At the Singularity Summit earlier this month I came to see Paul Saffo’s talk.  Famed as a forecaster and future thinker, I was expecting to hear what lay ahead in the world as the steepness of the technology curve continues towards cliff like proportions.  Instead all were treated to a reminder that our new future is represented overwhelmingly in the negative by our artists and poets.  He points out that if we can only imagine an awful techno future, that that is what we will get.

So Saffo read the one piece he could find that depicts a world run by computers in a positive light.  Amazingly it was written in 01967 by someone who was likely programming computers with punch cards.  It is shown in the original above and the text can be found on Saffo’s journal.

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Lisa Chamberblain writing in the New York Times in an article Planned City Rises Within a City in the Southwest reports on the work of Peter Calthorpe, an urban architect who has long advocated mixed use, green sensibilities, and a long-now perspective. (I used to rent the lower half of Peter’s houseboat in Sausalito when I first moved to California.) Calthorpe has been designing a new city, Mesa del Sol, to be developed organically over time. The plans include functions to create jobs and develop civic infrastructure. Picture above is one of six sound studios which are among the first buildings to be built — for jobs. One of the directors of the emerging city has a nice quote;

“There should be a different word for this model of development,” said Mark Lautman, director of economic development for Mesa del Sol. “Developers with a five-year timeline come in, throw up some buildings, then get out. This is like building a city from scratch. We call this generational development.”

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An excellent editorial by Long Now board member Paul Saffo on the Planktos carbon sinking project came out today. It is the first in a monthly series he is writing for ABC News. Saffo does an excellent job in clarifying what has become a characteristic battle in the green tech industry.

On one side are “engineers,” people convinced that we must work our way out of the climate crisis by engaging in planet-scale efforts like sequestering carbon, unfurling orbital sunshades, tossing dust high in the atmosphere to block sunlight, or moving wholesale to nuclear power to eliminate coal-based emissions. On the opposite side are individuals — call them “druids”– who are equally convinced that the only sensible option is reduce our human planetary footprint, to conserve, preserve and remediate the threatened natural environment.

We have seen this now playing out all over the world where the “druids” have some out against many low-to-no carbon methods of generating power (wind, hydro, nuclear and in some cases solar all fit this bill). What is often missing from these arguments are the larger contexts that now global warming is forcing upon us. We see opposition of wind farms world wide due to ‘unsightliness’ or because they may kill several hundred birds per year (However it is estimated that there are 32,000 air quality related deaths each year in the US, and hundreds of thousands world wide due to coal burning alone).

It seems that while we argue over how pretty a wind mill is, the earth’s climate continues to change. And soon the New England beach homes whose views may be adulterated by the windmills will be underwater.

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The Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History in New York’s Central Park West features the Hayden Planetarium, a unique building designed to display amazing interstellar content.

Opened to the public on Feburary 19, 2000, the Frederick Phineas and Sandra Priest Rose Center for Earth and Space is an extensive update of the old Hayden Planetarium, which dated back to 1935. The $210 million, 335,000-square foot building, designed by James Polshek, features a seven-story-tall glass cube that encloses the iconic 87-foot-diameter Hayden Sphere.

It’s a huge structure, but what is really big is what’s displayed inside - a three-dimensional atlas of the universe and tour through charted space. Seated below the massive screen, the digital journey begins with an amazingly detailed orbital view of the planet Earth. Guided by my friend Carter Emmart at the controls, you slowly begin to pull back away from home. The latest datasets from researchers all over the world are loaded into the system and accurately mapped. As you pull back out of our solar system, the distances are rendered as you would see them - if you could somehow travel untold light years per hour with a window seat. Constellations are stretched beyond recognition as you visit familiar star clusters, occasionally looking back at home, a point of light impossible to discern among the countless others until Carter turns on the waypoint marker.

It’s an almost dizzying journey through the known universe, and an excellent way to get a little perspective on what’s really out there - and how big it is. If you’re ever in New York, it’s definitely worth a visit for the longest journey one can do while seated.

The academic arm of the Hayden Planetarium also publishes a desktop version of the Digital Universe Atlas, which looks very cool (but I have not tried).

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DVDs don’t. Tape doesn’t. Paper won’t. But rock does. In fact carved rock is about the only medium we have that might last 100,000 years. Most of our current electronic media will hardly last several decades. You need to continuously migrate info from one platform to the next as the current platform crumbles beneath you.

The first enthusiasms for a new electronic platform hint that perhaps “self-assembling nanowire of germanium antimony telluride” may have a working life of 100,000 years. According to this report in Physorg, this new nanoscale memory material is not only extremely small but also extremely durable. (The original work was published in the October 2007 issue of Nature Nanotechnology, which is not online yet.)

