The Basalt Public Library in western Colorado has recently started lending seeds out to members. The members “borrow” the seeds with their library card, grow the plants, and harvest the best fruits’ seeds to give back to the library. The library gets better seeds back, while the members get to enjoy most of the harvest and learn more about the embodied art of gardening in the process.

Saving seeds itself is not a new idea–it is an ancient practice that goes back to the invention of agriculture. But combining a seed bank with the modern library is a novel answer to the threat of digital irrelevance, and one that can help preserve the thousands of endangered heirloom varieties that we have cultivated over civilization’s history.

As books and other media start to make the cloud their permanent home, libraries inevitably face the question of how to stay relevant in the future. Part of the answer will probably always be free access to information resources, but the trend seems to suggest that this will become far less pertinent with the proliferation of ebooks, online classes, book-scanning projects, and general free digitalized information.

It is easy to forget that libraries are some ways, very radical institutions. It’s true, you have to be quiet, but the idea that everyone should have access to as much information as possible is a beautiful and powerful concept. When one considers that seeds and the DNA they contain are one of the original information storage devices, it’s almost hard to understand why libraries haven’t always included seeds.

In 02011, economist Paul Romer was given an opportunity that few of his colleagues ever get: a chance to see one of his theories tested in a real-world setting. Octavio Sanchez, an idealistic government official in Honduras, saw in Romer’s proposal a resemblance to an idea of his own: to solve the country’s vexing problems by creating a semi-autonomous charter city in which a new and functional social order could be built “from scratch.”

Sanchez and Romer partnered up in what seemed to be a promising opportunity to put Honduras on a path to socio-economic development. But just a year later, their idealistic project seems to have fallen irreparably apart. Two NPR reporters recently traveled to Honduras to investigate what might have gone wrong.

As Romer explained in a 02009 SALT seminar and later in a TED talk, developing countries like Honduras are stuck in a vicious cycle of “bad rules.” Figuring out where to start the process of fixing these rules can be difficult. As Jacob Goldstein of NPR’s Planet Money explains,

“Say you want to start with the education system. The education system is terrible because teachers are always on strike. Teachers are always on strike because they don’t get paid. They don’t get paid because the government does a terrible job collecting taxes. Oh, and also, because the government doesn’t collect taxes, it can’t hire a proper police force. And there’s a huge backlog in the courts. And Hondurans think their cops, and for that matter lots of other government workers, can be bought and sold. So you have corruption, and chaos, and violence. How can you fix this? Where do you start?” (This American Life)

Rather than try to tackle all of these problems at once, both Romer and Sanchez concluded that the most effective solution would be to simply wipe the slate clean, and start from scratch in one little corner of the country. If successful, the new system could then be replicated on a larger scale. Planet Money’s Chana Joffe-Walt elaborates:

“Pick a totally uninhabited site, and … say, we’re going to create another alternative. And the city you build on this uninhabited site, Paul [Romer] calls it a charter city. The idea is, this city has its own set of laws. Its own cops, its own courts, its own schools, everything. This is a city where you start from scratch. And to make sure that the cops and courts and schools in this new city are good ones, you have to get help from rich countries. So, say you get the UK to let court cases in the charter city be appealed to courts in the UK.  Maybe Canada sends in some Mounties. Now, Paul says, you have a place that works, right inside a poor country that doesn’t.”

Sanchez and Romer were essentially proposing what mathematician Samuel Arbesman has recently called “procedural city generation.” Writing about the trend of constructing micro-cities with LEGO bricks, Arbesman explains that real cities derive their vibrant and organic “city feel” from what is known in mathematics as path dependence,

“where one’s current state is highly dependent on where one came from, and the decisions one has made along the way. Essentially, the state of the system is dependent on its path through the space of possible states.”

When starting from scratch, this city feel can be created by relying instead on a pre-determined set of rules, procedures, or algorithms – in other words, a charter. (more…)

Humanity’s success as a species is often credited to intellect: our uniquely large and capable brains, evolved relatively recently in biological terms, allowed us to reason our way to technological innovation and ecological domination.

Or so the story goes. Stephen Asma, for Aeon Magazine, writes that we might owe an even deeper debt, however, to an older part of ourselves and uses a trip to Africa to illustrate how.

Walking around (very carefully) on the Serengeti is like visiting the nursery of our own mind.

