Since we are hoping to build a monument of cultural significance, it was great to come across this wonderful collection of blueprints and process photos from the building of the Eiffel Tower in the 01880s. What is particularly inspiring is that they built it before widespread use of electricity, the telephone, and the automobile, making the technology used to build it little better than that of the ancient wonders (excepting steel of course).

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This week Shell oil published an article by their president Jeroen van der Veer about how he sees the future of energy through 02100. It is surprisingly non-corporate and shows how at least one of the largest oil companies in the world views the coming energy and environmental shortfalls. Most surprising to me is he concludes with an outright call for governments to institute a global carbon capture and trade system…

By 2100, the world’s energy system will be radically different from today’s. Renewable energy like solar, wind, hydroelectricity, and biofuels will make up a large share of the energy mix, and nuclear energy, too, will have a place. Humans will have found ways of dealing with air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. New technologies will have reduced the amount of energy needed to power buildings and vehicles.

Indeed, the distant future looks bright, but much depends on how we get there. There are two possible routes. Let’s call the first scenario Scramble. Like an off-road rally through a mountainous desert, it promises excitement and fierce competition. However, the unintended consequence of “more haste” will often be “less speed,” and many will crash along the way.

The alternative scenario can be called Blueprints, which resembles a cautious ride, with some false starts, on a road that is still under construction. Whether we arrive safely at our destination depends on the discipline of the drivers and the ingenuity of all those involved in the construction effort. Technological innovation provides the excitement.

(more…)

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One of most needed (but still absent) instruments for long-term thinking is a predictions archive. Stewart Brand and I fist conceived of the Long Bets project as a supplementary agency that would work best as part of a great prediction registry. The registry would include any and all predictions about the future. The ideal archive of predictions would include the thousands if not millions of predictions generated each day as a by-product of our ordinary speculations and inadvertent forecasts, not just those designated as a deliberate prediction. 

Like everything else it touches, the Wikipedia has the power to make hard things easy. I recently discovered Wikipedia  pages for the subject of future years — such as 2020 or 2029 and so on — can serve as a germ of what Fringehog calls a Futurepedia.

As an example there is a fantastic prediction made on the pages of 2010, concerning the pronunciation of the year 2010 and beyond.

According to a recent press release, David Crystal, author of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, has predicted that the change of pronunciation to “twenty X” will occur in 2011, as “twenty eleven”, explaining that the way people pronounce years depends on rhythm, rather than logic. Crystal claims that the rhythm or “flow” of “two thousand (and) ten”, beats that of “twenty ten”, but the flow of “twenty eleven” beats “two thousand (and) eleven”. Alternatively, Ian Brookes, editor-in-chief of Chambers Dictionary, suggests the change will occur in 2013. And finally, the UK Times has suggested 2020 as a final timeframe for the change, saying “If people can have “twenty-twenty” vision, then surely they should also live in the year “twenty twenty.”

Some suggest that after the “twenty X” pronunciation for current and future 21st century years has taken hold, future references to early 21st century years will change accordingly from the previous “two thousand (and) X” method; thus, they say, future generations will refer to the date of the 9/11 attacks in the United States as September 11, “twenty oh-one.”

Wikipedia’s entry for the years 2020 include vernacular predictions for that year such as:

* By mid-decade, Alpine glaciers are likely to contain only half their 1970’s volume.

* NASA expects to land another group of astronauts on the moon.

* Voyager 2 is expected to stop transmitting back to Earth in the 2020s.

* Futurist Ray Kurzweil puts 2029 as the year most likely for the Singularity.

These forecasts can be thought of as the official future — what conventional wisdom expects. Even though no one thinks Ray Kurzweil is conventional, I would argue that anything that persists on Wikipedia can be thought of as conventional wisdom by definition.

If expanded greatly the official future timeline might prove to be a useful document of what we expect.

