rejuvenating human cells, tissues, and organs; for not just treating but curing lethal diseases. Michael West, founder of Geron and Advanced Cell Technology, has been in the thick of regenerative biomedicine since the early '90s. As soon as normal human life spans begin to increase beyond 100 years, on purpose, everything we think and do will change. Will it really happen? If so, how soon? Michael West has been in the thick of cures for human aging since his work on telomerase and the founding of Geron in the 1990s. Now, as chair and CEO of Advanced Cell Technology, he is a leader in the use of embryonic stem cells and cloning for the regeneration of aging tissue and organs. He is author of _The Immortal Cell: One Scientist 's Quest to Solve the Mystery of Human Aging_.

### The long green The environmental movement has moved on. It has become so deep and wide that it adds up to something new entirely, still unnamed. Whatever it is, it is now the largest movement in the world and the least ideological. Driven by science and patience, it is civilization-scale therapy. Paul Hawken co-authored the now classic _Natural Capitalism_ with Amory Lovins and also wrote _The Ecology of Commerce_ and _Growing a Business_. He co-founded a great garden company, Smith & Hawken, and a great organic food company, Erewhon. He chaired the introduction of The Natural Step to the US and currently is creating several companies for Pax Scientific.

"How's the Clock coming?" Everyone connected with The Long Now Foundation or with Danny Hillis hears that question all the time. "Progress on the 10,000-Year Clock," Danny Hillis -- Friday, September 10, 7pm, Fort Mason Conference Center, San Francisco. Doors open for coffee and books at 7pm; lecture is promptly at 8pm. You may want to come early to be sure of a seat. Admission is free (donation of $10 very welcome, not required). Planned as an art/engineering work of heroic scale inside a Nevada mountain, the 10K Clock is meant to embody and inspire long-term thinking. The first working prototype was completed in 2000 and now ticks sedately away (one tick per minute) in London at the Science Museum (the Queen came to the opening). The second working prototype is nearing completion. Meanwhile the designated mountain-- Mt. Washington, 11,600 feet high in eastern Nevada-- is being explored in depth. If all goes well, construction of the Mountain Clock could begin soon. Co-founder and co-chair of The Long Now Foundation, Danny Hillis is an inventor, scientist, author, and engineer. He pioneered the concept of parallel computers that is now the basis for most supercomputers, as well as the RAID disk array technology used to store large databases. He is co-chair and chief technology officer at Applied Minds. Before that he was a vice president and Fellow at Disney. Before that he co-founded Thinking Machines, which built the first massively parallel supercomputers. (Full bio [here](https://longnow.org/about/board/hillis.htm "Danny Hillis"). )

### The depopulation problem Full PDF of the talk [here](http://static.longnow.org/seminars/020040813-longman/salt-020040813-longman.pdf "PDF"), slideshow [here](https://media.longnow.org/salt-slides/Longman.html "The Depopulation Problem"). No need to summarize this time. Phillip Longman wrote out his whole talk, with the illustrations more viewable even than they were at the Seminar and talk. (excerpt below) It is full of rethink-the-news sentences like: "Notice that Japan's lengthening recession began just as continuously falling fertility rates at last caused its working-age population to begin shrinking in relative size." One thing worth adding from the Q&A at Phil's public lecture August 13th. Kevin Kelly asked him what he thought the world might feel like in 100 years. "People a century from now will have so few blood relatives I think it could be very lonely." The audience, convinced by then, was utterly still. Excerpt from Longman's talk: "So where will the children of the future come from? Some biologists speculate that modern human beings have created an environment in which the “fittest”, or most successful, individuals are precisely those who have few, if any, offspring. As more and more humans find themselves living under conditions in which children have become costly impediments to success, those who are well adapted to this new environment will tend not to reproduce themselves. And many others who are not so successful will imitate them. But this hardly implies extinction. Some people will still have children. They just won’t be people highly motivated by material concerns or secular values. Disproportionately, the parents of the future will be people who are at odds with the modern environment – people who either “don’t get” the new rules of the game that make large families a liability or who, out of