Image credit: Christopher Sharp

Could the paucity of long-term thinking in the United States be due to a want of engineers in high places?

So suggests a report in EE Times, a long-running electronics industry newspaper, published earlier in the month. It argues that that engineers bring a valuable future-orientation and tendency to think long-term to the political process in a number of other countries, but that this pattern is not reproduced in the U.S.

Here’s an extract:

Engineers elsewhere apply their talents to the political sphere, but those in the United States, unfortunately, don’t–and there are no signs the situation will change anytime soon. The overwhelming majority of American engineers choose industry and business, not government or policy, as their rightful place, even as their counterparts around the globe see no conflict between politics and their profession.
[…]
Engineers in China are acknowledged as key players in the country’s rapid economic rise. They’re overrepresented in the Chinese Politburo and among government ministers, said William Wulf, president emeritus of the National Academy of Engineering and a professor at the University of Virginia.

Their role on the political stage is a reason for the country’s success. “That’s a real part of why China is doing so well,” Wulf said. Lawyers predominate in American government, and while their solutions often address the immediate problems, they don’t give much thought to future implications, he said.

The engineering mindset tends to focus on the long term. When you build a bridge that will be there for 100 years, you have to think about its impact, and its ability to absorb future traffic growth and adapt to new kinds of transport. “A lot of what we’re seeing in China’s astounding growth is that sort of long-term thinking,” Wulf said.
[…]
“In Islamic or developing countries, people usually study engineering simply because they think it offers them a better future,” [says professor of chemical engineering and materials science at the University of Southern California, Muhammad] Sahimi, who is also the National Iranian Oil Co. chair in petroleum engineering at USC.

Their analytical ability leads many engineers and engineering students to political activism in those settings, he said. In Iran, for example, the majority of those in government leadership positions have engineering backgrounds, said Sahimi, who is Iranian-American.

~Sheila Riley, “Engineering ‘mindset’ doesn’t include politics“, EE Times, 2 April 02008

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Stewart Brand sent in this spiffy UCLA project that uses historical interactive maps of Berlin through time. This is part of a larger trend I have seen from many governments and municipalities to use modern geographical information systems (GIS) to not only create maps of what is there, but to add the time element to create a much deeper now.

• Historical Maps in Google Earth
• Virtual Berlin
• Westport Ireland
• China
• Philadelphia

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Since purchasing property in Eastern Nevada for the Clock site, Long Now has been paying close attention to water issues.  The valley that makes up much of “view shed” from our potential Clock site has become of great interest to the Southern Nevada Water Authority who has recently bought all the private land in the southern half of this immense valley (with the exception of Long Now’s property).   What this has also brought to light however is the larger issue of access to water world wide, and how changing climate is affecting it.  It is not always easy to find long and in depth pieces on this issue that cover the history, scale, and angles well.  One such piece was just sent to me by Stewart Brand and was published in NRDC’s OnEarth.

[In Colorado at over 10,000ft] …we’re probably witnessing the effects of global warming on one of the highest, coldest parts of the country. Climate scientists predict that for every 1.8 degree Fahrenheit increase in temperature, mountain snow cover will retreat upward by 500 feet. The West’s total snowpack could be reduced by as much as 40 percent in the next half century.

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 Nice animated time line of human migration sent to me by Paul Saffo (via Jim Warren).  The coolest thing I learned was the very exciting day about 80,000 years ago when a massive volcanic eruption caused a 6 year darkening of the skies!

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I was reminded yesterday when speaking with one of the SETI board members of the very interesting conundrum we might find ourselves in if we in fact did receive a message from space.  Above is some imagery from the first seriously high powered transmission from earth, dubbed the Arecibo message:

The [01974] transmission consisted of a simple, pictorial message, aimed at our putative cosmic companions in the globular star cluster M13. This cluster is roughly 21,000 light-years from us, near the edge of the Milky Way galaxy, and contains approximately a third of a million stars.

So the best case scenario is that this data reaches a civilization in 21,000 years.  Which means they think up some brilliant response, and then beam it back.  Even if we found life much closer, it is most likely that the conversation delay would be at least a thousand years or more.  So what does one say in a multi-millennial conversation?  At least on the terrestrial end, each response would be made by wildly different civilizations.

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Amazingly only a few years after it begun the Seed Vault in Svalbard has opened. I cant wait to go and see how they built a multi-millennial structure so fast.

PhysOrg reports:

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened today on a remote island in the Arctic Circle, receiving inaugural shipments of 100 million seeds that originated in over 100 countries. With the deposits ranging from unique varieties of major African and Asian food staples such as maize, rice, wheat, cowpea, and sorghum to European and South American varieties of eggplant, lettuce, barley, and potato, the first deposits into the seed vault represent the most comprehensive and diverse collection of food crop seeds being held anywhere in the world.