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 Nikon Japan has put together a nice Powers of Ten style interactive Flash animation that does a great job of showing us scale with all kinds of clickable examples called Universcale.  Skip the intro and go right to the interactive part.  Thanks to Stuart Silverstone for sending this in.

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Can art by accident be bred
And if it were would art be dead?

There is a classic thought experiment made famous by French mathematician Émile Borel, the “infinite monkey theorem“, which states — and I paraphrase — that with enough monkeys pounding away for enough time at enough keyboards (and sustained, presumably, by a large enough supply of bananas and Mountain Dew) that one would would eventually happen to produce the works of Shakespeare.

Clearly there’s a lot of redundancy built into this formula — it’s not a recipe for great art, on the whole, but it is an interesting way to crack open one’s head to accommodate infinity.

Against this backdrop comes veteran Guardian (UK) technology columnist Victor Keegan with a website called Shakespeare’s Monkey which spouts random text in the eventual hope of matching the Shakespearean couplet above.

It’s a billion year project, according to Keegan, and so (click “about”) he suggests:

If it doesn’t [happen] in your life time, pass it on to your children.

If you feel we have set the computer too difficult a task, consider what Shakespeares monkeys are thinking as they try to write Hamlet.

It’s a great gimmick, but might benefit from the addition of a few statistics, such as the rate of random line generation, the running time and total number of trials to date, etc.

In any case, Long Now regulars will be familiar with founding board member Brian Eno’s preoccupation with generative art, described for instance in his SALT presentation with Will Wright, and exemplified by his installation 77 Million Paintings presented in San Francisco last summer.

There seems an interesting comparison to be drawn between the generative art (processes designed to produce unpredictable results, as in 77 Million Paintings) and the probabilistic crapshoot involved in attempting to chance upon a particular configuration which coincides with an existing work of art. The former’s algorithm is crafted to produce endless novelty, the latter to replicate a known result. The former is complex enough to come up with a delightful string of non-trivial surprises, the latter streams out nonsense almost all of the time.

Shakespeare’s Monkey poses — and performs — an interesting two-part question: “Can art by accident be bred / And if it were would art be dead?”

It seems to me that the answer to the first part is a qualified yes. In the hands of an aesthetically as well as technically gifted creator, the conditions for producing art (of varying specific characteristics and qualities, to be sure) can be set in motion. Why a qualified yes? Because, to me, there’s a tension between breeding and accident. Breeding is a form of design — it uses accident in a very deliberate way. So, if you’re designing the breeding process, what’s bred thereby isn’t really accidental.

Now, the second part; does this kill art? I’d say of course it doesn’t. Even where there’s more accident built into the setup (a “dumb” algorithm cycling randomly through letters of the alphabet barely counts as “breeding”) it is recognition of a particular result, against human criteria, that makes it art. The art is revealed as being where it always begins and ends: in the eye of the beholder.

While we wait a few more million years for Shakespeare’s Monkey to hit the right letters, truly generative art (new techniques of cultural breeding) is evolving in leaps and bounds. Eno in 01995:

What people are going to be selling more of in the future is not pieces of music, but systems by which people can customize listening experiences for themselves. Change some of the parameters and see what you get. So, in that sense, musicians would be offering unfinished pieces of music - pieces of raw material, but highly evolved raw material, that has a strong flavor to it already. I can also feel something evolving on the cusp between “music,” “game,” and “demonstration” - I imagine a musical experience equivalent to watching John Conway’s computer game of Life or playing SimEarth, for example, in which you are at once thrilled by the patterns and the knowledge of how they are made and the metaphorical resonances of such a system. Such an experience falls in a nice new place - between art and science and playing. This is where I expect artists to be working more and more in the future.

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Wired and Reuters are reporting on the latest work by Craig Venter published in Science this week. Venter’s synthetic life program completed the second of three steps in creating a synthetic organism.

“We consider this the second in our three-step process to create the first synthetic organism,” said J. Craig Venter, president of the J. Craig Venter Institute where scientists performed the study, on Thursday during a teleconference. “What remains now that we have this complete synthetic chromosome … is to boot this up in a cell.”

