Summary By Stewart Brand:

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.

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Long Now collects stories of the “digital dark age”.  Originally these were kept in discussion boards, but we have moved this to our blog as of 02007 (Acknowledging that the present will in fact be known as the digital dark age, since all our digital data has no forward migration path.)

I thought that the first post in this category should be the story of some of our own data loss here at Long Now including the first version f this forum. We have learned a lot over the last decade, and are working now on some new architectures based on this learning.

Our problems stemmed from the fact that Long Now is a project-based institution that survives soley on on project grants. This means that we have little to no carryover infrastructure when there is a lull between projects. (we now have a full time sys-admin however)

So when we had a lull about 2 years ago we did not have any sysadmin staff for several months. This resulted in our servers getting compromised by hackers, age, and heat.

We had hackers using one of our open wikis for file trading gobbling up bandwidth, and we had a drive or two fail from excessive heat in a server (due to the fan dying).

The wiki problem was solved easily enough and no permanent damage was done. We learned our lesson about allowing public file uploads to our wikis though.

The drive problem was much more problematic. The drive was mirrored to allow for two copies of all the data should a problem occur. The problem was that the mirroring actually mirrored corrupted data leaving us with two drives with exactly the same worthless data on it. One of the things we lost was the first version of this forum.

We now do incremental backups on separate machines that allow us to revert to several different snapshots of the data moving backward in time. This way if we get corrupt data we can keep moving backward until we have a clean sample.

We also now backup much of our cultural resources (like our Rosetta linguistic database) to the Stanford servers thanks to Stanford librarian Mike Keller.

For the future we are now moving away from a server room all-together. We are moving all publically served data to a collocation facility. For the in house data we are now looking at distributing the in house server architecture under peoples desks. Each project workgroup at Long Now will get a Network Attached Server with 1Tb or more storage in it. Each workgroup will administer permissions on their NAS box. But we will only use half of the storage of each box for each workgroup. The other half will be a distributed RAID of sorts - backing up the rest of the offices data. This way no one box has all the data, and no one box can lose all the data.

We now have begun these efforts using Infrant’s ReadyNAS standalone RAID storage servers..

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Summary By Stewart Brand

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 cheaper solar, effective energy storage (batteries are painfully limited), and a better electrical grid, while Cavanagh would like more R&D on vehicles and breakthroughs on coal processing.

My take on the evening is that Cavanagh was particularly persuasive on the need for nuclear to compete on the open market, and Schwartz was persuasive on the direness of climate prospects and the relative readiness of nuclear power to help.

–Stewart Brand

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