Ecologist Tim Flannery is on tour in the US to support his recently released Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet, a book that explores the intertwined histories of humanity and planet Earth.

On May 3rd, he’ll discuss Here on Earth at one of Long Now’s Seminars About Long-term Thinking in San Francisco. Long Now Members who can’t make it in person can listen to a live audio stream of the event as it happens.

In addition to the print version of Here on Earth, Flannery and his publishing team created an iPad app that comes with the full text of the book, 60 minutes of original film and animated content, interactive maps and infographics and an integrated Twitter-based reading group that allows readers to see what others are saying about the book in real-time.

Tim Flannery is a best-selling and prolific author of natural histories; a professor of paleontology, paleoclimatology & mammology; and the Chairman of the Copenhagen Climate Council. Some of his previous works include The Weather Makers and The Eternal Frontier.

10,000 years ago what was walking on the land you are on right now?  It turns out in a recent find that a mammoth was in Monterey county on the California coastline ten millennia ago. As is frequently the case, the bones were revealed while tilling agricultural land for the planting season. Mark Hylkema, Santa Cruz District archaeologist for the state Department of Parks, spoke with Kevin Howe of the Monterey County Herald about the find, which could indicate that more fossils might be buried in the area.

Hylkema described teeth, tusks and bones as still porous and in good condition

“There were three types of bone conditions noted,” Hylkema reported. “Fragments of ivory tusk, regular looking bone fragments and some that were discolored as though charred or lithified.”

If the bones are charred, he said, it could indicate human association with the remains. Some bone fragments were taken for radiometric tests to determine how old they are.

…The soil level and composition in which they were found indicates that the mammoth died 10,000 to 25,000 years ago, Hylkema said.

Another exciting collection of Ice Age fossils was uncovered last fall at the site of a popular ski resort in the Colorado Rockies. You can see some great photographs from that discovery on the National Geographic website.

A study was published last month that made some interesting conclusions about how the human brain organizes and prioritizes memory. Psychology Today reported on the investigation, which was conducted by a team of researchers under the leadership of University of Lübeck professor Dr. Jan Born. The experiment involved volunteers conducting one of a few memory tests and then being quizzed ten hours later on the tests. Only some of the participants, however, were told that they would be quizzed, and only some of them were allowed to sleep in the meantime. As it happens, we might all be futurists while we’re asleep…

The pivotal question is, How does the brain “decide” what to keep and what to dump?… German researchers have garnered evidence that the brain sorts through memories during sleep and preferentially retains the ones that are most relevant. The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, concludes that the brain evaluates information based on future expectations. After a good night’s sleep, we remember information better when we know it will be useful in the future.

…The researchers also recorded electroencephalograms (EEGs) from the individuals who slept. Subjects who expected a test displayed a strong increase in slow oscillation activity during their slow-wave sleep. The more slow-wave activity the sleeping participants had, the better their memory during the test. Born and colleagues think that the process may involve at least two parts of the brain. The brain’s prefrontal cortex appears to “tag” memories deemed potentially useful for the future, while the hippocampus consolidates those memories during sleep.

“Our results show that memory consolidation during sleep indeed involves a basic selection process that determines which of the many pieces of the day’s information are sent to long-term storage,” Born says. “Our findings also indicate that information relevant for future demands is selected foremost for storage.”

Since the end of the last ice age a little over 10,000 years or so ago, human civilization has blossomed in a climatically friendly epoch known as the Holocene. The flowers are still blooming, but as climate change begins to mix things up some have been predicting that the story of recent and pending human history will prove quite dramatic…and it will be written in stone. National Geographic reports:

Stratigraphers like Zalasiewicz are, as a rule, hard to impress. Their job is to piece together Earth’s history from clues that can be coaxed out of layers of rock millions of years after the fact. They take the long view—the extremely long view—of events, only the most violent of which are likely to leave behind clear, lasting signals. It’s those events that mark the crucial episodes in the planet’s 4.5-billion-year story, the turning points that divide it into comprehensible chapters.

So it’s disconcerting to learn that many stratigraphers have come to believe that we are such an event—that human beings have so altered the planet in just the past century or two that we’ve ushered in a new epoch: the Anthropocene. Standing in the smirr, I ask Zalasiewicz what he thinks this epoch will look like to the geologists of the distant future, whoever or whatever they may be. Will the transition be a moderate one, like dozens of others that appear in the record, or will it show up as a sharp band in which very bad things happened—like the mass extinction at the end of the Ordovician?

That, Zalasiewicz says, is what we are in the process of determining.