Venter will be speaking on Monday, February 25th as part of our Seminars About Long-term Thinking series.

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The latest Seminars About Long-term Thinking are now available as audio downloads or podcasts and in hi-res video for Long Now members.

* Paul Saffo on “Embracing Uncertainty: the secret to effective forecasting” - audio up now, video coming soon
* Jon Ippolito & Joline Blais on “At the Edge of Art”

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The Iowa Electronic Markets (IEM) trades real money in bets on future cultural events. Prediction markets sell contracts for an easily decidable future event (someone wins an election, a commodity hits a certain price, a movie sells X number of tickets). If that contract comes true, the different between what the price of the contract was when bought and its full price will be pocketed by the winner. So if $1 contracts for Bill Clinton winning the election were selling for 35 cents when you bought them, you would have profited 75 cents after the election.

Outside of the IEM most US predictions markets trade with token money to escape uncertain gambling and investor laws, which may prohibit real money trades. But in all prediction markets the price of a contract is decided by the collective demand, or in other words, by the collective mind. Outcomes with low expectations earn a low price. If you are a contrarian you can buy low value, low-expectation contracts, and if conventional wisdom is wrong (at that time), you’ll gain.

But the odd thing is that in these markets, the conventional wisdom of the crowd is usually right.

Even with token money, prediction markets have proven to be extremely reliable forecasters. Using real money, the Iowa Electronic Market for presidential elections has been uncannily accurate for many decades. According to Business Week article 12 years ago,

[IEM] predicted the vote totals of the past two Presidential elections within two-tenths of a percentage point, outperforming national polls. It also has closely tracked elections overseas, never wavering from Boris Yeltsin, for instance, as he won reelection in Russia.

in October 2006, CNN Money reported IEM’s predicted outcome for the mid-term elections, which was then a month away:

The Iowa Electronic Market, which offers contracts on the outcomes of political and economic events, says the percentage of investors in the 2006 Congressional Control market believing Republicans will hold full control of Congress has dropped to 39 percent from 58.5 percent on Sept. 28, when news was revealed about Rep. Mark Foley’s correspondence with pages. Those believing the Democrats will take full control of Congress have risen to 22.9 percent from 11.2 percent Sept. 29, the day the Florida Republican resigned.

The IEM market detected the swing in political moods that resulted in the Republican loss of Congress.

A few years earlier, in the summer of 2004, the IEM favored a Bush re-election win even when the pundits and polls showed Kerry in the lead. This out-of-sync prediction so puzzled many observers that some wondered (Salon article) if the IEM was systemically biased towards Republicans. But again, it was not bias, but simply accurate prediction; the IEM was uncannily accurate in forecasting Bush’s win.

So what about this year’s presidential election? What does the oracle of the IEM say about the prospects of a Democrat or Republican president in 2008? As of yesterday, here are the price of contracts for each.  It is still a close race, with the price of a Democrat president (blue) slightly higher than a Republican one (red). Of course we are 9 months away.

The price of party candidates is a lot more interesting. Below is the graph of the price of each of the major Democrat nominees winning the nomination. The recent double reversal between Clinton and Obama is clear, as is the sinking possibilities of the other contenders.

But the zig zags of the Democrats pale with the mess in the Republicans. Their prices are all over the map with very little clear trajectory, until very recently. For the first time, the price of a Republican candidate (McCain) breaks the 50 cent (half of the $1 value) threshold, while the others are sinking rapidly. According to the collective wisdom of the IEM, as of yesterday, the only other Republican in the race is Romney.

Anything can happen in the next 9 months. The IEM doesn’t see the future. It is merely a very quantifiable measure of aggregate expectations now. But because real money is at risk, people tend to bet on what they think will happen, vs. what they want to happen, and in aggregate, this method seems to yield better forecasts than polls or pundits.