In describing encounters with gorillas, lions and wildebeests, Asma discusses the burgeoning field of affective neuroscience, a program of study interested in the biological and evolutionary underpinnings of emotions and how they affect decision-making:

Neuroscience has begun to correct the computational model by showing how our rational, linguistic mind depends on the ancient limbic brain, where emotions hold sway and social skills dominate. In fact, the cognitive mind works only when emotions preferentially tilt our deliberations… Our rational mind is truly embodied, and without this emotional embodiment we have no preferences. In order for our minds to go beyond syntax to semantics, we need feelings. And our ancestral minds were rich in feelings before they were adept in computations.

While the “cognitive mind” of the neo-cortex is a fairly recent development in our evolution, shared only partially by some close primate relatives, this emotional system is older and more widely shared among mammals. So, how can it account for our unique success?

Asma points to new developments in climate studies that upend another common narrative of popular evolutionary psychology – that a period of stable climate and ecology led to the genetic development of our current superlative problem-solving. New data seem to indicate that the human brain’s unprecedented expansion happened not during a time of climatic stability, but rather during a time of relative chaos. Should new evidence continue to support this picture, well-established theories like Chomsky’s “universal grammar” will require revising as they rely on the assumption that independent problem-solving modules within the mind genetically evolved during this stable period.

Instead, a chaotic and changing environment that historically coincides with brain expansion would indicate that we survived by developing a unique ability to learn, change and adapt to unexpected circumstances:

According to this view, the neocortex is a highly flexible, general problem solver. Our environment selected for a mind with reliable pattern recognition and prediction powers, but it didn’t give us specific modules for thought contents or behaviors. As affective neuroscience advances, this scenario comes to look more credible, albeit with a surprising twist. It seems that even the emotional springs of the limbic system — our fear, care, rage and so forth — are more pliable and open-ended than we previously thought.

Asma covers a lot of ground in the essay, literally and figuratively, but ultimately reminds us that while intelligence might be like a new disruptive technology, our older, mammalian emotional heritage spryly pivoted along with it.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin is reported to have said,

There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.

Our subjective experience of time and events can even be reflected beyond the scale of decades, as blogger Lucretius, Ver 21c has methodically demonstrated. He compared the length of Wikipedia articles that summarize decades, centuries and millennia, and graphed the analysis to show which periods seem to contain relatively more noteworthy happenings (or, perhaps, simply how much we currently know about them):

He points out:

Interestingly, the larger the time unit, the less weighted Wikipedia is to the past in terms of article count: 5% of the decade articles, 13% of the century articles, and 35% of the millennium articles pertain to the future.

If you’re a fan of this video showing a years’ worth of front pages for NYTimes.com, or the Way Back Machine, which allows you to browse the internet of the past, you might also love a project released by the New York Times today: The TimesMachine.

TimesMachine can take you back to any issue from Volume 1, Number 1 of The New-York Daily Times, on September 18, 1851, through The New York Times of December 30, 1922. Choose a date in history and flip electronically through the pages, displayed with their original look and feel.

You’ve got to be a subscriber to access most of the content, but issues from several important days in history are freely available in their entirety:

Albert Einstein discovered that time is woven into the fabric of space. Now, Berkeley researcher Holger Müller suggests that time is woven into matter, as well.

Interested in determining the simplest possible way of measuring time, Müller has discovered a way to turn matter into a natural clock.

“When I was very young and reading science books, I always wondered why there was so little explanation of what time is,” said Müller, who is also a guest scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “Since then, I’ve often asked myself, ‘What is the simplest thing that can measure time, the simplest system that feels the passage of time?’ Now we have an upper limit: one single massive particle is enough.”

This is not an atomic clock in the traditional sense; rather than measuring the energy emissions of electrons, Müller’s timekeeper looks at atoms as a whole by making use of a particular feature of matter: its building blocks behave like both particles and waves.

Quantum mechanics was born when physicists decided that light was neither a wave (as argued by Huygens) nor a beam of particles (as Newton thought), but both. In 1924, De Broglie discovered that this duality was true for all forms of matter, and developed a formula to calculate the wavelength of different particles.

