Long Now Research Fellow Stuart Candy brought to our attention this visualization, which shows projections of what sorts of technologies will be available in the future, how soon, and how important they will be. It was created by London-based designer Michell Zappa, who leads a ‘technological trend bureau’ called Envisioning Technology. Their website explains that they seek to describe “where society is inexorably heading in the near future.”

Our research facilitates understanding the field for those who work in technology by painting a bigger picture of where the landscape is heading. In this, we try guide both corporations and public institutions in making better decisions about their (and society’s) future.

Presumably the programmers at Phillips weren’t imagining this sort of patient.

Long Now Board Member David Eagleman recently had a very unusual visitor at his lab. At three thousand years of age, this is by far the oldest person Eagleman has ever put through a scanner. Neshkons is an Egyptian mummy, exhumed from Luxor in the 19th century and recently acquired by an acquaintance of Eagleman’s. It turns out that scanning a mummy presents some interesting problems (and neuroscientific disappointments, such as having had his brain removed through his nostrils with a hook at death). Eagleman described the challenges in a blog post:

First, for those of you who know my lab, you’ll know that we employ magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) when trying to decipher the human brain. So this was my first plan for the mummy.  But there was a big concern here: the possibility that Neskhons had, enfolded in his ancient, never-unwrapped linens, a hunk of metal.  That would spell bad news for the MRI, which is a giant magnet. [...]

And there was a second problem. MRI scanners work, in part, by detecting changes in electron spin in fluids in tissue and bone. Neskhons had no fluid at all.

In the end, Eagleman’s team performed a CT scan, “a series of X-rays taken from all different angles and then reconstructed into a 3-dimensional whole.” The results were fantastic, with high-resolution 3-dimensional images of a body still hidden inside its linen cocoon after three millennia. (Except for its head, which was laid bare at an “unwrapping party” in Cleveland in 1900.) The mummy is currently on display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas.

Neskhons’ sarcophagus [...] is vividly painted with scenes about the afterlife. He presumably wouldn’t have guessed that his body’s afterlife would take place in a transparent case in a foreign land known as Houston, Texas, among tall and long-living people with magical tubes that have the power to peer into hidden dimensions of a body and reconstruct it at 1.5 millimeter resolution.  For this reason and others, we treated the occasion with the respect and solemnity. After all, who knows where our bodies will end up in 3,000 years hence? Who will be looking at our empty hulls, and what technologies will they employ to reconstruct the details of our lives?

Advances in computing technology have led to increasingly powerful devices – a cell phone can now do what early desktop computers did not even approximate. But these developments have largely been in the form of devices, objects made of silicon and plastic. Stanford bioengineering professor Drew Endy imagines, in a New York Times article, another frontier for computing, where computers with even a tiny amount of processing power would be useful.

…what if such computers could be installed inside every cell of your body? What if these computers were used to keep track of how many times each of your cells divided, forming the basis of systems that could track and control aging, development and cancer?

In his 02008 talk in The Long Now Foundation’s SALT series, Endy begins: “I want to develop tools that make biology easy to engineer.” While his article mentions that he and his colleagues have not yet been able to program a “genetically encoded eight-bit counter,” research does suggest that it is possible.

So the future of computing need not only be a question of putting people and things together with ubiquitous silicon computers. The future will be much richer if we can imagine new modes of computing in new places and with new materials — and then find ways to bring those new modes to life.

(Astronaut removing the MISSE-7 Experiment with our sample on EVA1 on the STS-134 mission)

Back in 02009 through a partnership with Applied Minds, and in turn the Air Force Research Lab (who generously invited us to include a sample), we sent one of our Rosetta materials on an experiment called MISSE-7 (pronounced “missey”), which flew on the International Space Station.  This experiment is a shorter term version of the material research begun in 01984 with the Long Duration Exposure Facility.  We sent a sample of commercially pure titanium, that was black oxide coated, and laser marked (pictured below left). This is the same material and oxide process that was used to create the front of the original Rosetta Disk. However we used a much lower power laser than was used on the Rosetta disk so the marking was not very deep.  The sample was just returned to us (below right) after its stint outside the ISS and looks no worse for wear at all except for a slight fade in the clarity of the etching.

  
(Sample before it was sent on left and after returning on right)

This marks our second space rated Rosetta Disk material,  the first one was the nickel material that is currently on the ESAs Rosetta Mission.  Below is all the info I have found out about the MISSE-7 mission so far.  I am trying to locate the section of the EVA videos where the experiment gets installed and removed.  Any help is appreciated.

• Samples went up on STS 129 (Atlantis) on Nov. 16, 2009
• Samples were placed on the back side (wake) of the ISS on Nov. 23, 2009
• Samples orbited Earth at ~8km/s
• Samples returned to earth on STS-134  June 1 02011

INSTALLATION:
MISSE-7 installed during  EVA 3 on shuttle Atlantis flight STS 129
Video CG Simulation of EVA 3, MISSE-7 at 2min, and 3:22

• http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/548353main_MISSE-77.jpg
• http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/547356main_MISSE-75.jpg
• http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/556618main_MISSE-79.jpg

In the effort to understand our environment, scientists generally rely on natural observations to describe the earth’s past. They examine tree rings, oxygen isotopes, sedimentary rock, pollen, and many other physical records from which we can glean information. These methods are quite fruitful, and when combined they offer compelling evidence. But wouldn’t it be nice if, at least for the last few millennia, our ancestors had just recorded all of that information for us?

