OVERVIEW from Planetary Collective on Vimeo.

In 01963, Buckminster Fuller wrote:

Our little Spaceship Earth is only eight thousand miles in diameter, which is almost a negligible dimension in the great vastness of space. Our nearest star – our energy-supplying mother-ship, the Sun – is ninety-two million miles away … Our little Spaceship Earth is right now travelling at sixty thousand miles an hour around the sun and is also spinning axially, which, at the latitude of Washington, D.C., adds approximately one thousand miles per hour to our motion. Each minute we both spin at one hundred miles and zip in orbit at one thousand miles. That is a whole lot of spin and zip. … Spaceship Earth was so extraordinarily well invented and designed that to our knowledge humans have been on board it for two million years not even knowing that they were on board a ship. And our spaceship is so superbly designed as to be able to keep life regenerating on board despite the phenomenon, entropy, by which all local physical systems lose energy.

Taking Fuller’s words to heart, Stewart Brand once argued that “we will never get civilization right” until we recognize ourselves as travelers aboard a spaceship, and famously claimed that a photograph of the whole vessel might do the trick.

Indeed, a new short film by Planetary Collective documents and celebrates the transformative power of what it calls the Overview Effect. Ever since the crew aboard Apollo 8 first turned its camera back toward our planet, space travelers and ordinary earth-bound citizens alike have been struck by the emotions elicited by images of the whole Earth, floating in the darkness of space. Bringing astronauts together with philosophers, the video attempts to put these reactions into words – and echoes Stewart Brand by suggesting that whole-earth consciousness can be the seed of long-term responsibility.

To have that experience of awe is to, at least for the moment, let go of yourself. To transcend the sense of separation. So it’s not just that they were experiencing something other than them, but that they were, at some very deep level, integrating, realizing, their interconnectedness with that beautiful, blue-green ball.

(Image credit: NASA)

The Returning Tree from YuriSerizawa on Vimeo.

Digital artist Yuri Serizawa created this visualization as his graduation work at Digital Hollywood. It blends the biological with the urban and set the stage for our June 02012 SALT talk with Benjamin Barber on the role of cities in the future, “If Mayors Ruled the World.” We screened it at the seminar as part of our Long Shorts series of short films that convey long-term thinking.

The universe may be governed by quantum probability and uncertainty, but we can nevertheless predict the movements of bodies in our solar system with relative accuracy. For a preview of how the Moon will behave in 02013, this video offers an animated choreography of its phases and libration as it ellipses around our planet.

And for detailed information about specific dates of your choosing, NASA offers this handy tool.

Our Story in 1 Minute – a quick, inspiring reminder of how far we’ve come, with original music by MelodySheep aka John Boswell.

(Thanks, Stuart!)

Alan Rickman in Portraits in Dramatic Time by David Michalek. Thanks to Laura for sending this in.  Most of our Long Shorts have been time lapses that speed time up, this is a good one on slowing it down…

The project featured an array of glacially paced performances of theater artists and actors all genres and nationalities. With artists featured both singly and in groups, the piece offered a unique and secret glimpse into some of the world’s greatest performing artists.  More at http://www.davidmichalek.net/

Scored by:
Music from Inception – Mind Heist

Created by:
David Michalek

Duelity from Ryan Uhrich on Vimeo.

Duelity is a split-screen animation that tells both sides of the story of Earth’ s origins in a dizzying and provocative journey through the history and language that marks human thought.

Marcos Ceravolo and Ryan Uhrich designed and directed the short animation Duelity with the Vancouver Film School. We featured it as a Long Short – our series of short films that convey long-term thinking - at the August 02012 SALT talk with Elaine Pagels. Duelity visualizes two versions of the earth’s creation, and Pagels’ presentation delves into the Book of Revelation’s apocalyptic foretelling of its end.

While searching for a Long Short that could help us visualize the Anthropocene for Mark Lynas’ SALT, we came upon an amazing resource: The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. Contained therein are well over a million images of our planet taken from space.

And since NASA is a public institution paid for by American tax dollars, their policy for using the photos is basically, “They’re yours – have at ‘em!” (Just give them some credit – they did go to space to take them for us…)

One particularly exciting section within this massive collection is a series of photos taken by astronauts on the International Space Station using low-light cameras. Stitched together into videos, these images create amazing time-lapse depictions of the Earth and human civilization rotating and pulsing in a starry sky. Despite being over 200 miles below, humanity features significantly in the videos, weaving across the landscape, clustering around water sources and glowing through cloud cover.

Long Now videographer Chris Baldwin created a compilation of some of those videos and set it to Brian Eno’s aptly titled ‘Late Anthropocene’ from Small Craft on a Milk Sea.

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.

Happy new year to all…

derDon1234 created a compilation featuring some of the important events of the last 100 years (2911-1011) in 10 minutes.

via Laughing Squid,  The Awesomer, BuzzFeed & MPViral.com

Phillip Mendonça-Vieira captured the front page of the website of the New York Times every few hours from September 2010 to July 2011 and made a video of all those images. As far as historical documents go, it’s a hypnotic view into a particular period of time.

On what we might learn from this he says:

Having worked with and developed on a number of content management systems I can tell you that as a rule of thumb no one is storing their frontpage layout data. It’s all gone, and once newspapers shutter their physical distribution operations I get this feeling that we’re no longer going to have a comprehensive archive of how our news-sources of note looked on a daily basis. Archive.orgcomes close, but there are too many gaps to my liking.

This, in my humble opinion, is a tragedy because in many ways our frontpages are summaries of our perspectives and our preconceptions. They store what we thought was important, in a way that is easy and quick to parse and extremely valuable for any future generations wishing to study our time period.

He also did one for the BBC!