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 Ehrlich on “The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment” - video now available
*Edward Burtynsky on “The 10,000-year Gallery” - audio up, video coming soon
Stuart Kendall (one of our clock engineers) just sent in the the link to this stunning piece of work… The AION four story tall rolling ball clock installed in a Bucherer store in Lucerne Switzerland, and utilizing 150 crystal spheres. “The project was entrusted to Hanns-Martin Wagner from Switzerland and Mark Bischof from Netherlands. Work on the sculpture began in spring 2006 with a series of detailed feasibility studies, and the project was completed in 12 months.” Some of the other stunning work by these guys can be see on their website.
At Long Now we have been paying attention to the Antikythera Mechanism happennings for many years, as we love to see two millennia old clocks get dug out of the deep and understood by modern technology.
The Antikythera Mechanism, sometimes called the first analog computer, was recovered more than a century ago in the wreckage of a ship that sank off the tiny island of Antikythera, north of Crete. Earlier research showed that the device was probably built between 140 and 100 B.C.
In November of 02006 Nature (via BBC) published some of their discoveries in the mechanism using modern scanning techniques, and now there is even more cool findings (also from Nature via NYT sent in by Jim Mason)…
After a closer examination of the Antikythera Mechanism, a surviving marvel of ancient Greek technology, scientists have found that the device not only predicted solar eclipses but also organized the calendar in the four-year cycles of the Olympiad, forerunner of the modern Olympic Games.
The new findings, reported Wednesday in the journal Nature, also suggested that the mechanism’s concept originated in the colonies of Corinth, possibly Syracuse, in Sicily. The scientists said this implied a likely connection with the great Archimedes.
Boing Boing TV is doing a multi-part series on the July 02008 Mechanicrawl. Above you can see correspondent Todd Lapin, and filming ninja Eddie Codel at their first stop, here at The Long Now Museum and Store.
In recent Edge.org piece both Danny Hillis and Kevin Kelly weighed in on the Atlantic cover story that asked “Is Google making us stupid?” Here are a couple excerpts…
For instance as evidence that new technologies can make us stupid he offers this story about the German writer Nietzsche. Near the end of his life Nietzsche got so blind and old he could not write with a pen but learned to touch type (no sight needed) on a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball typewriter. (BTW, this device is one of the coolest gizmos I’ve seen. Check out the video here. )
Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler, Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”
So was his change in style due to switching to a machine or was it because Nietzsche was ill and dying? - Kevin Kelly
We evolved in a world where our survival depended on an intimate knowledge of our surroundings. This is still true, but our surroundings have grown. We are now trying to comprehend the global village with minds that were designed to handle a patch of savanna and a close circle of friends. Our problem is not so much that we are stupider, but rather that the world is demanding that we become smarter. Forced to be broad, we sacrifice depth. We skim, we summarize, we skip the fine print and, all too often, we miss the fine point. We know we are drowning, but we do what we can to stay afloat. - Danny Hillis
Stone ink gallery
Photographer Edward Burtynsky made a formal proposal for a permanent art gallery in the chamber that encloses the 10,000-year Clock in its Nevada mountain. The gallery would consist of art in materials as durable as the alloy steel and jade of the Clock itself, and it would be curated slowly over the centuries to reflect changing interests in the rolling present and the accumulating past.
Photographs in particular should be in the 10,000-year Gallery, Burtynsky said, “because they tell us more than any previous medium. When we think of our own past, we tend to think in terms of family photos.”
But photographic prints, especially color prints, degrade badly over time. Burtynsky went on a quest for a technical solution. He thought that automobile paint, which holds up to harsh sunlight, might work if it could be run through an inkjet printer, but that didn’t work out. Then he came across a process first discovered in 1855, called “carbon transfer print.” It uses magenta, cyan, and yellow inks made of ground stone—the magenta stone can only be found in one mine in Germany—and the black ink is carbon.
On the stage Burtynsky showed a large carbon transfer print of one of his ultra-high resolution photographs. The color and detail were perfect. Accelerated studies show that the print could hang in someone’s living room for 500 years and show no loss of quality. Kept in the Clock’s mountain in archival conditions it would remain unchanged for 10,000 years. He said that making one print takes five days of work, costs $2,000, and only ten artisans in the world have the skill, at locations in Toronto, Seattle, and Cornwall. Superb images can be made on porcelain (or Clock chamber walls), but Burtynsky prefers archival watercolor paper, because the ink bonds deep into the paper, and in the event of temperature changes, the ink and paper would expand and contract together.
The rest of the presentation was of beautiful and evocative photographs from three demonstration exhibits for the proposed gallery—”Museum of the Mundane” by Vid Ingelvics; “Observations from a Blue Planet” by Marcus Schubert; and “In the Wake of Progress” by Burtynsky himself. A typical Burtynsky photograph showed a huge open pit copper mine. A tiny, barely discernible black line on one of the levels was pointed out: “That’s a whole railroad train.” Alberta tar sands excavation tearing up miles of boreal forest. China’s Three Gorges Dam. Mine tailing ponds beautiful and terrible. Expired oil fields stretching to the horizon. Michelangelo’s marble quarry at Carrera, still working.
