Long Now

## Practical geoengineering “Temporary, moderate, and responsive” should be the guidelines of responsible geoengineering, in David Keith’s view. For slowing global warming, and giving humanity time to bring greenhouse gas emissions down to zero (and eventually past zero with carbon capture), he favors the form of “solar radiation management” that reflects sunlight the way volcanoes occasionally do—with sulfate particles in the stratosphere. The common worry about geoengineering is that because it is so cheap ($1 billion a year) and easy, civilization would become “addicted“ and have to continue it forever, while giving up on the expensive and difficult process of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, thus making the long-term problem far worse. Keith’s solution is to design the geoengineering program as _temporary_ from start to finish. “Temporary“ means shut it down by 2200. (Keith also likes the term “patient” for this approach.) By “ _moderate_ ” he means there is no attempt to completely offset the warming caused by us, but just cut the rate of climate change in half. That would give the highest benefit at lowest risk—minimal harmful effect on ozone and rainfall patterns, and the fewest unwelcome surprises, while providing enough time (and plenty of incentive) for societies to manage their carbon dioxide mitigation and orderly adaptation. Geoengineering’s leverage is very high—one gram of particles in the stratosphere prevents the warming caused by a ton of carbon dioxide. “ _Responsive_ ” means careful, gradual, and closely monitored, with the expectation there will be many adjustments along the way, along with the ability to back off entirely if needed. Though climate-change models keep improving, we still do not completely understand how climate works, and that raises the very good question: “How do you engineer a system whose behavior you don’t understand?” Keith’s answer is “feedback. We engineer and control many chaotic systems, such as high-performance aircraft, through precise feedback.” The same goes for governance of geoengineering. It is a complex system that will require sophisticated control by a global set of governing bodies, but we already do that for the far more complex system of global finance. Keith’s specific program would begin with balloon tests in the lower stratosphere (8 miles up) releasing just 100 grams of sulfuric acid—about the amount of particles in a few minutes of normal jet contrail. “If those studies confirm safety and effectiveness,” Keith said, “then we could begin gradual deployment as early as 2020 with three business jets re-engineered for high altitude. By 2030 you could have about ten aircraft delivering a quarter million tons of sulfur per year at a cost of $700 million.“ The amount of sulfur being released might be up to a million tons by 2070, but that would still be only one-eighth of what went into the stratosphere from the Mt. Pinatubo volcanic eruption in 1991, and _one-fiftieth_ of what enters the lower atmosphere from our current burning of fossil fuels. By then we may have developed more sophisticated particles than sulfate. It could be diamond dust, or alumina, or even something like a nanoscale “photophoretic” particle designed by Keith that would levitate itself above the stratosphere. This is no quick fix. It is not quick, and it doesn’t try to be a complete fix. It has to be matched with total reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to zero _and_ with effective capture of carbon, because the overload of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere will stay there for a very long time unless removed. Keith asked, “Is it plausible that we will not figure out how to pull, say, five gigatons of carbon per year out of the air by 2075? I don’t buy it.“ Keith ended by proposing that goal should not be just 350 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. (It’s rising past 400 ppm now.) We can shoot for the pre-industrial level of the 1770s. Take carbon dioxide down to 270 ppm.

