Published on Tuesday, April 12th, 02011 by Austin Brown
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.
Published on Tuesday, April 12th, 02011 by Alex Mensing
10,000 years ago what was walking on the land you are on right now? It turns out in a recent find that a mammoth was in Monterey county on the California coastline ten millennia ago. As is frequently the case, the bones were revealed while tilling agricultural land for the planting season. Mark Hylkema, Santa Cruz District archaeologist for the state Department of Parks, spoke with Kevin Howe of the Monterey County Herald about the find, which could indicate that more fossils might be buried in the area.
Hylkema described teeth, tusks and bones as still porous and in good condition
“There were three types of bone conditions noted,” Hylkema reported. “Fragments of ivory tusk, regular looking bone fragments and some that were discolored as though charred or lithified.”
If the bones are charred, he said, it could indicate human association with the remains. Some bone fragments were taken for radiometric tests to determine how old they are.
…The soil level and composition in which they were found indicates that the mammoth died 10,000 to 25,000 years ago, Hylkema said.
Another exciting collection of Ice Age fossils was uncovered last fall at the site of a popular ski resort in the Colorado Rockies. You can see some great photographs from that discovery on the National Geographic website.
Published on Friday, April 8th, 02011 by Austin Brown
“High dwellings are the peace and harmony of our descendants,” the stone slab reads. “Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis. Do not build any homes below this point.”
Jay Alabaster of the AP reports that hundreds of stone markers dot the coastlines of Japan. The oldest of these markers appears to be near 600 years old.
They carry warnings of tsunamis past and instruct readers to get to high ground after earthquakes. Some are even placed at high-water marks to indicate the extent of particular tsunami events.
The village of Aneyoshi grew up as a collection of homes built uphill of some of the markers specifically to be safe. Residents are raised knowing of the stones and their meaning.
“Everybody here knows about the markers. We studied them in school,” said Yuto Kimura, 12, who guided a recent visitor to one near his home. “When the tsunami came, my mom got me from school and then the whole village climbed to higher ground.”
There are those who can recall the 1960 tsunami caused by an earthquake in Chile, but the stone markers form a deeper cultural memory, representing many generations of life in a disaster-prone area and lessons learned from it. “Crude” though they may be, perhaps they provide a useful example for memorializing the recent disaster and for durably preserving its lessons for future generations.
Published on Thursday, April 7th, 02011 by Alex Mensing
The second season of FUTURESTATES has been released, a film series featuring visions and stories of the “not-too-distant future.” Participants imagined narratives based on scenarios such as extreme climate change with environmental refugees, gated communities that regulate the genetic makeup of their offspring, and the proliferation of software that charts our likes and dislikes, “creeping into the human heart and soul.” J.P. Chan’s “Digital Antiquities” tells the tale of a man with a cryptic old device (a CD) that his mother left him and the woman who helps him retrieve its data. The story takes place in a time when all information is constantly uploaded to ‘the cloud,’ rendering nearly all of our present media obsolete. Interestingly, this time is fast approaching: the year is 2036. Chan writes:
My own experience with data loss made me think about how easy it is to lose digital memories and what it might mean for our culture — and ourselves — when that loss happens billions of times over. What memories will be preserved of our era, when the media itself is so fragile? Stone tablets survive millenia to tell us stories of civilizations that left few other traces. If the far-more-frail hard drive is the stone tablet of our times, we’re in big trouble.
In the future, virtually all of our lives will be recorded and presumably stored safely online somewhere. Recovering data from personal media like floppy disks, hard drives, optical discs, and memory chips will be an extinct business. But right now, we’re creating lots of digital memories on these media but only haphazardly preserving them. How will we feel about this in a few decades when much of it is gone?
You can watch “Digital Antiquities” here, and also check out FUTURESTATES’ Predict-o-Meter where you can weigh in on the future and see other users’ predictions.
Published on Monday, April 4th, 02011 by Austin Brown
Humans now engage the Earth at Gaian scale. How did Earth and humans get to this state? Given how we got here, how should we proceed? Tim Flannery finds that the evolutionary perspective of Alfred Russell Wallace offers better guidance than the more familiar Darwinian version of evolution.
Australian biologist Tim Flannery is the renowned author of The Weather Makers, The Future Eaters, and a great ecological history of North America, The Eternal Frontier. His current book is Here on Earth: A New Beginning.
Ideas about Long-term Thinking.
The Long Now Foundation
Fostering Long-term Responsibility
est. 01996.