“This is the sublime of our time,” said Burtynsky, “shown straight on, for contemplation.” Indeed worth studying for centuries.
–Stewart Brand
Paolo Salvagione (clock engineer) came across this great wall mural while traveling in Berlin this week.
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 Ehrlich on “The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment” - audio available, video coming soon
Danny Hillis had a great take on modern futurism in a recent piece in the Washington Post about Disney’s new Tomorrowland.
“Americans feel very little connection to the future anymore,” says Danny Hillis.
Hillis is in a singular position to make this statement. He has long been a deity of the computer age, having pioneered massively parallel processing — now the basis for most advanced computers. Then he was a Disney Fellow, and vice president for research and development at Walt Disney Imagineering. He is now co-chairman of the Long Now Foundation, which fosters long-term thinking and responsibility for the next 10,000 years.
“Basically there was a time in the 1950s and ’60s that were very future-oriented. Everybody wanted to be an astronaut. ‘The Jetsons,’ ‘Star Trek,’ stuff like that. Everybody was imagining that future we were all going to live in. That’s how I grew up as a kid.
“It was very surprising to me, getting to the future, that nobody was all that interested. Things just started to happen so fast, we were overwhelmed. With the microchip, we stopped being able to imagine the future — we had so much trouble handling what was being brought out in the present.
“The second thing, everyone was imagining the future was about universal prosperity — kids being much better off materially than they were. To see that attitude today, you have to go to China and India. They are very future-oriented. The Chinese are sort of the way we were in the ’60s. Everything’s going to get better. There will be glitches, but we’ll overcome them by progress and effort.
“We are future overwhelmed. I don’t think people try to imagine the year 2050 the way we imagined 2001 in 1960. Because they can’t imagine it. Because technology is happening so fast, we can’t extrapolate. And if they do, it’s not a very positive thing to imagine. It’s about a lot of the unwanted side effects catching up to us — like global ecological disaster. The future views are kind of negative. The most positive future-oriented stuff in the United States is around global ecology and sustainable living and that sort of stuff. It’s a counterpoint to that ecological disaster future.
“We have made incredible progress. The world is way better off than it was in the ’60s. But we’ve had enough of the future to realize that it’s complicated. If you look at ‘2001: A Space Odyssey,’ everything seemed quite plausible at the time — especially the international cooperation aspect of it.
“What I think it says is that we are nostalgic for a time when we believed in the future. People miss the future. There’s a yearning for it. Disney does know what people want. People want to feel some connectedness to the future. The way Disney delivers that is to reach back in time a little bit to the past when they did feel connected.
“It’s a bit of a cop-out. There was a time when the future was streamlined jet cars. Rather than create a new sense of the future, they say, ‘Ah, remember when we believed that the future was streamlined jet cars?’ It’s a feeling of connection to the future, rather than connection to the future.
“It’s a core ache. Something is missing that we’re searching for.”
Neal Stephenson’s new novel, ANATHEM, germinated in 01999 when Danny Hillis asked him and several other contributors to sketch out their ideas of what the Millennium Clock might look like. Stephenson tossed off a quick sketch and promptly forgot about it. Five years later however, when he was between projects, the idea came back to him, and he began to explore the possibility of building a novel around it. ANATHEM is the result, and will be released on September 9th, 02008.
I recently finished reading the review copy that Neal sent. The book pulled me in immediately, and I ended up reading the nearly 1000-page tome in just a few days. Set in a genre bending alt-future-retro world where mechani-punk technology meets space opera in a blend of the best of Snow Crash and the Baroque Cycle. Here is what Stewart, Danny and Kevin from the Long Now board had to say…
“‘I suffer from attention surplus disorder,’ jokes a character in Anathem. Attention surplus is exactly what Stephenson teaches his readers, in a book so tightly crafted it rewards instant rereading.” - Stewart Brand
“It is a great story, set in an alternative reality where people take long-term thinking seriously.” - Danny Hillis
“Long Now’s 10,000-year clock inspired Neal Stephenson’s new story, Anathem, and now Anathem is inspiring the Long Now. In ten centuries, no one will be sure which came first.” - Kevin Kelly
The Long Now Foundation will be hosting the book launch event in San Francisco on the evening of September 9th. The evening will include a reading by Stephenson, Q&A with Danny Hillis, and a small concert of the original music inspired by the book. Signed copies of the book will also be available.
Members of The Long Now Foundation will get complimentary priority invitations, and if you want to sign up for updates on this event please do so here.
Still wondering what The Long Now Foundation is? You can find out more here.
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