Long Now

Genome editing technologies provide the unprecedented ability to modify genetic material in a manner that is targeted, rapid, adaptable, and broadly accessible. Advances in genome editing form the foundation for new transformative applications across all of biology, ranging from highly personalized therapeutics to control of mosquito populations in the wild to reduce vector borne diseases. Extension of these technologies to gene drives and germline editing, which can alter the outcomes of inheritance, brings into focus the potential use of these tools in real clinical or ecological settings. While the potential for societal benefit from these technologies is immense, longer-term ramifications, such as the potential for these tools to impact large populations of organisms and ecosystems over many generations, must also be considered. Therefore, to support the safe and responsible use of gene editors, it is imperative that we innovate and build-in biosafety and biosecurity technologies early for future applications, including strategies to control, counter, and remediate the outcomes of gene editing. Co-development of safety measures ensures the continued rapid pace of technological progress, helps realize the potential of gene editors, and, importantly, enables novel applications to be accessible to the broadest and most impactful possible range of communities for public benefit. Dr. Renee Wegrzyn is a Program Manager at DARPA working to apply the tools of synthetic biology to support biosecurity and outpace infectious disease. Dr. Wegrzyn holds Doctor of Philosophy and Bachelor of Science degrees in Applied Biology from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Jason Scott is an activist archiver who preserves artifacts of digital culture for the future. Users today have many ways to create content online, but they often lack the skills, tools or guidance to preserve the media they make. As startups fail, platforms disappear, and technology companies take the short term view, Jason and his cohorts at the [Internet Archive](http://archive.org) and [Archive Team](http://archiveteam.org) are being good ancestors for everyone in the future networked world. In 02009 Jason founded the Archive Team: a loose collective that launches “Distributed Preservation of Service Attacks" to rescue content endangered by "shutdowns, shutoffs, mergers, and plain old deletions" that happen all too often in the tech industry. They've saved user-created content on Friendster, GeoCities, and Google Reader before they went to the virtual graveyard. Since 02011 Jason has been Free-Range Archivist & Software Curator at the Internet Archive. He is tasked with adding to and maintaining the largest vintage and historical software library in the world. It contains millions of programs from Shareware CD-Roms to open source software and vintage arcade games. Under Jason's direction, archive.org has now made hundreds of games playable in the browser--including those created for now-defunct operating systems, proprietary hardware, and arcade cabinets thanks to the modern miracle of emulation.

With a complex and truly global problem like this, we can only scratch the surface in an hour. But we hoped to reframe some aspects and include perspectives not always heard. What's certain is this is a long-term problem that has been ongoing and looks likely to worsen due to both environmental and political displacements. Our speakers and guests in order of appearance: * Hugh Bosely: executive director, ReBootKamp (rebootkamp.org) * Beverly Crawford: professor emerita of political science, UC Berkeley * Natasha Iskander: associate professor of public policy NYU / CASBS at Stanford * Sergio Medina: Refugee and Immigrant Services (RISE) (rise-int.org) * Peter Transburg: Inter-agency Network for Education in Emergencies (ineesite.org) * Raman Osman: Kurdish musician, speaks and performs on the tanbur "Refugee" is a recent term with legal distinctions, while those displaced within their own countries are often left out of the accounting. With a long-term view we look at ancient Athens and 19th century Manhattan for a bigger picture on a broader timescale of people moving within and across borders. We also get first-hand reports from Turkey and perspective on other migration realities besides those fleeing Syria. Finally Raman, a Kurdish refugee from Syria, tells his story and plays some of his original music on tanbur.

