It is 02019.

A multi petabyte-scale simulation of global processes, called the Global Extinction Awareness System (GEAS), has just determined that, without immediate action, humanity will survive only another 23 years before the deadly synergy of five catastrophic Superthreats does us in.

The Superthreats are:
1. Quarantine — declining health and pandemic disease, including the current Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ReDS) crisis
2. Ravenous — the imminent collapse of the global food system
3. Power Struggle — the increasingly desperate search for alternative energy solutions
4. Outlaw Planet — challenges to human security and civil rights in the midst of hypercomplex information systems
5. Generation Exile — skyrocketing numbers of refugees and migrants in the face of climate change, economic disruption, and war

Your role is to flex your foresight, creativity and collaborative skills to contribute to our collective survival.

The GEAS report is available in full here, and video briefings on each of the Superthreats can be found here. One to get you started:

The scenario described above is the premise of Superstruct, the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game, which kicks off in just under two weeks’ time, on 6 October 02008.

Over the six weeks of the game, long term thinkers everywhere will have the opportunity to imagine themselves in this version of 02019, bringing their real-world expertise and ideas to bear on the Superthreats. The purpose of the game is to harness our collective insights and ingenuity; to help invent the future by playing it first.

It’s being run by the Ten-Year Forecast Program at the nonprofit research organisation Institute for the Future, Palo Alto (disclosure: I’m one of the Game Masters).

Get involved, and good luck. The clock is ticking.

…well, actually, 45 million year old yeast.  Dr. Raul Cano, Director of the Environmental Biotechnology Institute at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo extracted the yeast from an unlucky weevil embedded in amber, reactivated it, and — budding zymurgist that he is — tried it out with a new brew.

The result?  Fossil Fuels Wheat Beer — a fine brew that is “smooth and spicy” (according to the Washington Post).

Okay, so it was Slashdotted earlier today… but we have to say, how very Long, and how totally Now.  Cheers!

By the way, this isn’t the only way beer functions as a long-term lens: “There is a perfectly respectable academic theory that civilization began with beer.”

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

*Daniel Suarez on “Daemon: Bot-mediated Reality” – video now available
*Peter Diamandis on “Long-term X Prizes” – audio up, video coming soon

On Friday September 19th Corpus Christi College at Cambridge unveiled a wild clock by Dr. John Taylor (sponsored by Stephen Hawking).  It is electrically powered, but uses a brilliant set of epicyclic mechanically phased vernier openings to cycle light around the dials to display seconds, minutes and hours. I think we should look at this idea to be used with focused sun light.

The escapement is quite literally based on Harrison’s grasshopper escapement, and actually personifies it in a giant stylized grasshopper automata on the top of the clock which “eats” the seconds as they go by.  By chance I will be near Cambridge at the end of this week, and will certainly stop by to check it out.  My wife is calling next week “our dorky clock tour of England”, we will  be stopping by our Clock at the Science museum in London, and hopefully Big Ben, Stonehenge, and the Salisbury Cathedral Clock.

You can see more on this clock including a little internal tour with Dr. Taylor in the video below:

In a post entitled “Temporary Becomes Permanent“, Kevin Kelly recently shared his thoughts at this blog on how fragments of culture that start out with a limited life expectancy can survive to become embedded much more deeply. The example he had in mind was the wartime graffito “Kilroy Was Here” which has now unobtrusively, yet unmistakeably, been etched in stone at the World War II Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

A somewhat different instance of this temporary-to-permanent transition is found in the installation “Grand Gestures” by the Toronto-based 640 480 Video Collective.

Grand Gestures (02007) installation by 640 480
Images via Torontoist

The artists’ website explains this part of the Grand Gestures project:

The public component consists of ten ‘memorial’ style plaques interspersed along Queen West… Each bronze plaque will contain a partial transcription of a personal video that has been created on Queen St., which 640 480 sourced from youtube.com. By memorializing these banal and inconsequential videos with such markers of public remembrance, 640 480 draws our attention to the fleeting nature of video.

Torontoist adds:

640 480 takes its name from the original 4:3 aspect ratio of video screens, and the group has an obvious affinity for the rapidly disappearing magnetic tape format. Memorial lapel ribbons made from videotape were also part of the grand Gestures installation, and taped copies of the videos are to be converted into an artificial diamond, signifying the preservation of memories from an increasingly obsolete format into an everlasting state.