Tests showed extremely low power consumption for data encoding (0.7mW per bit). They also indicated the data writing, erasing and retrieval (50 nanoseconds) to be 1,000 times faster than conventional Flash memory and indicated the device would not lose data even after approximately 100,000 years of use, all with the potential to realize terabit-level nonvolatile memory device density.

“This new form of memory has the potential to revolutionize the way we share information, transfer data and even download entertainment as consumers,” Agarwal said. “This represents a potential sea-change in the way we access and store data.”

(This picture is of a different self-assembling nano circuit by IBM.)

We’ve heard that last claim before. But even if this memory would remain intact for 1,000 years, it would be a revolution in digital preservation.

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The New York Times reported yesterday on the crisis of language loss, and the work of linguists to document languages that are on the brink of vanishing without a trace. This picture of linguists David Harrison and Greg Anderson, and Charlie Muldunga, the only known speaker of Amurdag (a language of the Northern Territory previously thought to be extinct), shows that the tools of this enterprise are quite simple and inexpensive: an audio or video recorder and good ol’ paper and pencil. With the right training, even short periods of work between linguists and speakers can yield a wealth of valuable documentation.

In the past, linguistic documentation like the kind being made here was distilled into scientific publications that illustrated unique features of a language, or that supported or disproved particular theories of grammatical structure. Now, with heightened awareness of the impending loss of global linguistic diversity, language minority researchers and advocates are realizing the tremendous value of this documentation itself. It can be used by many people, for many different purposes – by scientists interested in the grammatical or typological properties of language, to communities whose heritage culture is represented and embodied by these languages. With enough interest, motivation and effort, this documentation can even provide the seeds of language revitalization, where communities reinvigorate a language and bring it back into active use.

But there is another concern: these incredible resources can become endangered themselves – mouldering on dusty shelves, forgotten in people’s attics or garages, until daughters or grandsons find them and not knowing their value, sweep them into the dustbin. Even digital documentation is at risk, if not from lapsing into similar obscurity, then sinking into a digital format obsolescence that renders them practically unrecoverable. A growing number of archives and digital efforts like The Rosetta Project are working to prevent this from happening, by providing format conversion, safe storage, and most importantly public access. In the end, it is people knowing and caring about these languages that will help bring them back from the brink.

Note: It turns out we can’t link to the Amurdag language in The Rosetta Project, since its not on the books, so to speak. It was previously thought to be extinct until this single speaker Charlie Muldunga was found. Yeah — oops! But this turns out to be a known phenomena in Australia, and has to do with ideas of multilingualism, language identity, and who can claim to be a speaker of a language.

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I have often wondered what the brick circles along many of the streets in San Francisco are. I had always thought they were some kind of historical marker. It turns out they represent a nice piece of long term civic planning and disaster preparedness. Each one marks a 75,000 gallon cistern that is an emergency water supply for earthquakes and fires. These were installed during the rebuilding effort after the 01906 earthquake. I have not found too much documentation on it except for this little snippet from Channel 5 news.

It is a reminder that many civic water projects represent some of the most forward thinking in western society… at least from an engineering point of view. From a societal point of view however, some of this long term planning to feed cities with water, has had disastrous effects on the upstream and downstream users of the water. Owens Valley to LA, The Colorado River to the south west, and now the Great Basin to Las Vegas are all incredibly forward looking in their engineering, but terribly short sighted in the long arc of societal resource allocation.

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In today’s New York Times is an article explaining how they are going to open their archives and web site up - sort of. It is indeed great they are taking away the requirement of logging in to see articles, and they are allowing free access to the “TimeSelect” service (previously $8/month).

The most interesting part however is this note:

In addition to opening the entire site to all readers, The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain.

They put this out there like it does not require any explanation. As though no one might care about what happened between 01922-01987. I would think that the time frame encompassing such events as Prohibition, The Great Depression, World War II, and the conflicts of Korea and Viet Nam might be worth at least a footnote.

I would venture that what happened was Steamboat Willie. The first appearance of Mickey Mouse was in the twenties, and therefore the de-facto line in the sand drawn through our culture, from which Disney will never allow Mickey (and by default, anything else) to fall out of copyright. The Disney copyright lobby has done much to keep copyright increasing by more than one year - per year, in order to keep its “intellectual” property safely in their hands.  While I am certainly fine with Disney continuing their reign over the little mouse, depriving the rest of us of works of great cultural value, such as 62 years of The New York Times, during some of the most formative years of our nation seems a bit out of whack.