## Cognitive planet **Thanks to the growing human domination** of natural systems on Earth, people say we are entering an Anthropocene Epoch, Grinspoon began, but what if the term “epoch” understates the consequence of what is going on? Astrobiologists recently learned that planet formation is the norm in the universe, and now they’re trying to find out if life formation is also the norm. They won’t look for signs of mere geological epochs on other planets; they’re looking for eon-scale transitions like the three that Earth has gone through in its 4.8 billion years, all caused by life. About 4 billion years ago the Archean Eon began with the origin of simple life. Then 2.5 billions years ago the Proterozoic Eon unleashed “the Great Oxygenation Event” caused by cyanobacteria adopting solar energy (photosynthesis). “That’s when life took over the planet,” said Grinspoon. Everything accelerated further 542 million years ago with the Cambrian Explosion of complex life of plants and animals—the Phanerozoic Eon. Which we’re still in. Or are we? Alien astrobiologists could have noticed the Proterozoic transition by detecting the dramatic destabilization of Earth’s atmosphere. The Phanerozoic transition would have been apparent from forest fires glowing on Earth’s night side, indicating combustible plant material. What would outside observers make of our current night side, blazing with dazzling cities? Or of bits of Earth firing off purposefully to orbit other planets and moons in the Solar System? “Potentially,” Grinspoon suggested,”we’re at another eon boundary now, with an equally profound transition in the relationship between life and the planet, when cognitive processes become planetary processes. Is intelligence a planetary property, like life? Can it become a self-sustaining property, like life? Is civilization adaptive, or will it be a dead end?” We can ask, what do humans have that similarly cataclysmic cyanobacteria did not have? Awareness, intention, collaboration, and maybe a sense of responsibility. “The Anthropocene dilemma,” Grinspoon said, “is that we have global influence without global control. So far we’re acting like adolescent planet vandals.” He concluded, “In order to choose a constructive role rather than a destructive role, we have to see ourselves in the very long time scale. Our deep history shows that humanity is unique in its capacity for self-reinvention. If we can develop a mature, long-term, healthy relationship with world-changing technology and if we proceed with a careful combination of innovation and restraint, our planet could become Terra Sapiens—Wise Earth.” (Bonus point: When asked why people seem to be more worried about engineers hacking genetic code than hacking digital code, Grinspoon said, “Maybe it’s because the monsters we can imagine are scarier than the monsters we can’t imagine.” He added, “We tend to learn things through exploration, not through imagination.”)

Nicky Case, creator of visualizing tools and games for understanding complex dynamic systems, discusses the importance of understanding whole systems and the role of visualization in scientific progress. They explore the concept of emergence using the example of starlings' collective dance, discuss fitness landscapes in evolution, and delve into the role of chaos in adaptation. They also emphasize the significance of concrete examples and abstractions in simulations and games, and explore the relationship between negative and positive feedback loops.

## Life nearby **If we find, anywhere in the universe, one more instance of life** besides what evolved on Earth, then we are bound to conclude that life is common throughout the vastness of this galaxy and the 200 billion other galaxies. The discovery would change how we think about everything. Most of the search for life beyond Earth, Porco explained, is the search for habitats. They don’t have to look comfy, since we know that our own extremophile organisms can survive temperatures up to 250°F, total desiccation, and fiercely high radiation, high pressure, high acidity, high alkalinity, and high salinity. In our own Solar System there are four promising candidate habitats—Mars, Europa (a moon of Jupiter), Titan (a moon of Saturn), and Enceladus (“en-SELL-ah-duss,” another moon of Saturn). They are the best nearby candidates because they have or have had liquids, they have bio-usable energy (solar or chemical), they have existed long enough to sustain evolution, and they are accessible for gathering samples. On Mars water once flowed copiously. It still makes frost and ice, but present conditions on Mars are so hostile to life that most of the search there now is focussed on finding signs of life far in the past. Europa, about the size of Earth’s Moon, has a salty ocean below an icy surface, but it is subject to intense radiation. Photos from the Hubble Space Telescope revealed that occasional plumes of material are ejected through Europa's ice, so future missions to Jupiter will attempt to fly by and analyze them for possible chemical signatures of life. The two interesting moons of Saturn are Titan, somewhat larger and much denser than our Moon, and tiny Enceladus, one-seventh the diameter of our Moon. Both have been closely studied by the Cassini Mission since 2004. Titan’s hazy atmosphere is full of organic methane, and its surface has features like dunes and liquid-methane lakes “that look like the coast of Maine.” But it is so cold, at 300°F below zero, that the chemical reactions needed for life may be too difficult. Enceladus looks the most promising. Cassini has sampled the plumes of material that keep geysering out of the south pole. The material apparently comes from an interior water ocean about as salty as our ocean, and silica particles may indicate hydrothermal vents like ours. “I hope you’re gettin excited now,” Porco told the audience, “because we were.” The hydrothermal vents in Earth’s oceans are rich with life. Enceladus has all the ingredients of a habitat for life—liquid water, organics, chemical energy, salts, and nitrogen-bearing compounds. We need to look closer. A future mission (arriving perhaps by the 2030’s) could orbit Enceladus and continually sample the plumes with instruments designed to detect signs of life such as complexity in the molecules and abundance patterns of carbon in amino acids that could indicate no biology, or Earth-like biology, or quite different biology. You could even look for intact organisms. Nearly all of the material in the plumes falls back to the surface. Suppose you had a lander there. “It’s always snowing at the south pole of Enceladus,” Porco said. “Could it be snowing microbes?” (A by-the-way from the Q&A;: Voyager, which was launched 40 years ago in 1977, led the way to the outer planets and moons of our Solar System, and five years ago, Porco pointed out, “It went beyond the magnetic bubble of the Sun and redefined us as an interstellar species.”)

