The Long Now Foundation is always looking at materials that are best suited for long-term preservation. Perhaps tree resin should be added to the list, after all it’s been preserved as amber since the Carboniferous period (around 320 million years ago). The notion may be too Jurassic Park to be seriously considered, but Wired Science has an interesting post on some new 95 million year old amber finds from Africa that have yielded some new evolutionary context as reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Newly discovered pieces of amber have given scientists a peek into the Africa of 95 million years ago, when flowering plants blossomed across Earth and the animal world scrambled to adapt.

Suspended in the stream of time were ancestors of modern spiders, wasps and ferns, but the prize is a wingless ant (above) that challenges current notions about the origins of that globe-spanning insect family.

“Most specimens represent a unique fossil record of their group from Africa, and some are among the oldest records in the world,” wrote researchers in a paper April 5 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Read More at Wired Science and while there, see also the oldest preserved spider web.

Photo credit: Alexander Schmidt/PNAS

Long Now has compiled a record of all of the drawings made to create the first 10,000 Year Clock Prototype into a new book. Geared towards the mechanically inclined, this book has the technical drawing of every part used in the first prototype. It also includes several math notebooks and spreadsheets that Danny Hillis used to make the underlying calculations for parts of the Clock.

Long Now hopes that the widespread distribution of these plans will ensure that the knowledge and work that went into building our first Clock prototype is not lost and that this will help the survival of the Clock itself and the long-term thinking it represents.

The paperback book is available through Amazon (we do get a % of sales) and is $19.95. The drawings are also available to download for free on our site.

Stewart Brand sent in this fantastic graph that shows how “big” a given news story of the past decade was and then also notes how many lives were lost because of it.  To see the full size image click through to the wonderful Information is Beautiful Blog.  Of course the interesting bits are the real discrepancies such as the Y2k story (some might say non-story) which resulted in zero loss of life vs. killer wasps which I haven’t even heard of that have accounted for more deaths than SARS or Swine Flu.

Of course other major loss of life events like 40,000+ deaths in the US alone in car accidents dont even rate on the graph.

There is new media available from our monthly series, the Seminars About Long-term Thinking. Stewart Brand’s summaries and audio downloads or podcasts of the talks are free to the public; Long Now members can view HD video of the Seminars and comment on them.

Listen to the Audio of David Eagleman’s “Six Easy Steps to Avert the Collapse of Civilization” (downloads tab)

As reported on Laughing Squid SepiaTown is “A Collaborative Urban Time Machine”

SepiaTown lets you use your computer or mobile device to see what the very spot you’re standing on looked like decades or centuries ago.

A Google Maps mash-up, SepiaTown allows users to upload and geotag vintage photos of urban landscapes and then serves them up for others to view.  There’s even a “then/now” feature that juxtaposes the old shot with the current Street View:

The Long Now Foundation’s monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking

presents Nils Gilman on “Deviant Globalization”

Monday May 3, 02010 at 7:30 pm at the Cowell Theater in San Francisco

Long Now Members can reserve 2 seats, join today!

or you can purchase tickets for $10 each.

About this Seminar:

Hidden and powerful and growing worldwide at twice the rate of the legal economy, “deviant globalization” is described by Nils Gilman as “human trafficking, drug dealing, gun running, cross-border waste disposal, organ trading, sex tourism, money laundering, transnational gangs, piracy (both intellectual and physical), and so on.”

He adds: “The structure of the current global economy is not designed for equitable, plodding growth; it’s designed to reward opportunistic, risk-seeking innovators. Were one to construct an investment portfolio of illicit businesses, it would no doubt outperform Wall Street.”

Trained as an historian, Nils Gilman is a consultant at Global Business Network/Monitor for licit organizations, including the US intelligence community. He is co-author of the forthcoming book, Deviant Globalization.

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The Long News: stories that might still matter fifty, or a hundred, or ten thousand years from now.

The woman in this picture just celebrated her 100th birthday. But she’s far from the oldest living American: that’s Neva Morris, of Ames, Iowa, who’s 114. They’re just two of the 84,000 centenarians living in the United States.

It’s estimated that by 02050, the number of centenarians worldwide will reach nearly 6 million. And some say that half of the babies born in the U.S. today will live into the 22nd century. Obviously, this will pose new challenges for the workplace, social security, health care, and just about every other aspect of society.

Some recent news stories about aging:

1. Millions of hundred-year-olds:

Starting to get crowded in 100-year-olds’ club

Half of U.S. babies living today may reach 100

2. The science of life extension:

Genetic fountain of youth

Scientists spot genes tied to aging

One key found for living to 100

3. Is it genes? Diet? No, the most important ingredient might be hope:

Have a purpose in life? You might live longer

We invite you to submit Long News story suggestions here.

Trees on the second story of the abandoned Carnegie Library in Camden NJ. Photo: Camilo Jose Vergara.

Today we received another email about creating a record of humanity and technology that would help restart civilization.  The latest one is inspired by an essay that James Lovelock published in Science over 12 years ago called A Book For All Seasons (excerpt):

We have confidence in our science-based civilization and think it has tenure. In so doing, I think we fail to distinguish between the life-span of civilizations and that of our species. In fact, civilizations are ephemeral compared with species. Humans have lasted at least a million years, but there have been 30 civilizations in the past 5000 years. Humans are tough and will survive; civilizations are fragile. It seems clear to me that we are not evolving in intelligence, not becoming true Homo sapiens. Indeed there is little evidence that our individual intelligence has improved through the 5000 years of recorded history.