### Why nature is rebounding Over the last 40 years, in nearly every field, human productivity has _decoupled_ from resource use, Ausubel began. Even though our prosperity and population continue to increase, the trends show _decreasing_ use of energy, water, land, material resources, and impact on natural systems (except the ocean). As a result we are seeing the beginnings of a global restoration of nature. America tends to be the leader in such trends, and the “American use of almost everything except information seems to be peaking, not because the resources are exhausted but because consumers changed consumption and producers changed production.“ Start with agriculture, which “has always been the greatest raper of nature.” Since 1940 yield has decoupled from acreage, and yet the rising yields have not required increasing inputs such as fertilizer, pesticides, or water. The yield from corn has become spectacular, and it is overwhelmingly our leading crop, but most of it is fed to cars and livestock rather than people. Corn acreage the size of Iowa is wasted on biofuels. An even greater proportion goes to cows and pigs for conversion to meat. The animals vary hugely in their efficiency at producing meat. If they were vehicles, we would say that “a steer gets about 12 miles per gallon, a pig 40, and a chicken 60.“ (In that scale a farmed fish gets 80 miles per gallon.) Since 1975 beef and pork consumption have leveled off while chicken consumption has soared. “The USA and the world are at _peak farmland,_ “ Ausubel declared, “not because of exhaustion of arable land, but because farmers are wildly successful in producing protein and calories.” Much more can be done. Ausubel pointed out that just reducing the one-third of the world’s food that is wasted, rolling out the highest-yield techniques worldwide, and abandoning biofuels would free up an area the size of India (1.2 million square miles) to return to nature. As for forests, nation after nation is going through the “forest transition” from decreasing forest area to increasing. France was the first in 1830. Since then their forests have doubled while their population also doubled. The US transitioned around 1950. A great boon is tree plantations, which have a yield five to ten times greater than logging wild forest. “In recent times,” Ausubel said, “about a third of wood production comes from plantations. If that were to increase to 75 percent, the logged area of natural forests could drop in half.” Meanwhile the consumption of all wood has leveled off---for fuel, buildings, and, finally, paper. We are at _peak timber._ One byproduct of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the longer temperate-zone growing seasons accompanying global warming is greater plant growth. “Global Greening,“ Ausubel said, “is the most important ecological trend on Earth today. The biosphere on land is getting bigger, year by year, by two billion tons or even more.” Other trendlines show that world population is at _peak children,_ and in the US we are _peak car travel_ and may even be at _peak car._ The most efficient form of travel, which Ausubel promotes, is maglev trains such as the “Hyperloop“ proposed by Elon Musk. Statistically, horses, trains, cars, and jets all require about one ton of vehicle per passenger. A maglev system would require only one-third of that. In the ocean, though, trends remain troubling. Unlike on land, we have not yet replaced hunting wild animals with farming. Once refrigeration came along, “the democratization of sushi changed everything for sea life. Fish biomass in intensively exploited fisheries appears to be about one‐tenth the level of the fish in those seas a few decades or hundred years ago.“ One fifth of the meat we eat comes from fish, and about 40 percent of that fifth is now grown in fish farms, but too many of the farmed fish are fed with small fish caught at sea. Ausubel recommends vegetarian fish such as tilapia and “persuading salmon and other carnivores to eat tofu,” which has already been done with the Caribbean kingfish. “With smart aquaculture,“ Ausubel said, “life in the oceans can rebound while feeding humanity.” When nature rebounds, the wild animals return. Traversing through abandoned farmlands in Europe, wolves, lynx, and brown bears are repopulating lands that haven’t seen them for centuries, and they are being welcomed. Ten thousand foxes roam London. Salmon are back in the Thames, the Seine, and the Rhine. Whales have recovered and returned even to the waters off New York. Ausubel concluded with a photo showing a humpback whale breaching, right in line with the Empire State Building in the background.

## Holos Rising When Kevin Kelly looked up the definition of “superorganism” on Wikipedia, he found this: “A collection of agents which can act in concert to produce phenomena governed by the collective.” The source cited was Kevin Kelly, in his 01994 book, Out of Control. His 02014 perspective is that humanity has come to dwell in a superorganism of our own making on which our lives now depend. The technological numbers keep powering up and connecting with each other. Their aggregate is becoming formidable, rich with emergent behavior, and yet it is still so new to us that it remains unnamed and scarcely considered. Kelly clicked through some current tallies: one quintillion transistors; fifty-five trillion links; one hundred billion web clicks per day; one thousand communication satellites. Only a quarter of all the energy we use goes to humans; the rest drives Earth’s “very large machine.” Kelly calls it “the Technium” and spelled out what it is not. Not H.G. Wells’ “World Brain,” which was only a vision of what the Web now is. Not Teilhard de Chardin’s “Noosphere,” which was only humanity’s collective consciousness. Not “the Singularity,” which anticipates a technological event horizon that Kelly says will never occur as an event—”the Singularity will always be near.” The Technium may best be considered a new organism with which we are symbiotic, as we are symbiotic with the aggregate of Earth’s life, sometimes called “Gaia.” There are pace differences, with Gaia slow, humanity faster, and the Technium really fast. They are not replacing each other but building on each other, and the meta-organism of their combining is so far nameless. Kelly shrugged, “Call it ‘Holos.’ Here are five frontiers I think that Holos implies for us…” 1) Big math of “zillionics” ---beyond yotta (10 to the 24th) to, some say, “lotta” and “hella.” 2) New economics of the massive one-big-market, capable of surprise flash crashes and imperceptible tectonic shifts. 3) New biology of our superorganism with its own large phobias, compulsions, and oscillations. 4) New minds, which will emerge from a proliferation of auto-enhancing AI’s that augment rather than replace human intelligence. 5) New governance. One world government is inevitable. Some of it will be non-democratic—”I don’t get to vote who’s on the World Bank.“ To deal with planet-scale issues like geoengineering and climate change, “we will have to work through the recursive dilemma of who decides who decides?” We have no rules for cyberwar yet. We have no backup to the Internet yet, and it needs an immune system. There is lots to work out, but lots to work it out with, and inventiveness abounds and converges. “We are,” Kelly said, “at just the beginning of the beginning.”

