Long Conversation – Pete Worden Announces 100-Year Starship from The Long Now Foundation.

On October 16th, Long Now hosted the Long Conversation as part of our Longplayer event.  Speaking with Peter Schwartz about the future of space travel, NASA Ames Research Center Director Pete Worden announced a collaborative project between Ames and DARPA.  The two agencies have set aside just over a million dollars to begin research on a 100-year starship.

The announcement was first publicized by Amara Angelica writing for the Kurzweil AI blog:

NASA Ames Director Simon “Pete” Worden revealed Saturday that NASA Ames has “just started a project with DARPA called the Hundred Year Starship,” with $1 million funding from DARPA and $100K from NASA.

“You heard it here,” said Worden at “Long Conversation,” a Long Now Foundation event in San Francisco. “We also hope to inveigle some billionaires to form a Hundred Year Starship fund,” Dr. Worden added. (No further details on this are available from NASA at this time.)

“The human space program is now really aimed at settling other worlds,” he explained. “Twenty years ago you had to whisper that in dark bars and get fired.”

It later bounced its way over to Huffington Post and MSNBC’s Cosmic Log.

UPDATE:  On Oct 28th DARPA released this official statement (PDF).  MSNBC also covered it here.

I just happened upon a call for extras (check it out if you’re based in San Francisco) for a film that will be part of a series of sci-fi shorts called Futurestates:

What will become of America in five, 25, or even 50 years from today? FUTURESTATES is a series of 11 fictional mini-features exploring possible future scenarios through the lens of today’s global realities. Immerse yourself in the visions of these independent prognosticators as they project a future of their own imagining.

During his Seminar, Jesse Schell recommended a number of books and other resources that have informed his conception of the Gamepocalypse.  Here’s a list of the books for the curious:

• Authenticity, by James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine II
• Finite and Infinite Games, by James P. Carse
• The Singularity is Near, by Ray Kurzweil
• The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Clayton M. Christensen
• The Rational Optimist, by Matt Ridley
• Good to Great, by Jim Collins
• Punished by Rewards, by Alfie Kohn

He also mentioned a movie called Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel, a website called Couch to 5K, and plenty of other fascinating things.  Oh, he’s on twitter too: @jesseschell

Boulding’s long-present anticipated our Long Now. It is a reminder that the core concept of being in the middle of history, rather than it’s beginning or end is a useful concept at multiple time frames, whether very long or very short.

“A favorite concept of mine is the 200-year present, a way of thinking about change. The 200-year present began 100 years ago with the year of birth of the people who have reach their hundredth birthday today. The other boundary of the 200-year present, 100 years from now, is the hundredth birthday of the babies born today. If you take that span, you and I will have had contact with a lot of people from different parts of that span. So think in terms of events over that span and realize how long change takes. You can see how difficult it has been to create these bodies and new ways and how in many ways we are slipping backward; but in other ways we are not. I take comfort to know that super-power hegemony has a very limited lifespan (decline and fall of Rome, the Ottoman Empire).”

- Elise Boulding Interviewed by Julian Portilla — 2003

(forwarded to me by Stuart Silverstone)

Attendees at The Academy of Science debate whether or not to try the water from 02030

Long Now Research Fellow – Stuart Candy (along with cohorts) recently presented the Plastic Century futures project at the Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. The project gives you the option of drinking water from decades ranging from 01910 (no plastic) to a hypothetical 02030 (mostly plastic).   After sampling each  I found them all to be fine except for 01960 which was a bit bitter for some reason…

Boing Boing notes that Popular Science has put up their whole 137 year historical archive on line in partnership with Google.  While you cant search by issue, you can do keyword searches.  I hope more long standing publications follow suit, this is a real treasure trove, especially the advertisements…

Search the Popular Science Archive

Thanks to Chaz for sending this in.

Long Now Digital Research Director Kurt Bollacker was recently published in New Scientist discussing the challenges in maintaining data for the long haul:

It seems unavoidable that most of the data in our future will be digital, so it behooves us to understand how to manage and preserve digital data so we can avoid what some have called the “digital dark age.” This is the idea—or fear!—that if we cannot learn to explicitly save our digital data, we will lose that data and, with it, the record that future generations might use to remember and understand us.

It’s a fairly long and comprehensive piece with lots of good advice and a good description of how the Rosetta Disk tries to address some of these problems.

Read the full article at New Scientist.

John Brockman’s Edge has posted the responses from its members to their Annual Question.  This year they wanted to know, “How is the internet changing the way you think?”

There are over 160 short essays from members of ‘The Third Culture,’ or “those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are.”

There are quite a few Long Now Foundation Board Members that have contributed as well as plenty of SALT speakers, past and present.  Here’s a list with links to their thoughts on how the internet is changing their thoughts:

Long Now Foundation Board Members:

• Danny Hillis
• Stewart Brand
• Kevin Kelly
• Brian Eno
• Esther Dyson
• Peter Schwartz
• Paul Saffo

Long Now Seminar Speakers:

• Clay Shirky
• Nicholas Nassim Taleb
• George Dyson
• Sam Harris
• Peter Diamandis
• Daniel Everett
• Juan Enriquez
• David Eagleman (scheduled for 4/1/10)

Officially inaugurated in 02002, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina is an attempt by Egypt and the city of Alexandria to recreate, in spirit if not content, the original Library of Alexandria.  The Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt created what was at the time, the worlds largest library in the third century BC in the Egyptian city of Alexandria.  Though historical accounts disagree as to how, why and when, this massive repository of centuries of scholastic work was burned down and lost to the ages.

Long Now Board Member Michael Keller sent in notice of his event coming up at Stanford University on December 2nd in which Dr. Ismail Serageldin will be discussing his work as the Director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina and his hopes for better dialogue between the West and the Muslim world:

Stanford University Libraries is pleased to present two lectures by Dr. Ismail Serageldin.

At 2:00 pm: The New Library of Alexandria: A Beacon of Knowledge

At 4:30 pm: For a Better Dialog Between the West and Muslims

Refreshments will be provided after the second lecture.

The lectures are being held in the Dinkelspiel Auditorium.  Call 650-736-9538 or email sonialee@stanford.edu for details/reservations.

Of Note: The Bibliotheca Alexandrina has a complete copy and physical backup of the Internet Archive.