Whether or not humans are ushering in such a singular moment in recent geologic history, there seems to be increasing support for the notion that we are leaving the Holocene behind, and that ‘we’ have enough to do with that transition to merit naming the new epoch after ourselves. The term ‘Anthropocene’ was first used by Paul Crutzen, a Dutch chemist, at a conference about ten years ago. It’s come a long way: today it is featured in the March issue of the National Geographic.

Crutzen…thinks its real value won’t lie in revisions to geology textbooks. His purpose is broader: He wants to focus our attention on the consequences of our collective action—and on how we might still avert the worst. “What I hope,” he says, “is that the term ‘Anthropocene’ will be a warning to the world.”

The photograph of the oil field above was taken by Edward Burtynsky, who spoke at our seminar series in 2008 on “The 10,000-year Gallery.”

The Maeslant Barrier built for a once in 10,000 year storm

There was a maxim that predicted the existence of the longest living trees even before they were discovered, “adversity breeds longevity.”  Using this principle conifer scientists traveled to the harshest mountain peaks and found the Brisltecone Pine alive and over 4,800 years old.

It stands to reason then that a country that had spent the whole of it’s existence defending itself from an encroaching sea, would have the longest term perspective on the subject.  In 01939 when a series of studies in Holland revealed how their country might suffer from from a large storm in the north Atlantic, the Dutch began planning and building.  Only part way through their efforts, a storm in 01953 proved them right, killing over 2,000 people and flooding hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland.  Shortly after the flood these efforts would be doubled and put into a new nationalized government “Deltawerken” (Deltaworks) program.  The Dutch have since been steadily building dams, barriers, and sacrificial flood areas.  This culminated in the final Deltawerken project completed in 01997, the Maeslant Barrier one of the largest man made moving structures in the world.  This barrier opens and closes over one of the busiest ports on the planet, and is strong enough to withstand a once in 10,000 year storm event.  Yes, once in 10,000 years.  At a cost of nearly $1 billion it seems unthinkable that a country could have this much resolve for such a rare event.  In fact the barrier has already been closed multiple times and prevented minor flooding, so it is already paying itself off.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina (considered a 100 year event) which killed over 1,800 people and cost more than $81 billion, it seems unlikely the US will build infrastructure like this to protect the Southeastern seaboard.  I am not sure how much more adversity the residents of the gulf coast need however, they have had a tough decade.  It could be that the culture in the US looks more to dealing with problems of the future with insurance rather than prevention.  But if I lived in New Orleans, I think I would much rather have better levees and barriers, than a new insurance policy.

Devastation of Hurricane Katrina, a once in a 100 year event.

SETI Director Jill Tarter discussed in a 02005 blog post that we recently discovered the possibility of broadcasting humanity’s presence to the universe. SETI’s position for at least the next decade is that we’re not ready.

Any technology that is observable over interstellar distances cannot be more primitive than our own. After only 100 years of manipulating the electromagnetic spectrum, we find ourselves in the midst of an exponential explosion of technology. But it has taken us over 4.5 billion years of planetary and biological evolution to get to where we are today. If there is detectable technology out there, it is statistically improbable that their evolution and development will be fine-tuned to coincide precisely with our current emerging technological capabilities. They will be older, potentially billions of years older since the Milky Way Galaxy was around for at least five billion years before our solar system began to form.

In exploring some of the ways to make this decision, Tarter explains that communication across galactic distances will take protocols we can’t imagine and timescales we’re simply not seriously dealing with yet.

She searched Google and graphed the number of results she found for plans ranging between “The One Year Plan” to “The Two Hundred Thousand Year Plan.” As a point of reference, the green arrow just below 10,000 hits on Google represents the number of results she found when searching for her own name. Plans over one hundred years in scope were most often the result of science fiction and religion, though Y2K and nuclear waste had lead to some longer plans as well. (Long Now is in there right next to the 10,000-year Yucca Mountain plan.)

I did a quick Google Book N-gram viewer search on some of these terms over the last hundred years and found that during the late ’60s there was a peak in books discussing ‘x year plans’, the favorite being 10 year plans. ‘One year -’ and ‘hundred year’ plans show consistently, but few other plans registered at all.

Mind Hacks points us to a great BBC Radio 4 program on the history of our knowledge of the nervous system:

It’s a satisfyingly in-depth discussion that tracks first beliefs about the nervous system from ancient times through the renaissance into the modern age.

Check out the In Our Time episode page, or download the mp3.