Occasionally they did, particularly when they encountered conditions or events that they considered extremely important. For example, swarms of locusts that ate all of their food. Conservation Magazine describes a project by a team of scientists in China who have compiled over 8,000 historical documents that chronicle the insect’s effects:

“Outbreak of Oriental migratory locusts (Locusta migratoria manilensis) was, together with drought and flood, considered one of the three most severe natural disasters causing damage to crop production in ancient China,” a team led by Huidong Tian of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing notes in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “The earliest known written record of locusts was found inscribed on an ox bone in Oracle Script (Jiaguwen, the earliest Chinese script) 3,500 years ago, asking: ‘Will locusts appear in the field; will it not rain?’” Ever since, local histories and government documents have been littered with detailed records of locust outbreaks.

The study has shown a link between dry conditions and locust outbreaks, providing a rare biological source of evidence for climate variations. Regardless of whether or not the authors of these documents intended for them to be useful to future generations, their efforts to describe and catalog their environment in an enduring medium have proven very valuable to us, thousands of years later.

About ten years ago The Long Now Foundation initiated an effort to document every living organism on the planet within 25 years. The project was called All Species and while it did not make it through the dot com burst, it was continued by initiatives such as the Encyclopedia of Life and the Census of Marine Life. Because our knowledge of biological diversity of the planet is incomplete, scientists have always been uncertain of just how many species we have left to identify. Recently, however, a paper was published in the open-access biology journal of the Public Library of Science that approaches that question in a novel statistical way. The results are impressive. They indicate that the 1.2 million or so species that scientists have described to date comprise a mere 14% of the total number inhabiting our planet.

Our current estimate of ~8.7 million species narrows the range of 3 to 100 million species suggested by taxonomic experts [1] and it suggests that after 250 years of taxonomic classification only a small fraction of species on Earth (~14%) and in the ocean (~9%) have been indexed in a central database (Table 2). Closing this knowledge gap may still take a lot longer. Considering current rates of description of eukaryote species in the last 20 years (i.e., 6,200 species per year; ±811 SD; Figure 3F–3J), the average number of new species described per taxonomist’s career (i.e., 24.8 species, [30]) and the estimated average cost to describe animal species (i.e., US$48,500 per species [30]) and assuming that these values remain constant and are general among taxonomic groups, describing Earth’s remaining species may take as long as 1,200 years and would require 303,000 taxonomists at an approximated cost of US$364 billion. With extinction rates now exceeding natural background rates by a factor of 100 to 1,000 [31], our results also suggest that this slow advance in the description of species will lead to species becoming extinct before we know they even existed. High rates of biodiversity loss provide an urgent incentive to increase our knowledge of Earth’s remaining species.

On the bright side, there are some encouraging technological advances in social media and genetic identification that are increasing the efficiency of documenting new organisms. The internet facilitates the development of grassroots or amateur scientific projects, and it more widely distributes the daunting task of identifying another seven and a half million species (a task which would otherwise be all the more daunting in light of the dwindling number of professional taxonomists). One such project, featured previously on this blog, is known as 10000 birds and aims to photograph every bird in the world, providing a public database of avian images. For the important task of genetic documentation, DNA barcoding offers an efficient way of analyzing the genetic makeup of new specimens.

With these technologies and the development of others, it may indeed be possible to achieve a comprehensive description of life on earth in a time span closer to Long Now’s 25 year goal for the All Species project than the twelve centuries cited by the study above. And why develop such a catalog? Robert May of Oxford University’s Zoology department wrote a compelling companion piece to the study in the Public Library of Science’s journal.

[...] we increasingly recognise that such knowledge is important for full understanding of the ecological and evolutionary processes which created, and which are struggling to maintain, the diverse biological riches we are heir to. Such biodiversity is much more than beauty and wonder, important though that is. It also underpins ecosystem services that—although not counted in conventional GDP—humanity is dependent upon. [...] The essential fact is that, if we are to meet the challenges facing tomorrow’s world, we need a clearer understanding of how many species there are—both on land and in the even less well-studied oceans—underpinning the structure and functioning of ecosystems.

Long Now Board Member David Eagleman will be speaking as part of the Bay Area Science Festival presentation “Will We Ever Understand the Brain” on Wednesday, November 2, 02011. Eagleman will discuss with Henry Markram, coordinator of the Human Brain Project, whether the myriad functions of the brain will someday be clear to us, or if they will always be somewhat of a mystery.

The lecture will take place at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco at 7pm. See the California Academy of Sciences’ or the Bay Area Science Festival’s website for details and tickets.

