Exploring Long-Term Thinking

I call a computer from ten years ago “old.” My wife objects. It’s not old. I harrumph and then opt to change the term to “obsolete.”

But my wife has a point. Ten years is not a long time. Americans don’t care about long time periods in it unless it has dinosaurs and robots in it. And here I thought I was any better than that…

The Long Now Foundation is dedicated to long-term thinking. Ten years is 1/9 of your life. It feels like a long time because, personally speaking, it is. But measured against the time-span of the species, it’s tiny. The start of the book includes a little graphic that pops up now and then in seminars. The rate of change accelerates as you move out from the core of nature.

The forces that govern our biological nature experience change at more slowly than inherited culture. That, in turn, changes slower than our governing institutions and so on. Fashion has a pointless life of its own.

This is a favorite image from the book. It's been referenced in Long Now seminars and helps to wrap the mind around the shift in perspective that comes from studying long-term matters.

The ambition and folly of the Clock/Library is to reframe human endeavor, and to do so not with a thesis but with a thing. All this thing can do is give permission to think long term. If it succeeds in that, the rest may follow. (p48)

The journey

Imagine a far away place; it takes days to get there. In this remote southwestern region, in a mountain in the high desert of East Nevada, there’s a rock formation. It’s the edge of nowhere. It’s removed  from society and yet dedicated to it. After a journey of contemplation, you come to a mountain. Inside the mountain, along the rocky route to its interior, is a chamber.

In the chamber is a large, metal clock with a strange face. On the face of the clock you can see the orientation of the stars, the cycle of the year, and the time of the day. This clock is designed to keep reliable time for 10,000 years with minimal upkeep. To get a sense of perspective: scholars generally put the invention of the plow to around 10,000 BC. It’s design principals are (p62):

Longevity: display correct time for ten millennia.

Maintainability: with Bronze-Age technology, if need be.

Transparency: obvious operational principles.

Evolvability: improvable over time.

Scalability: the same design should work from tabletop to monument size.

The library

Along with the clock are plans for a library to house our prized knowledge. It’s not lacking in ambition; this sounds like science fiction. But how do you create an institution that can withstand the inevitable changes in millennia?

Religions are some of the longest-lived institutions we have. But when you go to the beginning and speed up the time-lapse view of the thing over time, this seeming rock of stability changes. A lot. Some faiths effectively teach that the future is irrelevant. If you’re waiting anxiously for God to show up (and day now, I swear), then who cares? Wreck the world.

When you’re focused on eternity, the future doesn’t matter.

A helpful motto for the Clock/Library tenders, therefore, would be: “We don’t do eternity.” What might other guidelines be for such an organization that intends to survive and be valuable for a very long time? Figuring out the answer is likely to be a long conversation indeed, which you are invited to join. For now, The Long Now Foundation has come up with these candidate guidelines (p53)

1. Serve the long view (and the long viewer).
2. Foster responsibility.
3. Reward patience.
4. Mind mythic depth.
5. Ally with competition.
6. Take no sides.
7. Leverage longevity

Brand’s book reads like a blog

In the years following my post-faith life, I discovered Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and got hooked. Sagan’s sorrow at the loss of the Library of Alexandria always stuck with me. It’s also the inspiration behind the decision to put a library with the clock.

So who burned the Library of Alexandria? War did three times, inadvertently. Religious bigotry did twice, on purpose. We are right to grieve. Only one in ten of the major Greek classics survived. Nothing like Alexandria’s library was seen again for a thousand years. (p73)

This video game cartidge will be virtually unreadable in much less than 100 year

I recently listened to“Gotta Catch ‘em All” at  A Life Well Wasted. The subject was about collectors and digital archiving. We face the prospect of losing a lot of evidence of our own cultural due to the short-term survivability of digital media. Websites may as well be castles on the sand. Jaron Lanier tried to recover his own work after ten years and got a headache instead.

I was asked last year by a museum to display an art video game (“Moondust”) that I had written in 1982. It ran on a Commodore 64, a computer that had already sold in the millions by the time of the game’s release. It turns out that after my game cartridge was introduced, there was a slight hardware change to the computer (in 1983), which caused the sound to not work. So I had to find a 1982 Commodore 64. But then it turned out that all the joysticks I could find only worked on the later version. Once I finally had a matching trio of computer, joystick, and cartridge, it turned out that I didn’t have a working video interface box. All this trouble with a machine whose operating system was fixed in ROM and had been available at the time in the millions! (p83)

Lanier found his solution eventually. Interested amateurs were preserving the digital past. Brand’s inquiry continues. Is there part of our biological natures that creates any bias?

