I have recently been impressed by all the ad campaigns that keenly visualize a possible future. As Kevin Kelly points out in an earlier post, we humans are pretty good at discounting the future, and these shocking images can be a bit of an antidote. The most impressive by far of these ad campaigns is the red cross San Francisco earthquake preparedness campaign, (one of the billboards from that shown above). Diesel now also has two campaigns that work on this principle (examples shown below with links to the full image sets):

Global Warming Ready

The Future is Human

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In the 15.08 issue of Wired is an interesting story on photographer David Michalek who seems to have pushed the tech of hi res - hi frame count film equipment to a new level, in ordeer to create is most recent piece of dancers in ultra slow motion. I always find it ironic that the slower you want something to appear in film, the faster you have to shoot it…

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This dynamic timeline of environmental history sent to me by Stewart Brand is a nice overview starting over 2000 years ago.  I especially like that it points out that we humans are not new to altering our natural environment in detrimental ways.  However it does seem to omit the Native American story of hunting and land use that drastically altered the ecosystems of the Americas.

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From Science Blogs comes this news about how long term thinking uses separate neural pathways in our brains than short term thinking.

So why do people take out sub-prime loans? Don’t they realize that they won’t be able to afford the ensuing 28 years of mortgage payments? I think a big part of the reason sub-prime loans remain so seductive, even when the financial terms are so atrocious, is that they take advantage of a dangerous flaw built into our brain. This flaw is rooted in our emotional brain, which tends to overvalue immediate gains (like a new house) at the expense of future costs (high interest rates). Our feelings are thrilled by the prospect of a new home, but can’t really grapple with the long-term fiscal consequences of the decision. Our impulsivity encounters little resistance, and so we sign on the bottom line. We want the house. We’ll figure out how to pay for it later.

The best evidence for this idea comes from the lab of Jonathan Cohen. Cohen’s clever experiment (PDF) went like this: he stuck people in an fMRI machine and made them decide between a small Amazon gift certificate that they could have right away, or a larger gift certificate that they’d receive in 2 to 4 weeks. Contrary to rational models of decision-making, the two options activated very different neural systems. When subjects contemplated gift certificates in the distant future, brain areas associated with rational planning (the Promethean circuits of the prefrontal cortex) were more active. These cortical regions urge us to be patient, to wait a few extra weeks for the bigger gift certificate.

On the other hand, when subjects started thinking about getting a gift certificate right away, brain areas associated with emotion - like the midbrain dopamine system and NAcc - were turned on. These are the cells that tell us to take out a mortgage we can’t afford, or run up credit card debt when we should be saving for retirement. They are our impulsive pleasure seekers, the hedonists inside our head.

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This youtube video sent to us by Stuart Silverstone is impressive not just for its stretch of time, but style, medium and interpretation as well. Or as Stewart Brand said, this is an “amazing form of time travel…”

You can also see a complete list of artists and paintings here.

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When the Cassini-Huygens probe passed saturn last year it took an extraordinary photo of Saturn eclipsing the sun. Even more amazing was a pale blue dot in the corner of the photo.

That’s us, Earth.

An earlier version of this photo was also taken in 01990 by Voyager, but this new version with the eclipse, amazing clarity, and natural color is even more clarifying. That is all of us, all of our history, friends, family, hopes and dreams — forever. The other planets are not close, easy to move to, or hospitible. This always reminds me that we need to learn how to do terra-forming, not so we can to move to those planets, but to save our own.

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By studying mitochondrial DNA from samples over 1000 years old to the present, scientists have good evidence that human genetic diverstiy is on the decline. You can see the article from the Royal Society here (a great source of many forms of long term science in general).

“In a study covering five different periods of history, from 300 AD to the present day, and geographically spread across much of Europe, scientists have extracted the mitochondrial DNA from a sizable number of individuals in an effort to examine changes in diversity. The results, published in the Royal Society journal is intriguing to say the least. 1700 years ago, three out of every four individuals belonged to a different haplotype. In modern Europe, the number is only one in three. The researchers blame a combination of plague, selection of dominant lineages and culturally-inflicted distortions. The researchers say more work needs to be done, but are unclear if this involves archaeology or experiments involving skewing the data in the local female population.” -from Slashdot

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An amazingly in depth article by Long Now board member Paul Saffo on the intracacies of Forecasting appeared in the July 07 Harvard Business Review. The whole issue entitled Going The Distance is about long term thinking in the business realm and is highly recommended. Below are some highlights of Paul’s forcasting article…

The goal of forecasting is not to predict the future but to tell you what you need to know to take meaningful action in the present.

Rule 1: Define a Cone of Uncertainty
Rule 2: Look for the S Curve
Rule 3: Embrace the Things That Don’t Fit
Rule 4: Hold Strong Opinions Weakly
Rule 5: Look Back Twice as Far as You Look Forward
Rule 6: Know When Not to Make a Forecast

Cone of Uncertainty graphic from the sidebar in the article.

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San Bushman in Namibia. Linguists say the ‘click’ sound used in San speech may have been a feature of the proto-language. (Joy Tessman/NGI/GI)

“Linguists seek a time when we spoke as one

A controversial research project is trying to trace all human language to a common root.”

Nice article (CS Monitor) forwarded to me by Paul Saffo on the search for a single proto-language from which all others came. In the last seven years of the Rosetta Project our data has been used by linguists to try and prove out this theory including the work at Sante Fe Institute mentioned in the article.

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A silica glass DVD will be traveling on the soon to be launched Phoenix Mission to Mars. I have a sneaking suspicion that it will add to the lineage of data lost on Mars:

What would a Martian traveler find on the disk? Assuming that he or she could figure out how to decode the DVD, the “library” would yield 80 forward-looking stories and articles -Cosmic Log

And there is the rub… “Assuming that he or she could figure out how to decode the DVD”. Its interesting that even though within my lifetime we have moved from 8-track, to 4-track, to CD, to DVD, and now to HD DVD (sort of), that we are launching something that requires a hi-tech, and very opaque technology to play. We can only hope that they did not use any copy protection to further encrypt the data.

We seem to be stepping backward from the wonderful Voyager Record which included directions on how to make a record player. Ironically, of all the formats, an LP record is the only one that I have been able to play continuously throughout my life.

There is more detail on Visions of Mars and the contents of the DVD here.

Full disclosure: Long Now has its own text based disk of space debris on its way to a comet via the ESAs Rosetta Mission.

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