Photo by Jessie Levandov

Opening: Global Lives Project Installation
at The Long Now Museum & Store

Wednesday November 10
6:00 – 8:00 pm

We’ll be celebrating the opening of a Global Lives Project installation at the Long Now Foundation Museum & Store on the evening of November 10th. Please join us for drinks, snacks and some words from Global Lives Project Founder and Executive Director, David Evan Harris. Global Lives Project filmmakers Ya-Hsuan Huang and Jason J. Price will also be in attendance to answer questions.

The Global Lives Project is a collaboratively-built library of human experience gathered from an orphanage in Kazakstan, a corner store in China, a street car in San Francisco and many other locations foreign and familiar. It takes shape online and as a video installation.

Framed by the arc of the day and conveyed through the intimacy of video, we have slowly and faithfully captured 24 continuous hours in the lives of 10 people from around the world. They are screened here in their own right, but also in relation to one another.

There is no narrative other than that which is found in the composition of everyday life, no overt interpretations other than that which you may bring to it.

By extending the long take to a certain extreme and infusing it with the spirit of cinema verité, we invite audiences to confer close attention onto other worlds, and simultaneously reflect upon their own.  The force and depth of human difference and similarity are revealed in this process. Gaps which mark cultural divides feel, at once, both wider and narrower.  This sense – that we, as humans, are both knowable and unknowable, fundamentally different as well as the same – opens a space for dialogue.

-Artist’s Statement 2010

Long Conversation – Pete Worden Announces 100-Year Starship from The Long Now Foundation.

On October 16th, Long Now hosted the Long Conversation as part of our Longplayer event.  Speaking with Peter Schwartz about the future of space travel, NASA Ames Research Center Director Pete Worden announced a collaborative project between Ames and DARPA.  The two agencies have set aside just over a million dollars to begin research on a 100-year starship.

The announcement was first publicized by Amara Angelica writing for the Kurzweil AI blog:

NASA Ames Director Simon “Pete” Worden revealed Saturday that NASA Ames has “just started a project with DARPA called the Hundred Year Starship,” with $1 million funding from DARPA and $100K from NASA.

“You heard it here,” said Worden at “Long Conversation,” a Long Now Foundation event in San Francisco. “We also hope to inveigle some billionaires to form a Hundred Year Starship fund,” Dr. Worden added. (No further details on this are available from NASA at this time.)

“The human space program is now really aimed at settling other worlds,” he explained. “Twenty years ago you had to whisper that in dark bars and get fired.”

It later bounced its way over to Huffington Post and MSNBC’s Cosmic Log.

UPDATE:  On Oct 28th DARPA released this official statement (PDF).  MSNBC also covered it here.

The above video is Long Now board member David Eagleman discussing his idea of Possibilianism at the Poptech conference.  Eagleman talked a bit about this in his Long Now seminar and I thought it was great to hear him dive into it further. Enjoy.

Jamie O’Shea is an artist interested in technology, memory and time. In the video below he demonstrates how to create an electrical battery using only stone-age materials.

As Jamie points out, this isn’t just great material for the Manual for Civilization – it’s also a good way to illustrate that the historically observed progression of technology wasn’t the only way it could have happened.

The project is documented on his website:

Some people have viewed this project through the lens of sustainability. While self-sufficiency and locally sourced material would certainly seem to be sustainable, my methods fail quite spectacularly in environmental analysis. For one, I used an estimated 20 kg of charcoal to produce perhaps 20 g of metal…

My project is about the origin of technologies- the ability for them to emerge out of context- but not their ability to sustain themselves.  A sustainable society is not really the most natural option; humans began as a nomads exhausting the resources of places and then moving on.  Maybe people in the future will look back on us just as we can look back on our predecessors, and see the answer to a lasting society lying on the ground all around us, just waiting to be put together with the right information.

(Thanks, Kurt!)

Discovery News has a feature in which astronomer Robert Hurt of NASA’s Spitzer Science Center uses space simulation software Starry Night to explain how Earth’s view of five major constellations will change over time, like Ursa Major:

“Stargazers of the future will look into a different night sky. That’s because the stars are constantly moving relative to each other. These shifts are nearly imperceptible during a person’s lifetime, but they add up over the centuries and millennia. This means that in, say, 50,000 years, many common constellations will have a very different shape.”

See the other four constellation shifts at Discovery News.

Image credit: Starry Night Education software/Discovery News

The European Space Agency has released an amazing new image of our universe, created by the recently launched Planck mission.  The image above comes from Planck’s first detailed survey of the cosmic microwave background, the universe’s “first light.”

It is the light that was finally allowed to move out across space once a post-Big-Bang Universe had cooled sufficiently to permit the formation of hydrogen atoms.

Before that time, scientists say, the cosmos would have been so hot that matter and radiation would have been “coupled” – the Universe would have been opaque.

Planck is funded to create four of these surveys, each more precise than the last:

“We know that eventually as the data get better and better, what you end up getting to are the limitations of what you know about the instrument,” explained Professor Jaffe.

“And so, by running Planck for longer we can learn a lot more about the instrument itself and thereby remove a lot of the contaminating effects that are just because of the way it produces its noise.”

(BBC via Brian Eno)

Atlas Obscura, “a compendium of the world’s wonders, curiosities and esoterica” in collaboration with Long Now has created a new category just for us called Long Now Locations.

The Long Now Locations serve as a compendium and ongoing collection of objects and places that exhibit long-term thinking, intended or not. Along with the character of Atlas Obscura, many of the Long Now Locations are also mysterious and curious in nature.

Ranging from items that were created with a long-term mindset and intention, as were the Oak Beams at New College Oxford, to items that accidentally survived and now serve as long-term examples, telling a story and giving important information regarding past civilizations and their knowledge and capabilities, like the Antikythera Mechanism.

We encourage Long Now supporters to explore the Long Now Locations collection and add your own experiences with places and items of long-term nature, and maybe even some examples of poor long-term thought or planning. Sign up with an Atlas Obscura to start contributing your stories.

Obscura Day 02010

In addition to Long Now Locations, on Saturday March 20 02010, Long Now collaborated with Atlas Obscura on the first, of what we hope will be many an Obscura Day. Taking part in a day of 80 events, expeditions, back-room tours and hidden treasures in 20 countries worldwide, Long Now’s Museum & Store opened our doors to over 80 Obscura Day explorers for an evening of merry-making and conversation around the Long Now and the 10,000 Year Clock.

After exploring the Musee Mechanique alongside owner Dan Zelinsky, the San Francisco Obscura Day party roved down along the historic Aquatic Park and over into Fort Mason where an after-party was held at the Long Now Museum & Store to close Obscura Day’s world-wide events and festivities.

image courtesy of michaelz1 on flickr

Long Now and Atlas Obscura staff and guests gathered to mingle around prototypes of the 10,000 Year Clock of the Long Now. Amongst the Orrery, Chime Generator, and Tungsten Bobs. Alexander Rose, Executive Director of Long Now and Project Manager/Designer of the 10,000 Year Clock, gave an introduction to the clocks various prototypes. Clock engineers, Greg Staples and Paolo Salvagione were also in attendance to answer questions and give demonstrations of the various prototypes.

Here is a wonderful video and summary on the day from Atlas Obscura:

The day started with folks hiking out to an abandoned railroad tunnel Australia to see bioluminescent glow worms, and ended some 30 hours later with San Francisco obscuraphiles watching an amazing demonstration of parts of the 10,000-Year Clock at the Long Now Foundation. In between, we walked the lost River Fleet in London, visited amazing anatomical museums in Paris, Washington, Boston, and Philadelphia, toured the world’s largest treehouse in Tennessee, circumnavigated one of the largest holes in the world in Butte, made shiny mud balls in Albuquerque, and photographed an unbuilt suburb in the Mojave desert.

Want to be updated on future Atlas Obscura events and tours? Sign up here.

For thousands of years emperors, clerics, nobles and kings all over the world have erected slabs of stone called stelae as markers to indicate a boundary, either phsyical or temporal.  They commemorate battles won, loved ones lost, borders, holocausts, and laws.  Some stelae have been vital sources of information on past societies; many still stand after millenia.

Outside the Everhart Museum in Scranton, four ceramic stelae have been erected by an artist named Jordan Taylor.  The four-ton blocks will sit in Nay Aug Park, marking the entrance to the museum, until they erode “and follow the watershed as far as the Chesapeake Bay, back to the lie of the land”.  Rather than a king’s accomplishment or a claimed territory, they mark the absence of boundary, the dissolution of moment and material into matter and spacetime.

“I look forward to watching the stelae from season to season, year to year. They are sentinel. Yet we too share that role. We will keep watch over them, bearing witness to their transformation from art back into the earth.”

- Cara A. Sutherland, Executive Director, Everhart Museum

History of Major Contagion Map by Haisam Hussein

Long Now member #744 Jason Martin sent in links to a few maps by Lapham’s Quarterly each of which depicts a different view of deep time.  Click on the maps shown here to see the larger versions.

Telling Tales Map by Haisam Hussein

The Art of Knowing graphics by Joyce Pendola

Technology Review has an article up in which some physicists defend their clock-making chops.  It seems they feel pulsars are getting more credit than they deserve in the public perception of accurate time-keeping:

So accurate are pulsar signals that when they were discovered, astronomers gave serious credence to the idea that they were evidence of intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe because they were unmatched by anything physicists could make on Earth. This has lead to the widespread belief that pulsars are the most accurate clocks in the Universe.

John Hartnett and Andre Luiten at the University of Western Australia want you know that’s no longer the case.

Today, the best optical lattice neutral atom clocks and trapped ion clocks have a frequency stability approaching one part in 10^17.By contrast, as more pulsars have been discovered, their timing stability has improved by less than an order of magnitude in the last 20 years. The best millisecond pulsars have a stability of only one part in 10^15 at best.

That means that terrestrial clocks can rightly be crowned the best clocks in the Universe, say Hartnett and Luiten.

Duly noted.  It seems worth pointing out that the measure of accuracy in the article is expressed as a ratio without units – often you hear that an atomic clock will lose a second of accuracy only every 10 billion years or so.  The author of this article avoids that, and maybe for good reason.  Sometimes people told Long Now is building a 10,000 Year Clock react by asking, “Oh, like an atomic clock?”   It seems that an occasional side-effect of using these long time units to illustrate the accuracy of atomic clocks is the implication that they will be around for eons.

The thing is, atomic clocks rely on vacuum-sealed chambers full of cesium atoms kept near absolute zero or similarly complicated mechanisms to make their extremely precise measurements.  That kind of hardware requires a significant technological, economic and bureaucratic infrastructure to maintain.  If you can imagine finding an atomic clock after the electricity failed that kept it running, you would have to recreate a lot of knowledge to understand what in fact it was.

The article goes on to discuss the difficulty of building a timepiece durable enough that its lifespan requires scientific notation to describe, and mentions Long Now’s attempt through the Clock of the Long Now. It’s in this endurance category, however, that pulsars maintain their dominance, as they’re likely to last quite a bit longer than anything humans have been able to build, even Long Now – we’ve been able to observe some that are thought to be around 200 million years old.

(Where Is the Best Clock in the Universe? – Technology Review)