The Long Now Foundation’s monthly

Seminars About Long-term Thinking

Elaine Pagels on “The Truth About the Book of Revelations”

TICKETS

Monday August 20, 02012 at 7:30pm Cowell Theater at Fort Mason

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

About this Seminar:

Revelations about the Book of Revelation

Probably the most consequential vision of the future ever written is the Bible’s Book of Revelation. If God didn’t write it (through the sainted instrument of someone named John), then who did, and why?

Elaine Pagels has a persuasive answer, spectacularly illustrated. The author of The Gnostic Gospels; Beyond Belief; and Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation, Pagels analyzes other revelations of the time (they were common) and examines how John’s particular version of apocalypse made it into the world’s most popular book. John had his own agenda. It wasn’t Christian.

Like their makers, robots can be used for creativity or destruction. Robots can be used to build things we wouldn’t expect and to destroy us in ways we haven’t yet imagined. In two events, Daniel Suarez and Alexander Rose discuss this dynamic potential and some of the things they’ve learned through hands-on and speculative work with robots and drones.

Daniel Suarez reading at Long Now 7/23/12

Long Now Members can RSVP via Eventbrite; please see your email for the access code.

Suarez will be reading and discussing his new book, Kill Decision, at The Long Now Museum on Monday July 23rd, at 6:30pm; refreshments will be served and books will be for sale.

about the book:

…a terrific mix of thrills and mayhem, big ideas, and well-founded technological and social speculation. This is the kind of mind-expanding novel that uses entertainment to make powerful, important points about alarming current trends; the novel as cautionary tale has rarely been better executed. – Tim O’Reilly

Dorkbot with Alexander Rose and Daniel Suarez on 7/25/12

No pre-sale tickets, $5 to $20 sliding scale at the door, open to the public
*Please note that this event may reach capacity

This Dorkbot is at Jellyfish Gallery on Wednesday July 25th at 7:30pm. DorkbotSF is about people doing strange things with electricity and is run by Long Now member Karen Marcelo.

Daniel Suarez will be talking about Crossing the Rubicon: Autonomous Combat Drones — what’s driving their development and their likely impact on human society.

Long Now Executive Director Alexander Rose will discuss the technology and methodology of construction now underway on the 10,000-Year Clock.

More about the speakers:

Long Now Seminar Speaker, Daniel Suarez is an independent systems consultant who designed and developed enterprise software for the defense, finance, and entertainment industries. He then turned to writing to explore his ideas about our near-term future in his books Daemon, Freedom (TM), and now Kill Decision.

Hired as the first employee of The Long Now Foundation in February of 01997, Alexander Rose is the Executive Director of the Foundation and the Project Manager for the 10,000-Year Clock. Alexander graduated with a bachelor of arts honors degree from Carnegie Mellon University in Industrial Design in 01995 and shares several design patents on the 10,000-Year Clock with Danny Hillis.

More about Kill Decision:

From the New York Times Bestselling author of Daemon and Freedom™, comes a terrifying, breathtaking, and all-too-possible vision of the world’s near future. In his new novel, Kill Decision, Daniel Suarez turns to the timely and increasingly important topic of combat drones.  The book tells the story of myrmecologist Linda McKinney—a scientist studying weaver ants—who is forced to team up with a Special Ops soldier after her research is stolen and used by unknown forces to power autonomous swarming weapons.  Suarez’s well researched thrillers are based on real science and technology, and in Kill Decision he takes the very real implications of automated war to its next logical step.”

“The Coming Century of War Against Your Computer”

Tuesday July 31, 02012 at the Novellus Theater, San Francisco

If geek culture had a class president, Cory Doctorow would be frontrunner for the position. He writes for BoingBoing, uses Ubuntu, played a hero in XKCD, published several rebellious young-adult sci-fi novels (under CC licenses, no less), and has worked on two continents fighting for the rights of internet users. He’s spent the better part of the last couple decades encouraging content-producers to embrace the new models of distribution made possible by the internet and fought them tooth and nail when they seek to hold it back.