The sixth largest lake in the world is located deep in the continent of Antarctica where it has been isolated under two and a half miles of solid ice for more than 14 million years…and, according to the Wired Science blog, it will remain so for at least one year more. A team of Russian scientists that has been drilling through the ice was scheduled to break through this month, but extreme weather has required them to leave the site until next December. So what’s in the water?

What lies beneath the mammoth sheet of ice may provide answers to what Earth was like before the Ice Age and how life has evolved.

Most importantly, Lake Vostok appears to be incredibly similar to the frozen lakes of Jupiter’s Europa satellite and Saturn’s Enceladus. As Wired UK reported earlier this week, NASA and the ESA have already planned a mission to esplora Europa’s lake in 2020. If life is found in Vostok, the implications for the possibility of extraterrestrial life on Europa and Enceladus are huge.

“It’s like exploring an alien planet where no one has been before,” said Valery Lukin of the Arctic and Antarctic Research told Reuters. “We don’t know what we’ll find.”

One thing that some people hope they don’t find is kerosene (or Shoggoths, for that matter), the substance with which the team has filled their unfinished bore-hole to prevent it from icing over.

Moons of Jupiter through an amateur telescope, photo by Thomas Bresson

Forgive the metaphor, but earlier this month in the Wall Street Journal, Jonah Lehrer discussed several trends that have emerged in scientific discovery over the past century that indicate we may need to start ‘digging deeper.’

An economist at Northwestern named Benjamin Jones has pointed out the first of those trends by analyzing millions of published scientific papers. He found that the prevalence of teams working on papers has been growing steadily; there are more papers published these days that have several authors than in the past. That prevalence is especially pronounced among highly successful papers: those that receive a disproportionate amount of citations in other papers. So, using papers published as an indication of scientific progress seems to indicate that more work is being done collaboratively and that productive science seems to increasingly require more work and wider expertise than a single person can muster.

The second trend comes from Samuel Arbesman, a researcher at Harvard Medical School. He’s found that across many different disciplines, the relative magnitude of discoveries seems to be falling:

By measuring the average size of discovered asteroids, mammalian species and chemical elements, he was able to show that, over the last few hundred years, these three very different scientific fields have been obeying the exact same trend: the size of what they discover has been getting smaller.

These trends seem to indicate that science is actually getting harder. Lehrer borrows a metaphor from Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation to argue that we’ve basically picked all the low-hanging fruit of scientific discovery – all Galileo had to do was be the first person to look at Jupiter through a telescope and he discovered four moons. But, we’ve found all the moons now, and without those easy to reach facts, we’re now forced to pool more effort and resources into learning new things.

The figure shows the projected increase in global climate data holdings for climate models, remotely sensed data, and in situ.

On February 11 Science magazine published a special issue dedicated to the challenges that research communities face as they produce increasing quantities and types of data. One of the articles tells the story of particle physicist Siegfried Bethke, who wanted to reanalyze the data from an experiment conducted twenty years earlier. He discovered that no organized effort had been made to preserve the data, and it took him, his secretary and a graduate student two years to find it all and rewrite the now-obsolete code necessary to read it.

“The problem starts when the experiment is over, and the data used by one group of people is only understood by those people,” [Cristinel] Diaconu says. “When they go off and do other things, the data is orphaned; it has no parents anymore.” The orphan metaphor only goes so far: After a certain point, orphaned data can’t be adopted by later researchers who weren’t part of the original team. Even given the raw data, only someone intimately involved in the original experiment can make sense of it.

A particle physics study group has recommended that every large experiment hire a ‘data archivist,’ a sort of Receiver of Memory who would be responsible for making sure that data remains intelligible and accessible long after ‘the end’ of a project.

A data archivist would be a mix of librarian, IT expert, and physicist, with the computing skills to keep porting data to new formats but savvy enough about the physics to be able to crosscheck old results on new computer systems.

As indicated by another article in the special issue, “Climate Data Challenges in the 21st Century,” scientists not only need to make their data accessible to colleagues and to researchers of the future, but also to non-researchers of the present. As managers and policy-makers move to address time-sensitive issues such as climate change, the long-term soundness of their decisions will depend at least partly on the information available to them.

Increased support from the funding agencies is needed to enhance data access, manipulation, and modeling tools; improve climate system understanding; articulate model limitations; and ensure that the observations necessary to underpin it all are made. Otherwise, climate science will suffer, and the climate information needed by society—climate assessment, services, and adaptation capability—will not only fall short of its potential to reduce the vulnerability of human and natural systems to climate variability and change, but will also cause society to miss out on opportunities that will inevitably arise in the face of changing conditions.