Submitted by Dan Mosedale this animated map/timeline of the last 5000 years of religion is really fantastic. Also another take on that was submitted by Kevin Kelly. I also just came across this great Historical Atlas page.
Submitted by Stewart Brand this interactive urbanization map and timeline is a nice tool for visualizing how cities have been groing over the last 60 years. I would love to see the millennial version… 
On June 29th and 30th The Long Now Foundation presents the North American Premiere of 77 Million Paintings by Brian Eno. And on Sunday July 1st we will have a members night closing the event with special guests from The Long Now Foundation board.
I came across this very Long Now quote recently. It is pretty amazing to see this level of optimism from someone who worked on the Manhatten Project.
“We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.”
Richard Feynman (1918 - 1988) [source]
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. Cess pools filled basements, slaughter houses 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, 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) and his book on video games and TV (EVERYTHING BAD IS GOOD FOR YOU). 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.
We are learning to master complexity, to revel in long zooms like Google Earth or the forthcoming Will Wright game, “Spore.” A few years ago, Johnson was introducing his 7-year-old nephew to to Wright’s early video game, “Sim City”— “Ooh, look at the big buildings!” Shortly, Johnson’s factory district was failing. His nephew piped up. “Lower your industrial tax rate,” said the child.
Johnson ended the talk with another line from James Joyce: “It was very big to think about everything and everywhere.”
“It’s never been easier,” said Johnson.
–Stewart Brand
PS… Also anounced at this talk is the North American Premiere of Brian Eno’s 77 Million Paintings. There is a special night for charter members on Sunday July 1st. All charter members get one free ticket, and can purchase a guest ticket (see EVENTS tab in the members section). Non members can purchase tickets for the Friday and Saturday shows (June 29 &30th).
Every 20 years the Shinto temple at Ise is rebuilt. It is an exact copy of the one that has stood there for the last twenty years. They alternate the sites so that they can complete one before taking down the last. Depending on which source you trust, this has been going on, in one fashion or another, for between 500 and 2000 years. They have already begun the rebuild for 02013 by harvesting the cypress trees (shown above as they were walked through Tokyo’s Rappongi district during the ‘Okihiki’ event on Feb 4th 02007).
The 20 year cycle is an interesting one. It is just long enough for one generation to teach the next. This tradition has allowed this structure, made of rice paper and wood, to last at least centuries. Below is a very rare picture of both temples. Right as one was completed, and before the last was disassmebled.
The subtitle of this very nifty weblog says it all: A look into the future that never was.
Paleo-Future is a steady stream of news about the future that (mostly) did not come true. By rummaging through the archives and dust bins of yesteryear’s futurists, the editors of this blog uncover past predictions about their future. Some of these futures have already past, some are still to come. Each item serves as a warning about our own hubris in imagining what the future will be like.
A little while ago the design for the Svalbard International Seed Vault was released (BBC article). They are building a long term vault for seed stock preservation. Interestingly they seem to have chosen the site mainly under the assumption that the planet will only get warmer in the next 200 years. My understanding of the Gulf Stream dynamics is that if the Greenland ice sheet calves off, and shuts down the Gulf Stream, it is also likely that the North Atlantic will be plunged into an ice age, burying the seed vault under a lot of ice…
This article was forwarded to me by Paul Saffo who also points out another interesting fact about the location chosen in terms of long term preservation strategies:
Spitzbergen (one of four islands in Svalbard where the vault will be) is very unusual, though it is Norwegian Territory, it is actually an international ‘condominium’ with approx 12 nations having rights for commercial exploitation on the islands. It thus mirrors the sentiment that led to the notion of “The common Heritage of Mankind” in the (mostly) failed Las of the Sea Treaty. Anyway, I find the status interesting because building archives on land owned by many parties is an interesting preservation strategy.
-Paul Saffo
This has nothing whatsoever to do with Long Shorts (videos, generally short ones, that exemplify long term thinking or longer perspective) at all.
In the Long Now Shop we carry a variety of DVDs that have something to do with long term thinking, or inspire us the same way the clock does. One of these videos is “The Way Things Go”, an art project from a few years back. The project involved a Rube Goldberg-esque contrivance, set up in a huge warehouse, that was entertaining but also served as a kind of meditation on staying still long enough to watch the whole thing all the way through.
The video below is similiar to “The Way Things Go”, however, it’s a lot shorter and has a whole lot more flammable material. This video is of interest to us, because when we at The Long Now are not promoting mindful civilization or discussing data stamping methods for micro-etching, we like to throw rocks at things and blow stuff up.
In that vein, please click here to watch “Rube Goldberg On Fire”.
[Thank You Mike Strange!]
As part of the series of “Long Shorts” (videos, generally short ones, that exemplify long term thinking or longer perspective).
This was a brilliant X Box commercial that was pulled off the air… really great.
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