Science fiction author Bruce Sterling, who delivered one of our earliest SALT presentations, recently shared an article about the difficulties of film preservation on his Wired blog, beyond the beyond.

In the article, Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell describe the enormous and myriad challenges that film archivists face, from physical and digital decay, multiplicity of formats, sheer volume of footage, cost of preservation, and a general disregard for ‘preservability’ in the film industry’s production process.

The authors begin with the story of Dawson City, where a cache of films buried in 1929 was recently found, leading to some amazing restorations. But as digital footage becomes the norm, the stability inherent in 35 mm film (upwards of a 100-year life-span with proper care) is no longer a guarantor of longevity.

Given such discoveries, the archivists will set to work creating usable and enduring versions. But today such a task is much harder. Soon most of the films we make and show will not exist on photochemical stock. They’ll be digital files, and they need to be kept securely. But how?

Will today’s typhoon of ones and zeroes rip away our analog past? Will there ever be a digital Dawson City, a stockpile of files of lost movies? It seems likely that digital projection has, in unintended and unexpected ways, put the history of film in jeopardy.

Even when people recognize the severity of the problem, the cost of doing anything about it is steep. An EU archival commission estimates the cost of basic archiving for Europe’s yearly film output in 02015 at 1.5-3 million euros, with 1,900 petabytes of data and another 290 million euros to ensure long-term preservation. To archive the Library of Congress’ 30,000-title nitrate collection alone would require 1.44 exabytes of data storage.

Now let’s say you’ve not only recognized the problem, found the funding to act on it, and archived a film. “What if,” the authors ask, “you want to show it tomorrow? Or ten years from now? Or fifty?”

If you have a DCP [Digital Cinema Package] in good shape, and a projector that will show 2K/4K according to the Digital Cinema Initiative standard, you’re good to go. For now. But maybe not tomorrow. [...]

The digital gold rush, along with fear of piracy, favored short-term solutions and proprietary, incompatible software and hardware. There were too many ephemeral video formats chasing the consumer and prosumer market, with little thought of their afterlives. The days of 8mm, super-8mm, 16mm, 35mm, and 65/70mm were simple by comparison. We’re left with a plethora of transitory standards that will be impossible to recover.

The tradeoffs between these standards – both digital and chemical – present a dizzying array of problems and opportunities that the article explores in much further detail. At the end is a long list of links and resources for anyone interested in digging deeper into the issue.

Policy-makers wrestling with foreign policy decisions that will have very long-lasting repercussions often turn to experts to inform them of the likely outcomes.

Through the lens of the current international dilemma over Iran’s nuclear ambitions, foreign policy historian (and former SALT speaker) Francis Gavin offers his thoughts on the relationship between policy-makers and experts in an article for Foreign Policy written with James B. Steinberg.

Crafting policy requires a certain amount of implicit prediction about the future, which is – to put it lightly – notoriously difficult to do right:

“In fact, as Philip Tetlock demonstrated in Expert Political Judgment, a 20-year study that looked at over 80,000 forecasts about world affairs, self-proclaimed authorities are no better at making accurate predictions than monkeys throwing darts at a dart board, and they are rarely held accountable for their errors.”

While exploring some of the past decisions made as part of US nonproliferation efforts, he shows that historians can easily choose individual precedents that belie the larger portfolio of issues faced during their time and the broader strategy into which they may have fit. Taking the full context of the time, the issues and the decision-makers is necessary to properly extracting any useful historical knowledge from past events:

“If Vietnam is understood at least in part as a function of the Johnson administration’s successful efforts to encourage nuclear nonproliferation, seek détente and cooperation with the Soviets, and manage the German question, the policy — if still disastrous in its consequences — makes more sense. The difficulty inherent in assessing U.S. foreign policy is made clear by the fact that all three policies were crafted by the same policymakers in the same administration at the same time.”

