The Maeslant Barrier built for a once in 10,000 year storm

There was a maxim that predicted the existence of the longest living trees even before they were discovered, “adversity breeds longevity.”  Using this principle conifer scientists traveled to the harshest mountain peaks and found the Brisltecone Pine alive and over 4,800 years old.

It stands to reason then that a country that had spent the whole of it’s existence defending itself from an encroaching sea, would have the longest term perspective on the subject.  In 01939 when a series of studies in Holland revealed how their country might suffer from from a large storm in the north Atlantic, the Dutch began planning and building.  Only part way through their efforts, a storm in 01953 proved them right, killing over 2,000 people and flooding hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland.  Shortly after the flood these efforts would be doubled and put into a new nationalized government “Deltawerken” (Deltaworks) program.  The Dutch have since been steadily building dams, barriers, and sacrificial flood areas.  This culminated in the final Deltawerken project completed in 01997, the Maeslant Barrier one of the largest man made moving structures in the world.  This barrier opens and closes over one of the busiest ports on the planet, and is strong enough to withstand a once in 10,000 year storm event.  Yes, once in 10,000 years.  At a cost of nearly $1 billion it seems unthinkable that a country could have this much resolve for such a rare event.  In fact the barrier has already been closed multiple times and prevented minor flooding, so it is already paying itself off.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina (considered a 100 year event) which killed over 1,800 people and cost more than $81 billion, it seems unlikely the US will build infrastructure like this to protect the Southeastern seaboard.  I am not sure how much more adversity the residents of the gulf coast need however, they have had a tough decade.  It could be that the culture in the US looks more to dealing with problems of the future with insurance rather than prevention.  But if I lived in New Orleans, I think I would much rather have better levees and barriers, than a new insurance policy.

Devastation of Hurricane Katrina, a once in a 100 year event.

SETI Director Jill Tarter discussed in a 02005 blog post that we recently discovered the possibility of broadcasting humanity’s presence to the universe. SETI’s position for at least the next decade is that we’re not ready.

Any technology that is observable over interstellar distances cannot be more primitive than our own. After only 100 years of manipulating the electromagnetic spectrum, we find ourselves in the midst of an exponential explosion of technology. But it has taken us over 4.5 billion years of planetary and biological evolution to get to where we are today. If there is detectable technology out there, it is statistically improbable that their evolution and development will be fine-tuned to coincide precisely with our current emerging technological capabilities. They will be older, potentially billions of years older since the Milky Way Galaxy was around for at least five billion years before our solar system began to form.

In exploring some of the ways to make this decision, Tarter explains that communication across galactic distances will take protocols we can’t imagine and timescales we’re simply not seriously dealing with yet.

She searched Google and graphed the number of results she found for plans ranging between “The One Year Plan” to “The Two Hundred Thousand Year Plan.” As a point of reference, the green arrow just below 10,000 hits on Google represents the number of results she found when searching for her own name. Plans over one hundred years in scope were most often the result of science fiction and religion, though Y2K and nuclear waste had lead to some longer plans as well. (Long Now is in there right next to the 10,000-year Yucca Mountain plan.)

I did a quick Google Book N-gram viewer search on some of these terms over the last hundred years and found that during the late ’60s there was a peak in books discussing ‘x year plans’, the favorite being 10 year plans. ‘One year -’ and ‘hundred year’ plans show consistently, but few other plans registered at all.

Photo by Pat Tufts

Languages are works of art, great libraries, how-to guides for living on planet Earth, windows into our minds and inalienable human rights. Long Now’s own Dr. Laura Welcher, Director of Operations and The Rosetta Project, spoke on March 3rd to a group of Long Now Members about the beauty, variety and value in the almost 7,000 languages spoken in the world. The event was part of our new Salon Series: occasional, intimate talks held in The Long Now Museum & Store for Members of the Foundation.

Laura’s talk was called The Rosetta Project and The Language Commons and in it she discussed several efforts to preserve linguistic diversity around the world. The Long Now Foundation’s role thus far, she explained, has been to develop and manufacture The Rosetta Disk: a durable, nickel archive of linguistic data. Laura also discussed her work with The Language Commons Working Group – a collaboration of linguists, archivists and programmers working to create an open and accessible encyclopedia of languages and linguistic diversity as a tool for teaching, studying, preserving and sharing languages.

The full audio of Laura’s talk can be streamed from the player below or downloaded as an mp3. You can also click through the slides she presented in the window below the audio player.

Two days ago, we learned that a Rosetta Disk made its way into the Special Collections of the University of Colorado Boulder library, and was on public display there. One of our members, Zane Selvans paid a visit, and had an extraordinary experience. He took fantastic pictures and wrote it up on his blog Amateur Earthling – we repost it here with his permission. It is a great illustration of the challenge in keeping information alive over time, place, and people.

Human Language in the Palm of my Hand

by Zane Selvans

One of the Rosetta discs was recently bequeathed to the University of Colorado libraries, and the Long Now put out a request for pictures of it in its new home.  I eagerly responded by heading to the special collections in Norlin yesterday.  It didn’t seem to be on display anywhere, so when the librarian made eye contact, I said I was here to see the Rosetta disc, and she sent someone off to get it.  And they took it out of its Pelican case, and set it on the table in front of me (after I’d filled out a reader card and agreed only to take notes in pencil… or by digital means — no pens are allowed near the old books)  At first I was hesitant to touch it, and asked if it was okay, and she said “Oh it doesn’t look like the kind of thing that requires any special handling.”  So I picked it up.

