Long Now: Seminars About Long-term Thinking

"You cannot manage elements of the environment individually, one by one, or all your best efforts will unravel," says Johnson.  Government planning is needed, and it must match the pace and scale of the environment itself.  He instigated that kind of planning when he was California's Secretary of Resources in the 1980s, and he is inspired by the exemplary Green Plans of the Netherlands, New Zealand, and Singapore.  In this talk, as in his work with nations worldwide, he spells out the current best practices for serious, long-term Green Planning. Trained as a biologist, an avid hunter and fisherman, Huey Johnson is president of the Resource Renewal Institute, based in Fort Mason.  After serving as head of The Nature Conservancy he founded Trust for Public Land in San Francisco in 1972.  While Secretary of Resources from 1976 to 1982 he created a hundred-year plan for California's natural resources called "Investing for Prosper

Prizes are proving themselves as powerful tools to accelerate goal-specific innovation. Diamandis, the founder and chairman of the X Prize Foundation, has built on the success of the $10 million Ansari X Prize that inaugurated private-sector spaceflight in 2004 with Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne. Currently in play are new prizes for a $10,000 human genome, for a private Moon landing, and for a super-efficient car, with more in the pipeline. But prize contests so far have focussed on near-term goals---spectacular achievements that can be accomplished in a decade or two. What might be prize-worthy hundred-year goals, or thousand-year goals? What goals might a century of focussed effort transform from the clearly impossible to the merely difficult?

At an event hosted by the Long Now Foundation, science fiction author Neal Stephenson reads from his latest novel Anathem.

The viral success story of the year is a techno-thriller called Daemon. Software developer Suarez printed the book himself after being turned down by mainstream publishers. Blog raves, Amazon raves, and brief item in Wired magazine turned the book deservedly into a runaway hit. In this presentation, his first on the subject, Suarez spells out the ideas behind Daemon and its forthcoming sequel, Freedom™: "'Bots' are simple software programs designed to automate tasks - such as finding, retrieving, or acting upon information. Bots set loose on the Internet have been the catalyst behind many revolutionary Web 2.0 technologies. However, the unintended consequences of activating millions of bots in our networks -- bots that wield increasing influence over the activities and opportunities of human beings - may have serious consequences for society."

Burtynsky's massively informative photographs change minds and influence policy. They are also exquisite art. Their historical value will grow with time. Other art has similar reach. There should be a gallery that collects, displays, and sifts such works over centuries and millennia, and develops ways to preserve them. That is exactly Burtynsky's plan--- a 10,000-year Gallery to accompany the 10,000-year Clock. His presentation will explore and demonstrate the idea. Edward Burtynsky is an Officer of the Order of Canada and winner of the 2004 Ted Prize. His photographs are in the permanent collections of fifteen major museums, including the Guggenheim and Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Bibiotheque Nationale in Paris, and the Victoria & Albert in London. He is the subject of a prize-winning film, "Manufactured Landscapes."

Everything living evolves, but humans evolve culturally as well as biologically, and that puts us in a peculiar relation to the rest of life, with a peculiar responsibility. If we can understand how cultural evolution works, we'll have a better handle on how to manage our responsibilities. The question that Ehrlich has been exploring lately is whether cultural evolution really does show patterns that would yield predictive theory. He now has data from Polynesian canoes that indicate the answer is yes, cultural evolution is patterned enough to predict with. We can discover a new way to comprehend our own behavior and perhaps influence it to the benefit of life. Entomologist and population biologist Paul Ehrlich is President of Stanford's Center for Conservation Biology, author and co-author of books ranging from The Population Bomb (1968) to One With Nineveh (2004), recipient of many awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship, the Blue Planet Prize, and the Nobel-level Crafoord Prize.

Quadir is the now-legendary founder of GrameenPhone, which transformed his home country of Bangladesh in the 1990s and led the way for the cellphone revolution throughout the developing world. Currently Quadir heads the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at MIT and is building Emergence BioEnergy Inc., a project to develop local electricity for the rural poor, using such devices as a fuel cell that runs on anaerobic bacteria. Linking new technology with the boundless resourcefulness of the poor drives innovation in surprising directions at surprising speed.