Humanity’s adaptation to climate change will require novel, global cooperation and societal evolution. The award-winning science fiction author of _2312_ , the _Mars_ Trilogy, and _Aurora_ shares his vision for how the world must change in advance of his 02017 novel _New York 2140_. Hosted by Stewart Brand. From May 02016. [Kim Stanley Robinson](http://www.kimstanleyrobinson.info/) is an American novelist, widely recognized as one of the foremost living writers of science fiction. His work has been described as "humanist science fiction" and "literary science fiction." He has published more than 20 novels including his much honored "[Mars trilogy](http://www.kimstanleyrobinson.info/content/mars-trilogy)", [_New York 2140_](https://www.amazon.com/New-York-2140-Stanley-Robinson/dp/031626234X) (02017), and [_Red Moon_](https://www.amazon.com/Red-Moon-Kim-Stanley-Robinson/dp/0316262374/) due out in October 02018. Robinson has a B.A. in Literature from UC San Diego and an M.A. in English from Boston University. He earned a Ph.D. in literature from UCSD with a dissertation on the works of Philip K. Dick.

Kara Platoni, author and journalism professor at UC-Berkeley, set out to find the sensory pioneers who are changing the way we experience the world. Her boot-strapped and crowd-sourced quest led her to laboratories and workshops around the world. In her book _[We Have The Technology](http://www.amazon.com/Have-Technology-Biohackers-Physicians-Transforming/dp/0465089976)_ she reports back from the intersection of curiosity, science and technology. Her book goes beyond the five basic senses to examine more complex perceptual amalgams: time, pain and emotion. After that she explores technological extensions like virtual and augemented reality. And finally her book looks at those who are searching for new or latent human senses; adventurous members of our species possessed by a kind of manifest destiny of perception. As we humans have narrowed the places to explore on our planet, it turns out there is still more mysteries to probe within ourselves. In her Interval talk Platoni discussed the search for a sixth basic taste (the current five are: sweetness, sourness, bitterness, saltiness, and umami). A variety of theories exist as to what other taste has that primary nature, and she gave our audience a chance to try one candidate on their own tongues when she passed around strips of fat for all to sample. Exploring the extremes, she closed her talk discussing new senses, an area that borders on the transhuman and includes surgically embedding magnets and other devices which may give human additional capabilities. During a lively Q&A;, Kara also tells us about her Virtual Reality research. She spent time in US Army and Stanford University VR Labs where she had some beyond human experiences. So the night ended with the suggestion that empathy, applying our senses to the experience of others, was an additional frontier that is being explored.

## Time travel is time research **Gleick began with H.G. Wells’s 1895 book _The Time Machine_** , which created the idea of time travel. It soon became a hugely popular genre that shows no sign of abating more than a century later. “Science fiction is a way of working out ideas,” Gleick said. Wells thought of himself as a futurist, and like many at the end of the 19th century he was riveted by the idea of progress, so his fictional traveler headed toward the far future. Other authors soon explored travel to the past and countless paradoxes ranging from squashed butterflies that change later elections to advising one’s younger self. Gleick invited audience members to query themselves: If you could travel in time, would you go to the future or to the past? When exactly, and where exactly? And why. And what is your second choice? (Try it, reader.) “We’re still trying to figure out what time is,” Gleick said. Time travel stories apparently help us. The inventor of the time machine in Wells’s book explains archly that time is merely a fourth dimension. Ten years later in 1905 Albert Einstein made that statement real. In 1941 Jorge Luis Borges wrote the celebrated short story, “The Garden of Forking Paths.” In 1955 physicist Hugh Everett introduced the quantum-based idea of forking universes, which itself has become a staple of science fiction. “Time,” Richard Feynman once joked, “is what happens when nothing else happens.” Gleick suggests, “Things change, and time is how we keep track.” Virginia Woolf wrote, “What more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment? That we survive the shock at all is only possible because the past shelters us on one side, the future on another.” To answer the last question of the evening, about how his views about time changed during the course of writing _Time Travel_ , Gleick said: > I thought I would conclude that the main thing to understand is: Enjoy the present. Don’t waste your brain cells agonizing about lost opportunities or worrying about what the future will bring. As I was working on the book I suddenly realized that that’s terrible advice. A potted plant lives in the now. The idea of the ‘long now’ embraces the past and the future and asks us to think about the whole stretch of time. That’s what I think time travel is good for. That’s what makes us human—the ability to live in the past and live in the future at the same time.

The co-founder of Because We Can, the architecture/design firm that designed The Interval at Long Now, discusses the future of building: automation, communication, and whether "robots" will change everything. An informed and realistic overview of how architects and builders use automation today and how they may use it tomorrow. From February 02015.