New Scientist recently got in touch with a series of experts to discuss a thought experiment they call Civilization 2.0 – If we had the chance to redesign civilization from the ground up, with all our current knowledge (and the agreement of everyone in the world), how would we do it?

Suppose we could try again. Imagine that Civilisation 1.0 evaporated tomorrow, leaving us with unlimited manpower, a willing populace and – most important – all the knowledge we’ve accumulated about what works, what doesn’t, and how we might avoid the errors we got locked into last time. If you had the chance to build Civilisation 2.0 from scratch, what would you do differently?

They spoke with Geoffrey West (a future SALT speaker) about appropriate size and scale of cities, noting that there seem to be some very predictable patterns to the way life in cities changes as they grow. Apparently many things increase at a steady 15% with each doubling in population of city: energy and resource efficiency, income, wealth, colleges, but also crime, disease and even average walking speed.

In talking to Christopher Flavin and Mark Delucchi, they come to the conclusion that denser, transit-oriented cities (rather than sprawling suburbs) will be important. A combination of top-down planning would establish hubs near fresh water and other useful resources, link them into a large-scale transit system, and then hand over the local design and details to residents. Carlo Ratti is particularly keen on this local-scale wiki-style planning and hopes that in Civilization 2.0, residents will have much more knowledge and influence, thanks to technology, over the planning decisions immediately affecting them.

This local/distributed paradigm also informs their approach to energy – Lena Hansen encourages a locally-producing renewable system for the sake of resilience and efficiency. Then they zoom out a little more and discuss ways that the cost of producing energy could be factored more realistically into the costs of materials and goods and ways that environmental quality and human happiness could better be accounted for in measures of economic well-being.

For governing our new, enlightened civilization, two sides are explored. The first perspective comes from sociologist Robin Dunbar, whose research has shown the upper cognitive limits of the human mind to know and recognize other people. Each person, he’s found, can only recall personal information and maintain a relationship with about 150 other people. Groups adhering to this limit can generally be governed through personal relationships rather than hierarchy and bureaucracy.

Paul Raskin takes a different approach: he proposes a newspaper published once per decade and suggests that the most recent edition’s headline would have to be about what he calls the ‘planetary phase’ of history. He hints at what some have called the ‘anthropocene,’ a geological epoch in which humanity is the major force in earth’s biosphere. Such broad, global effects, he explains, require broad, global control – not necessarily a single world government, but certain goals and values set and enforced on a planetary scale.

In the end, the article also explains that too specific or rigid a design opens civilization up to catastrophe in the face of climatic and ecological change. Historically, we’ve seen societies that run very efficiently in their given environment unable to adapt to changes to that environment and so some flexibility at the cost of efficiency will likely be, in the long-run, worth it.

The full article on New Scientist is available for the next week (if you are willing to go through the free registration), after which it will require a paying subscription. Above, you can find links to information on many of the experts they spoke with as well as the points each contributed to the scenario. Happy planning!

A study was published last month that made some interesting conclusions about how the human brain organizes and prioritizes memory. Psychology Today reported on the investigation, which was conducted by a team of researchers under the leadership of University of Lübeck professor Dr. Jan Born. The experiment involved volunteers conducting one of a few memory tests and then being quizzed ten hours later on the tests. Only some of the participants, however, were told that they would be quizzed, and only some of them were allowed to sleep in the meantime. As it happens, we might all be futurists while we’re asleep…

The pivotal question is, How does the brain “decide” what to keep and what to dump?… German researchers have garnered evidence that the brain sorts through memories during sleep and preferentially retains the ones that are most relevant. The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, concludes that the brain evaluates information based on future expectations. After a good night’s sleep, we remember information better when we know it will be useful in the future.

…The researchers also recorded electroencephalograms (EEGs) from the individuals who slept. Subjects who expected a test displayed a strong increase in slow oscillation activity during their slow-wave sleep. The more slow-wave activity the sleeping participants had, the better their memory during the test. Born and colleagues think that the process may involve at least two parts of the brain. The brain’s prefrontal cortex appears to “tag” memories deemed potentially useful for the future, while the hippocampus consolidates those memories during sleep.