But, rather than simply taking “experts” down a peg for ignoring the broader range of issues policy-makers must consider, he suggests a way to make better use of their specialties:

“We believe that if different types of experts — the best strategists and historians, for example — were brought together with statesmen in an environment that encouraged honest debate and collaboration and not point-scoring, where participants were encouraged to acknowledge how little anyone can actually know about the future effects of U.S. actions, the possibility to achieve both greater coherence and greater humility in the U.S. foreign-policymaking process would be greatly enhanced.”

Keeping time for 10,000 years isn’t tricky just because its hard to build a really durable clock. It also forces us to recognize and account for changes in things we normally think of as immutable, like the length of a day.

Long Now co-founder and lead designer of the 10,000-Year Clock, Danny Hillis, published a paper recently along with Rob Seaman, Steve Allen, and Jon Giorgini, with the American Astronomical Society.  The paper discusses the different kinds of time that the Clock needs to track in order to show accurate time for the next ten millennia, and how these systems interrelate.

The 10,000-Year Clock has both a pendulum (generating an approximation of absolute time) and is also synchronized to the sun at noon. Therefore the Clock must reconcile Universal Time, Terrestrial Time, and Barycentric Dynamical Time and also deal with unpredictable changes in the Earth’s rotation:

“The variation is caused by a variety of effects including tidal drags, shifts in the Earth’s crust, changes in ocean levels, and even weather… This creates an uncertainty in the average length of day of about 10 parts per million, an uncertainty of plus or minus 37 solar days over the design lifetime of the clock.”

So, not accounting for these variations could theoretically leave the Clock over a month off at the end of 10,000 years. Read the paper to see how each system is accounted for.

The paper was presented at a colloquium in October 02011 called Decoupling Civil Timekeeping from Earth Rotation. Attendees, including astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, discussed the paper and the 10,000-Year Clock. Notes taken during the conversation show that, while the technical success of the Clock’s durability is yet to be determined, its ability to inspire long-term thinking is already taking hold:

Neil deGrasse Tyson jested that the Long Now should put some signage on the 10,000 Year Clock so that a post-apocalyptic Earth will not think that the world will end when the clock stops working.

The Long Now Foundation’s monthly

Seminars About Long-term Thinking

Mark Lynas on “The Nine Planetary Boundaries: Finessing the Anthropocene”

TICKETS

Tuesday March 6, 02012 at 7:30pm Cowell Theater at Fort Mason

Long Now Members can reserve 2 seats, join today! • General Tickets $10

About this Seminar:

Human activities increasingly dominate 9 crucial planetary systems. Add to the familiar ones—climate, biodiversity, and chemical pollution—atmospheric aerosols, ocean acidification, excess nitrogen in agriculture, too much land in agriculture, freshwater scarcity, and ozone depletion. To have “a safe operating space for humanity” on Earth requires adjusting our behavior to work within those systems. How we collectively step up to that responsibility will determine whether “the Anthropocene” (the current geological era shaped by humans) will be a tragedy or humanity’s greatest accomplishment.

British environmentalist Mark Lynas is the author of one of the finest climate books, Six Degrees, and of a new work, The God Species: How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans, which spells out a cohesive Green program for this century guided by the 9 boundaries.

“Heirlooms: Saving Humanity’s 10,000-year Legacy of Food”

Wednesday February 22, 02012 at the Cowell Theater, San Francisco

Jim Richardson’s photography focuses heavily on humanity’s relationship to the natural world. He often travels far and wide to explore distant locations, working for both National Geographic and Traveler Magazine, but he’s also lovingly documented life in his own backyard of rural Kansas.

He’ll be speaking in an upcoming Seminar About Long-term Thinking about the biodiversity created by human agriculture. Though industrial monoculture threatens this rich legacy, humans have spent considerable time and effort over the last 10,000 years breeding and cross-breeding plants and animals of every color, stripe and shape. These heirlooms will require their own conservation efforts and documenting them photographically is a task Jim Richardson is highly qualified for.

In an interview for The Comment Factory, he discussed the proliferation of digital photography and the ways it has lowered many photographic boundaries. He reminds us, though, that, “Technology alone is never enough. Meaning comes from people. Technology without meaning is just a waste.”