## The Hundred Year Burn "Burning Man is like one of those birthday candles you can’t blow out,” observed Burning Man’s primary founder and Chief Philosophical Officer. Indeed, Burning Man has thrived in the face of Burners and skeptics alike declaring it dead after each of its first 25 years. Too big, too fashionable, too many rich people, too hard to get in: each year the rationale changes, and Burning Man continues to thrive. Half of the secret is simplicity. Consider the Man. Before anything exists on the playa, Burning Man begins with a single stake pounded into the ground marking the spot where the Man will stand. This is the axis mundi of Burning Man, the point on which everything converges, from the radiating streets to the final ritual of the burn. The stake itself is the object of a spontaneous ritual: as it is placed each year, each crew-member gives the stake a few hammer-blows to drive it in. The other half of Burning Man’s secret is transformation. “Just when you are done with one existential challenge, then you encounter another.” For example, in recent years, forty percent of Burning Man’s population are newcomers. “I am pretty comfortable with that – it is new energy that keeps things very much alive,” observed Harvey. Burning Man is now setting on a course to thrive for another 75 years. Its [Ten Principles](http://www.burningman.com/whatisburningman/about_burningman/principles.html) are the compass and the newly established Philosophical Center is the think tank and “collective memory and conscience” helping guide Burning Man on this 100-year journey. Harvey observed that, “Corporations have a remarkably short life-span, while cities have a remarkably long life-span – drop an atom bomb on it and it comes right back. We will find our way. It always looks dubious when we set out because we are setting out in the dark. But your faith always guides you.” Our advice: mark your calendar for the last Monday of August 02090 and sign up early; the tickets are certain to sell out fast.

## Massively collaborative synthetic biology Natural genomes are nearly impossible to figure out, Endy began, because they were evolved, not designed. Everything is context dependent, tangled, and often unique. So most biotech efforts become herculean. It cost $25 million to develop a way to biosynthesize the malaria drug artemisinin, for example. Yet the field has so much promise that most of what biotechnology can do hasn’t even been imagined yet. How could the nearly-impossible be made easy? Could biology become programmable? Endy asked Lynn Conway, the legendary inventor of efficient chip design and manufacturing, how to proceed. She said, “Go meta.” If the recrafting of DNA is viewed from a meta perspective, the standard engineering cycle---Design, Build, Test, Design better, etc.—requires a framework of DNA Synthesis, using Standards, understood with Abstraction, leading to better Synthesis, etc. “In 2003 at MIT,” Endy said, “we didn’t know how to teach it, but we thought that maybe working with students we could figure out how to learn it.” It would be learning-by-building. So began a student project to engineer a biological oscillator—a genetic blinker—which led next year to several teams creating new life forms, which led to the burgeoning iGEM phenomenon. Tom Knight came up with the idea of standard genetic parts, like Lego blocks, now called BioBricks. Randy Rettberg declared that cooperation had to be the essence of the work, both within teams (which would compete) and among all the participants to develop the vast collaborative enterprise that became the iGEM universe—students creating new BioBricks (now 10,000+) and meeting at the annual Jamboree in Boston (this year there are 2,500 competitors from 32 countries). “iGEM” stands for International Genetically Engineered Machine. Playfulness helps, Endy said. Homo faber needs homo ludens—man-the-player makes a better man-the-maker. In 2009 ten teenagers with $25,000 in sixteen weeks developed the ability to create _E. coli_ in a variety of colors. They called it _E. chromi_. What could you do with pigmented intestinal microbes? “The students were nerding out.” They talked to designers and came up with the idea of using colors in poop for diagnosis. By 2049, they proposed, there could be a “Scatalog” for color matching of various ailments such as colon cancer. “It would be more pleasant than colonoscopy.” The rationale for BioBricks is that “standardization enables coordination of labor among parties and over time.” For the system to work well depends on total access to the tools. “I want free-to-use language for programming life,” said Endy. The stated goal of the iGEM revolutionaries is “to benefit all people and the planet.” After ten years there are now over 20,000 of them all over the world guiding the leading edges of biotechnology in that direction. During the Q&A;, Endy told a story from his graduate engineering seminar at Dartmouth. The students were excited that the famed engineer and scientist Arthur Kantrowitz was going to lead a session on sustainability. They were shocked when he told them, “‘Sustainability‘ is the most dangerous thing I’ve ever encountered. My job today is to explain two things to you. One, pessimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Two, optimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

## The NSA reaches out Of her eight great-grandparents, seven were murdered at Auschwitz. “So my family’s history burned into me a fear of what occurs when the power of a state is turned against its people or other people.” Seeking freedom from threats like that brought her parents from Hungary to America. By 1976 they had saved up to take their first flight abroad. Their return flight from Tel Aviv was high-jacked by terrorists and landed at Entebbe Airport in Uganda. Non-Jewish passengers were released and the rest held hostage. The night before the terrorists were to begin shooting the hostages, a raid by Israeli commandos saved most of the passengers. Anne Neuberger was just a baby in 1976. “My life would have looked very different had a military operation not brought my parents home. It gives me a perspective on the threats of organized terror and the role of intelligence and counterterrorism.” When she later entered government service, she sought out intelligence, where she is now the principal advisor to the Director for managing NSA’s work with the private sector. The NSA, Neuberger said, has suffered a particularly “long and challenging year” dealing with the public loss of trust following the Snowden revelations. The agency is reviewing all of its activities to determine how to regain that trust. One change is more open engagement with the public. “This presentation is a starting point." “My family history,” she said, "instilled in me almost parallel value systems – fear of potential for overreach by government, and belief that sometimes only government, with its military and intelligence, can keep civilians safe. Those tensions shape the way I approach my work each day. I fully believe that the two seemingly contradictory factors can be held in balance. And with your help I think we can define a future where they are.” The National Security Agency, she pointed out, actively fosters the growth of valuable new communication and computing technology and at the same time “needs the ability to detect, hopefully deter, and if necessary disable lethal threats.” To maintain those abilities over decades and foster a new social contract with the public, Neuberger suggested contemplating 5 tensions, 3 scenarios, and 3 challenges. The tensions are… 1) Cyber Interdependencies (our growing digital infrastructure is both essential and vulnerable); 2) Intelligence Legitimacy Paradox (to regain trust, the NSA needs publicly understood powers to protect and checks on that power); 3) Talent Leverage (“the current surveillance debates have cast NSA in a horrible light, which will further hamper our recruiting efforts”); 4) Personal Data Norms (the growing Internet-of-things—Target was attacked through its _air-conditioning network_ —opens vast new opportunities for tracking individual behavior by the private as well as public sector); 5) Evolving Internet Governance (the so-far relatively free and unpoliticized Internet could devolve into competing national nets). Some thirty-year scenarios… 1) Intelligence Debilitated (with no new social contract of trust and thus the loss of new talent, the government cannot keep up with advancing technology and loses the ability to manage its hazards); 2) Withering Nation (privacy obsession hampers commercial activity and government oversight, and nations develop their own conflicting Internets); 3) Intelligent America (new social contract with agreed privacy norms and ongoing security assurance). Initiatives under way from NSA… 1) Rebuild US Trust (move on from “quiet professionals” stance and actively engage the public); 2) Rebuild Foreign Trust (“extend privacy protections previously limited to US citizens to individuals overseas”); 3) Embrace Collective Oversight (reform bulk collection programs in response to the President’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board). As technology keeps advancing rapidly, the US needs to stay at the forefront in terms of inventing the leading technical tools to provide public services and maintain public security, plus the policy tools to balance civil liberties with protection against ever-evolving threats. “My call to action for everyone in this audience is get our innovative minds focussed on the full set of problems.” A flood of **QUESTION CARDS** came to the stage, only a few of which we could deal with live. Anne Neuberger wanted to take all the questions with her to share with NSA colleagues, so Laura Welcher at Long Now typed them up. I figure that since the questioners wanted their questions aired on the stage to the live and video audience, they would like to have them