“Our results show that memory consolidation during sleep indeed involves a basic selection process that determines which of the many pieces of the day’s information are sent to long-term storage,” Born says. “Our findings also indicate that information relevant for future demands is selected foremost for storage.”

About this Seminar:

Historian and archaeologist, Ian Morris’ most recent book, Why the West Rules – For Now, discusses reasons for changes in global dominance, cultural and geographic differences between civilizations, and the eroding usefulness of the East/West distinction.

Morris has studied at Cambridge, the University of Chicago, and most recently Stanford. He founded the Stanford Archaeology Center in 02000 and oversaw excavations for 6 years at Monte Polizzo, Sicily.

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LISTEN

Matt Ridley’s “Deep Optimism”

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.

This National Park Service spectrogram, from the Western Soundscape Archive, visually represents the sounds heard at a particular site over the course of 24 hours.

Sound is fleeting. Unless it is recorded while it occurs, it can never be heard again. As the earth evolves, species come and go, ecosystems change or are destroyed, and urban landscapes transform; when organisms and ways of life go extinct, their sounds disappear with them. We record music, lectures, and performances, but it is relatively uncommon to record our everyday activities and environment. There are, however, a few efforts to do just that.

High Country News recently published a profile of Jeff Rice, the founder of the Western Soundscape Archive. The archive hosts a growing collection of audio recordings of the flora and fauna of the Western United States.

The archive now represents close to 800 species — amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals — even some invertebrates. Scientists, educators, students and nature enthusiasts can download podcasts or stream audio files free of charge. Rice sees the loss of species and habitats as a driving force behind his work. “We are experiencing a new ‘silent spring’ across the globe and in our own backyards,” he says. “Not only is it a marker of what we’re losing on an important ecological level, but it’s also a loss of our heritage.”

The collection also provides access to National Park Service acoustical monitoring. These take the form of spectrograms–images that show, over 24-hour periods, the relative prevalence of bird songs and airplanes, crickets and cars. They provide information about a region’s biodiversity as well as the impact of anthropogenic noise on its ecosystems.

Aporee is another sound collection, but with a less specific sonic target. The aporee ::: maps project encourages people to record the sounds around them and upload them to the site. All recordings are plotted on google maps, where anyone can click on them to listen. The project is described on Aporee’s website:

It develops from the insight that it is basically impossible to map the complexity of todays [sic] public spaces. Against the background of an increasing awareness of spatial aspects in media and the popularity and presence of visual geographies like google maps, the idea was to connect sound and space, and to create a cartography which focusses [sic] solely on sound, and open it to the public as a collaborative project. Meanwhile it contains 1000s of recordings from numerous urban, rural and natural environments, showing the sonic complexity of these environments, as well as the different perception and artistic perspectives related to sound, space and places. Furthermore, it’s an exciting playground for experiments with sound and mobile media.

A sound archive could someday form a very engaging and informative part of a library dedicated to describing the human experience as it has evolved through time. Think of a museum exhibit on the ocean that includes short sound clips: rolling waves, the incessant squawking of seagulls, the call of an elephant seal. The portrayal instantly becomes more vivid, more real. For a future human to grasp what it meant to live in the 21st century, it could be quite useful to have a soundtrack with examples of car traffic, a busy farmer’s market, or perhaps even the soft chirping and buzzing heard in a pine forest on a sunny morning, out of earshot from human civilization.

Click here to hear the Western Soundscape Archive’s recording of a bark beetle (one species of which is responsible for the current epidemic that has killed vast swaths of trees in the Rockies).

Long Now’s Alexander Rose recently visited the Svalbard Seed Vault with Steve Rowell, who uploaded to Aporee this recording of a Svalbardian windstorm. Make sure you’ve got a warm blanket with you.

A History of the World in 100 Seconds from Gareth Lloyd on Vimeo.