For more on what makes good photography and how to produce it, he offers Notes and Tips from the field on some photos he’s taken for National Geographic over the years. A recent feature on light pollution called Our Vanishing Night, is full of stunning urban, rural and aerial shots by Richardson that explore our relationship with the night sky.

While on the topic of preserving agricultural diversity, some Long Now followers might be thinking of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a seedbank on an archipelago near the North Pole. (Long Now Executive Director Alexander Rose visited the site in 02011.) Indeed, it’s been on Richardson’s radar as well: he traveled to Svalbard in 02010 and documented some run-ins with the local ‘wildlife’ on his blog.

We’re looking forward to seeing Jim Richardson’s artwork and hearing stories of his travels for this lecture and we hope you’ll join us. The talk is on Wednesday February 22nd at the Cowell Theater. You can reserve tickets, get directions and sign up for the podcast on the Seminar page.

Subscribe to the Seminars About Long-term Thinking podcast for more thought-provoking programs.

Keeping time, it turns out, is a messy business. In order to satisfy science, religion, and sometimes ego, our calendar has changed quite a bit throughout history. This video by Jeremiah Warren tells the story up to now.

Since we can’t predict what changes might be made in the future, the 10,000 Year Clock has been designed to keep track of the cycles of the Sun, the Moon, the planets and the constellations – things even the largest of egos will have trouble changing.

WATCH

Lawrence Lessig’s “How Money Corrupts Congress and a Plan to Stop It”

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.

“When you feel the impossibility of really thinking about the ten thousand year horizon, you’ve got to access that part in each of us which knows that the rational calculation is not the only reason we do things.  We celebrate doing things that are plainly irrational—loving our children, loving our country, loving our planet—even though we’ll never see any of those things come to the perfection we imagine.”

At the beginning of each year, John Brockman’s Edge poses a question to a long list (192 this year!) of thinkers and authors. The ensuing onslaught of insight is then published for us all to enjoy. This year he asks:

What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?

Scientists’ greatest pleasure comes from theories that derive the solution to some deep puzzle from a small set of simple principles in a surprising way. These explanations are called “beautiful” or “elegant”. Historical examples are Kepler’s explanation of complex planetary motions as simple ellipses, Bohr’s explanation of the periodic table of the elements in terms of electron shells, and Watson and Crick’s double helix. Einstein famously said that he did not need experimental confirmation of his general theory of relativity because it “was so beautiful it had to be true.”

The full list is bound to include a few folks you’d like to hear from. Below is the subset of respondents that have crossed through the Long Now orbit:

Board Members:

• Stewart Brand discusses fitness landscapes.
• David Eagleman tells us that the brain isn’t an executive, but rather a team of rivals.
• Brian Eno wraps the whole earth in a bow and plays John Conway’s game of Life.
• Kevin Kelly reminds us we’re all star-stuff.
• Paul Saffo digs into plate tectonics.

SALT Speakers:

• Jared Diamond mixes equal parts sodium, potassium and squid, with electrifying results.
• Freeman Dyson reconciles quantum mechanics & gravity. Or doesn’t? It’s kind of hard to tell.
• George Dyson thinks it’ll be a long time before we’ve got one good explanation for everything.
• Juan Enriquez ruminates on what anthropomorphism illuminates and what it obscures.
• Matt Ridley recalls Crick’s metaphor of life as code.
• Martin Rees warns of another Copernican demotion.
• Clay Shirky takes us beyond memes.
• Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains hormesis.
• Carl Zimmer‘s elegant explanation is his favorite because it is wrong.

About this Seminar:

Agricultural biodiversity is as much in need of defending as the world’s wildlife. Countless varieties of plants and animals were bred by the world’s peoples for talents specific to every soil, climate, and human culture. Most of them have been lost—their hard-won genetic sophistication extinguished. But many have survived, thanks to professional and amateur devotion, and they are wondrous—living embodiments of humanity’s deepest traditions.

Photojournalist Jim Richardson has been covering the agricultural beat for National Geographic since 1984. His spectacular photographs, and the stories he tells with them, are renowned.

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