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.”

Time exists, but that’s only the first of ten things Cosmic Variance wants to be sure you know on the subject.

The most common noun in the English language describes a rather elusive concept and after the Setting Time Aright conference brought together “leading researchers across a wide range of fields within physics and cosmology, as well as from computer science, complex systems, biology, philosophy, and psychology,” to talk about it, organizer Sean Carroll of Caltech rounded up the best takeaways and posted them for our edification:

Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Time

Earlier this month author Charles Stross gave a lecture in San Francisco for the USENIX Security Symposium. He called his talk “Network Security in the Medium Term, 2061-2561 AD” and in it he took the concept far beyond keeping your email password private or your WiFi from being hacked.

Network security, according to Stross, will slowly work its way down to a basic need for everyone until it resembles the right to personal safety.

With increasingly pervasive networked sensors, knowledgeable genetic tests, and falling data storage costs, our online identities become more and more just our identities. Trade-offs and double-edged swords abound:

Is losing your genomic privacy an excessive price to pay for surviving cancer and evading plagues?

Is compromising your sensory privacy through lifelogging a reasonable price to pay for preventing malicious impersonation and apprehending criminals?

Is letting your insurance company know exactly how you steer and hit the gas and brake pedals, and where you drive, an acceptable price to pay for cheaper insurance?

But the value in storing and selectively sharing this data is there, as anyone who’s searched for an old email to absolve themselves of some minor (or not so minor) blame can attest. A short story, Nanolaw with Daughter, by Paul Ford hints at this same issue:

Then would come the game. Cameras in the phone of every parent. Sensors on the goals; sensors in the ref’s whistle; in the ball; in the lamps that light the field. Yellow cards, goals, offsides, all recorded from many angles and tagged with time, location, temperature, whether for the memories or to limit liability—the motion of 22 bobbing ponytails transformed into lines of light.

And so, if one is compelled to record as much of their life as possible, even just as a means of refuting those who would accuse them, network security becomes a highly personal long-term archiving project:

But some forms of personal data – medical records, for example, or land title deeds – need to remain accessible over periods of decades to centuries. Lifelogs will be similar; if you want at age ninety to recall events from age nine, then a stable platform for storing your memory is essential, and it needs to be one that isn’t trivially crackable in less than eighty-one years and counting.

Your very assertion of who you are will become dependent on the reliable and secure functioning of a vast infrastructure: “Robustness and durability are going to be at a premium in the future,” Stross emphasizes.

You can view video of the talk or read the full text.

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:

The rapid rate of technological change is a common topic of discussion these days, but only occasionally does someone actually take the time to examine – let alone utilize – the technologies that we so readily leave behind.

A great example of just such an undertaking is a project called All On Paper recently carried out by student journalists at Florida Atlantic University. Under the direction of Michael Koretzky, president of the South Florida Pro Chapter of the Society for Professional Journalists, the staff at the student newspaper University Press produced an entire issue using decades-old newsroom methods. For a week, typewriters, film photography, x-acto knives and rubber cement took the place of Word, Photoshop and InDesign.

Koretzky shared some of the challenges and lessons from the experience on his blog, journoterrorist. As he and other professionals taught the students how to use old technology, they realized that even they had to occasionally reference the user’s manual.

While archaeologists try to recreate what life was like 10,000 years ago, and historians try to recreate what life was like 1,000 years ago, journalists can’t even recreate how they published a newspaper 20 years ago. No one documented the details or saved the old equipment. (I had to buy some of it from creepy old men through Craigslist.)

Journalists may write history’s first draft, but when it comes to covering their own history, they don’t even take notes.

Journalists, of course, aren’t the only ones who have neglected their abandoned methodologies. Neither, however, are they the only ones who have attempted to get back to basics. A previous post on this blog featured an artist who, in fact, specializes in such undertakings, and Long Now executive director Alexander Rose maintains a list of projects that record humanity and technology in ways that could help restart civilization in the event of some sort of collapse.

Koretzky ends his description of All On Paper with a quote from one of the participants. It is a statement of appreciation, and one that highlights a potential benefit of placing our current technologies in their historical context.

Technology hasn’t made us lazier, but it has made it possible to be lazier while still producing the same amount of quality work. Now that I’ve realized this, I know I’ll definitely be working faster to produce more quality news. And unlike the ancient civilizations of the 20th century, I’ve got the technology to do it.

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!

While speaking at Long Now’s Long Conversation with Peter Schwartz last year, NASA Ames Research Director Pete Worden announced a partnered initiative with DARPA to explore long-term space travel, calling it the 100 Year Starship Study. Watch video of their talk in our previous post about it.

The conversation around this research agenda will be opened wide at the 100 Year Starship Study public symposium in Orlando later this fall.

The organizers say they’ve received 520 abstracts and will be choosing from among them the presentations for the event. Seven main research tracks will guide the agenda:

• Time-Distance Solutions
• Habitats and Environmental Science
• Biology and Space Medicine
• Education, Social, Economic and Legal Considerations
• Destinations
• Philosophical and Religious Considerations
• Communication of the Vision

Long Now’s Stewart Brand will participate in the Symposium by filling the chair overseeing the Philosophical and Religious Considerations Track.

There will also be a Sci-Fi Author’s Discussion Panel featuring, among others, Charlie Stross and former SALT speaker Vernor Vinge.

The 100 Year Starship Study public symposium will be held from September 30 through October 2, 2011 at the Hilton Convention Center in Orlando, FL. Registration is free.

When it comes to Danish meta-mockumentaries about virtual worlds and mysterious clocks, My Avatar and Me is the one to see. Starring and co-directed by Mikkel Stolt, the film features cameos by Long Now co-founder Danny Hillis and the Foundation’s Nevada site.

My Avatar and Me can be viewed on Constellation.com, a global digital movie theater:

“My Avatar and Me is a creative documentary-fiction film about a man who enters the virtual world of Second Life to pursue his personal dreams and ambitions. His journey into cyberspace becomes a magic learning experience, which gradually opens the gates to a much larger reality.”

The next showtime is Sunday July 10th and writer/co-director Bente Milton will be virtually present to answer questions and to discuss the film.

Jesse Schell interviews gaming legend Bob Bates, who predicts that we will be having emotional vocal conversations with game characters by 2021.

There’s really no one more fun to watch predict the future than Jesse Schell,  so it’s our good fortune that he just launched The Crystal Ball Society as a space to place predictions on the future.

(From his SALT talk): “…The prediction threshold is creeping in, it’s made a lot of people give up on prediction. They’ve become future blind. That’s ridiculous because if you put some energy into it you can make some predictions about the future. *You can look into your crystal ball and you can figure it out.* But it takes practice… If you practice predicting you will get better and you’re going to get feedback fast. But if you’re future blind and you don’t bother, you’re going to continue to suck at predicting the future.”

Practice sucking less by sending predictions here: crystalballsociety[at]gmail{dot}com

Also of note, an exceptionally relevant post on 2019 Unthinkables by board member Kevin Kelly, that made me daydream this afternoon about an Amazon Bookstore by 2015.

Check out lots more debatably-thinkables at Long Bets.