Long Now

### Future now **“The present and the future** now coexist at the same time,” Coupland began. “It’s why time doesn’t feel like time any more. We’re inside the future.” He wondered if the constant acceleration of acceleration that we experience might lead to some kind of “collective cracking point” for humanity. As an installation artist Coupland said he was highly impressed by the short truisms of the New York artist Jenny Holzer, such as “MUCH WAS DECIDED BEFORE YOU WERE BORN.” And so he began a “slogan project” of sayings that “make perfect sense now but would make no sense if you saw them 20 years ago.” Examples included: I MISS MY PRE-INTERNET BRAIN HOARD ANYTHING YOU CAN’T DOWNLOAD LIVES ARE NO LONGER FEELING LIKE STORIES (“I call this process ‘de-narration.’”) WE’VE NEVER BEEN SMARTER. WE’VE NEVER FELT STUPIDER. THINKING ABOUT THE FUTURE MEANS YOU WANT SOMETHING DEMOCRACY SEEMS INADEQUATE TO DEAL WITH THE PRESENT For an installation in Shanghai, Coupland created some “slogans for the 22d Century:” MONEY WAS OVERRATED ANYWAY DON’T MENTION THE CLOUD YOUR BORDER IS YOUR BRAND Coupland ended with what he considers the three leading questions of our time: “Does the need to be remembered eclipse the right to be forgotten?” “Will the internet favor the individual over the group?” “Will the internet favor secularity or religion?” At the end of the evening, Coupland looked at the camera and said, “Hello posterity. What are we doing right now that is scaring the crap out of you?”

### The Brain’s Now Our perception of time raises all sorts of questions, Eagleman began. “Why does time seem to slow down when you’re scared? And why does it seem to speed up as you get older?” With an onscreen demonstration, Eagleman showed that “Time is actively constructed by the brain.“ His research has shown that there’s at least a 1/10-of-a-second lag between physical time and our subjective time, and the brain doesn’t guess ahead, _it fills in behind_. “Our perception of an event depends on what happens next.” In whole-body terms, we live a half-second in the past, which means that something which kills you quickly (like a sniper bullet to the head), you’ll never notice. In order to manage a realistic sense of causality, the brain has to calibrate the rate of different signals coming into it. When that system malfunctions, you can get “credit misattribution”—the sense that “I didn’t do that!” It may explain why some schizophrenics think that their normal internal conversation is voices coming from somewhere else, and it might be curable by training their brain to manage signal lags better. Is “now” expandable? Why do you seem to experience time in slow motion in a sudden emergency, like an accident? Eagleman’s (terrifying) experiments show that in fact you don’t perceive more densely, the amygdala cuts in and _records the experience_ more densely, so when the brain looks back at that dense record, it thinks that time must have subjectively slowed down, but it didn’t. “Time and memory are inseparable.” This also explains why time seems to speed up as you age. A child experiences endless novelty, and each summer feels like it lasted forever. But you learn to automatize everything as you age, and novelty is reduced accordingly, apparently speeding time up. All you have to do to feel like you‘re living longer, with a life as rich as a child’s, is to never stop introducing novelty in your life.

### Coherent cities What holds a city together? Rose noted that the earliest cities were built around a temple and the spirituality it embodied. As the early communities became larger and more diverse and complex, their economic activity intensified. To be effective in trade they had to specialize, monetizing their regional opportunities. One city became known for shipping, another for serving caravans. One as a source of metal, another as a source of grain. To cope with their growing complexity the cities had to develop varying control systems for everything—irrigation, food storage, accounting, building codes. The Code of Hammurabi was written in 1754 BCE explicitly “to further the well-being of mankind.” (One of its building-code provisions declared, “If your building falls down and kills somebody, we kill you.”) Modern cities need to create their own “circular economy,” Rose stressed, not just of services and goods, but of greener waste treatment, of water recycling, of food creation (such as“vertical gardens”,) and especially of what he called "communities of opportunity”—where low-income groups such as immigrants get a chance to create prosperity for themselves and the city. In his own many real-estate projects, Rose focusses on increasing urban density with low-income housing in combination with improved mass transit, local parks, better schools, and the greenest of building standards. But for such innovations to be copied, he pointed out, they have to be profitable. Cities are systems, Rose concluded: “When a system is optimized, then all of its components do well. Cities that focus on the optimization of the whole for everybody are the ones that thrive the best.”