Thanks to Long Now research fellow Stuart Candy for sending this in:

Many wikipedia articles have coordinates. Many have references to historic events. Me (@godawful) and Tom Martin (@heychinaski) cross referenced the two to create a dynamic visualization of Wikipedia’s view of world history. Watch as empires fall, wars break out and continents are discovered.

This won “Best Visualization” at Matt Patterson’s History Hackday in January, 2011. To make it, we parsed an xml dump of all wikipedia articles (30Gb) and pulled out 424,000 articles with coordinates and 35,000 references to events. Cross referencing these produced 15,500 events with locations. Then we mapped them over time.

More information and datasets: ragtag.info/​2011/​feb/​2/​history-world-100-seconds/

Undeniable Progress

A Summary by Stewart Brand

Hominids had upright walking, stone tools, fire, even language but still remained in profound stasis. What led to humanity’s global takeoff, Ridley argues, was the invention of exchange about 120,000 years ago. “That’s ten times older than agriculture.”

The beginnings of trade encouraged specialization and innovation, which encouraged further innovation, specialization, and trade, and the unending virtuous cycle of…

Read the rest of Stewart Brand’s Summary here.

You can also read a summary by Kevin Kelly Here.

At a TEDx event at Caltech in January, the theme was Feynman’s Vision: The Next 50 Years:

TEDxCaltech was an unprecedented event that brought together innovators, explorers, teachers and learners for an exhilarating day of collaboration, conversation and celebration. We assembled a group of inventive thinkers and creative artists who are pushing the boundaries of their own disciplines. Throughout the day they introduced groundbreaking new ideas, shared inspired stories and gave us a glimpse at the technology of the future. Inspired by Caltech’s own Richard Feynman, Nobel laureate, iconoclast and visionary, the day was an exciting and entertaining intellectual adventure!

At the event, Long Now co-founder Danny Hillis, who worked with Dr. Feynman while developing The Connection Machine, reminisced about becoming friends with the famously eccentric professor and relayed a conversation they had shortly before Dr. Feynman passed away. (Also see Hillis’ essay on this story)

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen”.  – Lenin

(thanks to @JPBarlow for this one)

Since the end of the last ice age a little over 10,000 years or so ago, human civilization has blossomed in a climatically friendly epoch known as the Holocene. The flowers are still blooming, but as climate change begins to mix things up some have been predicting that the story of recent and pending human history will prove quite dramatic…and it will be written in stone. National Geographic reports:

Stratigraphers like Zalasiewicz are, as a rule, hard to impress. Their job is to piece together Earth’s history from clues that can be coaxed out of layers of rock millions of years after the fact. They take the long view—the extremely long view—of events, only the most violent of which are likely to leave behind clear, lasting signals. It’s those events that mark the crucial episodes in the planet’s 4.5-billion-year story, the turning points that divide it into comprehensible chapters.

So it’s disconcerting to learn that many stratigraphers have come to believe that we are such an event—that human beings have so altered the planet in just the past century or two that we’ve ushered in a new epoch: the Anthropocene. Standing in the smirr, I ask Zalasiewicz what he thinks this epoch will look like to the geologists of the distant future, whoever or whatever they may be. Will the transition be a moderate one, like dozens of others that appear in the record, or will it show up as a sharp band in which very bad things happened—like the mass extinction at the end of the Ordovician?

That, Zalasiewicz says, is what we are in the process of determining.

Whether or not humans are ushering in such a singular moment in recent geologic history, there seems to be increasing support for the notion that we are leaving the Holocene behind, and that ‘we’ have enough to do with that transition to merit naming the new epoch after ourselves. The term ‘Anthropocene’ was first used by Paul Crutzen, a Dutch chemist, at a conference about ten years ago. It’s come a long way: today it is featured in the March issue of the National Geographic.

Crutzen…thinks its real value won’t lie in revisions to geology textbooks. His purpose is broader: He wants to focus our attention on the consequences of our collective action—and on how we might still avert the worst. “What I hope,” he says, “is that the term ‘Anthropocene’ will be a warning to the world.”

The photograph of the oil field above was taken by Edward Burtynsky, who spoke at our seminar series in 2008 on “The 10,000-year Gallery.”