Over the years these proposals have been in different forms; create a book, set of books, stone tablets, micro-etched metal disk, or a constantly updated wiki.  I really like the idea of creating such a record, in fact the Rosetta Disk project was our first effort in this direction.  These Doomsday Manuals are a positive step in the direction of making a softer landing for a collapse, and the people creating them (like ourselves) are certainly out to help people.  It took millennia for the world to regain the technology and levels of societal organization attained by the Romans, so maybe a book like this would help that.

However it also seems that these efforts tap a romantic notion that we would all love to find something like this book from a past or otherwise alien civilization.  My worry is that it also feeds off a (likely incorrect) feeling that somehow collapse might be a fun challenge to live through, and that everyone kind of wants to be the monk in A Canticle For Leibowitz or Mel Gibson in Road Warrior.

My bet is that the reality of watching your civilization (and population) collapse is likely one of the worst things anyone could experience.  I am also not so sure the problem is just knowing how to remake a technology.  For instance after the fall of the great Egyptian, Mayan, and Roman empires we had evidence and examples of their engineering achievements all around us.  But aqueducts or senate buildings are worthless without a society around them to maintain, contextualize and protect them.

It is also worth pointing out that there are likely well over a billion people on earth who currently don’t interact with formal economies or technological society at all.  They will be very well adapted to a post collapse world, you should find some and make friends.  They will likely be far more helpful than a manual on restarting the internet, because they know how to gut a deer.

In any case I thought I would create this blog post which I will try and keep updated as these proposals and efforts come to me (and hopefully come to fruition).  I will also list some of the resources that I usually refer to when I get these inquiries.   Please note these resources are extremely biased toward the English language, the United States and Western culture.  Also note that one of the first things that comes up when creating any compendium style work is the issue of copyright.  It might sound ridiculous that you might worry about copyright in a doomsday manual, but if you want to publish it and get it into peoples hands before the apocalypse, you are going to have to deal with it in some way. Please feel free to use the comments field to make suggestions and pointers and I will integrate them here as well.

Projects that are attempts in this direction:

• The Rosetta Project: A multi-millennial micro-etched disk with a record of thousands of the worlds languages.
• Westinghouse Time Capsules: Two time capsules (they actually coined the term for this project) by Westinghouse buried at Worlds Fair sites, one in 01939 and the other 01965 to be recovered in 5000 years.  They also did the very smart thing of making a “Book of Record” and an above ground duplicate of the contents on display.
• The Human Document Project: A German project to create a record of humanity that will last one million years.
• Crypt of Civilization: A airtight chamber located at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, Georgia. The crypt consists of preserved artifacts scheduled to be opened in the year 8113 AD.
• The Voyager Record: The Voyager Golden Record are phonograph records which were included aboard both Voyager spacecraft, which were launched in 1977. They contain sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, and are intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life form, or far future humans, who may find them.
• Georgia Guidestones: The four granite Guidestones are covered in inscriptions written in 8 major languages that describe the tenets of their imagined Age of Reason.
• (added) Doomsday Chests by Noah Raford
• (added) The Forever Book an idea by Kevin Kelly
• (added) Global Village Construction Set
• (added) “History of Humanity” project
• (added) The Library of Utility

Content that has been discussed to be used for these projects:

• The Gingery books always seemed to me to be a great first pass on how to re-start manufacturing technology
• (added) Immaculate Telegraphy: An Artist creates hi tech out of materials in nature.
• (added) Wiki How has a lot of great info and it is continuously updated.  The entry on how to deliver a baby seems like a particularly handy one…
• (added) The Foxfire Books on homespun technology seem to have a slightly less industrial take than the Gingery books, and are pretty comprehensive
• (added) The Lets Say Youve Gone Back in Time poster to help you restart civilization by Ryan North the creator of the awesome Dinosaur Comics
• (added) The Way Things Work by David Macaulay.  This is a fantastic book, but it might leave people thinking that all technology is powered by woolly mammoths and angels.
• The Harvard Classic‘s originally known as Dr. Elliots Five Foot Shelf are often referred to as an item that should go into a record like this.
• Encyclopedia Britannica People often suggest using the latest version that is now out of copyright.  I believe this is the 13th edition but so far I have only found digital copies of the 11th.
• The Domesday book: The Domesday Book is the record of the great survey of England completed in 1086.  It would be interesting to find surveys and census’ from around the world
• The Mormon Genealogical Data:  This is also held in a bunker outside Salt Lake City Utah, but it might be nice to have a record of gene lines for a future civilization to better understand its past.
• The Top 100 Project Gutenberg books: If you are concerned with archiving works in copyright this is a great source to find texts that are free to use.
• The Internet Archive: An archive of complete snapshots of the web as well as thousands of books and videos.  Incidentally you would also get all of our scanned page content from the Rosetta Project with this.
• Wikipedia: The text only version of this is actually not that large, and could be archived fairly easily.  Also one of the few sources that is beginning to get filled out in many languages and is also not held under a copyright.
• How to field dress a deer: PDF pocket version from Penn State College of Agricultural Science (living in Northern California, I think this one will be especially handy).
• (added) The Toaster Project

Averting Collapse

Civilizations always think they’re immortal, Eagleman noted, but they nearly always perish, leaving “nothing but runes and scattered genetics.” It takes luck and new technology to survive. We may be particularly lucky to have Internet technology to help manage the six requirements of a durable civilization:

1. “Try not to cough on one another.” More humans have died from epidemics…

Read the rest of Stewart Brand’s Summary

Click the image above to see the Solar Beat page aand make sure your sound is turned on.

Solar Beat is a project by White Vinyl Designs that uses a virtual Orrery as a type of music box.  Turn on your sound and click the image above to see what type of music our solar system makes…  (thanks to Chris Baldwin for sending this in)