religious or chauvinistic conviction, reject the game altogether. In short people like Mormons. "

### The long search "The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence: Necessarily a Long-term Strategy" is the title for Jill Tarter's Seminar About Long-term Thinking this Friday. There's no deeper question than "Are we alone in the universe?" And there's no quick way to answer it. Slow, steady science is the hardest to fund and organize, but Jill Tarter has been working on the question for 30 years and the SETI Institute (which she co-founded) for 20 years. The work has had incremental jumps in capacity, such as with the seti@home program (the first major peer-to-peer application) and with the Allen Telescope Array, coming on line later this year. Jill Tarter holds the Bernard Oliver chair and directs the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute in Mountain View. Interested in the subject since the mid-70s, Dr. Tarter first published on SETI in 1977. Recipient of numerous prizes and awards, Dr. Tarter has lately expanded her activities to include helping educate the next generation of scientists. She was the model for the Ellie Alloway character in Carl Sagan's 1985 novel _Contact_ and the 1997 movie starring Jodie Foster. "We are the first generation of humans who can investigate for signs of other intelligences in the universe," began Jill Tarter at the July 8-9 Seminar About Long-term Thinking. All we have to find is one case for the universe to appear utterly different to us, because finding one will guarantee there are many. "Anybody we find," she went on, "will be older than we are. SETI was rightly characterized right back at the beginning of the idea in 1959 as 'archaeology of the future'-- their past, our future." "We can't detect intelligence at a distance, so really SETI is SETT-- the Search for Extra-terrestrial TECHNOLOGY." Jill thinks that the technological Singularity feared by some won't happen, "because in nature all exponential growths saturate at some point." If, however, technologies always self-extinguish, then we will find no one (and presumably we will eventually join the great silence). But if technologies at least sometimes stabilize, or even keep on accelerating, and they bother to communicate, we could gradually build a catalog of the ways technology can develop, to better guide our own. In Earth's history inferior technologies have always been crushed by the "guns, germs, and steel" of superior technologies. Isn't contacting civilizations certain to be superior to ours asking for serious trouble? You can't catch a cold through the phone, Jill pointed out. The effect of ET contact is more likely to be what Europe experienced when it reached back in time for the culture, science, and technology of the Classical era (and across Asia via the Mongol Empire for the "compass, gunpowder, and printing" of China): the result of those contacts was the Renaissance. As Jill chronicled the history of SETI, I was impressed at how limited the search has been so far, even though 101 targeted and survey searches have been reported since around 1974. If the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, were leaking TV and radio signals like Earth is, we would not detect it-- yet. The SETI Institute is now building at Hat Creek, California, a 300-times improvement on previous search technology-- the Allen Telescope Array (initially funded by Paul Allen; $16 million is needed to complete it). It will have 350 ingenious dishes (designed by Jill's husband Jack Welch) arrayed in a Gaussian random pattern. The next stage would be a Square Kilometer Array, offering 100-times better still power, for a cost of $1 billion. Then really good listening could be done from the far side of the Moon ("the only place in the Solar System not exposed to Earth's electronic noise"). Jill's catalog of search technology to come (she's a self-confessed hardware geek) had a piece of stunning news, at least to me. If computation keeps getting better and our radio-telescopy keeps improving, we should know by 2040 whether or not there's anyone out there, at least in our galaxy. That's soon! And huge. On of Jill's slides quoted cartoonist Walt Kelly (via Porkypine): "Thar's only two possibilities: Thar is life out there in the universe which is smarter than we are, or we're the most intelligent life in the universe. Either way, it's a mighty sobering thought." What about Earth transmitting instead of just listening? Jill noted that for a signal to go out and be answered could take up to 200,00 years. (That's within our galaxy; for the next galaxy over it would be millions of years.) She ended her talk: "Who should talk for Earth? The winders of the Clock of the Long Now. What should they say? The Library of human culture. You could call it… 'the long hello.'"

