The Long News: stories that might still matter fifty, or a hundred, or ten thousand years from now.

Last week The Millennium Project released its 02011 State Of The Future report, looking at trends for the past twenty years and projecting ahead for the next decade. (Not the 10,000 year future, but still of interest.) You can read an executive summary of the report here.

While the report finds many things to worry about – global warming, terrorism, corruption – overall the trends are surprisingly hopeful, as shown in their chart called “Where we are winning”:

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 Long News: stories that might still matter fifty, or a hundred, or ten thousand years from now.

Internet map of the Middle East

A computer defeats humans on a television game show. An information network brings down a series of dictatorships. We are witnessing a massive explosion in data, and an equally massive explosion in our ability to process and distribute it. The fall of the Soviet Union may have been driven, in part, by the fax machine; today, revolutions are driven by Wikileaks, Facebook, and Twitter. (You say you want a revolution? Google it.) Or, as Ken Jennings wrote on his monitor when he lost at Jeopardy to IBM’s Watson: “I for one welcome our new computer overlords.”

Some recent news articles about information overload — as well as some additional stories:

1. “A whopping 94% of global data is now stored digitally, up from 0.8% 25 years ago”: As computer capacity soars, users drowning in data

2. It tripled in 2010: Worldwide mobile data traffic exploding

3. The Internet = us: World’s total CPU power: one human brain

4. Or maybe, surpasses us: Robots replace teachers at 21 schools in South Korea

5. Meanwhile: maybe our energy problems are solvable: Today’s clean tech could power the world by 2050

6. Unsettling news for climate change deniers and creationists: Global warming may reroute evolution

7. Shocking how many Americans don’t believe in evolution (this time, it’s the science teachers): Evolution still struggling in public schools

8. That’s okay, we can rewrite evolution anyway: Mammoth ‘could be reborn in four years’

We invite you to submit Long News story suggestions here.

As a recent New York Times article observes, the kilogram is officially defined as “a unit of mass equal to the mass of the international prototype of the kilogram.” Well, it turns out that the prototype, a chunk of platinum and iridium housed at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in France, has lost a bit of weight since it was made in the 1880s. The builders of the prototype did their best to design for the long-term, choosing a 90% platinum / 10% iridium alloy for its corrosion resistance and good thermal properties, sheltering it with bell jars and a vault, and minimizing its surface area. Time, however, has proven their efforts insufficient. The New York Times points out that the method for standardizing the kilogram has been going out of style:

The kilogram is the last base unit of measurement to be expressed in terms of a manufactured artifact. (Its cousin, the international prototype of the meter, was retired from active duty in 1960, when scientists redefined the meter. They redefined it again in 1983; a meter is now officially “the length of the path traveled by light in a vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second,” for those who would like to try it at home.)

Scientists now have similarly bold plans for the kilogram, and indeed for several other base units of measure. A draft resolution to be considered at the General Conference of Weights and Measures in October includes new and improved definitions for the ampere, the mole and the candela.

“This would be the biggest change in metrology since the metric system was introduced during the French Revolution,” Dr. Quinn said.

Which is all very exciting and very revolutionary. But it is easier said than done.

Indeed, we all take these standards for granted, but they are one of the things that allow us to build on the past and conceive into the future.  Their definition may seem esoteric, but one only has to go to a gas station in a country without standards enforcement to see the potential pit falls of a lack of them.  Moving into the future with standards not defined by physical items, the Bureau of Weights and Measures discusses some of the difficulties they face, such as the degree of uncertainty in Planck’s constant, here on its website.

Blue Lake in Sitka, Alaska

Newsweek reports that Sitka, Alaska is looking at selling 3 billion of gallons of water for bottling in Mumbai India shipped via tanker.  This will mark one of the first major water transfers of this sort, making water a globally traded commodity.  It also brings up some interesting questions around climate change and how it will affect population centers.  It is said that water always travels uphill towards money, if this deal goes through we will determine if it will also cross oceans.

Mumbai, India

The Long News: stories that might still matter fifty, or a hundred, or ten thousand years from now.

Burr Heneman suggests that the increasing empowerment of women around the world will have impact for generations to come.

Just a few weeks ago the U.S. marked the 90th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote; yet few would argue that the genders have achieved equality. Still, there are signs of economic and political progress.