Distinguished historian Ferguson and renowned futurist Schwartz disagree profoundly on the nature of human progress. Both use scenarios (called "counterfactual history" by Ferguson) to analyze how events play out. Ferguson wrote The War of the World (2006), a history of the violence that defined the 20th Century. Schwartz wrote The Art of the Long View (1991), the standard text on scenario planning, and The Long Boom (1999), on global prosperity in the 21st century. Both speakers regard history as highly contingent. The question is, contingent on what?

With his current series of breakthroughs in synthetic biology Craig Venter and his team are not so much creating life as joining life. Reverse-engineering evolution's long-refined tricks and subtleties at the molecular level is building humanity's most powerful toolkit yet. Through shotgun-sequencing whole microbial populations ("metagenomics"), the domain of the organisms that rule the world is at last opening up. Genome synthesis will lead to major advances in biomedicine and in adjusting civilization's global energy metabolism.

Skeptical empiricist Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, has bracing things to say about the future. It is inevitable that we will be massively blindsided by events, because our understanding is misled by an array of beguiling illusions about reality. Some lessons: Events are not predictable, but consequences are, so focus on preparedness. Pay attention to elders, because they've experienced more Black Swans. Check Wikipedia's bio of Taleb for more on the vividness of his ideas and exposition.

"Some would argue that forecasting is a dangerous exercise in futility, but they are mistaken. In fact, effective forecasting is not merely possible, but remarkably easy; all it takes is simple shift in perspective and a few common-sense heuristics." The most quoted futurist alive, Paul Saffo specializes in the history and future of technology. In a recent article in the Harvard Business Review he spelled out the secrets of his trade, which he will expand on in this talk. Saffo is a member of the board of The Long Now Foundation.

Art is humanity's long-term unconscious memory.  Artists work by creative misuse, and thanks to the Internet there have never been so many tools for so many artists (and multitudes who don't know they're artists) to creatively misuse.  Take a cruise through how strange and meaningful it is getting with the authors of At the Edge of Art .

Principles are fundamental and moral, and they abide. Professor Kanter from the Harvard Business School, author of renowned leadership and strategy books such as The Change Masters and When Giants Learn to Dance, has a new book titled America the Principled. In it and in this talk, she "offers a positive agenda for the nation, focussed on innovation and education, a new workplace social contract, values-based corporate conduct, competent government, positive international relations through citizen diplomacy and business networks, and national and community service."

Enriquez has a world-class collection of historic maps made at the very point of discovery. He will deploy them for the first time in one of his dazzling presentations, to examine how we image and imagine what we are exploring, and thus image and imagine exploration itself. Enriquez is author of As the Future Catches You and The United States of America, and CEO and Chair of Biotechonomy, a life sciences research and investment firm.

The best introduction to the current realities and benefits of nuclear power is Gwyneth Cravens' forthcoming book Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy. A science journalist and novelist, and long an activist against nuclear, Cravens had her assumptions shaken through friendship with the leading expert on nuclear risk assessment at Sandia National Laboratories, D. Richard Anderson, know as "Rip." Both are professional skeptics. They took their skepticism on the road to travel the uranium atom's path in America from mine to refinery to reactor to short-term and long-term storage, with a side trip to the coal alternative. It is a revelatory journey.

Frank Fukuyama's 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man had profound and lasting impact with its declaration that science and technology, the growing global economy, and liberal democracy are leading history in a quite different direction than Marx and Hegel imagined. In this revisit to those themes, Fukuyama examines conflict with and within Islam, the need for a diffuse form of global governance to deal with problems like climate change, and the deeper implications of biotechnology.

"I now believe there are over one million organizations working toward ecological sustainability and social justice. This is the largest social movement in all of history, no one knows its scope, and how it functions is more mysterious than what meets the eye. What binds it together is ideas, not ideologies. The promise of this unnamed movement is to offer solutions to what appear to be insoluble dilemmas: poverty, global climate change, terrorism, ecological degradation, polarization of income, loss of culture." Paul Hawken is the author of Blessed Unrest and co-author of Natural Capitalism.

Nobody discovers or imparts an insight with the dexterity of Steven Johnson, author of Emergence, Everything Bad Is Good For You, and The Ghost Map. In this talk he examines how humanity is transformed by its new scaling capability--- our ability now to examine and relate events at the nanometer and nanosecond scale and then zoom right out to a cosmic scale and time frame. With tools like Google Earth and Will Wright's "Spore" game, we all are learning to zoom with comfort. How does that change us?

Acclaimed nature photographer Lanting has created the most graphic timeline ever, at its best as a live performance. This is the "long now" in glowing imagery.