One reason lots of people don't want to think long term these days is because technology keeps accelerating so rapidly, we assume the world will become unrecognizable in a few years and then move on to unimaginable. Long-term thinking must be either impossible or irrelevant. The commonest shorthand term for the runaway acceleration of technology is "the Singularity"--a concept introduced by science fiction writer Vernor Vinge in 1984. The term has been enthusiastically embraced by technology historians, futurists, extropians, and various trans-humanists and post-humanists, who have generated variants such as "the techno-rapture," "the Spike," etc. It takes a science fiction writer to critique a science fiction idea. Along with being one of America's leading science fiction writers and technology journalists, Bruce Sterling is a celebrated speaker armed with lethal wit. His books include _The Zenith Angle_ (just out), _Hacker Crackdown_ , _Holy Fire_ , _Distraction_ , _Mirrorshades_ (cyberpunk compendium), _Schismatrix_ , _The Difference Engine_ (with William Gibson), _Tomorrow Now_ , and _Islands in the Net_. The Seminar About Long-term Thinking on June 10-11 was Bruce Sterling examining "The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole." He treated the subject of hyper-acceleration of technology as a genuine threat worth alleviating and as a fond fantasy worth cruel dismemberment. Sterling noted that the first stating of the Singularity metaphor and threat came from John Von Neuman in the 1950s in conversation with Stan Ulam--"the rate of change in technology accelerates until it is mind-boggling and beyond social control or even comprehension." But it was science fiction writer Vernor Vinge who first published the idea, in novels and a lecture in the early 1980s, and it was based on the expectation of artificial intelligence surpassing human intelligence. Vinge wrote: "I believe that the creation of greater than human intelligence will occur during the next thirty years. I'll be surprised if this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030." Vinge was not thrilled at the prospect. The world-changing event would happen relatively soon, it would be sudden, and it would be irrevocable. "It's an end-of-history notion," Sterling drawled, "and like most end-of-history notions, it is showing its age." It's almost 2005, and the world is still intelligible. Computer networks have accelerated wildly, but water networks haven't--in fact we're facing a shortage of water. The Singularity feels like a 90s dot-com bubble idea now--it has no business model. "Like most paradoxes it is a problem of definitional systems involving sci-fi handwaving around this magic term 'intelligence.' If you fail to define your terms, it is very easy to divide by zero and reach infinite exponential speed." It was catnip for the intelligentsia: "Wow, if we smart guys were more like we already are, we'd be godlike." Can we find any previous Singularity-like events in history? Sterling identified three--the atomic bomb, LSD, and computer viruses. The bomb was sudden and world changing and hopeful--a new era! LSD does FEEL like it's world changing. Viruses proliferate exponentially on the net. LSD is pretty much gone now. Mr. Atom turned out to be not our friend and has blended in with other tools and problems. Singularity proponents, Sterling observed, are organized pretty much like virus writers--loose association, passionate focus, but basically gentle. (They'd be easily rounded up.) "They don't have to work very hard because they are mesmerized by the autocatalyzing cascade effect. 'Never mind motivating voters, raising funds, or persuading the press; we've got a mathematician's smooth line on a 2D graph! Why bother, since pretty soon we'll be SUPERHUMAN. It's bound to happen to us because we are EARLY ADAPTERS.'" Vernor Vinge wrote: "For me, superhumanity is the essence of the Singularity. Without that we would get a glut of technical riches, never properly absorbed." Said Sterling, "A glut of technical riches never properly absorbed sounds like a great description of the current historical epoch." Sterling listed five kinds of kinds of reactions to the Singularity. 1) Don't know and don't care (most people). 2) The superbian transhumanists. 3) The passive singularitatians--the Rapture of the Nerds. 4) The terrified handflapping apocalypse millennialists (a dwindling group, too modish to stay scared of the same apocalypse for long). 5) The Singularity resistance--Bill Joy killjoys who favor selective relinquishment. Sterling turned out to be a fellow traveler of the Resistance: "Human cognition becoming industrialized is something I actually worry about." Vinge did a great thing, said Sterling. The Singular