Eagleman is a neuroscientist at the Baylor College of Medicine as well as an author whose works include the fictional Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives and most recently, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain.

When it comes to  society’s propensity for compromisingly short-term thinking, not even the scientific community is immune. A recent post on John Horgan‘s blog at Scientific American discussed a few of the trends responsible for the hastiness (and resulting shoddiness) of too much of our scientific activity. Among the trends is an overemphasis on ‘popular’ research topics, which statistician John Ioaniddis has shown leads to more inaccurate publications.

The likelihood that a claim will hold up, he argues, is inversely proportional to the initial attention that it gets from other scientists and the media. Large, fast-moving, “hot” fields, which can yield large financial payoffs, tend to have the worst records.

Thankfully, the primary subject of Horgan’s post is not fast-paced failure, but an interesting effort to promote slower, better science. A group of scientists based in Germany have published “The Slow Science Manifesto,” which praises the essential nature of “accelerated science of the early 21st century” but scolds those who demand that scientists constantly produce research with immediate practical application and clear meaning and intention. “Science needs time,” they assert, “to think.”

Science needs time to read, and time to fail. Science does not always know what it might be at right now. Science develops unsteadi­ly, with jerky moves and un­predict­able leaps forward—at the same time, however, it creeps about on a very slow time scale, for which there must be room and to which justice must be done.

The Manifesto concludes: “We cannot continuously tell you what our science means; what it will be good for; because we simply don’t know yet. Science needs time.” This statement corresponds neatly to a sentence from a chapter (titled, not incidentally, “Slow Science”) in Stewart Brand’s book The Clock of the Long Now: “Rigorously collected old data keeps finding new uses.” Brand proposes that the Long Now Library could help facilitate the kinds of long-term projects that produce large useful data sets by helping scientists overcome the obstacles that stand in the way of such endeavors. Perhaps the authors of The Slow Science Manifesto would agree with his analysis:

…in light of their great accumulative value, why are long-term scientific studies so rare? Well, (1) they’re not about proving or disproving hypotheses, the coin of the scientific realm; (2) they don’t generate quick papers, the coin of a scientific career; (3) they bear no relation to scientific fashion, where the excitement is; (4) they’re not subject to money-making patent or copyright; (5) the few that exist usually die when their primary researcher dies; (6) they’re extremely difficult to maintain funding for; and (7) ever growing archives are an expensive hassle to service and keep accessible.

The Long Now Foundation has, in fact, already had the opportunity to support a long-term scientific project. In 02008 the Nevada System of Higher Education received funding from the National Science Foundation to study climate change in the Great Basin. As part of the study they needed to install permanent climate monitoring stations over a wide range of elevation levels and ecosystem types, and the Long Now Foundation’s property in Nevada provided some key locations for constructing stations. If the project overcomes the challenges and pressures that drove a group of frustrated scientists to publish their Slow Science Manifesto, it will one day become a valuable bank of ‘rigorously collected old data,’ and future scientists will continue to use and reuse it for purposes that, quite frankly, we’ve never even dreamed of.

Brought to our attention by BoingBoing, the Center for PostNatural History specializes in specimens that are unlikely to be on display at, say, the American Museum of Natural History. As its name implies, the Center features organisms that are ‘unnatural,’ in that they were produced or altered by human activity. If we are, as some have suggested, entering a new epoch where the earth is sufficiently affected by humans so as to elicit the name ‘Anthropocene,’ then this museum could be the first of many to exhibit its characteristic life-forms. As its website explains,

The Center for PostNatural History is dedicated to the advancement of knowledge relating to the complex interplay between culture, nature and biotechnology. The PostNatural  refers to living organisms that have been altered through processes such as selective breeding or  genetic engineering. The mission of the Center for PostNatural History is to acquire, interpret and provide access to a collection of living, preserved and documented organisms of postnatural origin.

Every organism in an ecosystem, of course, exists in a network of constantly interacting relationships, so the idea that the effects of our species on other organisms are somehow ‘unnatural’ is debatable. But the idea of the “PostNatural” dovetails nicely with Bill McKibben’s “End of Nature,” referring not to a true absence of nature, but to a world in which human influence reaches ever more deeply into the biology of our planet.

And the nature of that influence is not really clear – what will be its long-term effects? How will people choose to utilize biotechnology? At the very least we can take notes as we go. Given that the vast majority of the species on our planet are not yet described by scientists, it is encouraging that the goals of the Center for PostNatural History include “the maintenance of a unique catalog of living, preserved and documented specimens of postnatural origin.”

Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman is a show on Discovery’s Science Channel that features cosmological and metaphysical questions about science and the universe.

Mr. Freeman, as it turns out, is quite the geek.

An  episode from the show’s second season recently asked, “Can We Live Forever?” Well known scientists such as Michio Kaku and Aubrey de Grey provided perspective on the challenges and research underlying the the science of human life extension. (Coincidentally, a newly announced DARPA research initiative on the subject, called Biochronicity, was mentioned on Long Views just last month.)

Also featured in the discussion was Long Now Executive Director Alexander Rose. You can see a clip of his segment below: