Urban Renewal #4, by Edward Burtynsky

Researchers at the McKinsey Global Institute have been studying the process of urbanization – what works and what doesn’t – and argue in this article that the detrimental effects of rapid city growth are not directly the result of insufficient resources. Rather, they stem from management that is neither comprehensive enough nor farsighted enough.

Does this imply that the future will be one of massive megalopolises spread across the globe? Theoretically, the answer is yes—there is no limit to the size of cities. In practice, however, the growth of most urban centers is bound by an inability to manage their size in a way that maximizes scale opportunities and minimizes costs. Large urban centers are highly complex, demanding environments that require a long planning horizon and extraordinary managerial skills. Many city governments are simply not prepared to cope with the speed at which their populations are expanding.

Theoretical physicist Geoffrey West spoke at The Long Now Foundation’s SALT series in July of 02011 and discussed how cities tend to become more efficient and productive as they grow, and that they do so at an exponential rate. The challenge, as he described it, is that cities have to innovate faster and faster in order to keep up with superlinear growth. So how can city governments cope? The authors of the McKinsey Global Institute article, Richard Dobbs and Jaana Remes, outline four principles to guide the leaders of quickly growing metropolises:

First, successful cities need sufficient funding to finance their running costs and new infrastructure. Sources of funding could include monetizing land assets and levying property taxes, sales taxes, or user charges. Second, cities need modern, accountable governance; many large successful cities, including London and New York, have opted for empowered mayors with long tenures and clear accountability. Third, cities need proper planning that spans a 1- to 40-year horizon. Finally, all cities should craft dedicated policies in critical areas such as affordable housing.

In the effort to understand our environment, scientists generally rely on natural observations to describe the earth’s past. They examine tree rings, oxygen isotopes, sedimentary rock, pollen, and many other physical records from which we can glean information. These methods are quite fruitful, and when combined they offer compelling evidence. But wouldn’t it be nice if, at least for the last few millennia, our ancestors had just recorded all of that information for us?

Occasionally they did, particularly when they encountered conditions or events that they considered extremely important. For example, swarms of locusts that ate all of their food. Conservation Magazine describes a project by a team of scientists in China who have compiled over 8,000 historical documents that chronicle the insect’s effects:

“Outbreak of Oriental migratory locusts (Locusta migratoria manilensis) was, together with drought and flood, considered one of the three most severe natural disasters causing damage to crop production in ancient China,” a team led by Huidong Tian of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing notes in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “The earliest known written record of locusts was found inscribed on an ox bone in Oracle Script (Jiaguwen, the earliest Chinese script) 3,500 years ago, asking: ‘Will locusts appear in the field; will it not rain?’” Ever since, local histories and government documents have been littered with detailed records of locust outbreaks.

The study has shown a link between dry conditions and locust outbreaks, providing a rare biological source of evidence for climate variations. Regardless of whether or not the authors of these documents intended for them to be useful to future generations, their efforts to describe and catalog their environment in an enduring medium have proven very valuable to us, thousands of years later.

About ten years ago The Long Now Foundation initiated an effort to document every living organism on the planet within 25 years. The project was called All Species and while it did not make it through the dot com burst, it was continued by initiatives such as the Encyclopedia of Life and the Census of Marine Life. Because our knowledge of biological diversity of the planet is incomplete, scientists have always been uncertain of just how many species we have left to identify. Recently, however, a paper was published in the open-access biology journal of the Public Library of Science that approaches that question in a novel statistical way. The results are impressive. They indicate that the 1.2 million or so species that scientists have described to date comprise a mere 14% of the total number inhabiting our planet.

Our current estimate of ~8.7 million species narrows the range of 3 to 100 million species suggested by taxonomic experts [1] and it suggests that after 250 years of taxonomic classification only a small fraction of species on Earth (~14%) and in the ocean (~9%) have been indexed in a central database (Table 2). Closing this knowledge gap may still take a lot longer. Considering current rates of description of eukaryote species in the last 20 years (i.e., 6,200 species per year; ±811 SD; Figure 3F–3J), the average number of new species described per taxonomist’s career (i.e., 24.8 species, [30]) and the estimated average cost to describe animal species (i.e., US$48,500 per species [30]) and assuming that these values remain constant and are general among taxonomic groups, describing Earth’s remaining species may take as long as 1,200 years and would require 303,000 taxonomists at an approximated cost of US$364 billion. With extinction rates now exceeding natural background rates by a factor of 100 to 1,000 [31], our results also suggest that this slow advance in the description of species will lead to species becoming extinct before we know they even existed. High rates of biodiversity loss provide an urgent incentive to increase our knowledge of Earth’s remaining species.

On the bright side, there are some encouraging technological advances in social media and genetic identification that are increasing the efficiency of documenting new organisms. The internet facilitates the development of grassroots or amateur scientific projects, and it more widely distributes the daunting task of identifying another seven and a half million species (a task which would otherwise be all the more daunting in light of the dwindling number of professional taxonomists). One such project, featured previously on this blog, is known as 10000 birds and aims to photograph every bird in the world, providing a public database of avian images. For the important task of genetic documentation, DNA barcoding offers an efficient way of analyzing the genetic makeup of new specimens.

With these technologies and the development of others, it may indeed be possible to achieve a comprehensive description of life on earth in a time span closer to Long Now’s 25 year goal for the All Species project than the twelve centuries cited by the study above. And why develop such a catalog? Robert May of Oxford University’s Zoology department wrote a compelling companion piece to the study in the Public Library of Science’s journal.