### Maps and time David Rumsey's spectacularly illustrated lecture, "Mapping Time" is not just about maps. It is the future of data and knowledge handling. People literally gasp at the things Rumsey shows can be done. I love it when techies, artists, and historians all gasp at the same time. That happened with David Rumsey's spectacularly illustrated Seminar About Long-term Thinking on May 13-14, "Mapping Time." Once an artist, long a real estate success, now one of the world's leading historic map collectors and THE leading online map innovator, David Rumsey gives an exceptionally deft graphic talk. Complex and elegant things kept happening with his images, always on cue with never a hesitation or false move. I've never seen a tighter weaving of ideas, words, and persuasive images. You can find everything he talked about and more at his website: [http://www.davidrumsey.com](http://www.davidrumsey.com/) Maps define worlds, Rumsey said. Compare the Spanish and British maps of the years of discovery in the New World. Because the Spanish maps and charts were kept as state secrets, their voluminous naming of rivers and mountains and so on didn't last. The British proudly published all their discovery maps as a proof of ownership. Their names are the ones that still adorn the land. The combination of the Web and GIS (Geographic Information Systems) has utterly transformed the world of maps. When Rumsey contemplated donating his collection of historic maps to a library or museum, he learned that they would be hidden carefully away in some vault, and almost no one would see them. So instead he put the collection online--inventing new super-high-resolution imaging systems and new browsers that could read the multi-gigabyte images. His site now gets two million visitors a year. Stanford's excellent map library gets six thousand users a year. Nothing shows the value of high resolution as well as maps, said Rumsey. For example, he was able to take the 110 separate sheets of a bird's-eye view of late 19th Century St. Louis and in a "digital knitting project" connect them all into one vast, beautiful image. There are two TERAbytes of data on his website. Because the files are too large to download, he invented browsers that can explore and compare them. It's the comparison tools that are shocking. Thanks to GIS, Rumsey can take old somewhat incorrect maps and "geo-rectify" them, using "rubber-sheeting" software tools he developed, so that the old maps can overlay perfectly on current precisely accurate maps. He demonstrated with four maps and an aerial photo of the San Francisco waterfront area where he was giving the talk. Starting with the old map, he faded up through the sequence of maps to the present, and you saw the city build in exquisite detail. Then he popped the four maps into four separate windows and scrolled them all in synch. Take Lewis and Clark's hand-drawn maps of the Missouri River from 1805. Once geo-rectified, you can use them for navigating now, GPS in hand. Tim O'Reilly commented, "This means that old maps are no longer 'wrong.' The past is not a mistake. You can add new information to an old document in a way that keeps it perpetually valuable." Rumsey demo-ed some other features of his site, such as his way of empowering serendipity by providing a "ticker"--a crawl of random images from his collections (and now other collections, including art) scrolling along the bottom of the screen. Click on anything enticing, and off you go to explore it. He said that getting totally covered by Google was essential--"Google is the ultimate catalog." Once fully linked on Google, his traffic took off from 2,000 visitors a day to 7,000. Then Rumsey showed what happens when you "drape" his maps over a raised-relief topological version of the landscape. You can view it obliquely. You can fly through it! As you fly through it, you can flick from one historic version of the landscape to another! This is where the gasps took over. To my mind, Rumsey's dynamic layering tools for visual data are new tool of thought, one that will become common. They are a compelling new way to think in time. All of Rumsey's maps can be perused totally for free. We asked him how much it costs to run his incredible operation. He said it's maybe 3 or 400K a year. Where does the money come from? From him. David Rumsey is one of the most impressive just-do-it philanthropists I've ever met. He is having more fun with his money and his time and the world than just about anyone.

### Mega gardening Big as life and twice as opinionated, the renowned preservation biologist Daniel Janzen spoke for The Long Now on Friday, April 9, 2005. His perspective on preservation may be jarring to some: "It's ALL Gardening". Dan Janzen is most widely known for his heroic efforts helping set all of Costa Rica on a preservation path, ensuring that the mega-diverse nation continues indefinitely as a haven for science and eco-tourism. His particular focus, Guanacaste Conservation Area, was recently declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. His ongoing work there in field taxonomy and innovative preservation practices led to his receiving the Crafoord Prize (1984), the Kyoto Prize (1997), and the Albert Einstein Science Prize (2002). Professor Janzen teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.