aired here as well. And it would be in keeping with the NSA’s new openness to public discourse. Ms. Neuberger agreed… > I have a general (unfocused) question about transparency – which hasn’t been mentioned thus far. What is the NSA’s rationale around hiding its activities from the American people? What can you tell us about the issue of transparency going forward? > What are the key questions NSA is discussing following the Snowden releases? And what is the NSA doing to address these issues? > Germany is very, very upset. What could we have done, and what should we do in the future, to fulfill our many responsibilities while also respecting our most valuable international relationships? > How can we work toward a new social contract when the intelligence agency directors repeatedly lie to the Congress and to the public? > Is it true you can still find one-star generals playing Magic the Gathering in the NSA canteen during lunch hour? > The failures of 9-11 were not technical failures, but failures of individuals and organizations to work together toward a common goal. What concrete steps can you describe in the intelligence community that have been taken to remedy this? > What is the NSA doing to make the scope of its data collection efforts as transparent as possible, while still achieving its goals w.r.t. national security? > Is it an acceptable outcome that NSA fails at securing us in the service of privacy considerations? > If the Snowden incident hadn’t happened, would the NSA have hired the civil liberties expert? What structural changes will make this role actually effective? > Has the real tension been between the NSA needing to protect its own systems while ensuring that everybody else’s are vulnerable? Is this inevitable? > Do you believe the mission of the NSA can be accomplished without building a record of all worldwide communications and activities? Why? > Is the NSA embedding backdoor or surveillance capability in any commercial integrated circuits? > If you want to address the damage to public trust, and improve the social contract, why not applaud the work Edward Snowden has done to demonstrate how your agency has gone astray? > Do you consider the NSA’s role in weakening the RSA random number generator to be a violation of the NSA’s existing social contract? How do you think about its exploitability by criminal elements? > What do you tell American corporate tech leaders who are concerned about lowered trust and security of their services and products? Lack of trust based on national security letters, for example, or weaknesses introduced into RSA crypto by the NSA? > What is the best mechanism for an intelligence agency to prevent themselves from using “national security secrecy” to cover up an embarrassment? Is there something better than whistleblowers? > Secure information and privacy need to be balanced – please give an example of when you feel the NSA worked at its best in this balancing act. Please be specific :-) > How much is your presentation a reflection of NSA or your personal views? > Should the NSA play a role in devising the new rules for cyberwar? (Since the old rules for war don’t work in the digital universe.) How do we citizens participate? > Do you personally feel that the leaks of the last year have revealed serious overreach by your agency? Or, do you feel as though the NSA has simply been unfairly painted and that the leaks have been damaging? > Privacy is, logically, implied (4th, and 5th and 10th Amendments). Should it be an explicit right? If so, how should it be architected? > Amnesty for Snowden? > When Russia invaded Ukraine, it seemed to take us by surprise. Have Snowden’s revelations damaged our ability to anticipate sudden moves by rivals and adversaries? > How can the NSA build an effective social contract when it destroys evidence in an active case and when its decisions are made in a secret court without public scrutiny? > How can the public make informed decisions if NSA keeps secret what it is doing from its public rulers viz the abuses exposed by Snowden? > Can you give an example of a credible “cyber threat” thwarted by the NSA? > Why did NSA dissolve its Chief Scientist Office? So too FBI. This Office funded the disk drive and speech recognition. > How do you reconcile your stated goal of improving the security of private sector products with NSA’s documented practice of intentionally weakening encryption standards and adding backdoors to exported network devices that facilitate billions of dollars of e-commerce? > How does surveillance directed towards the United States’s closest allies help deter terrorist threats, and how does the damage of our relationship with Germany and other allies offset the benefits of conducting such surveillance? > I am an American, legally, politically, culturally, economically. I was born in Pakistan and am a young male. My demographics are the prime target of the NSA. I have no recourse if the NSA sees that I have visited the “wrong” links. I