From The Atlantic Monthly: “According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women now hold 51.4 percent of managerial and professional jobs—up from 26.1 percent in 1980… Earlier this year, for the first time in American history, the balance of the workforce tipped toward women, who now hold a majority of the nation’s jobs.” Forty years ago, just 4% of the nation’s lawyers were women; now the figure is 32%. (They also note that among Americans who choose the sex of their children, most now choose girls.)

There’s more. According to the Small Business Administration, more than 40% of all U.S. businesses are women-owned, and in the past decade, nearly two out of every three businesses were started by women. Women also own more than 40% of private businesses in China. And in Europe, women already make up the majority of university graduates.

On the other hand, the Women’s Bureau of the U.S. Dept of Labor reports that pay for men and women is still unequal, and many women still remain concentrated in traditionally lower-paying jobs despite the fact that women hold the majority of post-secondary degrees in this country.

And social progress seems to be coming more slowly. Poverty is becoming feminized (around the world, two out of three poor adults are women). Finally: although statistics are hard to come by, sexual assault and sexual slavery may actually be on the rise — and there are 20,000 “honor killings” of women each year.

Some recent news stories about the role of women in the world:

1. In the U.S., the salary gap may be shrinking: Workplace salaries: at last, women on top and also Young U.S. women learn, earn more than men

2. And yet: 90 years after the 19th Amendment, equality remains elusive

3. Mobile phones and micro-credit are leveling the playing field in Africa: Africa: women’s rights

4. 100 million girls have gone missing in Asia: Gendercide: The war on baby girls

5. About those “honor killings”: The crimewave that shames the world

6. Stafford Matthews sends news of another disturbing and unexplained development: More and more girls hitting puberty by age 7

7. Finally: women are better drivers than men, but do they get credit for it? For women who drive, the stereotypes die hard

We invite you to submit Long News story suggestions here.

(Thanks to Heather Kinlaw for background research.)

The Long News: stories that might still matter fifty, or a hundred, or ten thousand years from now.

At a recent Long Now seminar, Ed Moses mentioned in passing that we now produce enough bullets each year to kill every person on the planet — twice. We are a violent species; we hunt, we organize in gangs, we go to war. Today the U.S. is prosecuting two wars, and there are hotspots around the world from Darfur to Mexico.

At the same time, global defense spending is rising by 8% a year. We face unquantifiable threats from nuclear, biological, and robot weapons. And, of course, there will almost certainly be new conflicts over food, water, and other resources.

And yet –

Over the long term, it’s possible that war may actually be on the decline. The UN defines a “major war” as an armed conflict which causes more than 1,000 violent deaths a year. Just ten years ago, the world had fifteen major ongoing wars. Today there are seven.

In fact, Steven Pinker has argued that if you’re a young man (the group most likely to bear the burden of soldiering), your chances of dying in an armed conflict are lower than at any time in history: “If the wars of the twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in the wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion deaths, not 100 million.” His essay is a few years old, but it’s worth reading if you haven’t seen it before: A history of violence.

Here are some other recent news stories and opinion pieces about the future of war (somewhat U.S.-centric, as the U.S. accounts for nearly half of global military spending, and most “advances” are taking place here):

1. Money and the military:

• Top 10 military spending nations
• Report proposes downsized military
• China’s 2010 military spending 1.5 times larger than defense budget
• The purchasing power of peace

2. Ironically, even as we eliminate nuclear warheads:

• U.S. plans to increase nuclear spending

3. High-tech combat:

• The transformation of American warfare: fighting wars with robots
• War of the machines
• This is the future of war
• U.S. engaging in virtual cyber-war

4. War, what is it good for:

• Seven reasons why we can’t stop making war

We invite you to submit Long News story suggestions here.

The Long News: stories that might still matter fifty, or a hundred, or ten thousand years from now.

It’s obvious energy will be one of the great challenges of this century. But it’s possible to hope that the current BP oil spill might help prompt a broader conversation about possible alternatives.

Over the past few weeks we’ve been looking for stories about the future of energy, running a News Hunt with the help of social news site NewsTrust.

There was good news on many fronts – we found a lot of high quality journalism; we had great participation from a large number of NewsTrust and Long Now Foundation members, bringing in news sources from around the world; and finally, there was a surprising amount of good news in the news stories themselves, as you’ll read below.

To quote Alexander Rose: “Looking back over what came out of the Energy News Hunt I found that I learned not only more about energy, but a lot more about the way it is covered by the press. I am reminded how rare it is to see a story that contextualizes new energy technology in the overall picture. Crowd-sourcing is a tricky and nuanced business. NewsTrust did a great job framing and directing the efforts of its contributors to yield high quality stories.”