### Asteroid threat report Schweickart filled the hall with some 240 at the Presidio Officers Club and gave a dazzling lecture. He left the next day for Washington DC to lobby Congress to apply its will to making the Earth safe for the very long term. "For life to survive in planetary systems," said Schweickart, "it has to figure out how to deal with massive asteroid impacts. Who knows how many advanced life forms in the universe have failed or passed that test. Humanity is just now on that cusp. We have the knowledge and the ability---if not yet the will---to prevent future large-scale extinction events from asteroids." Data-rich, graphics-rich, and huge in conceptual scale, it was the most long-now Seminar yet---"The Asteroid Threat Over the Next 100,000 Years." Impact craters everywhere---Moon, Mercury, Mars; even asteroids have craters from other asteroids. (And occasional comets---1% of the source of impacts is from comets, as we saw very recently when a fragmented comet carpet-bombed Jupiter.) "How many asteroids are in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter? Pick a number. But if it doesn't have at least nine zeroes after it, it's wrong." Rusty's presentation was full of lore. Most asteroids are stone, but they are light---they absorb impact like Styrofoam. There are 100,000 shooting stars every night on Earth---small asteroids. Meteorites are COLD when they land, not hot (the deep cold of space is preserved, while the air-friction hot surface ablates away.) Air bursts from large asteroids cause more damage than ground strikes, and ocean impacts can cause tremendously destructive tsunamis. With really large impacts, the planets exchange material---Mars rocks on Earth, Earth rocks on Mars. When the last major-extinction impact occurred in Yucatan 65 million years ago, 10% of the stupendous blast debris exploded clear away from the Earth, while the other 90% rained down incandescent with re-entry all over the Earth for 90 minutes of burning sky---everything flammable on Earth burned up, and one meter of the oceans boiled off. (That was a 10-kilometer asteroid; when a 200-kilometer asteroid hits, it boils off the whole oceans). Then there was no sunlight for several years. 65% of all species on Earth ceased to exist, including the super-dominant dinosaurs. They failed the asteroid test. Rusty showed a diagram with all important asteroid data in it. The power-law distribution (many small, few large) is so perfect you can directly correlate frequency of impact with size of asteroid and energy released in megatons and the damage that would result. (Calibration: the largest nuclear weapon tested was a Soviet bomb of 58 megatons---6,000 times the force of the Hiroshima bomb. The 1908 air-burst of an asteroid over Tunguska, Siberia, made an 11-megaton explosion that flattened 2,100 square kilometers of forest.) "The asteroid threat over the next 100,000 years is right there in the chart," said Rusty. In the next hundred millennia: * There's a 10% chance of an asteroid causing planet-scale damage with 100,000 megatons of energy released. * There's a 50-50 chance of a 500-meter asteroid that could destroy an area the size of Texas with a 6,000 megaton explosion---100 times the USSR's biggest bomb. * There will be about TEN 200-meter asteroid impacts, good for 400 megatons. * There will be about A HUNDRED 70-meter-diameter asteroids, each causing 15 megatons of damage (i.e. worse than the Tunguska explosion, which would have wiped out all of London if it had hit there instead of the remote wilderness). NASA's Space Guard program has been looking for PHA's---Potentially Hazardous Asteroids---that are 1 kilometer or more in diameter. There are about 1,100 of them---700 have been detected and tracked and found innocent of threat; that leaves some 400 still unknown. Since asteroids orbit with the Earth around the Sun, any collision path is gradually convergent. Advance knowledge of collision with a very large asteroid can range from 40 years to 2 years, with the kind of attention now being paid. Extreme case: "1950DA" is an asteroid that has been tracked since 1950. Its orbit is so precisely known that we can forecast there is a 1-in-300 chance it will collide with Earth on March 16, 2880---876 years from this month. Orbital mechanics are destiny. One of the sponsors of the SALT series, Leighton Read, noted that the asteroid threat is a rare instance where we really CAN predict the future, a very long way out and in great detail, at least statistically. Furthermore, this is a rare instance where we really can do something about the future. Threatening asteroids can not only be detected, they can be deflected. Rusty said there are two main approaches to deflection---sudden impulse (like a nuclear explosion), and slow, guided redirection. He favors the second, and lead-authored an article in last November's SCI

### Long-term policy analysis Dewar is head of RAND’s Pardee Center on very long-term policy—35 to 200 years For over half a century the RAND Corporation has influenced national policy and invented major intellectual tools. Packet switching (Paul Baran) came from RAND; so did scenario planning (Herman Kahn); so does the current understanding of “net warfare” (John Arquilla). For all of its power, RAND’s thinkers are seldom heard in public. Three years ago RAND set out to engage serious long-term thinking. A RAND alum funded the Pardee Center for Longer Range Global Policy and the Future Human Condition, with the charge “to improve our ability to think about the longer-range future–from 35 to as far as 200 years ahead.” Selected to run the new center was 22-year-RAND-veteran James Dewar. Jim Dewar from RAND laid out a persuasive case for long-term thinking and planning at the Seminar last Thursday. Examples of successful long-term planning include: * The US Constitution * Panama Canal * Transcontinental railroad in the US * Marshall Plan * Bismarck’s unification of Germany * George Kennan’s policy of “containment” of the USSR * US Social