am afraid that the NSA deems me a suspect. Your response? > Balancing the needs of ‘security, society and business’ leaves most of us with 1 vote in 3. Given the shared interest in big data by security agencies and business, how do the rest of us keep from getting outvoted 2-to-1 every time? > Your fears seem to be based on a highly competitive scarcity-based economy. What is your role in a post-scarcity society? > In what ways do public, crowdsourced prediction markets help to resolve the tension between public trust and the need for sophisticated intel? > Does the government have either a duty or a need to be open and honest in its communication with the public? > How does the NSA approach biological data? Synthetic biology applications? > You never use the word law. > How many more leaks would it take to make your mission impossible? Personally I look forward to this particular point in time. > Please share your thoughts on: Re: ‘talent leverage’ impact on world stage. We are all one family on spaceship earth, and we have grave system failures in the ship. If the U.S. gov’t can shift from empire to universal economic empowerment, based on natural carrying capacity of each ecosystem. Then, trust can be restored that this is not a gov’t of and for the military-industrial complex, and the most powerful corporations. > What are three basic reasons that make the NSA assume that it doesn’t need to obey the law? > Surveillance and security are mutually contradictory goals. Shouldn’t these functions of the NSA be split into different agencies? > Was Snowden a hero or a damaging rogue? Did he catalyze changes to keep NSA from being the “KGB”? > Do we live in a democracy when there are no checks and balances in the intelligence community? --> CIA/Senate, --> Snowden/NSA? > You described the importance of a social contract in determining the appropriate balance between privacy and intelligence gathering. But contracts require all parties to be well-informed and to trust each other. How can the American public trust the intelligence community when all of the reforms you mentioned only occurred because a concerned patriot chose to blow the whistle (and now faces prosecution)? > How are we to maintain the creative outliers and risk takers (things that have been known to create growth and brilliance) if we are keeping / tracking ‘norms’ as acceptable – or the things we accept. – How will we know if we are wrong? > Can or does the NSA influence or seek to influence immigration policy so that the US could retain foreign workers here on expiring H1Bs? > What does the NSA see as some of the greatest emerging technologies (quantum decryption for example) that can create the future “Intelligent America”? > What are the factors that determines whether the NSA ‘quietly assists’ improving a company’s product security, or it weakens or promotes weaker crypto standards / algorithms / tech? > Please talk about the recent large scale hacking from Russia. > Why frame this as “how can laws keep up with technology” instead of “how do we keep the NSA from exceeding the law?” > 1) Was NSA interdiction of a sovereign leader’s aircraft a violation of international law? 2) Does NSA believe they can mill and drill a database to find potential terrorists? > The NSA paid a private security form, RSA, to introduce a weakness into its security software. Spying is one matter. But making our defenses weaker is another. How do you defend this? > What is your biggest fear about NSA overreaching in its power [?] > How many real, proven terrorist threats to the U.S. have been uncovered by NSA surveillance of email / cell phone activity of private citizens in the last few years (4-8)? > Your list of tensions omitted any mention of corporate or otherwise economic fallout that may result or have resulted from the Snowden revelations. What relief mechanism do you foresee maintaining corporate trust in the American government? > You mentioned doing during slide 14 that the Director of the NSA is declassifying more information to promote “tranparency”. Can you please elaborate on how we might find these recently declassified documents? > Long ago we created a “privilege” for priests, doctors and lawyers, fearing we could not use them without it. Today, our computers know us better than our priests, but they have no privilege and can betray us to surveillance. How do we fix that? > What systems are in place to prevent further leaks? > 1) Is it ok for a foreign entity to collect and intercept President Obama’s communications without our knowledge? 