“All life is imperfectly transmitted code,” Enriquez began, “and it
is promiscuous.” Thus discoveries like the one last month of an
entire bacterial genome inside the DNA of a fruitfly is exploding the
old tree-of-life models of evolution. The emerging map replaces gene
lineages with gene webs.

“There is a whole genomic continent to discover, and we’ve just
mapped part of the coastline so far.” Noting that his friend Craig
Venter has just transplanted the DNA from one microbe into a
different one, and booted it up there, Enriquez said that humans are
going to be increasingly designing and controlling the code of life.
“We’ll do with bacteria what we do with our pets.”

Likewise new maps of brain function are raising questions such as,
“Can we model the brain, can we download it, can we transplant it,
can we reboot it?” Prostheses such as robotic arms used to be driven
by muscle signals, but now they are being controlled directly from
the brain.

Enriquez noted that some nations are charging ahead with such
technology and the education that drives it while others cripple
themselves by holding back. Portugal had colonies throughout the
world, he said, but they never respected the natives enough to help
educate them, and so left intellectual blight behind them and at
home. London and Paris are full of Indian and Chinese restaurants,
but there are none in Portugal. He showed a photo of a billboard
that read: “Portugal— We were a world power for about 15 minutes.”

The new maps of life, he said, will profoundly affect countries,
business, religion and ethics. Being alive in the midst a scientific
renaissance like this is Christmas every day.

During Q&A Enriquez lamented that the pharmacology industry has
retreated to doing just marketing now instead of discovery, haven
been driven into a defensive crouch by public misapplication of the
“Precautionary Principle” that all new technologies are guilty until
proven innocent, and innocence is impossible to prove. Thus the
potential death of tens is used to head off treatments that could
save tens of thousands. I asked him, “What would you call the
opposite of the Precautionary Principle?” Kevin Kelly offered from
the audience, “How about the Pro-actionary Principle?”

–Stewart Brand

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Cool Tools Reader Michael Hohl figured out this wonderful way to make your computer Y10K compliant. That is, how to set your computer so that it displays the 5-digit date it will need when we reach the years after 9999: that is 10000 and beyond. In anticipation of that time, you can set this year’s date to 02007 if you have Mac OSX Tiger. Here are step-by-step directions on his site (or click the “read the rest of this entry” link below). Be first in your neighborhood to have all your documents and files future-proofed.

Now if we could only get our WordPress blog engine to the same thing…

(more…)

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(This post was submitted by Roderick Jones, photo from Flickr user Dukal)

One of the stranger aspects of the explosion in the use of virtual worlds is when the avatar outlives the physical life of the gamer controlling it. People inhabiting virtual communities die in real life leaving their avatar and its property behind. A trend that is likely to increase given the predicted increase in use of virtual worlds. Players could leave their avatar passwords to their children or friends to carry on their virtual lives and distribute their property, but it is possible to conceptualize a scenario whereby the avatar continues to exist by replicating the digital profile of its real-life creator.

Both Myspace and Facebook are on the verge of introducing systems to monitor their users online activity in order to better direct advertising toward them. It doesn’t seem long before this kind of marketing system will also be applied to virtual worlds. The process of distilling an individual’s online behavior into a digital profile is currently driven by the commercial needs of advertising but it is possible to imagine it being used in more creative ways. The software used to track the online behavior of users, within in particular system (virtual worlds or social networks) could be modified to track the entirety of their online behavior, over a longer space of time – say thirty years. At the end of this period the data could be used to program an avatar. This avatar would inhabit a virtual world or worlds and be programmed with all the users personal data, preferences and potential responses– would this lead to an avatar afterlife?

With the increase in data storage capacity, computational power and future arrival of mainstream interconnected virtual worlds, this scenario does not seem so improbable. The idea of uploading minds into computers and robots certainly isn’t new (Moravec, Kurzweil) but is generally tripped up by ideas of consciousness and attempts to replicate the mechanics of the human brain. Creating a copy of online behavior and programming an avatar to respond to stimuli in the way the user has been during their digital life is not suggesting consciousness, merely sophisticated replication. This scenario has some intriguing consequences. Amongst them are the possibilities an individual could leave money to their avatar rather than their children in order to support their avatar afterlife, or that future generations would have access to a representation of their ancestors – but would having access to the temporal wisdom of our forebears be of any use? A digital representation of life could continue unhindered in a virtual environment, after real-life has ended.

Tech companies could offer this service; certainly there has never been a lack of human interest in life after death. Maybe Google with its seemingly endless storage capacity will one-day also host our virtual afterlife.