### Quantum Computer Reality The 15th-century Renaissance was triggered, Lloyd began, by a flood of new information which changed how people thought about everything, and the same thing is happening now. All of us have had to shift, just in the last couple decades, from hungry hunters and gatherers of information to overwhelmed information filter-feeders. Information is physical. A bit can be represented by an electron _here_ to signify 0, and _there_ to signify 1. Information processing is moving electrons from here to there. But for a “qubit" in a quantum computer, an electron is both _here_ and _there_ at the same time, thanks to "wave-particle duality.” Thus with “quantum parallelism” you can do massively more computation than in classical computers. It’s like the difference between the simple notes of plainsong and all that a symphony can do—a huge multitude of instruments interacting simultaneously, playing arrays of sharps and flats and complex chords. Quantum computers can solve important problems like enormous equations and factoring--cracking formerly uncrackable public-key cryptography, the basis of all online commerce. With their ability to do “oodles of things at once," quantum computers can also simulate the behavior of larger quantum systems, opening new frontiers of science, as Richard Feynman pointed out in the 1980s. Simple quantum computers have been built since 1995, by Lloyd and ever more others. Mechanisms tried so far include: electrons within electric fields; nuclear spin (clockwise and counter); atoms in ground state and excited state simultaneously; photons polarized both horizontally and vertically; and super-conducting loops going clockwise and counter-clockwise at the same time; and many more. To get the qubits to perform operations—to compute—you can use an optical lattice or atoms in whole molecules or integrated circuits, and more to come. The more qubits, the more interesting the computation. Starting with 2 qubits back in 1996, some systems are now up to several dozen qubits. Over the next 5-10 years we should go from 50 qubits to 5,000 qubits, first in special-purpose systems but eventually in general-purpose computers. Lloyd added, “And there’s also the fascinating field of using funky quantum effects such as coherence and entanglement to make much more accurate sensors, imagers, and detectors.” Like, a hundred thousand to a million times more accurate. GPS could locate things to the nearest micron instead of the nearest meter. Even with small quantum computers we will be able to expand the capability of machine learning by sifting vast collections of data to detect patterns and move on from supervised-learning (“That squiggle is a 7”) toward unsupervised-learning—systems that learn to learn. The universe is a quantum computer, Lloyd concluded. Biological life is all about extracting meaningful information from a sea of bits. For instance, photosynthesis uses quantum mechanics in a very sophisticated way to increase its efficiency. Human life is expanding on what life has always been—an exercise in machine learning.

## Digital is just getting started In Kevin Kelly’s view, a dozen “inevitable” trends will drive the next 30 years of digital progress. Artificial smartnesses, for example, will be added to everything, all quite different from human intelligence and from each other. We will tap into them like we do into electricity to become cyber-centaurs -- co-dependent humans and AIs. All of us will need to perpetually upgrade just to stay in the game. Every possible display surface will become a display, and study its watchers. Everything we encounter, “if it cannot interact, it is broken.” Virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR) will become the next platform after smartphones, conveying a profound sense of experience (and shared experience), transforming education (“it burns different circuits in your brain”), and making us intimately trackable. “Everything that can be tracked will be tracked,” and people will go along with it because “vanity trumps privacy,” as already proved on Facebook. “Wherever attention flows, money will follow.” Access replaces ownership for suppliers as well as consumers. Uber owns no cars; AirBnB owns no real estate. On-demand rules. Sharing rules. Unbundling rules. Makers multiply. “In thirty years the city will look like it does now. We will have rearranged the flows, not the atoms. We will have a different idea of what a city is, and who we are, and how we relate to other people.” In the Q&A;, Kelly was asked what worried him. “Cyberwar,” he said. “We have no rules. Is it okay to take out an adversary’s banking system? Disasters may have to occur before we get rules. We’re at the point that any other civilization in the galaxy would have a world government. I have no idea how to do that.” Kelly concluded: “We are at the beginning of the beginning—the first hour of day one. There have never been more opportunities. The greatest products of the next 25 years have not been invented yet.” “You are not late.”

Author Brian Christian discusses applying computer algorithms to human decision-making, including optimal stopping in apartment hunting, romantic pursuits, strategic voting, AI ethics, and interdisciplinary collaborations.

Delving into the famous Marshmallow Test, the podcast explores the impact of self-control on success. It discusses the evolution of self-regulation in children and the significance of hot and cool mental activities. The link between self-control, happiness, and decision-making is examined, along with strategies to enhance self-regulation skills from a young age. Embracing aging, responsibility, and legacy are also key themes discussed in the podcast.

## The darkness of dark matter and dark energy ALL THAT WE KNOW of the universe we get from observing photons, Natarajan pointed out. But dark matter, which makes up 90 percent of the total mass in the universe, is called dark because it neither emits nor reflects photons — and because of our ignorance of what it is. It is conjectured to be made up of still-unidentified exotic _collisionless_ particles which might weigh about six times more than an electron. Though some challenge whether dark matter even exists, Natarajan is persuaded that it does because of her research on “the heaviest objects in the universe“ — galaxy clusters of more than 1,000 galaxies. First of all, the rotation of stars within galaxies does not look Keplerian — the outermost stars move far too quickly, as discovered in the 1970s. Their rapid rate of motion only makes sense if there is a vast “halo” of dark matter enclosing each galaxy. And galaxy clusters have so much mass (90 percent of it dark) that their gravitation bends light, “lenses” it. A galaxy perfectly aligned on the far side of a galaxy cluster appears to us — via the Hubble Space Telescope — as a set of multiple arc-shaped (distorted) galaxy images. Studying the precise geometry of those images can reveal some of the nature of dark matter, such as that it appears to be “clumpy.” With the next generation of space telescopes — the James Webb Space Telescope that comes online in 2018 and the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope a few years afterward — much more will be learned. There are also instruments on Earth trying to detect dark-matter particles directly, so far without success. As for dark energy — the _accelerating_ expansion of the universe — its shocking discovery came from two independent teams in 1998–99. Dark energy is now understood to constitute 72 percent of the entire contents of the universe. (Of the remainder, dark matter is 23 percent, and atoms — the part that we know — makes up just 4.6 percent.) When the universe was 380,000 years old (13.7 billion years ago), there was no dark energy. But now “the universe is expanding at a pretty fast clip.” Natarajan hopes to use galaxy-cluster lensing as a tool “to trace the geometry of space-time which encodes dark energy.” These days, she said, data is coming in from the universe faster than theory can keep up with it.” We are in a golden age of cosmology.”

