Becoming a benign dominant

To track how humans became Earth’s dominant animal, Ehrlich began with a photo of a tarsier in a tree. The little primate had a predator’s binocular vision and an insect-grabber’s fingers. When (possibly) climate change drove some primates out of the trees, they developed a two-legged stance to get around on the savanna. Then the brain swoll up, and the first major dominance tool emerged—language with syntax.

About 2.5 million years ago, the beginnings of human culture became evident with stone tools. “We don’t have a Darwin of cultural evolution yet,” said Ehrlich. He defined cultural evolution as everything we pass on in a non-genetic way. Human culture developed slowly-the stone tools little changed from millennium to millennium, but it accelerated. There was a big leap about 50,000 years ago, after which culture took over human evolution—our brain hasn’t changed in size since then.

With agriculture’s food surplus, specialization took off. Inuits that Ehrlich once studied had a culture that was totally shared; everyone knew how everything was done. In high civilization, no one grasps a millionth of current cultural knowledge. Physicists can’t build a TV set.

Writing freed culture from the limitations of memory, and burning old solar energy (coal and oil) empowered vast global population growth. Our dominance was complete. Ehrlich regretted that we followed the competitive practices of chimps instead of bonobos, who resolve all their disputes with genital rubbing.

“The human economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Earth’s natural systems,” said Ehrlich, and when our dominance threatens the ecosystem services we depend on, we have to understand the workings of the cultural evolution that gave us that dominance. The current two greatest threats that Ehrlich sees are climate change (10 percent chance of civilization ending, and rising) and chemical toxification of the biosphere. “Every cubic centimeter of the biosphere has been modified by human activity.”

The main climate threat he sees is not rising sea levels (”You can outwalk that one”) but the melting of the snowpack that drives the world’s hydraulic civilizations— California agriculture totally dependent on the Sierra snowpack, the Andes running much of Latin America, the Himalayan snows in charge of southeast Asia. With climate in flux, Ehrlich said, we may be facing a millennium of constant change. Already we see the outbreak of resource wars over water and oil.

He noted with satisfaction that human population appears to be leveling off at 9 to 10 billion in this century, though the remaining increase puts enormous pressure on ecosystem services. He’s not worried about depopulation problems, because “population can always be increased by unskilled laborers who love their work.”

The major hopeful element he sees is that cultural evolution can move very quickly at times. The Soviet Union disappeared overnight. The liberation of women is a profound cultural shift that occurs in decades. Facing dire times, we need to understand how cultural evolution works in order to shift our dominance away from malignant and toward the benign.

In the Q & A, Ehrlich described work he’s been doing on cultural evolution. He and a graduate student in her fifties at Stanford have been studying the progress of Polynesian canoe practices as their population fanned out across the Pacific. What was more conserved, they wondered, practical matters or decoration? Did the shape of a canoe paddle change constantly, driven by the survival pressure of greater efficiency, or did the carving and paint on the paddles change more, driven by the cultural need of each group to distinguish itself from the others.

Practical won. Once a paddle shape proved really effective, it became a cultural constant.

–Stewart Brand

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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.

*Iqbal Quadir on “Technology Empowers the Poorest” -video now available

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Those of you reading this blog may remember my post about The Longest Conversation discussing the Arecibo Message, or Kevin Kelly’s on the Voyager Disk. But this week Lore Sjöberg over at AltText did the best, or at least most humorous, survey of messages sent into space.  It’s worth reading the whole thing, but here is an excerpt:

The Pioneer Plaques

These are identical, gold-plated plaques attached to the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft. They feature a picture of the solar system, a picture of the probes and a pictorial representation of the hyperfine transition of neutral hydrogen. Ring any bells? No? Well, it also has a picture of a naked man and woman on it. Ah, yes. Now you remember.

Many people considered this nothing more than interstellar porn. Others objected to the fact that the man is the one waving his hand, presumably to give the woman time to bake the aliens a nice batch of muffins. My objection is that the people depicted have no body hair at all. Aliens are gonna come down and think we’re living in symbiosis with our pubes.
Grade: C

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 In my research of large pendulums for the 10,000 Year Clock I came across the beautifully designed tuned mass damper in the Taipei 101 tower.  Basically really tall buildings are themselves massive pendulums, as they are built to sway in the wind and earthquakes.  However very tall buildings in earthquake zones need something to dampen this motion.

These mass dampers do that, and are used widely including the ones in the new buildings here in San Francisco that use baffled water tanks.  However the one pictured above is the first one I have seen designed with a high degree of aesthetics in mind…  It was clearly designed impress people on the building tour.  Below is a small animated image of how it counteracts building sway, it pretty much does what you do with your own weight when you are standing on a stool changing that light bulb and it starts to sway.