Müller theorized that if you can find a way to measure these wavelengths experimentally – if you can construct a clockwork to count an atom’s oscillations – you have a very fundamental unit of time. Unfortunately, these atomic frequencies (also known as Compton frequencies) still outpace our best instruments of detection. But Müller has found a possible solution in yet another one of Einstein’s discoveries. Because motion slows the passage of time, a moving atom oscillates at a slower pace than a stationary one. The difference between the two frequencies may be measurable, and thereby give us a unit of time.

Though Müller’s mechanism is not yet as precise as an atomic clock, improvement of the design will increase its accuracy. Either way, the implications are far-reaching. If matter can be used to count time, the reverse is also true: time can become a unit of measurement for matter. In other words: Müller’s work shows that time is woven into the most fundamental building blocks of our world. One might even say it’s what we’re made of.

Digital data is exploding in volume and there’s enough money in making sense of it all that it’s garnered its own buzzword lately: big data. In an increasingly measurable world, data-sets of unprecedented size and comprehensiveness are turning up new and genuinely exciting insights. Applied Mathematician Samuel Arbesman points out, though, that many of these data-sets are but snapshots, when it’s timelapse videos we need to really understand something:

Why does the time dimension matter if we’re only interested in current or future phenomena? Because many of the things that affect us today and will affect us tomorrow have changed slowly over time: sometimes over the course of a single lifetime, and sometimes over generations or even eons.

Datasets of long timescales not only help us understand how the world is changing, but how we, as humans, are changing it — without this awareness, we fall victim to shifting baseline syndrome. This is the tendency to shift our “baseline,” or what is considered “normal” — blinding us to shifts that occur across generations (since the generation we are born into is taken to be the norm).

Arbesman spoke last year at a Salon event at The Long Now Foundation on his book, The Half-Life of Facts. He explained that there are patterns in the ways our scientific knowledge changes over time. Much of what we take to be true today has a half-life: it will decay at a predictable rate as new science overturns our current understanding. Long data, of the type he champions in this recent article, is essential to unearthing these types of insights and avoiding a static understanding of a dynamic world.

(The image above is a page from a notebook of Isaac Newton’s.)

According to a team of psychologists at Harvard, we’re poor predictors of our own future.

In a paper published last week in Science, these researchers report on a study that asked participants to estimate how much their personality, tastes, and values had changed over the last decade, and how much they expected they would change in the next. Statistical analysis reveals what these psychologists call an “End of History Illusion”: while we remember our past selves to be quite different from who we are today, we nevertheless believe that we won’t change much at all in the future. The New York Times quotes:

“Middle-aged people – like me – often look back on our teenage selves with some mixture of amusement and chagrin,” said one of the authors, Daniel T. Gilbert, a psychologist at Harvard. “What we never seem to realize is that our future selves will look back and think the very same thing about us. At every age we think we’re having the last laugh, and at every age we’re wrong.”

There are several ways to explain these findings. It’s more difficult to predict the future than to recall the past; perhaps participants simply weren’t willing to speculate on something they felt uncertain about. It’s also possible that study participants overestimated how much they had changed in the past, making it seem as though they were underestimating their change in the future. However, the psychologists suggest that the end of history illusion is most probably explained by the fact that it just makes us feel better about ourselves:

… most people believe that their personalities are attractive, their values admirable, and their preferences wise; and having reached that exalted state, they may be reluctant to entertain the possibility of change. People also like to believe that they know themselves well, and the possibility of future change may threaten that belief. In short, people are motivated to think well of themselves and to feel secure in that understanding, and the end of history illusion may help them accomplish these goals. (Science 339:98).

This “end of history” notion has some history of its own. For example, Stanford political scientist and former SALT speaker Francis Fukuyama follows Marx in arguing that civilization as a whole has come to the end of a 10,000-year history of development. With the advent of liberal democracy, he writes in 1989, we’ve reached the pinnacle of social evolution:

What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. This is not to say that there will no longer be events to fill the pages of Foreign Affair’s yearly summaries of international relations, for the victory of liberalism has occurred primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as yet incomplete in the real or material world. But there are powerful reasons for believing that it is the ideal that will govern the material world in the long run.” (The National Interest).