His outspokenness doesn’t come from a single statement like “information wants to be free.” Doctorow argues in a recent essay called Lockdown that enforcing Copyright law in the digital era is about more than protecting the rights of intellectual property holders; it has rather become a kind of trojan horse for the surveillance industrial complex and threatens to severely curtail the individual autonomy of the world’s citizens. Computers are infusing everything, he explains. They increasingly extend our embodiment and cognition and can thus be enabling and liberating. Computing’s inherent flexibility therefore offers a form of freedom; commercial or governmental interests that seek to control computing for their own needs or simply out of a fear of the new way must be resisted in order to protect that freedom.

The hacker resistance is a central theme in Doctorow’s fiction. Little Brother and its upcoming sequel, Homeland, focus on teenagers in a near-future world who, as savvy tech users, confront the increasingly intrusive surveillance of a paranoid government. For the Win explores what the world of online gaming can offer to the understanding of resistance movement recruiting and organization. He also recently collaborated with Charles Stross on a book called The Rapture of the Nerds, comically and satirically exploring the idea of the technological singularity.

Cory Doctorow lucidly and pragmatically voices geek culture’s highest hopes and biggest fears. In a recent column in The Guardian or this interview with Technology and Activism, for instance, he describes both the need to organize against those who would curtail digital rights and the increasing ease with which it can be done through web technology. His work supports the need for a critical and activist approach to technological development, symbolically and creatively through his fiction, but also substantively and measurably through his scholarship, his journalism, and his work with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Cory Doctorow describes the threats our technological rights will face – and how we can protect them – on July 31st at the Novellus 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.

The Long Now Foundation’s monthly

Seminars About Long-term Thinking

Cory Doctorow on “The Coming Century of War Against Your Computer”

TICKETS

Tuesday July 31, 02012 at 7:30pm Novellus Theater at YBCA

Long Now Members can reserve 1 seat, join today! • General Tickets $10

About this Seminar:

The war against computer freedom will just keep escalating, Doctorow contends. The copyright wars, net neutrality, and SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) were early samples of what is to come. Victories in those battles were temporary. Conflict in the decades ahead will feature ever higher stakes, more convoluted issues, and far more powerful technology. The debate is about how civilization decides to conduct itself and in whose interests.

“Cory Doctorow is one of the great context-setters of our generation,” says Tim O’Reilly. Co-editor of the acclaimed blog “Boing Boing,” Doctorow writes contemporary science fiction blending contextual insight with journalistic depth. His recent books include For the Win; Makers; and Little Brother.

This lecture was presented as part of The Long Now Foundation’s monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking.

If Mayors Ruled the World

Tuesday June 5, 02012 – San Francisco

Video is up on the Barber Seminar page for Members.

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Audio is up on the Barber Seminar page, or you can subscribe to our podcast.

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City-based global governance – a summary by Stewart Brand

Sovereign nation states have conspicuously failed to cooperate well enough to deal with increasingly global problems such as climate change, environmental degradation, and organized crime, Barber said. Nations focus on their borders, which are seen as competitive zero-sum games. “But if we shift our gaze, in thinking about global governance, from nation states to cities, things suddenly become possible that seemed impossible. Cities are apart from one another, separated by wide spaces. Their relationships are based on communication, trade, transportation, and culture. They are relational, not in a zero-sum game with one another.”

Cities are inherently pragmatic rather than ideological. “They collect garbage and collect art rather than collecting votes or collecting allies. They put up buildings and run buses rather than putting up flags and running political parties. They secure the flow of water rather than the flow of arms. They foster education and culture in place of national defense and patriotism. They promote collaboration, not exceptionalism.”

An honoring of all that practicality is shown by polling results of confidence in various levels of government. Only 18 percent of Americans have confidence in the US Congress (“the lowest in a long time”). The Presidency gets 44 percent. Americans have 65 percent confidence in their mayors. They can see clearly that city governments are less distorted by party politics, less responsive to massive lobbying. They see mayors getting things done.

New York City’s “hyperactive” mayor Michael Bloomberg says, “I don’t listen to Washington very much. The difference between my level of government and other levels of government is that action takes place at the city level. While national government at this time is just unable to do anything, the mayors of this country have to deal with the real world.” After 9/11, New York’s police chief sent his best people to Homeland Security to learn about dealing with terrorism threats. After 18 months they reported, “We’re learning nothing in Washington.” They were sent then to twelve other cities—Singapore, Hong Kong, Paris, Frankfurt, Rio—and built their own highly effective intelligence network city to city, not through Washington or Interpol.

Last year following the meeting in Mexico City on climate, where little progress was made by the national delegations, representatives from 207 cities signed a Global Cities Climate Pact pledging to pursue “strategies and actions aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.” The cities did what the nations could not. There are many existing bodies of robust cooperation among cities—the International Union of Local Authorities, the World Association of Major Metropolises, the American League of Cities, the Local Governments for Sustainability, the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, the United Cities and Local Governments at the UN, the New Hanseatic League, the Megacities Foundation—200 such networking organizations. “They are dull sounding, but they are fashioning global processes that work.”

Global governance needs no great edifice with unitary rulers. It can be voluntary, informal, bottom-up. Barber recommends forming a global parliament of cities, because nation states will not govern globally. Cities can. They already are.

Subscribe to our Seminar email list for updates and summaries.

This lecture was presented as part of The Long Now Foundation’s monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking.

Eternal Plastic: A Toxic Love Story

Tuesday May 22, 02012 – San Francisco

Video is up on the Freinkel Seminar page for Members.

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Audio is up on the Freinkel Seminar page, or you can subscribe to our podcast.

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Making Plastic Even Better- a summary by Stewart Brand

Plastic is so new, Freinkel began, that among all the objects preserved in the sunken Titanic, none are synthetic plastic, because there was hardly any available in 1912. Natural plastic, however, was a familiar material. Amber was popular. Rubber was essential (all plant cellulose is made of long-chain polymers). Ivory for everything from billiard balls to piano keys was in such high demand that an 1867 paper warned about the looming extinction of elephants. The first synthetic plastic—celluoid—was developed as a substitute for ivory, and the elephants survived.

Bakelite was invented in 1907 to replace the beetle excretion called shellac (“It took 16,000 beetles six months to make a pound of shellac.”), and was first used to insulate electrical wiring. Soon there were sturdy Bakelite radios, telephones, ashtrays, and a thousand other things. The technology democratized consumption, because mass production made former luxury items cheap and attractive. The 1920s and ‘30s were a golden age of plastic innovation, with companies like Dow Chemical, DuPont, and I. G. Farben creating hundreds of new varieties of plastic for thrilled consumers. Cellophane became a cult. Nylons became a cult. A plastics trade show in 1946 had 87,000 members of the public lining up to view the wonders. New fabrics came along—Orlon and Dacron—as colorful as the deluge of plastic toys—Barbie, the Frisbee, Hula hoops, and Silly Putty.

Looking for new markets, the marketers discovered disposability—disposable cups for drink vending machines, disposable diapers (“Said to be responsible for the baby boom”), Bic lighters, soda bottles, medical syringes, and the infinite market of packaging. Americans consume 300 pounds of plastic a year. The variety of plastics we use are a problem for recycling, because they have to be sorted by hand. They all biodegrade eventually, but at varying rates. New bio-based polymers like “corn plastic” and “plant bottles” have less of a carbon footprint, but they biodegrade poorly. Meanwhile, thanks to the efficiencies of fracking, the price of natural gas feedstock is plummeting, and so is the price of plastic manufacture.

Some plastics have some chemicals like bisphenol A and phthalates that are toxic. American manufacturers don’t have to list the materials in their products, and there’s no hope of testing every one of the 80,000 industrialized chemicals loose in the world. Freinkel recommends greatly expanding the practice of “green chemistry,” so that every process and product of manufacturing is safe and sustainable from the ground up. She would like to see a stronger regulatory environment and the building of a fully systemic recycling infrastructure.

In the Q & A Freinkel recommended a book by Elizabeth Grossman, Chasing Molecules: Poisonous Products, Human Health, and the Promise of Green Chemistry.

Subscribe to our Seminar email list for updates and summaries.

The Long Now Foundation’s monthly

Seminars About Long-term Thinking

Benjamin Barber on “If Mayors Ruled the World”

TICKETS

Tuesday June 5, 02012 at 7:30pm Cowell Theater at Fort Mason

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

About this Seminar:

Democracy began in cities and works best in cities. Mayors are the most pragmatic and effective of all political leaders because they have to get things done. “The paramount aims of city-dwellers,” says Barber, “concern collecting garbage and collecting art rather than collecting votes or collecting foreign allies, the supply of water rather than the supply of arms, promoting cooperation rather than promoting exceptionalism, fostering education and culture rather than fostering national defense and patriotism.”