As pointed out in a couple of the comments there is an astounding video of this mass dampening pendulum in action as the recent earthquakes in China reached the Taipei tower.   One guy had the presence of mind to run in and video tape the pendulum in action…

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Where the pervasive ones and zeros of digital media have come to dominate our lives and almost all of our modern day histories, we are slowly reaching the point where we are having to stop and rethink just how viable this media is for keeping our history intact and readable in the distant future. The hard truth is, it really isn’t viable. Where books – our friendly and familiar purveyors of history – have been known to survive for hundreds of years, digital media has an average shelf life of ten years. And that’s if you’re lucky.Many of you are sitting in front of your computer right now asking yourselves, “So, what can I do?” Librarians, archivists, and computer scientists are diligently working on large scale solutions to preserve our at risk and historically important information, but certainly you want to know what you can do at home to ensure that your files and your history can be accessed and used ten, twenty, or even ten thousand years from now.

While there is, as of yet, no hard guarantee that your family photos will be around 10,000 years from now, there are a few things that you can do to keep them around long enough for the next generation to enjoy and pass on. We have some basic tips for keeping your personal digital data alive and kicking through your lifetime, and if you want to shoot for the ten thousand year mark, these tips can get you headed in that direction, too.

The key concepts to remember here are Format, Media, Metadata, and Multiple copies. FMMM, if you will. Giving a little attention to each of these elements can ensure that your data will survive at least until the next great technology change, and most likely beyond it.

Format. Always try to use the most common and least proprietary file formats when saving your files. If you have important email files that you would like to preserve, save them outside of your email platform as simple text files. For other documents, it has been recommended that they be saved in the PDF or PDF/Archive format. Though the PDF format is technically considered to be proprietary, the fact that the source code is available and the PDF format is now universally accepted, it is a good solution for keeping your files and their context intact. It is important to remember that for image and sound files, the larger, higher quality files are much more readable and can be used in many more ways than files that have been reduced or compressed. Compressing files for storage or emailing causes significant data loss, so avoid this when possible.

Media. Some good advice from the Library of Congress is to never use re-writable discs to store your data for the long-term. Re-writable discs may be good to transfer files from one location to another, but they are problematic in terms of access and how quickly they deteriorate and become obsolete. The best place to store your data is in one large external hard drive or even with an online data storage service. External hard drives are becoming much less expensive to purchase, are more durable, and have greater overall longevity. Plus, having all of your files in one place will save you from having to search through multiple discs for one file.

Metadata. Meta-what? Metadata is the data about data and is the secret weapon of the pros in digital preservation. You may best know metadata as keywords and “tags”. Including metadata within or in reference to your digital object not only helps you and others find the object, but it can also provide structure, context, authority, rights information, and validation of the object; all things that are important for long-term preservation. Metadata standards have been developed specifically for digital preservation, and adhering to these standards when you create your own metadata will lend even greater longevity to your personal digital archive.

Multiple Copies. Stanford University has developed a system to preserve access to online journal subscriptions called, LOCKSS, or Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe. Where the materials that you may be looking to save are different than online journals, the same underlying principle holds true for any digital preservation effort. Keeping to this principle, you should absolutely back up your data. As mentioned, you can do this either on an external hard drive, with an online data storage service, and even better, BOTH. Your best bet is to have your personal archives backed up and stored in more than one location. In true mimicry of the LOCKSS model, you may even consider starting a file sharing network with your friends and family where you can collectively back up your files in several remote locations.

Any one of these activities will bring you closer to securing your digital files for a long voyage through time, and obviously the more you do the better. If you would like to learn more/do more, check out the online resources below. Happy archiving!

For Further Reading

The Library of Congress guide to “What You Can Do.” A great, simple guide published by the masters of archiving. Probably the best layman’s guide out there. Check out “Preserving Your Digital Memories” and “Caring for Your Collections.”
The Library of Congress guide to “What You Can Do”

Wikipedia article on digital preservation. A great beginning guide to the who, what, where, and why of digital preservation. Definitely check out the links and references for further reading.
Wikipedia article on digital preservation

Stewart Brand’s essay on digital preservation, “Written on the Wind.” This essay provides a great overview of the digital preservation problems we are facing. Astute observations of our present needs as seen from ten years ago.
Stewart Brand’s essay on digital preservation, “Written on the Wind.”

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 The always cool Genetic Archaeology blog has a nifty article on a team of researchers that have managed to get some 2000 year old dates to germinate and produce a tree.  The dates were excavated from the Masada which as built 2044 years ago, and carbon dating of other seeds confirmed their age.  Not quite Jurassic Park, but it could be beginning of a new attraction…  The Biblical Garden.

After eight weeks, a small green shoot emerged from one seed, and by 26 months, Methuselah had grown to a height of nearly four feet. Except for a few white spots on its first leaves, the plant remains healthy.

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Kevin Kelly has a wonderfully detailed post about an organizational ‘hypercard’ system (with emphasis on the ‘card’) that as near as he can tell has gone extinct.  Most interestingly Kelly posits that techno-extinction is actually a very rare thing:

Usually someone, somewhere will continue to employ the most ancient technology. There are probably more people making swords by hand now than in the past. On any given weekend in the US there will be a gathering of weekend flint knappers churning out mounds of magnificent arrow heads, using the exact technology of the stone age. Online you can buy new valves for a Stanley steam powered car, or leather parts for a horse drawn buggy, just as you could 100 years ago. In some parts of Africa and Asia any ancient tool is still manufactured in ancient ways.  It is hard to find an old technology that is not available in any form any where on earth.