The bodies of most animals are configured toward the future, our faces leading the way in the direction of travel. Our mental framework has what the philosopher Derek Parfit describes as a “bias toward the future.” Future pain, such as a forthcoming visit to the dentist, gets more of our attention than past pain. We may put off a future pleasure temporarily just to savor it longer, whereas the same pleasure in the past is less interesting. “We go from anticipation to anticipation,” said Samuel Johnson, “not from satisfaction to satisfaction.” (p119)

A natural human tendency is to hurry toward the next thing. Our family recently visited the Burke Museum and saw a cast of hominid footprints, among other creatures, in an ancient slab of earth. It was a fascinating moment. I couldn’t put my finger on just why until I read this:

At one point, and you need not be an expert tracker to discern this, she stops, pauses, turns to the left to glance at some possible threat or irregularity, and then continues to the north. This motion, so intensely human, transcends time. Three million six hundred thousand years ago, a remote ancestor – just as you or I – experienced a moment of doubt. (p127)

That was an observation by Mary Leakey, who discovered the footprints in volcanic ash.

The future’s funny

As we all know, the American children of the late 1900's were placed in a painful apparatus. Thereafter, they were fed "electrified books" via the input funnel. The later development of miniaturized funnels would create mobile knowledge locks. This technology leads directly to the PC-farms of Palo Alto, where Steve Jobs harvests bits with his army of roving info-farmers.

I read Paleofuture because understanding history requires some thought about the future and it’s good to remember how wrong we’ve been. What a “right future” looks like is an another interesting discussion. We cast our futures in the only terms we know: the now.

In the end, we get it wrong. We don’t do much better than the ridiculous photograph on the right. Walter Benjamin has a more grim interpretation of the future.

[The angel of history’s] face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (p127)

What about long-term science? This interests me because I work in a lab. While not a scientist, I do administrative grunt-work relating to grants and publications. Interest and funding operates along 3-to-5 year cycles. The NIH isn’t handing out money for studies lasting a century. Current funding methods are great for near-term studies, but lousy for long-term studies. Stewart has some ideas why it’s not happening.

So in light of their great accumulative value, why are long-term scientific studies so rare? Well, (p141)

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.
7. Ever-growing archives are an expensive hassle to service and keep accessible.

It’s not condescending, just reality. One of the aims of the Clock/Library is to address those points. There’s a place for this kind of science; it can live next to more traditional sciences.

20,000 Foot View

Reading this, I realized just how much I love to zoom out. I love timelines, maps, and any visual tool you can give me. It’s possible to capture a bunch of concepts and bring them together. This is why I always loved playing Civilization. James Burke’s Connections is another. In both cases, we bound through time and observe change.

Traditionally, we have fields of study and put our observations into those boxes. This is useful, but only so far as it allow us to focus in. The cosmos is a giant mystery, and I have a hunch that it can’t be labeled and filed so easily.

One day in the late sixties humanity found itself atop a new peak, the Moon, viewing Earth and Earth’s history from an altitude of 240,000 miles. It turned out that the astronomer Fred Hoyle was right in 01947 when he forecast, “Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from outside, is available…a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.” In those photos of the Moon we saw fractured humanity’s home as itself unfractured and whole, and we began to see what the Tewas saw from the local mountains: a relationship measured in millennia. (p144)

Google Earth, NASA Worldwind, World Wide Telescope, and many others are working toward big ideas like this. Stephen Johnson said there was a time when this was rare and unique, but now we do it to get directions to the grocery store. Remembering to appreciate this special view of our own world will be another challenge. Americans get bored with things once it’s commonplace. James Burke made a great observation about this desire for novelty and our tendency to think something incredible is humdrum.

Imagine yourself along the continuum of human civilization. You’re the end link in a long chain of people that came before you. Science has allowed for a recognition of longevity badly lacking in the lives of our ancestors, we just have to care. The potential is to live longer and influence those who come after, long after life.

The bonds between immediate family generations may loosen, while the overall bond among humanity’s generations becomes stronger, simply because so many generations are sharing the same world – having direct experience of the Long Us. Esther Dyson again: “As I get older, my ‘age group’ widens on both sides. When I was small I felt a certain kinship with five-year-olds, but six-year-olds were of another generation, and four-year-olds were little punks. When I was a teenager, my range extended a year or two in either direction. Now, in my mid-forties, my ‘generation’ includes people who grew up or even fought in the Second World War.” (p152)

I can relate to this. With more generations alive during a given time period, the dialog gets interesting. Add the differing character of those generations and you see a deeper mixture. These thoughts are enlivened by the works of Strauss & Howe (Generations, The Fourth Turning) who argue that the place-in-time of each generation helps to shape their overall viewpoint.

How likely is it that Stewart Brand and The Long Now Foundation will pull this off? Their success can’t be measured in anything but hundreds of years, so “we don’t know” will have to suffice. I can spare a few moments over the next few decades to try to understand this stuff.

The learning theorist Seymour Papert tells of a group of friends eating lobster at a Boston fish house. The question came up, “Can anyone eat lobster without making a mess?” Papert reports, “A brain surgeon at the table did it. It took him two hours – completely eaten lobster with a perfect absence of mess. He took the time appropriate to the job, which he knew about. It wasn’t his skill. It was his patience.”

Two hours was the difference between impossible and easy. For what tasks would two hundred years make that kind of difference? (p158)

Stewart Brand and the inner workings of the 10,000 year clock.