Most of humanity now lives in cities, and cities worldwide connect with each other more readily than any other political entity. By expanding on that capability, Barber suggests, “Cities can make themselves global guarantors of social justice and equality against the depredations of fractious states. And they can become, as the polis once was, new incubators of democracy, this time in a global form.“

A much-honored political theorist, Barber is author of Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age and of Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World.

This lecture was presented as part of The Long Now Foundation’s monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking.

Living in the Homogenocene: The First 500 Years

Monday April 23, 02012 – San Francisco

Video is up on the Mann Seminar page for Members.

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Audio is up on the Mann Seminar page, or you can subscribe to our podcast.

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Bio-blender Earth - a summary by Stewart Brand

Tumultuous effects resulted and continue to result from the massive mixing of the world’s biota when European ships reconnected the American continent to the rest of the world. Mann traced several of the cascading consequences of “the biggest ecological convulsion since the death of the dinosaurs.”

The first momentous change came from microbial exchange—20 lethal diseases came from Europe to the Americas while only one (syphilis) went the other way. North America, which had been largely cleared by natives with fire and agriculture, reforested when two-thirds to 95% of the native inhabitants died from European diseases—”the greatest demographic catastrophe in human history.” That huge reforesting drew down atmospheric carbon dioxide and Europe’s “Little Ice Age” (1550-1800) apparently resulted.

Meanwhile the mountain of silver at Potosí, Bolivia, vastly enriched Europe, which “went shopping” worldwide. Trading ships coursed the world’s oceans. One artifact picked up from Peru was the potato—a single variety of the 6,000 available. When potatoes in Europe turned out to provide four times the amount of food per acre as wheat, the previously routine famines came to an end, population soared, governments became more stable, and they began building global empires. After 1843 guano shipped by the ton from coastal Peru for fertilizer introduced high-input agriculture. In Ireland 40% of the exploding population ate only potatoes. Around 1844 a potato blight arrived from Mexico, and a million Irish died in the Great Famine and a million more emigrated.

In China, which has no large lakes and only two major rivers, agriculture had been limited to two wet regions where rice could be grown. Two imports from America—maize and sweet potato—could be farmed in dry lands. As in Europe, population went up. Vast areas were terraced as Han farmers pushed westward as far as the Mongolian desert. In heavy rains the terraces melted into the streams, and silt built up in the lowlands, elevating the rivers as much as 40 feet above the surrounding terrain, so when they flooded, millions died. “A Katrina per month for 100 years,” as one Chinese meteorologist described it. The constant calamities weakened the government, and China became ripe for foreign colonial takeover.

In America two imported diseases—malaria and yellow fever—were selective in who they killed. Europeans died in huge numbers, but Africans were one-tenth as susceptible, and so slavery replaced traditional indentured servitude in all the warm regions that favored mosquito-borne diseases. As one result, four times as many Africans as Europeans crossed the Atlantic and began mixing with the remaining native Americans, giving rise to an endless variety of racial blends and accompanying vitality throughout the Americas.

During the Q & A, Mann described a potential fresh eco-convulsion-in-waiting. “There is an area in southeast Asia roughly the size of Great Britain that is a single giant rubber plantation.” Where rubber trees originally came from in the Amazon there is now a rubber tree leaf-blight that is starting to spread in Asia. “You could lose all the rubber trees in three to six months. It would be the biggest deforestation in a long time.” The entire auto industry, he added, depends on just-in-time delivery of rubber.

Subscribe to our Seminar email list for updates and summaries.

This lecture was presented as part of The Long Now Foundation’s monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking.

The Social Conquest of Earth

Friday April 20, 02012 – San Francisco

Video is up on the Wilson Seminar page.

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Audio is up on the Wilson Seminar page, or you can subscribe to our podcast.

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The Real Creation Story - a summary by Stewart Brand

“History makes no sense without prehistory,“ Wilson declared, “and prehistory makes no sense without biology.” He began by noting that every religion has a different creation story, all of them necessarily based on ignorance of what really happened in the past. Religions thus can’t give valid answers on the meaning of life—Gauguin’s questions: “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?” Philosophy gave up on the questions long ago. The task was left to science, and from science a valid, shareable creation story is now emerging.