While I think that whole, evolved technologies going extinct is likely quite rare, my bet is that the record of the steps that got us to many of those technologies is rarer still.  In fact if you take Kelly’s note above, that there are likely more people knapping arrowheads now than 40,000 year ago, he is likely right (on shear numbers, not per capita of course).  But what about all the bad or inefficient techniques along the way to high quality knappery?  Those are lost and unpracticed, just like the Indecks card system shown above, and many other dead computer media replaced by newer better versions. If we look at systems for organizing data now we can see a gradual lock in occurring toward relational databases (ackkk Oracle!).  Once this paradigmatic lock in is complete, my bet is that many people will be using it well past its time of pure usefullness.

This loss of process is likely very widespread throughout all technologies, it often results in the final evolved technology surviving, but we often forget how we got there.  Evidence of this is in the anecdotes of how a modern designer or engineer tries to improve an ancient system, only to find out that the ancient system is vastly superior (W. McDonough often cites the black Bedouin tent as an example, and S. Lansing has a similar story from Balinese water and agricultural systems).  Until a technology is mature and standardized, which our digital tech is only beginning to be, we will continue to lose a lot of information stored on these obsolescing systems like Indecks.

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Long term fire.  It turns out there are many very long lasting fires.  I became interested in the way fire moves underground back in 02000 when I saw parts of the Long Now property on fire, and the fire was spreading through the root systems of trees.  Every 5 minutes or so a tree would just appear to spontaneously combust.  That fire eventually blew up in near nuclear proportions (mushroom cloud and everything) and tragically took out a swath of the ancient bristlecones.

Since then I have noted several long term and underground fires (which also  produce massive amount of global CO2).  The one pictured above from Uzbekistan is one of the more photogenic.  I will keep the list below updated as I find more (like I do with the Underground Wonders post), so feel free to make notes of ones you know about in the comments and they will be added.

• Mt Wingen Australia underground coal fire first noted by westerners around 01828, but it is predicted that it has been burning for over 6000 years.
• “Fossil Reactors” are naturally occurring underground fission reactions in Uranium deposits of Oklo Africa, estimated at around 1.7 billion years old.
• “Door to Hell” (pictured above) Near Darvaz in Uzbekistan, burning since ~01972
• Coal mine seam fires, some of these have been burning since the Qing dynasty in China, and the Centralia PA fire has been burning since 01961.
• Some tire fires have lasted several years

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Davide Bocelli recently sent in this entertaining tidbit. Apparently the Prince of Wales just remembered that the crown owes someone some money. The thing of it is that the unpaid bill was from 357 years ago left by Charles II for £453 and 15 pence. He repaid last week, sans interest however. (here is his speech)

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Most companies don’ t live as long as most humans. Their relative short life has to do with culture’s rapidly shifting interests, and the difficulty of transmitting values and goals beyond the original founders. When viewed this way, it is a wonder any group of workers would continue to exist after the founding group vanishes. It is simply astounding that some companies could outlive the industry they began in, or even the country they were started in.

The oldest living company today is one from Japan. It is a 1,290-year-old hotel located at a hot spring, run by 46 generations of the Hoshi family. Like most of the 100 oldest companies in the world today, it is a family-owned business. It is also probably one you’ve never heard of.  If you check out this list of the oldest 100 companies in the world, you might need to scroll to the last half before you’d recognized one of the names.

Until last year the oldest living company was a Japanese construction company which was founded in 578 . Then in 2007, after 40  generations and 1,430 years it went kaput. Not that there was any pressure on the descendants. But there must be a good story there. Why now? What gave out?

Number 8 on the list is Ambert d’Auvergne a paper company founded in France in 1326. By the time Picasso bought paper from them, they were already 600 years old and venerable. Google, by the way is 10 years old. Microsoft, that ancient dinosaur of a company, is 23. Can you imagine either of these companies in 600 years?

Ambert d’Auvergne

Some computer scientists believe that certain bits of essential software code today, such as TCP/IP, or even the unix kernel, will still be operating 600 years from now. Like the primeval Krebs or TCA energy cycle in cells, these routines form the foundation for more complex systems, but still run unchanged after billions of years of evolution. It is not inconceivable that Page Rank code might be running in search 600 years, operating beneath massive other bits, and it is no more inconceivable that a company called Google might still oversee it.  By then search would be an boring commodity like beer, hotel rooms, or paper. No one would recognize the name.

The above list of ultra-longevity is far from definitive. For instance it lists some family farms and plantations in the US, when clearly there are many family farms worldwide that are still successfully operating today after centuries. They aren’t mentioned. The list also includes almost no companies from China or India, which probably have more century-old family companies each than the rest of the world put together.

Despite the aura and glam surrounding start-ups, most of the businesses today — in the US and the world — are still family owned. They work in humdrum occupations such as food, lodging, fabrication — exactly the kind of businesses that the oldest 100 are in. It is not hard to imagine some hi-tech industries today (web design?) becoming the domain of family businesses in the future.

About 85% of the oldest-lived companies listed have websites. I bet the ones that will fail in the next 5 years will be in the 15% that don’t have a website in 2008.

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