Photo by Jessie Levandov

Opening: Global Lives Project Installation
at The Long Now Museum & Store

Wednesday November 10
6:00 – 8:00 pm

We’ll be celebrating the opening of a Global Lives Project installation at the Long Now Foundation Museum & Store on the evening of November 10th. Please join us for drinks, snacks and some words from Global Lives Project Founder and Executive Director, David Evan Harris. Global Lives Project filmmakers Ya-Hsuan Huang and Jason J. Price will also be in attendance to answer questions.

The Global Lives Project is a collaboratively-built library of human experience gathered from an orphanage in Kazakstan, a corner store in China, a street car in San Francisco and many other locations foreign and familiar. It takes shape online and as a video installation.

Framed by the arc of the day and conveyed through the intimacy of video, we have slowly and faithfully captured 24 continuous hours in the lives of 10 people from around the world. They are screened here in their own right, but also in relation to one another.

There is no narrative other than that which is found in the composition of everyday life, no overt interpretations other than that which you may bring to it.

By extending the long take to a certain extreme and infusing it with the spirit of cinema verité, we invite audiences to confer close attention onto other worlds, and simultaneously reflect upon their own.  The force and depth of human difference and similarity are revealed in this process. Gaps which mark cultural divides feel, at once, both wider and narrower.  This sense – that we, as humans, are both knowable and unknowable, fundamentally different as well as the same – opens a space for dialogue.

-Artist’s Statement 2010

LISTEN

7 – 12 of Nineteen Speakers in the
“Long Conversation”

There is new media available from our monthly series, the Seminars About Long-term Thinking. Stewart Brand’s summaries and audio downloads or podcasts of the talks are free to the public; Long Now members can view HD video of the Seminars and comment on them.

LISTEN

1 – 6 of Nineteen Speakers in the
“Long Conversation”

There is new media available from our monthly series, the Seminars About Long-term Thinking. Stewart Brand’s summaries and audio downloads or podcasts of the talks are free to the public; Long Now members can view HD video of the Seminars and comment on them.

Long Conversation – Pete Worden Announces 100-Year Starship from The Long Now Foundation.

On October 16th, Long Now hosted the Long Conversation as part of our Longplayer event.  Speaking with Peter Schwartz about the future of space travel, NASA Ames Research Center Director Pete Worden announced a collaborative project between Ames and DARPA.  The two agencies have set aside just over a million dollars to begin research on a 100-year starship.

The announcement was first publicized by Amara Angelica writing for the Kurzweil AI blog:

NASA Ames Director Simon “Pete” Worden revealed Saturday that NASA Ames has “just started a project with DARPA called the Hundred Year Starship,” with $1 million funding from DARPA and $100K from NASA.

“You heard it here,” said Worden at “Long Conversation,” a Long Now Foundation event in San Francisco. “We also hope to inveigle some billionaires to form a Hundred Year Starship fund,” Dr. Worden added. (No further details on this are available from NASA at this time.)

“The human space program is now really aimed at settling other worlds,” he explained. “Twenty years ago you had to whisper that in dark bars and get fired.”

It later bounced its way over to Huffington Post and MSNBC’s Cosmic Log.

UPDATE:  On Oct 28th DARPA released this official statement (PDF).  MSNBC also covered it here.

The above video is Long Now board member David Eagleman discussing his idea of Possibilianism at the Poptech conference.  Eagleman talked a bit about this in his Long Now seminar and I thought it was great to hear him dive into it further. Enjoy.

Languages are Parallel Universes

A Summary by Stewart Brand

“To have a second language is to have a second soul,” said Charlemagne around 800 AD. “Each language has its own cognitive toolkit,” said psychologist/linguist Lera Boroditsky in 2010 AD.

Different languages handle verbs, distinctions, gender, time, space, metaphor, and agency differently, and those differences, her research shows, make people think and act differently.

Take a sentence such as “Sarah Palin read Chomsky’s latest book.” In Russian, the verb would have to indicate whether the whole book was read or not. In Turkish the verb would signify whether the speaker saw the event personally, or it was reported, or it was inferred. Russians have two words for blue, and when those words are present in their mind, they can distinguish finer gradations of the color than English…

Read the rest of Stewart Brand’s Summary here.

This video, which uses words and meaning to stitch together a series of otherwise unrelated shots, was created by Everynone in collaboration with WNYC’s Radiolab and National Public Radio. It was shown as part of our “Long Short” series of short films that convey long term thinking. This Long Short was screened at Lera Boroditsky’s “How Language Shapes Thought” SALT.

WORDS from Everynone on Vimeo.

WATCH

Richard Rhodes’s “Twilight of the Bombs”

There is new media available from our monthly series, the Seminars About Long-term Thinking. Stewart Brand’s summaries and audio downloads or podcasts of the talks are free to the public; Long Now members can view HD video of the Seminars and comment on them.

Jamie O’Shea is an artist interested in technology, memory and time. In the video below he demonstrates how to create an electrical battery using only stone-age materials.

As Jamie points out, this isn’t just great material for the Manual for Civilization – it’s also a good way to illustrate that the historically observed progression of technology wasn’t the only way it could have happened.

The project is documented on his website:

Some people have viewed this project through the lens of sustainability. While self-sufficiency and locally sourced material would certainly seem to be sustainable, my methods fail quite spectacularly in environmental analysis. For one, I used an estimated 20 kg of charcoal to produce perhaps 20 g of metal…

My project is about the origin of technologies- the ability for them to emerge out of context- but not their ability to sustain themselves.  A sustainable society is not really the most natural option; humans began as a nomads exhausting the resources of places and then moving on.  Maybe people in the future will look back on us just as we can look back on our predecessors, and see the answer to a lasting society lying on the ground all around us, just waiting to be put together with the right information.

(Thanks, Kurt!)

The Long Now Foundation’s monthly

Seminars About Long-term Thinking

Rachel Sussman’s
“The World’s Oldest Living Organisms”

TICKETS

Monday November 15, 02010 at 7:30pm Cowell Theater

Long Now Members can reserve 2 seats, join today! • General Tickets $10

About this Seminar:

While we may aspire to live a century, Rachel Sussman documents creatures who don’t bat an eye at a millennium or two. Her photography has captured 4,500 year old bristlecone pines, 12,000 year old yucca, 400,000 year old Siberian bacteria, and many other wizened elders, all with stories longer than all of recorded human history.

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