I was amazed at the weight of the thing.  The tungsten hemisphere (I think it’s tungsten anyway… but maybe I’m thinking of one of the clock parts) [ed. note - it is actually stainless steel]  is much denser than most everyday objects.  That, plus the iridescent sheet of the etched words and the distortion of the lens makes it into a strange kind of artifact.  It’s obviously a weird thing.  I couldn’t help but think of Michael Madsen’s Into Eternity, and the difficulty of attempting to ensure that we communicate anything tens of thousands of years into the future.  His one way conversation with those who inherit our histories.  These spheres are beautiful art and elegant thought experiments today, but holding one made me envision the world in which they were actually needed, where they’ve been used for their intended purpose.  Far seeing, informational time machines.  Linguistic Palantír.  It’s both horrifying and hopeful to think about what could come to pass in our deep futures.

If this thing has been used, then darkness fell one day.

If this thing has been used, then someone made it through, and they want to know again.

I couldn’t help myself.  I had to open it up.  Gingerly.  It’s a hard thing to handle, so smooth and round and heavy enough that it’s challenging to control it with one hand.  The lockring tinkled down and the librarian looked over a little surprised.  “Oh, I didn’t know you could open it.”

Have you looked at it.  Do you know what it is?  Something to do with languages.  Mmm.  Yes.

With only a single change of custody, all information about the thing had already apparently been lost.  They said that when it was checked in to the collections, it hadn’t come with any accompanying documentation.  Just a strange heavy sphere in a padded box.  The box was labeled, saying who it had come from, and naming it a Rosetta disc, but that was about it.  It’s supposed to be usable even without any documentation — that’s kind of the point — but it certainly does highlight the fragility of information.  I tweeted to the Long Now afterward, and they’ve sent “Care and Feeding” documentation to the curator.  Somehow it feels good to have participated, even peripherally, in the smuggling of this information into the future.

Mind Hacks points us to a great BBC Radio 4 program on the history of our knowledge of the nervous system:

It’s a satisfyingly in-depth discussion that tracks first beliefs about the nervous system from ancient times through the renaissance into the modern age.

Check out the In Our Time episode page, or download the mp3.

In 02008, one of the first prototype Rosetta Disks went to the family of the late Charles Butcher, who was the founder of The Lazy 8 Foundation. Lazy Eight was one of the first supporters of the Long Now 10,000 Year Library and Rosetta Projects.

This Rosetta Disk has now been donated by the Charles Butcher family to the University of Colorado Boulder. It looks like it is housed in the Library Special Collections, and that it is currently on exhibit as part of Realia: Everyday Objects from Other Lives.

If anyone has a chance to go visit the Rosetta Disk in this exhibit, please send us photos!

The sixth largest lake in the world is located deep in the continent of Antarctica where it has been isolated under two and a half miles of solid ice for more than 14 million years…and, according to the Wired Science blog, it will remain so for at least one year more. A team of Russian scientists that has been drilling through the ice was scheduled to break through this month, but extreme weather has required them to leave the site until next December. So what’s in the water?

What lies beneath the mammoth sheet of ice may provide answers to what Earth was like before the Ice Age and how life has evolved.

Most importantly, Lake Vostok appears to be incredibly similar to the frozen lakes of Jupiter’s Europa satellite and Saturn’s Enceladus. As Wired UK reported earlier this week, NASA and the ESA have already planned a mission to esplora Europa’s lake in 2020. If life is found in Vostok, the implications for the possibility of extraterrestrial life on Europa and Enceladus are huge.

“It’s like exploring an alien planet where no one has been before,” said Valery Lukin of the Arctic and Antarctic Research told Reuters. “We don’t know what we’ll find.”

One thing that some people hope they don’t find is kerosene (or Shoggoths, for that matter), the substance with which the team has filled their unfinished bore-hole to prevent it from icing over.

Moons of Jupiter through an amateur telescope, photo by Thomas Bresson

Forgive the metaphor, but earlier this month in the Wall Street Journal, Jonah Lehrer discussed several trends that have emerged in scientific discovery over the past century that indicate we may need to start ‘digging deeper.’

An economist at Northwestern named Benjamin Jones has pointed out the first of those trends by analyzing millions of published scientific papers. He found that the prevalence of teams working on papers has been growing steadily; there are more papers published these days that have several authors than in the past. That prevalence is especially pronounced among highly successful papers: those that receive a disproportionate amount of citations in other papers. So, using papers published as an indication of scientific progress seems to indicate that more work is being done collaboratively and that productive science seems to increasingly require more work and wider expertise than a single person can muster.

The second trend comes from Samuel Arbesman, a researcher at Harvard Medical School. He’s found that across many different disciplines, the relative magnitude of discoveries seems to be falling:

By measuring the average size of discovered asteroids, mammalian species and chemical elements, he was able to show that, over the last few hundred years, these three very different scientific fields have been obeying the exact same trend: the size of what they discover has been getting smaller.

These trends seem to indicate that science is actually getting harder. Lehrer borrows a metaphor from Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation to argue that we’ve basically picked all the low-hanging fruit of scientific discovery – all Galileo had to do was be the first person to look at Jupiter through a telescope and he discovered four moons. But, we’ve found all the moons now, and without those easy to reach facts, we’re now forced to pool more effort and resources into learning new things.