I would assume that after 01987 The New York Times is able to attribute all its work and photos in accordance with modern copyright laws, and therefore are able to offer that (which is actually no small feat). But for the 62 years of unsharable data, there is apparently no good solution. The question that this begs in my mind is… What is more valuable to our culture? An make believe mouse, or 62 years of The New York Times?

This 62 year copyright gap does a nice job of pointing out where our intellectual property laws have become so onerous, that a large and venerable institution such as The New York Times simply cannot clear the rights in their own archive. Much smaller groups and individuals are in an even worse bind, we have lost great pieces of cultural history to this problem such as “Eyes on the Prize“.

I wonder what people will think about this time far into the future? A dark ages — not created by war, famine, depression, or even technological failure, but a small whistling mouse.

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In the early 1980s Gwyneth Cravens was one of the protesters against the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant on Long Island, and also participated in ban-the-bomb rallies. After 15 years of deepening familiarity with nuclear power, she says she still would ban the bomb, but she now regrets that the Shoreham reactor was shut down.

Who changed her mind was a nuclear expert at Sandia Labs in Albuquerque, D. Richard Anderson, known as “Rip.” “Here was someone who thinks in thousands of years, about climate, about nuclear waste storage,” she said. “He applies to nuclear issues the same probabilistic risk assessment that helps us understand what we’re facing with climate change.”

One concept that altered Cravens’ perspective was realizing what “baseload” requires. Rip Anderson, on the stage with her, explained that baseload is the fundamental currency of grid power. It is massive power constantly available 24/7. It comes from only three sources— fossil fuels, hydro-electric dams, and nuclear. Hydro is maxed out. Fossil fuels have to be cut back to slow global warming. That leaves only nuclear growth to handle the expected doubling of energy demand in the world by 2030.

Anderson added that his first scientific discipline was oceanography, so one of his greatest concerns about CO2 loading of the atmosphere is that the resulting carbonic acid in the oceans is dissolving the calcifying organisms and could effectively end the crucial carbon sink that oceans provide.

Cravens went into detail about the harm brought by coal, which currently provides 51% of US electricity (while hydro is 7%, nuclear 20%). Estimates are that coal pollution causes 24,000 deaths a year in the US, 400,000 a year in China (not counting the 5,000 who die annually in Chinese coal mines).

She also mentioned the still-incomplete science of the effects of low radiation— the amounts below 10,000 millirems. People encounter much higher levels of natural radiation at higher elevations and in some radon-rich areas, but there is no indication of higher cancer rates in those places. The fears of long-lingering cancer effects in the Chernobyl region have not proven out.

Comparing the environmental footprint of nuclear versus coal was the most persuasive mind-changer for Cravens. Coal involves vast quanities of mine spoil, vast quantities of fuel, vast quantities of pollution (including mercury and uranium), and vast quantities of carbon dioxide poured into the atmosphere. Nuclear, by contrast, uses the most concentrated form of energy in the world, the plants are small, and the waste amounts to one Coke can per person’s lifetime of energy use.

There is said to be no geological repository for nuclear waste yet, but Rip Anderson pointed out that the WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant) in a deep salt formation in New Mexico has been operating since 1999. It now handles only military waste, but there is no reason except political that it could not take all of our civilian spent fuel.

Two questions from the audience addressed possible limitations on fast growth of nuclear energy in the world. One was, “Won’t we quickly run out of uranium?” Anderson said that 10% of US electricity currently comes from recycled Soviet nuclear warheads, and we haven’t begun to draw the energy from decommissioned US warheads. The price for uranium ore has been so low in recent decades that mines closed and discovery stopped. Now that the price is rising, mines are reopening and new reserves are being found. (They’re mostly in Canada and Australia, some in the US.) Meanwhile, spent fuel in the US still has 98% of its energy in it. Once we reprocess the spent fuel the way the rest of the world does, we will extract more of that energy, and the final amount of waste will be drastically smaller.

Second question: “Are there enough nuclear engineers in the pipeline to deal with a worldwide nuclear renaissance?” Answer: No. That’s the most limiting resource at this point.

Gwenyth Craven’s new book, The Power to Save the World.

–Stewart Brand

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We have recently resolved Bet 117 on Long Bets about the adjusted cost of energy. It was an interesting case where we had very specific criteria for who would win the bet, yet we could not adjudicate it when the time came. The bettors cited the Department of Energy published numbers to resolve their bet. However in the first quarter of 02006 when the DOE posted their numbers, they then quickly retracted them. It turns out they had several years worth of data incorrect due to the deceptive data from the Enron energy kerfuffle. It took the DOE over a year to straighten it all out. In any case we have yet another resolved bet. Congratulations to Steve Kurtz on winning the bet, and to both bettors who patiently awaited the results, and agreeing quite gentlemanly in the end.

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