Today a million copies of the  International Herald Tribune were distributed that were dated 6 months from now… after the Copenhagen climate talks.

In a front-page ad in today’s International Herald Tribune, the leaders of the European Union thank the European public for having engaged in months of civil disobedience leading up to the Copenhagen climate conference that will be held this December. “It was only thanks to your massive pressure over the past six months that we could so dramatically shift our climate-change policies…. To those who were arrested, we
thank you.”

There was only one catch: the paper was fake.

Looking exactly like the real thing, but dated December 19th, 2009, a million copies of the fake paper were distributed worldwide by thousands of volunteers in order to show what could be achieved at the Copenhagen climate conference that is scheduled for Dec. 7-18, 2009.

The effort was orchestrated through a joint effort bythe always amazing Yes Men and Greenpeace. While this is not the first time someone has produced an artifact from the future as a way to change the way people are acting now, this is certainly one of the most ambitious efforts.  Kudos.

One of my favorites parts of the paper are the ads like the one from BP below:

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 Spark radio show has a segment that includes interviews with Brewster Kahle on the Internet Archive, and Ed Burtynski about his idea for 10,000 photography and the Clock of the Long Now.

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Alex Steffen sent in a note about this interesting new service that allows your estate to elegantly handle your digital assets, passwords, accounts etc after your passing.

As people increasingly document their lives digitally, and move the majority of their interactions to the internet, there is a strange undeadness that happens to their online presence after they are gone.  I have had first hand experience with this in my family last year, it is very difficult to get all the passwords and account logins sorted so that you can set everything straight once someone is gone. I would love to hear from someone who has used this service…

I am not exactly sure how much better it is than telling a trusted a friend or relative where to find this information, or using an lawyer to hang onto it.  But their plans start at free for a limited account, and go up to $299 for a lifetime paid unlimited account, so that is likely less than you would spend with a lawyer, and I suspect this is easier to keep updated.

It is good to see economies popping up around long term storage of digital assets.  However the idea of storing those assets for long periods of time with an internet startup is likely a dubious venture at best.

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This niftiness was sent in by Jimmy Wales.  On this one graphic is all the stuff you need to know to jump start a civilization (or get super rich if you travel back in time).  To be sure it comes with you on your travels they sell it as a t-shirt, so unless you happen to be using that time machine from Terminator that only works on naked people, you are all set.  James Welcher also noted that it is particularly interesting to cross reference this document with “Phone call to the 14th century” by Kasper Houser [mp3 audio].

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There’s a new mood: collapse.

Former President Reagan defined a recession as when your friend lost his job, and a depression as when you lost your job. Collapse is when no one has a job; in fact there are no longer any such things as jobs to be had.

Google Trends showing number of news references to “collapse” (red) and “depression” (blue).

Doom and collapse are in the air. We could think of the Long Doom as the opposite of the Long Boom. The stock market has been falling steadily for a year and not even  the usual optimists are claiming it has bottomed out.  Like a vicious circle bad news breeds more bad news, and so at the moment the prospect for the near future is for more of the same bad news.

How low could it go?

Article continued at The Technium…

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A multitude of tweets from people like Tim O’Reilly and Nion McEvoy pointed me to this excellent piece on the end of analog news by (past seminar speaker) Clay Shirky.  Not to be missed, here is an excerpt:

“When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.”

I guess Long Now should start planning our next technological funeral event.  The funeral for the analog newspaper.

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The recent collision of two satellites in orbit represents a pretty serious problem for proponents of spaceflight.  Some scientists are discussing ways of cleaning up the increasing amounts of debris in earth orbit.  They’re worried that more and more junk flying around up there will make it difficult for humanity to reliably operate satellites or manned vehicles.

Trash in orbit isn’t a new issue - it came up a couple years ago as a result of the Chinese test to shoot down a satellite, though the debris concern was somewhat overshadowed by totally legitimate fears of the militarization of space.

What scientists and spaceflight supporters hope to avoid is what’s called the Kessler Syndrome - a chain reaction set off by debris collisions that cause more debris and, therefore, more collisions.  The result of this scenario is such a high risk of collision in orbit that it renders impossible many or all of the space-based activities that we currently take for granted.

NASA’s on the case, though, with their Orbital Debris Program Office at the Johnson Space Center.  The coolest thing on their site is a link to the facility where orbital debris collisions are modeled - the Hypervelocity Impact Technology Facility.  They use high-speed cameras, light gas guns and computer simulations (with video!) to explore how collisions at orbital velocity (kilometers per second) will effect various shielding materials.

The European Space Agency is also taking a serious look at the space debris problem.  Watch a video showing the build-up of orbital debris over the last 50 years on their Space Debris Spotlight page and check out their own work on hypervelocity impacts on the space debris section of their website.

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Last Friday I attended the Prediction Markets Summit here in San Francisco.  I met Robin Hanson there who clued me into an article published in Science (subscr. req’d.) on the Psychology of Transcending the Here and Now.  Most impressive is that the study itself seems to span several decades.  Hanson wrote this up on his blog here, and takes the idea further here.  This is the first serious study I have seen on how humans do long-term thinking, and it makes me realize that I should pay more attention to the world of psychology.

Abstract:

People directly experience only themselves here and now but often consider, evaluate, and plan situations that are removed in time or space, that pertain to others’ experiences, and that are hypothetical rather than real. People thus transcend the present and mentally traverse temporal distance, spatial distance, social distance, and hypotheticality. We argue that this is made possible by the human capacity for abstract processing of information. We review research showing that there is considerable similarity in the way people mentally traverse different distances, that the process of abstraction underlies traversing different distances, and that this process guides the way people predict, evaluate, and plan near and distant situations.

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Back in June of 02005 Steve Jobs gave the commencement speech at Stanford.  I heard about it second hand from several people who said he quoted Stewart Brand at the end.  But until I came across this video today, I had not heard or seen it.  The whole thing is an excellent talk, and may be a good stand-in for those of you suffering from the disappointment in the lack of Steve at the last MacWorld.  Look for the mention of the Whole Earth Catalog and Stewart at 12:50 into the talk.

Also of note for the Whole Earth Catalog fans out there is that Danica Remy and the folks at Point Foundation have put up a digital version of all of The Whole Earth Catalogs.

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Stewart Brand sent me this excellent piece by past Seminar Speaker, historian and author, Niall Furguson.  It is a retrospective of 02009, bravely published a year in advance.  An excerpt from the intro:

“It was the year when people finally gave up trying to predict the year ahead. It was the year when every forecast had to be revised – usually downwards – at least three times. It was the year when the paradox of globalisation was laid bare for all to see, if their eyes weren’t tightly shut.”

The piece is impressive for a historian, as it puts his written history into the territory of the future.  And aside from letting his McCain adviser status show fairly bluntly, I think it is an unfortunate but likely scenario.  The main take away for me is that it reinforces the idea that the borrow and spend economy cannot sustain, it will always have to brutally correct at some point…

“With total debt above 350 per cent of US gross domestic product, the excesses of the age of leverage proved difficult to purge. Households reined in their consumption. Banks sought to restrict new lending. The recession deepened. Unemployment rose towards 10 per cent, and then higher. The economic downward spiral seemed unstoppable. No matter how hard they saved, Americans simply could not stabilise the ratio of their debts to their disposable incomes. The paradox of thrift meant that rising savings translated into falling consumer demand, which led to rising unemployment, falling incomes and so on, ever downwards.”

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