## Revolutionary rice Feeding the world (and saving nature) in this populous century, Jane Langdale began, depends entirely on agricultural efficiency—the ability to turn a given amount of land and sunlight into ever more food. And that depends on three forms of efficiency in each crop plant: 1) interception efficiency (collecting sunlight); 2) conversion efficiency (turning sunlight into sugars and starch); and 3) partitioning efficiency (maximizing the edible part). Of these, after centuries of plant breeding, only conversion efficiency is far short of the theoretical maximum. Most photosynthesis (called “C3“) is low-grade, poisoning its own process by reacting with oxygen instead of carbon dioxide when environmental conditions are hot and dry. But some plants, such as corn and sugar cane, have a brilliant workaround. They separate the photosynthetic process into two adjoining cells. The outer cell creates a special four-carbon compound (hence “C4“) that is delivered to the oxygen-protected inner cell. In the inner cell, carbon dioxide is released from the C4 compound, enabling drastically more efficient photosynthesis to take place because carbon dioxide is at a much higher concentration than oxygen. Rice is a C3 plant--which happens to be the staple food for half the world. If it can be converted to C4 photosynthesis, its yield would increase by _50%_ while using _half_ the water. It would also be drought-resistant and need far less fertilizer. Langdale noted that C4 plants have evolved naturally 60 times in a variety of plant families, all of which provide models of the transition. “How difficult could it be?” she deadpanned. The engineering begins with reverse-engineering. For instance, the main leaves in corn are C4, but the husk leaves are C3-like, so the genes that affect the two forms of development can be studied. Langdale’s research suggests that the needed structural change in rice can be managed with about 12 engineered genes, and previous research by others indicates that the biochemical changes can be achieved with perhaps 10 genes. How much is needed for the eventual fine tuning will emerge later. When is later? The C4 Rice project began in 2006 at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The research is on schedule, and engineering should begin in 2019, with the expectation that breeding of delicious, fiercely efficient C4 rice could be complete by 2039. It is the kind of thing that highly focussed multi-generation science can accomplish.

### Ecological wildfire “We are uniquely fire creatures,” Pyne began, “on a uniquely fire planet.” Life itself is a form of slow metabolic combustion—which eventually created oxygen and burnable vegetation that allowed fast combustion, ignited by lightning. Humans came along and mastered fire for warmth, food preparation, and managing the landscape, and that made us a keystone species. Humanity’s ecological signature on the world is fire. Then we made fire the all-purpose catalyst for craft (clay, glass, metal) and eventually industry, shifting to the vast geological resource of fossil fuels. That “pyric transition” made humans dominant on the earth, even to the point of affecting climate. We used fire to clear much of the world’s forest for agriculture. Then came a century of misdirection about wildfire. The forests of Europe are mostly too wet to burn, but by the late 19th century the leading foresters in world came from there and taught their ignorance to foresters in North America and India, where the land depends on seasonal fire for ecological health. National governments set about suppressing all wildfire, with catastrophic success. In the absence of the usual occasional local fires, massive fuel loads built up, and destructive megafires became the norm. There was an alternative theory of a “restoration strategy” to manage wildfire in way that would emulate how lightning and native American burning kept the landscape ecologically healthy, but it has been applied haltingly and fractionally, and megafires still rule. “The real argument for fire is that it does ecological work that nothing else does,” Pyne concluded. “Charismatic megaflora” like redwoods need fire. An ecologically rich mosaic of forest, savannah, and meadows needs fire. Healthy prairie needs fire or it gets taken over by invasive woody plants. People trained only as foresters are blind to all that. Wildfire practice now works best when it is guided by wildlife biologists who insist that red cockaded woodpeckers need fire-dependent longleaf pines, that grizzly bears need the berries that grow in recent burns, that pheasants need grassland burned free of invasive eastern red cedar. The techniques for prescribed burns for a bioabundant natural landscape are now well honed. They need to be applied much more widely. When in doubt how to proceed, ask the ecologists, who will ask the animals.