For the last 65 million years Earth has been dominated by eusocial animals. Ants, termites, and bees in some areas make up half of all biomass. Yet only a few of the million known insect species made the jump to eusociality. One variety of mammal, a tiny set of primates, made a similar jump. Once they began to use their eusocial skills to fan out from Africa 60 thousand years ago, they gradually became far more dominant even than the social insects. “The term ‘eusocial,’“ Wilson said, “means a society based in part on a division of labor, in which individuals act altruistically, that covers two or more generations, and that cares for young cooperatively.”

That eusociality is so rare suggests how difficult it is for altruistic traits to evolve. The powerful evolutionary force to make individuals that successfully reproduce has to be overcome by some form of selective pressure which generates altruistic individuals who yield their interests to the interests of the group. How does that occur? Examining near-eusocial species like African wild dogs and snapping shrimp along with primitively eusocial species like sweat bees shows that a crucial step appears to be made when multiple generations linger to defend a constructed nest with valuable access to food. That step can be made with a simple change to a single behavioral gene, silencing the trait for normal dispersal of young to carry out their own independent reproduction. When the young linger to defend the nest and begin to provide for the next generation of young, eusociality begins.

All eusocial species appear to have arisen from multi-generational nest defense. Two million years ago our ancestors began using fire for campsites and cooking. At the same time hominid brain size began expanding dramatically. Social traits emerged that have characterized humanity ever since. We love joining groups, and we became geniuses at reading the intentions of each other, a skill we fine-tune incessantly with our enjoyment of gossip. In another distinctively human trait, like ants, we became highly adept at collaborative warfare.

Wilson had long been a proponent of William Hamilton’s theory of “kin selection” as an explanation for how altruistic traits could evolve. But as a naturalist he found it did not explain phenomena that he and others were discovering in eusocial species, and he began to favor “group selection” instead—a process where the “target” of evolution was sacrificially collaborative traits, because highly cooperative groups beat poorly cooperative groups, and the “units” of evolution (genes) adjusted accordingly. It is successful groups, more than successful families, that are being selected for. In 2010 Wilson, along with mathematician Martin Nowak and Corina Tarnita formally challenged kin selection with a peer-reviewed paper in Nature. There was, as Wilson put it, “considerable blowback” from kin selection theorists and supporters.

Wilson’s alternative he calls “multi-level selection,” where individual selection and group selection proceed together (with kin selection a continuing bit player). In our eusocial species, that mix of traits makes us “permanently unstable, permanently conflicted” between selfish impulses and cooperative impulses. We negotiate these conflicts endlessly within ourselves and with each other. Wilson sees inherent adaptive value in that constant negotiation. Our vibrant cultural life may be driven in part by it.

In response to a question about what the next stages of human eusociality might be, Wilson said he hoped for a fading of interest in end-state ideologies and end-time religious creation stories because they so fervently deny negotiation.

Subscribe to our Seminar email list for updates and summaries.

The Long Now Foundation’s monthly

Seminars About Long-term Thinking

Susan Freinkel on “Eternal Plastic: A Toxic Love Story”

TICKETS

Tuesday May 22, 02012 at 7:30pm Cowell Theater at Fort Mason

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

About this Seminar:

Plastic now pervades civilization—how many of the things you see from where you are right now are plastic? It is an ingenious material whose miraculous qualities we take too much for granted, but it also sometimes has nightmarish downstream effects. The giant polymer molecules (polyethylene, polypropylene, polystyrene, etc.) that are so marvelously cheap to mold, extrude, shape, and weave are also extremely durable. Their cheapness makes them the basic material of a throw-away culture (one third of all plastic goes into disposable packaging.) Their durability means that any toxic effects persist indefinitely in the environment.

Plastic presents a problem in temporal management of the very long-term and the very short-term. How do we get the benefits of plastic’s amazing durability while reducing the harm from its convenient disposability? The matter requires close and respectful coordination between short-term experts (businesses) and long-term experts (governments and nonprofits). Managing plastic well is a microcosm of managing civilization well.

Susan Freinkel is the author of Plastic: A Toxic Love Story and American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree.