What long life means

Ken Dychtwald gave a terrific talk Friday evening to a standing-room audience on “The Consequences of Human Life Extension.”

The growing—and soon overwhelming—prevalence of the old in developed nations is leading to a “new old.” Ken described meeting a bright-eyed apparent 70-year-old who talked about. . .   Read More

Ever longer life

Our germline cells (eggs and sperm) are already immortal. What if the rest of the cells of our body could acquire the same ability? Tissue by tissue, one degenerative disease after another, it could gradually happen in the course of one or two human generations. When it does happen, what we mean. . .   Read More

  With the Republican control of the House and Senate, there is no scenario in which a Democrat can become President by August 2005 (the two-year horizon of my original Bet). Looking at the two arguments, Eno’s is persuasive in detail, mine clearly wrong. The morning after the election I wrote Eno my summary of […]

  The Red Sox have won the Series and with it falls Mike Elliot’s argument around the speed of globalization vs. the Red Sox pitching depth.  Below is the write up in the New York Times. Hey, Cliff Clavin, This Time Sam Malone’s the Smart One By JONATHAN FUERBRINGER The New York Times Published: November […]

The long green

The environmental movement has moved on. It has become so deep and wide that it adds up to something new entirely, still unnamed. Whatever it is, it is now the largest movement in the world and the least ideological. Driven by science and patience, it is civilization-scale therapy.

Paul Hawken co. . .   Read More

“How’s the Clock coming?” Everyone connected with The Long Now Foundation or with Danny Hillis hears that question all the time.

“Progress on the 10,000-Year Clock,” Danny Hillis — Friday, September 10, 7pm, Fort Mason Conference Center, San Francisco. Doors open for coffee and books at 7pm; lecture is promptly at 8pm. You. . .   Read More

The depopulation problem

No need to summarize this time. Phillip Longman wrote out his whole talk, with the illustrations more viewable even than they were at the Seminar and talk.

It is full of rethink-the-news sentences like: “Notice that Japan’s lengthening recession began just as continuously falling fertility rates at last caused. . .   Read More

The long search

“The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence: Necessarily a Long-term Strategy” is the title for Jill Tarter’s Seminar About Long-term Thinking this Friday. There’s no deeper question than “Are we alone in the universe?” And there’s no quick way to answer it. Slow, steady science is the hardest. . .   Read More

Your future as a black hole

One reason lots of people don’t want to think long term these days is because technology keeps accelerating so rapidly, we assume the world will become unrecognizable in a few years and then move on to unimaginable. Long-term thinking must be either impossible or irrelevant.

The commonest. . .   Read More

Maps and time

DAVID RUMSEY’s spectacularly illustrated lecture, “Mapping Time” is not just about maps. It is the future of data and knowledge handling. People literally gasp at the things Rumsey shows can be done.

I love it when techies, artists, and historians all gasp at the same time. That happened with David Rumsey. . .   Read More