On the other hand, French postmodern philosopher Jean Beaudrillard contends that Fukuyama’s modernist theory is no more than an illusion caused by our particular relationship with time. He writes that contemporary civilization has simply “lost” its sense of history:

… one might suppose that the acceleration of modernity, of technology, events and media, of all exchanges – economic, political, and sexual – has propelled us to ‘escape velocity’, with the result that we have flown free of the referential sphere of the real and of history. … A degree of slowness (that is, a certain speed, but not too much), a degree of distance, but not too much, and a degree of liberation (an energy for rupture and change), but not too much, are needed to bring about the kind of condensation or significant crystallization of events we call history, the kind of coherent unfolding of causes and effects we call reality. Once beyond this gravitational effect, which keeps bodies in orbit, all the atoms of meaning get lost in space. Each atom pursues its own trajectory to infinity and is lost in space. This is precisely what we are seeing in our present-day societies, intent as they are on accelerating all bodies, messages and processes in all directions and which, with modern media, have created for every event, story and image a simulation of an infinite trajectory. Every political, historical and cultural fact possesses a kinetic energy which wrenches it from its own space and propels it into a hyperspace where, since it will never return, it loses all meaning. No need for science fiction here: already, here and now – in the shape of our computers, circuits and networks – we have the particle accelerator which has smashed the referential orbit of things once and for all. (1994:1-2). 

Illusion or not, the Harvard study shows that a sense of being at the end of history has real-world consequences: underestimating how differently we’ll feel about things in the future, we sometimes make decisions we later come to regret. In other words, the end of history illusion could be thought of as a lack of long-term thinking. It’s when we fail to consider the future impact of our choices (and imagine alternatives) that we lose all sense of meaning, and perhaps even lose touch with time itself.

This year’s Edge question is up, and it has the usual breadth of analysis we have come to expect over the years. For the uninitiated, Edge.org is one of the best not-so-secret secrets of the internet. Founded in 01996 by John Brockman, Edge asks a “big picture” question every year to scholars who think about systemic issues in creative ways. The answers have always been enlightening, and it has always been worth a few hours of time to read through them each year. This year, as in past years, the Long Now Board is well represented, as well as the scholars who’ve spoken in our lecture series.

The question this year is “What *should* we be worried about?”. Below you will find the responses of Long Now affiliates, although we also recommend reading through the rest of the responses.

Long Now Board:

• Daniel Hillis wonders about the filtering effects of semantic search.
• Brian Eno calls us to reflect on our persistent aversion to politics.
• Kevin Kelly discusses the long term effects of aging populations.
• Paul Saffo worries about the partisan ideology surrounding technological advances.
• Esther Dyson asks us to consider the ethical and political questions surrounding greater predictive power in health and medicine.

SALT speakers:

• Nassim Taleb would prefer those with massive wealth and power have more “skin in the game.”
• Martin Rees hopes we can avoid weaponizing (purposely or not) bio- and nano-tech.
• Craig Venter wants the public to understand vaccines only work if we all get them.
• Tim O’Reilly reminds us to be vigilant of anti-intellectualism in times of economic stress.
• Bruce Sterling thinks whatever we worry about, it shouldn’t be the Singularity.
• Vernor Vinge doesn’t want us to think we’ve escaped Mutually Assured Destruction.
• Sam Harris hopes those designing our institutions will carefully take into account the incentives they create.
• Daniel Everett worries about the future of academic scholarship with the rise of online courses.
• Matt Ridley warns against superstition both against and within science.
• George Dyson thinks we need a low-tech redundant backup internet in case of emergencies.
• Juan Enriquez wonders how we are going to navigate our increasingly large digital fingerprints.
• Steven Pinker talks about the threats to peace that get often get overlooked.
• Mary Catherine Bateson wants us to properly frame our worries so that we can act on them accordingly.

In December, the Atlantic Council’s Strategic Foresight Initiative hosted a conference entitled Global Trends 2030: US Leadership in a Post-Western World. Organized to coincide with the release of the National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds report, the conference brought policy makers together with futurists to discuss the global “megatrends” that might shape the next two decades. Attendees included Chuck Hagel, the current nominee for Secretary of Defense, as well as Long Now Board member Paul Saffo.

Examining different areas of inquiry, speakers applied long-term thinking to economic and political questions of global concern: from the role of the USA in global politics to the relationship between individual and state. A panel discussion on the potential impact of emerging technologies explored the revolutionary potential of 3D printing and robotics, and analyzed the role of technology in creating economic opportunity.

Conference participant Marriette DiChristina has written up a summary of the conference in Scientific American; to read more about what was discussed at the conference, you can download the SFI and NIC report.