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A buried time capsule is a popular way to mark an anniversary for a school or community. Hundreds of thousands of capsules have been buried in the last 50 years. Every now and then one is remembered and resurrected. In 1957 the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma entombed a brand new 1957 Plymouth Belvedere, stuffed with momentos, as a time capsule to celebrate the state’s centennial.

A few days before the time capsule was opened, Robert Lauer, a local reporter set the scene:

The Plymouth was sprayed with cosmoline, wrapped in plastic, and buried in a concrete tomb, placed on a steel plate so the wheels were off the ground. Stuffed in the trunk were five gallons of gasoline in glass jugs, oil, a case of beer, and other artifacts. Placed inside the glove compartment at the last minute were the contents of a woman’s purse containing fourteen bobby pins, a ladies compact, plastic rain cap, combs, a tube of lipstick, pack of gum, facial tissues, $2.73 in money, and a pack of cigarettes. Also placed in were unpaid parking tickets and a bottle of tranquilizers which the winner of the car may need. During the party in 1957, residents were asked to guess the population of Tulsa in 2007; the guesses were sealed in a steel container and placed in the car. The winner or their heir will receive the Plymouth and a $100 trust fund which was accruing interest since 1957, (reportedly now containing $400). The car was buried in downtown Tulsa with traffic cruising nearby; some were concerned that vibrations may have cracked the concrete tomb allowing moisture to enter. Will the 1957 Plymouth be in mint condition or will it require itself to come back to life like its sister car Christine? I will be there for the unveiling on 15 June 2007 for either a pristine 1957 Plymouth with 7 miles on her or a pile of rust with four dried out rubber tires!

It will be the event of a lifetime!

When the capsule was opened, the prize was not what everyone wanted.

I kind of like the gunk covering the car. It’s unique and transforms it into an art piece. One could see it in an museum gallery. As this page make clear, the same car was better preserved outside the capsule by ordinary buffs.

One conclusion from this mishap is that time capsules should attempt to preserve not popular items, but things that have no fans, no enthusiasts, no one to care for them. You should stuff them with artifacts that people currently find dumb, stupid, worthless, and insignificant. That’s the stuff that won’t be saved, and will therefore be of prime interest in 100 years.

If you are making a time capsule today don’t put in an iPod, a copy of Lost, a Prada bag, or a Nike sneaker. And for goodness sake, waterproof it.

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Image: John Dransfield / Royal Botanic Gardens via AP

Associated Press reports (via Discovery Science):

A self-destructing palm tree that flowers once every 100 years and then dies has been discovered on the Indian Ocean island of Madagascar, botanists said Thursday.
[…]
Local villagers have known about it for years although none had seen it in flower until last year.
[…]
Puzzling [author of the new study Dr. John] Dransfield is how botanists had missed such a “whopping palm” until now. According to him it is the largest palm species in the country but there appear to be only about 100 in existence.
[…]
Dransfield suggests the plant has been quietly living and dramatically dying in Madagascar since the island split with mainland India 80 million years ago.

It seems that we have here another patron plant for the Long Now, joining the long lived bristlecones atop Mt Washington.

If we must anthropomorphise such findings (and why not?), then unlike the steadfast bristlecone, whose multimillenial lifespan in the rugged environs of eastern Nevada seems to buttress the stoic contention that adversity breeds longevity, there may be an even more tragic, beautiful message here:

“It’s spectacular. It does not flower for maybe 100 years and when it’s like this it can be mistaken for other types of palm,” said Mijoro Rakotoarinivo, who works for the London botanical gardens in Madagascar.

“But then a large shoot, a bit like an asparagus, grows out of the top of the tree and starts to spread. You get something that looks a bit like a Christmas tree growing out of the top of the palm,” he said.

The branches of this shoot then become covered in hundreds of tiny white flowers that ooze with nectar, attracting insects and birds.

But the effort of flowering and fruiting depletes the tree so much that within a few months it collapses and dies, said [Dransfield].

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