So the intention seems to have been to pay tribute to a disappearing medium, magnetic videotape; a sentiment which resonates with the Long Now’s concern for the preservation of languages as well as the cultural record generally. However, the plaque installation also stands, more robustly I think, as a broader comment on the selectiveness of historical memory. By sitting in marked contrast to the parade of history’s conventional notables usually given the bronze-plaque treatment (to wit: stateman X spent an evening in this building; general so-and-so took a meal here; a certain poet was inspired to write about this view; etc), otherwise trivial and unremarked moments of everyday life are anointed as worthy of remembrance. Certain slices of the “temporary” are suddenly, and quite arbitrarily, rendered “permanent”. All of which refocuses the attention in a curious way, as the hierarchy of significance in human affairs is briefly turned upside down.

Of course, nothing lasts forever. Even with elements of lives memorialised in so (relatively) permanent a medium as bronze, things can happen to drop them right back into obscurity.

Where one of the 640 480 plaques used to be
Image from alexanderthematt‘s Flickr photostream, via Torontoist

(Thanks Jake!)

Beyond Audacious

Pursuing the idea of “revolution through competition” via huge-purse prizes was inspired for Peter Diamandis by reading about the Orteig Prize. In 1927 $25,000 was offered to the first person to fly non-stop from New York to Paris. Nine teams spent $400,000 in the competition. A 25-year-old named Lindbergh won the prize. Within 18 months air passengers had multiplied 30-fold from 6,000 to 180,000, the number of aircraft increased four-fold, and aviation stocks soared.

A lifelong space nut, Diamandis created out of thin air the Ansari X Prize. $10 million would go to the first team to make a 3-person reusable space vehicle that could reach 100 kilometers in altitude twice in two weeks…

Read the rest of Stewart Brand’s Summary

02060s, that is.

User-modified self-and solar-powered hybrid wireless telephone
Design by FoundFutures, executed by Dan Phelan

User-modified cookware (“hubcap wok”)
Design by FoundFutures, executed by Sally Szwed

Military uniform of the Army of O’ahu, Confederation of Hawaiian Republics
Design by FoundFutures, executed by Haruko Moberg

What if an energy crisis prompted Hawaii to close its doors to visitors?

That’s the premise of an unusual exhibition currently running at San Francisco’s Wattis Institute, California College of the Arts.

The objects on display are fragments of a story in which a Great Oil Collapse strikes in the 02010s, generating long-term global disruption which (among other things) culminates in the Hawaiian monarchy being reinstated some twenty years later, and Hawaii’s doors being closed to outsiders. In 02069, with the U.S. riven by Civil War, a man named Nestor von Hoepper flees by boat to escape the draft. He survives to build a new life in Hawaii, which has by now developed self-sufficiency in some intriguing ways. The exhibition is set in 02108, in the aftermath of a turbulent 21st century, as the archive of von Hoepper’s secret effects — journals, drawings, and artifacts — sheds light for the first time on the “dark islands”.

Curator Sally Szwed writes in her notes to the show:

As you look at the display, imagine you are three generations into the future and outsiders have not been able to visit the Hawaiian Islands for decades. The land of luxury resorts and tiki-torches that one might now associate with the state has disintegrated and Hawaii has become an independent nation. The objects that are on display are artifacts from this future. They tell the story of one man’s experiences and discoveries while living on the islands during this time of seclusion, drastic transition, and cultural rebirth.

The scenario and pieces on display were conceived and designed for Sally’s project by FoundFutures, an ongoing series of multimedia projects manifesting alternative future scenarios in tangible form. (FoundFutures is run by myself and Jake Dunagan, who has just moved from the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies to join Palo Alto’s Institute for the Future.)

The exhibition exemplifies long-term art in another way. It’s part of Americana, a multi-year presentation planned to run until 02012, co-organised by Wattis Institute director Jens Hoffmann and CCA’s Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice. Each month the display at the Wattis takes up a different American state, and is curated by a different student. Sally drew Hawaii at random, and her online research turned up HRCFS Director Jim Dator’s “Best Little Backwater” scenario (pdf, 01999), which prompted the idea of “collecting” artifacts from a low-key future Hawaii.

Americana: Hawaii is on display at the Wattis until 20 September. Hours and location can be found here.

Mandatory ration card for the ahupua’a (governing district) of Honolulu, O’ahu
Design by Yumi Vong, from an earlier piece for FoundFutures by Steve Kiyabu

(Images: the sceptical futuryst.)

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

*Neal Stephenson’s Anathem - video excerpt of Stephenson reading from the book
*Iolet, the music of Anathem – CD available for purchase

Stewart Brand telling the story of the beams at New College in Oxford England for the BBC series he did on How Buildings Learn.  Most amusing about this story is that the folks at New College now deny the veracity of this story.  But Stewart actually chased it all down and verified it.

Video above (from Fora.tv) of Neal reading from Anathem at the book launch event last night, and a little of the live singing.  We would like to thank the nearly 900 attendees, and those that watched the video stream.  We apologize for the delays and sound troubles that plagued us at the venue.