[...] we increasingly recognise that such knowledge is important for full understanding of the ecological and evolutionary processes which created, and which are struggling to maintain, the diverse biological riches we are heir to. Such biodiversity is much more than beauty and wonder, important though that is. It also underpins ecosystem services that—although not counted in conventional GDP—humanity is dependent upon. [...] The essential fact is that, if we are to meet the challenges facing tomorrow’s world, we need a clearer understanding of how many species there are—both on land and in the even less well-studied oceans—underpinning the structure and functioning of ecosystems.

Long Now encourages a 10,000 year perspective, but if that just isn’t enough zeroes for you, check out FutureTimeline.net, a site that literally goes Beyond 10,000:

Welcome to the future! Here you will find a speculative timeline of future history. Part fact and part fiction, the timeline is based on detailed research that includes analysis of current trends, projected long-term environmental changes, advances in technology such as Moore’s Law, future medical breakthroughs, and the evolving geopolitical landscape. Where possible, references have been provided to support the predictions. FutureTimeline.net is intended to be an ongoing, collaborative project that is open for discussion – we welcome ideas from scientists, futurists, inventors, writers and anyone else interested in the future of our world.

As a resource for science, technology and futures thinking, the site is chockfull of links and ideas. Just as an example, did you know that in about 3,000,000,000 AD, our own Milky Way may begin to merge with Andromeda?

When it comes to  society’s propensity for compromisingly short-term thinking, not even the scientific community is immune. A recent post on John Horgan‘s blog at Scientific American discussed a few of the trends responsible for the hastiness (and resulting shoddiness) of too much of our scientific activity. Among the trends is an overemphasis on ‘popular’ research topics, which statistician John Ioaniddis has shown leads to more inaccurate publications.

The likelihood that a claim will hold up, he argues, is inversely proportional to the initial attention that it gets from other scientists and the media. Large, fast-moving, “hot” fields, which can yield large financial payoffs, tend to have the worst records.

Thankfully, the primary subject of Horgan’s post is not fast-paced failure, but an interesting effort to promote slower, better science. A group of scientists based in Germany have published “The Slow Science Manifesto,” which praises the essential nature of “accelerated science of the early 21st century” but scolds those who demand that scientists constantly produce research with immediate practical application and clear meaning and intention. “Science needs time,” they assert, “to think.”

Science needs time to read, and time to fail. Science does not always know what it might be at right now. Science develops unsteadi­ly, with jerky moves and un­predict­able leaps forward—at the same time, however, it creeps about on a very slow time scale, for which there must be room and to which justice must be done.

The Manifesto concludes: “We cannot continuously tell you what our science means; what it will be good for; because we simply don’t know yet. Science needs time.” This statement corresponds neatly to a sentence from a chapter (titled, not incidentally, “Slow Science”) in Stewart Brand’s book The Clock of the Long Now: “Rigorously collected old data keeps finding new uses.” Brand proposes that the Long Now Library could help facilitate the kinds of long-term projects that produce large useful data sets by helping scientists overcome the obstacles that stand in the way of such endeavors. Perhaps the authors of The Slow Science Manifesto would agree with his analysis:

…in light of their great accumulative value, why are long-term scientific studies so rare? Well, (1) they’re not about proving or disproving hypotheses, the coin of the scientific realm; (2) they don’t generate quick papers, the coin of a scientific career; (3) they bear no relation to scientific fashion, where the excitement is; (4) they’re not subject to money-making patent or copyright; (5) the few that exist usually die when their primary researcher dies; (6) they’re extremely difficult to maintain funding for; and (7) ever growing archives are an expensive hassle to service and keep accessible.

The Long Now Foundation has, in fact, already had the opportunity to support a long-term scientific project. In 02008 the Nevada System of Higher Education received funding from the National Science Foundation to study climate change in the Great Basin. As part of the study they needed to install permanent climate monitoring stations over a wide range of elevation levels and ecosystem types, and the Long Now Foundation’s property in Nevada provided some key locations for constructing stations. If the project overcomes the challenges and pressures that drove a group of frustrated scientists to publish their Slow Science Manifesto, it will one day become a valuable bank of ‘rigorously collected old data,’ and future scientists will continue to use and reuse it for purposes that, quite frankly, we’ve never even dreamed of.

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

The planet Neptune was first observed by astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle in the night sky of September 23, 01846. Well, it wasn’t until recently that the large blue planet completed its first (roughly) 165-year orbit since the night when Galle first viewed it from the Berlin Observatory. Paul Gilster at Centauri Dreams wrote a thoughtful and interesting post on the event, which occurred on July 12 of 02011. Gilster even includes a brief overview of Neptune’s appearances in science fiction:

H.G. Wells likewise wrote about Neptune in ‘The Star’ (1897), a short story in which the planet is destroyed by a collision with what appears to be a rogue wandering planet from the interstellar deep. The event puts a brilliant new star in Earth’s sky, one that inexorably approaches our planet. Interestingly, the massive new object now gets a gravitational assist from Jupiter, as foreseen by a canny mathematician who forecasts the end of the human race…

To put Neptune’s orbital longevity in perspective, I like to reflect on the fact that it will orbit the sun a mere sixty times in the next 10,000 years.

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.

Our friend Scott Beale of Laughing Squid let us know this morning that Salon has a great slideshow of very old trees from around the world, including some Bristlecone Pines and the oldest tree with a recorded planting date.

Check it out:
Photo by Charleston’s TheDigitel

Here’s a beautiful time-lapse of a pulsing, breathing, flowing superorganism:

Mindrelic – Manhattan in motion from Mindrelic on Vimeo.

(via stellar)