….

Each vault is surrounded by frozen arctic permafrost, ensuring the continued viability of the seeds should the electricity supply fail. The low temperature and moisture level inside the vaults will ensure low metabolic activity, keeping the seeds viable. If properly stored and maintained at minus 20 degrees Celsius (about minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit), some seeds in the vault will be viable for a millennium or more. For example, barley can last 2000 years, wheat 1700 years, and sorghum almost 20,000 years.
…

A work of art also will make the vault visible for miles around. Artist Dyveke Sanne and KORO, the Norwegian agency overseeing art in public spaces, have worked together to fill the roof and vault entrance with highly reflective steel, mirrors, and prisms. The installation acts as a beacon, reflecting polar light in the summer months, while in the winter, a network of 200 fibre-optic cables will give the piece a muted greenish-turquoise and white light.

One my favorite bits of the story is that the vault is built near the village of “Longyearbyen,” what a great name for a town with endless winters!

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In 1984 NASA launched a bus-sized cylinder into space. It was covered with 86 panels, each of which was a scientific experiment created to measure the long-term effects of space on various materials. The space craft, called the Long Duration Exposure Facility (LDEF) weighed 10 tons and circled the earth 32,000 times before it was retrieved by the Space Shuttle. NASA says the “experiments involved the participation of more than 200 principal investigators from 33 private companies, 21 universities, seven NASA centers, nine Department of Defense laboratories and eight foreign countries.”

After it was returned to earth an additional 400 scientists studied the wear and tear upon the surface of this spacecraft after 5.7 years in space. Of course, 5 years is hardly long, especially for space, but it’s a start in trying to understand what would happen over centuries in space.

Each of the 86 panels is its own science experiment. Each has a beauty of their own. They posses a kind of geeky modernist charm.

And each has also acquired a patina of expose to meteors, vacuums, and extreme heat and cold.

The author of thenonist was so enamomured by the beauty of the panels as “art” that he posted a wonderful gallery of them as an ode to this overlooked tool.

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Laura Welcher just pointed me to  this Google Earth Outreach project on the ancient Bristlcone Pine tree.  These are the same trees that live atop our Nevada Clock site.  Much of the data comes from our friends over at the Arizona Tree Ring Lab that have been studying the trees on our property.  By studying the rings on living and dead bristlecones they have been able to piece together climate data of the last 10,000 years.

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Genetic Archeology (very cool site in its own right) is reporting new research that suggests that all blue eyed people stem from a common ancestor 6-10,000 years ago.

“They have all inherited the same switch at exactly the same spot in their DNA” says Professor Eiberg.  Brown-eyed individuals, by contrast, have considerable individual variation in the area of their DNA that controls melanin production.

Professor Eiberg and his team examined mitochondrial DNA and compared the eye colour of blue-eyed individuals in countries as diverse as Jordan, Denmark and Turkey. His findings are the latest in a decade of genetic research, which began in 1996, when Professor Eiberg first implicated the OCA2 gene as being responsible for eye colour.

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Long Now board member Peter Schwartz’s The Art of the Long View has topped the list of the most important futures works ever, in a worldwide vote by members of the Association of Professional Futurists (APF). Congratulations, Peter!

The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World was first published in 01991, and describes a process for creating and using scenarios to help decision-makers navigate change, as incubated at Royal Dutch/Shell, and nurtured to maturity at Global Business Network (founded in 01987 by Schwartz together with Jay Ogilvy, Lawrence Wilkinson, Napier Collyns and Long Now’s Stewart Brand).

The honouring of Long View as the most important futures work by a group of futures consultants is, it seems to me, testimony to the role it played in popularising and legitimising scenario-based thinking and planning in organisations. Quite a few other books explaining and illustrating the development and use of scenarios have been published both before and since, but Schwartz presented a systematic, accessible, and reproducible approach to using scenarios that has garnered a wide audience and aged well. (Also among the book’s less celebrated impacts was my suggestion for the name of this blog.)

The Association of Professional Futurists announced the poll results last month (January 02007). APF is dedicated to “support[ing] professional futurists by advancing professional excellence, facilitating network and community building, and promoting the unique value proposition of futures work”. Founded in 02002, it has some 200 members worldwide comprising professional futures practitioners in consulting, business, and education sectors.

Other top-voted futures works were Foundations of Futures Studies: Human Science for a New Era (2 vols) by Wendell Bell; the multi-volume Knowledge Base of Futures Studies edited by Richard Slaughter, The Limits to Growth by the late Dana Meadows et al, and the State of the World series by The Worldwatch Institute.

[Disclosure: I’m an APF member, but as part of my ongoing effort to fit in with U.S. culture, didn’t bother to take part in the vote (:]

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