Security plan—cemented in place with a card for every citizen, by clever Roosevelt * FCC wisely helping the US phone system connect to computers * Leighton Read noted that all these examples emerged from traumatic conditions. As for an example of “getting it right about getting it wrong,” Dewar cited Keynes’s 1919 book, _The Economic Consequences of the Peace_ , about how taking revenge on the defeated Germans would lead to another war. It did. The next time, the Allies took Keynes’s advice, and that was the Marshall Plan. Historian David Lowenthal, a guest at the seminar, observed that no publisher would take Keynes’s book, so he published it himself, and made $2 million on it. Unpacking the idea of Long-Term Policy Analysis (LPTA), Dewar stated that “long-term” means “characterized by deep uncertainty”—typically including uncertainty at the systemic level (structure), uncertainty about likelihood of which way events might go, uncertainty about the migration of values, and uncertainty about what are proper goals. Leighton Read suggested we should build a detailed taxonomy of the various kinds of uncertainties about the future. Dewar observed that one of the greatest difficulties of doing long-term policy analysis is GETTING THE ATTENTION of policy makers. Peter Schwartz recalled that at Royal Dutch/Shell he had extensive profiles on all the managing directors of Shell—his direct customers for scenario planning—so he could tailor the work to their interests. Both Dewar and David Lowenthal noted that policy makers find it much easier to take on known, existing problems that to work on emerging problems that are not defined yet. They’re great at “pound of cure,” terrible at “ounce of prevention.” That’s what long-term policy analysis has to fix. Dewar showed slides of a technique his center at RAND is developing to run models using thousands of scenarios, but what he was showing seemed incomprehensible, so the seminar group challenged it strongly. This was tremendously helpful for the lecture the following evening, where Dewar made the same slides very compelling by spelling out a case—involving the tradeoffs of various forms of taxing polluters against joint gains in economic growth AND “decoupling” that growth from environmental harm.

### Long-term thinking about large-scale computing Ever since his 1997 breakthrough book, _Darwin Among the Machines_ , Dyson has become regarded as a leading historian and interpreter of computer science, bringing a rigorous and unconventional perspective. Thus his willingness to examine the long-term prospects for mega-scale computing. Most computer people are averse to discussing seriously any future beyond ten years. With the Dyson seminar, our series begins to get down to specific cases of applying long-term thinking. "Your now is only as long as you remember. To way to understand the future is give the present more depth," said George Dyson at the start of his Seminar at Long Now last Thursday. Then he proceeded to help us remember what really went on at the very beginning of computerdom, back in 1947 at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) when John von Neumann and colleagues were inventing the digital world. Thanks to his physicist/mathematician father Freeman, George grew up at the IAS, along with his older sister Esther. Last year he went back to spend an entire year burrowing through the ancient files and logbooks of the von Neumann period. A skilled photographer, he has hundreds of richly evocative photos of those records to show. In them the past comes to life. Nion McEvoy said George's artifacts are deep and consequential, like relics from earliest Christianity. The artifacts showed that at the beginning the code was small and sound and the machines (vacuum tubes and oscilloscope tubes) were maddenly flaky. By the end of that period the machines had become reliable, and most of the problems were in the ever-growing code. Von Neumann wrote a landmark paper, "Reliable Organizations of Unreliable Elements." Strings of bits (then still called binary digits) come in two forms, Dyson reminded us---sequential in time and structural in space. The sequences make things happen; stored as structure they are memory. Building an architecture that would manage the transitions adroitly and also scale up radically for decades was a profound achievement. Engineers were never particularly welcome at the IAS. One letter shows an administrator complaining that the computer people from the basement were using excessive quantities of sugar and tea, and doing so at all hours of the night. Programmers evidently have been caffeine and sugar swilling nocturnal troglodytes from the very start. Like Eniac, the IAS computer was mainly used for atomic bomb studies---that's where the money came from. The researchers also worked on weather prediction (with approaches still in use, only now they're fast enough to predict the future instead of the past), and von Neumann assumed we would eventually use them to control the weather---an assumption George shares. By 1953 at the IAS Nils Barricelli was working on "Symbiogenetic Evolution Processes Realized by Artificial Methods," running the first artificial life programs. (Their source code is still around and could come to life again.) Danny Hillis, who has also done a-life experiments, noted that there are no seriously long-lived computations going on (max is a year, for prime numbers and the like). Maybe Long Now should start some. George ended by looking at the larger picture. He said that computation at present is still parasitic on us, but it probably is in the process of becoming part of life itself---it's just another system of genetics. Evolution, after all, is massively parallel computation, and now the world of code is evolving, perhaps to reshape the tree of life itself. As von Neumann's famous work on Theory of Games showed, coalitions are the most important element. "The great collective organism we're becoming part of will have a completely different sense of time."