Roderick Jones

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(Frozen bacteria found by Richard Hoover in the ice of the Fox permafrost tunnel)

From New Scientist:

Microbes can survive trapped inside ice crystals, under 3 kilometres of snow, for more than 100,000 years, a new study suggests. The study bolsters the case that life may exist on distant, icy worlds in our own solar system. Living bacteria have been found in ice cores sampled at depths of 4 kilometres in Antarctica, though some scientists have argued that those microbes were contaminants from the drilling and testing of the samples in labs. And in 2005, researchers revived a bacterium that sat dormant in a frozen pond in Alaska for 32,000 years (see Ice age bacteria brought back to life). Now, physicist Buford Price and graduate student Robert Rohde, both at University of California in Berkeley, US, have found a mechanism to explain how microbes could survive such extreme conditions. They say a tiny film of liquid water forms spontaneously around the microbe. Oxygen, hydrogen, methane and many other gases will then diffuse to this film from air bubbles nearby, providing the microbe with sufficient food to survive. Thus, virtually any microbe can remain alive in solid ice, resisting temperatures down to -55° Celsius and pressures of 300 atmospheres. Under such harsh conditions, the microbes would not be able to grow and reproduce, but they would still be able to repair any molecular damage, keeping themselves viable for more than a thousand centuries, the team says. “It is not life as we generally think about it,” says Rohde. “[They] are just sitting there surviving, hoping that the ice will melt.”

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 At the Singularity Summit earlier this month I came to see Paul Saffo’s talk.  Famed as a forecaster and future thinker, I was expecting to hear what lay ahead in the world as the steepness of the technology curve continues towards cliff like proportions.  Instead all were treated to a reminder that our new future is represented overwhelmingly in the negative by our artists and poets.  He points out that if we can only imagine an awful techno future, that that is what we will get.

So Saffo read the one piece he could find that depicts a world run by computers in a positive light.  Amazingly it was written in 01967 by someone who was likely programming computers with punch cards.  It is shown in the original above and the text can be found on Saffo’s journal.

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An excellent editorial by Long Now board member Paul Saffo on the Planktos carbon sinking project came out today. It is the first in a monthly series he is writing for ABC News. Saffo does an excellent job in clarifying what has become a characteristic battle in the green tech industry.

On one side are “engineers,” people convinced that we must work our way out of the climate crisis by engaging in planet-scale efforts like sequestering carbon, unfurling orbital sunshades, tossing dust high in the atmosphere to block sunlight, or moving wholesale to nuclear power to eliminate coal-based emissions. On the opposite side are individuals — call them “druids”– who are equally convinced that the only sensible option is reduce our human planetary footprint, to conserve, preserve and remediate the threatened natural environment.

We have seen this now playing out all over the world where the “druids” have some out against many low-to-no carbon methods of generating power (wind, hydro, nuclear and in some cases solar all fit this bill). What is often missing from these arguments are the larger contexts that now global warming is forcing upon us. We see opposition of wind farms world wide due to ‘unsightliness’ or because they may kill several hundred birds per year (However it is estimated that there are 32,000 air quality related deaths each year in the US, and hundreds of thousands world wide due to coal burning alone).

It seems that while we argue over how pretty a wind mill is, the earth’s climate continues to change. And soon the New England beach homes whose views may be adulterated by the windmills will be underwater.

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The BBC is reporting on a new super bright x-ray source called a “Diamond Synchotron” (yes really) that could be used to view previously unreadable ancient texts. The synchotron could even be used to finish reading the parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls that have yet to even be unrolled due to their fragility.

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Jamais Cascio, friend of Long Now, and now a “foresight consultant” posted his recent speech to the Singularity Summit on his website.

Besides being a pretty fine manifesto for an open future, it started with a very long-now-ish quote:

I was reminded, earlier this year, of an observation made by polio vaccine pioneer Dr. Jonas Salk. He said that the most important question we can ask of ourselves is, “are we being good ancestors?” …..In our work, in our policies, in our choices, in the alternatives that we open and those that we close, are we being good ancestors? Our actions, our lives have consequences, and we must realize that it is incumbent upon us to ask if the consequences we’re bringing about are desirable.

It’s not an easy question to answer, in part because it can be an uncomfortable examination. But this question becomes especially challenging when we recognize that even small choices matter. It’s not just the multi-billion dollar projects and unmistakably world-altering ideas that will change the lives of our descendants. Sometimes, perhaps most of the time, profound consequences can arise from the most prosaic of topics.

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Linden Lab releases new builds every week. Flickr releases them up to every half hour. Writer and publisher Tim O’Reilly writes that “the open source dictum, ‘release early and release often’ in fact has morphed into an even more radical position, ‘the perpetual beta,’ in which the product is developed in the open, with new features slipstreamed in on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis” (O’Reilly). Considering that it is a component of long-term success in Web 2.0, ‘the perpetual beta’ can remind us that iterative short-term thinking is nested within thinking that is longer-term.

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Long Now seminar speaker Alex Wright brought to all of our attention the truly visionary work of Belgian Paul Otlet and his Mundameum of 1910 (video from a documentary above, and Stewart Brand’s description from the talk below.)

The greatest unknown revolutionary was the Belgian Paul Otlet.
In 1895 he set about freeing the information in books from their
bindings. He built a universal decimal classification and then
figured out how that organized data could be explored, via “links”
and a “web.” In 1910 Otlet created a “radiated library” called the
Mundameum in Brussels that managed search queries in a massive way
until the Nazis destroyed the service. Alex Wright showed an
astonishing video of how Otlet’s distributed telephone-plus-screen
sysem worked . - Stewart Brand on Alex Wright

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