For an excellent summary of everything we learned, visit the NewsTrust blog here.

For a quick overview, here are some of the best recent news stories we found about the future of energy:

1. Solar: Here comes the sun

European dream of desert energy takes shape

The rise of big solar: growing pains

2. Wind: The answer, my friend

How Texas lassoed the wind

Bottled wind could be as constant as coal

3. Nuclear: The news on nukes

The future of nuclear power

The nuclear option is back on the table

4. Geothermal: I feel the earth move

Joining the energy underground: residential geothermal power systems

Using carbon dioxide to extract geothermal energy

5. Biofuels: What’s it all about, algae?

Algae to solve the Pentagon’s jet fuel problem

Exxon bets $600 million on algae biofuel despite doubters

6. Fusion: You are my sunshine

Laser fusion test results raise energy hopes

This machine might* save the world

7. Oil: Not all the news is good

Lasting menace: gulf oil-spill disaster likely to exert environmental harm for decades

Think gas is too pricey? Think again.

Finally, we’d like to thank the folks at NewsTrust for helping pull this together, particularly their terrific team: Fabrice Florin, Kaizar Campwala, Jon Mitchell, Beth Wellington, and Mike La Bonte. We invite you to visit http://newstrust.longnow.org, where you can join NewsTrust to comment on stories yourself.

Heliotron magnetic field fusion containment device

Is There Good News About Energy?

In the face of the BP disaster, it would be all too easy to lose hope about our energy future. But it’s possible there might be a silver lining in that oily cloud: if we’re lucky, the spill may prompt a deeper conversation about the need to find new, global, scalable solutions to meet our energy needs.

As part of that conversation, we’d like to invite you to join our Energy News Hunt, with social news site NewsTrust.net.

From June 7 to 20, 02010, The Long Now Foundation and its Long News initiative are partnering with NewsTrust to find good journalism about the future of energy — with a particular focus on low carbon technologies and innovative solutions that can scale quickly into terawatts. For a sense of the scale required, see Saul Griffith’s talk on Climate Change, Recalculated.

We invite you to join forces with us and NewsTrust, so that together we can find some of the best (and worst) coverage of this important topic. NewsTrust is a community of citizens and journalists who rate the news based on quality, not just popularity — by reviewing articles for accuracy, fairness, context and other journalistic qualities.

Joining the Energy News Hunt is easy and informative — and you can contribute your expertise in just minutes. Simply review stories listed in our Energy topic page — or post other interesting articles you have come across on this topic. As you review these stories, you will learn more about important energy issues, and you will become more aware about the quality of the news you consume.

To get started, sign up on NewsTrust’s special welcome page for The Long Now Foundation. This will let you review stories on NewsTrust and get the full benefit of their free service.

On June 16th, 02010, The Long Now Foundation is hosting a talk about fusion energy by Ed Moses of the National Ignition Facility. If you live in the Bay Area, this is a great opportunity to learn about his groundbreaking work on laser fusion. This News Hunt is intended as a companion for this talk, to help share quality news and information about this complex topic.

Throughout the Energy News Hunt, News Trust will update its blog to feature some of each day’s best finds: featured stories recommended by our hosts and editors.

Join the Energy News Hunt – and get more informed!  You can see some of the most recently added articles below:

The Long News: stories that might still matter fifty, or a hundred, or ten thousand years from now.

It used to be thought that what defined us as human is the fact that we make tools. But in the past few decades, toolmaking has also been observed in chimpanzees, dolphins, elephants, otters, octopuses, and several kinds of birds. Still, no other species manipulates matter as relentlessly as humans do. And over the long term, our tools are getting smaller and more sophisticated as we learn more about how to fiddle with molecules, engineer new substances, and tinker with the stuff of… stuff.

Some recent news stories from the world of materials science:

1. Pushing the envelope with paper:

Scientists say paper battery could be in the works

‘Tissue paper’ could stop bullets, harness solar energy

2. Cracking the glass ceiling:

Spray-on liquid glass is about to revolutionize almost everything

3. Water water everywhere:

MIT researchers harness viruses to split water

Device to convert seawater offers hope to parched lands

Water practically flies off new surface

4. Meanwhile, machines are getting smaller every day:

Scientists create world’s first molecular transistor

Scientists harness bacteria to turn microscopic gears

Molecules made into motors

Nanodevice powered by motion

We invite you to submit Long News story suggestions here.