2) Do you think William Binney and Thomas Drake are heroes? > How do we build a world of transparency, while also enabling security for our broader society? > As we grow more connected, the sense of distance embodied in national patriotism and the otherness of the world shrinks. How is a larger NSA a reasonable response in terms of a social contract? > Describe the culture that says it’s ok to monitor and read US citizens’ email (pre-revelation) [?] > How can the NSA enable more due process during the review of approvals of modern “wire taps” (i.e. translating big data searches to individuals)? > In the next 10 years there will be breakthroughs in math creating radical changes in data mining. What are the social risks of that being dominated by NGO’s vs. government? > Has the NSA performed criminally illegal wiretapping? If so, when will those responsible be prosecuted? > Can you define what unlocking Big Data responsibly really means and give examples? Can NSA regulate Facebook in terms of privacy and ownership of users’ data? > How do other governments deal with similar problems? > What prevents NSA from trusting “Intelligent America” revealing that linking information but not the content was broadly collected could have been understood and well presented. Funded [?] “Intelligent Ingestion of Information” ...[?] DARPA 1991-1995. > Please address the spying upon and the filing of criminal charges against US Senators and their staff by the USA, particularly in the case of Senator Diane Feinstein of California. > Does the NSA’s legitimacy depend more on the safety of citizens or ensuring the continuity of the Constitutional system? > Can you shed any light on why Pres. Obama has indicted more whistleblowers than all previous presidents combined? > When will Snowden be recognized as a hero? When will Clapper go to jail for perjury? Actions speak louder than buzz words. > Does NSA make available the algorithms for natural language processing used by the data analysis systems? > In the long term view, it would seem freedom is a higher priority value than safety so why is safety the highest value here? Why isn’t the USA working primarily to ensure our continued freedom? > How do you protect sources and methods while forging the new social contract? > How can any company trust cybercommand when the same chief runs NSA where the focus is attack? How can we trust the Utah Data Center after such blatant lies of “targeted surveillance?” > Now that the mass surveillance programs have to some extent been revealed, can we see some verifiable examples of their worth? If not, will NSA turn back towards strengthening security instead of undermining it? > The terrorist attacks of 9/11 encouraged our govt. leaders to adopt aggressive surveillance laws and regulations and demands from the intelligence communities. How do we reverse these policies adopted under duress?

### Future artifacts Speaking from 02082, Hon described 5 (of 100) objects and events from this century’s history he felt most strongly evoked the astonishing trends that have transformed humanity in the past 8 decades. Not all developments proved to be positive. One such was _Locked Simulation Interrogation_. In 02019 in Washington DC, frustrated by a series of 5 unsolved bombings, the FBI combined an unremovable top quality virtual reality (VR) rig with detailed real-time brain scanning to run a suspect through a cascade of 572 intense simulations designed to draw out everything the suspect knew about the bombings. As a result the 6th bombing was averted, and the technique of adaptive VR became a standard law enforcement tool. But over time it was found to be unreliable and often harmful, and in 02033 the Supreme Court declared it to be unconstitutional. By the 02040s people’s comfort with mood drugs and discomfort with lives that felt meaningless (mass automation had replaced many forms of work) led to the _Fourth Great Awakening_. In 02044 a religious entrepreneur found a way to transform human nature and acquire converts to the “Christian Consummation Movement” with a combination of one eyedropper, 18 pills, and an “induction course of targeted viruses and magstim.” Inductees were made more empathic, generous, trusting, and disciplined. The movement grew to 20 million Americans by the 02070s before it leveled off. The world learned what could be done with desire modification. A lasting monument to humanity’s progress off planet was _Alto Firenze_ , the first space station designed for elegance. Constructed in 02036, it progressed through a series of beautifications and uses from hotel to conference center and art museum to eventually being declared a World Heritage Site. In 2052 it was moved to L5 and thus escaped the cascade of debris collisions that completely emptied the over-crowded low-Earth orbit later that year. Perhaps it was the steady increase of older people, along with continuing trends in self-quantification and “gamification,” that led to the _Micromort Detector_ in 02032. “What if you could have a number that told you exactly how risky an action, any action, was going to be?“ The Lifeline bracelet measured the wearer’s exact health condition along with the environment and the action being contemplated and displayed how risky it would be in “micromorts”—a unit representing one chance in a million of death. Go canoeing—10 micromorts. Two glasses of wine—1 micromort. The bracelets became tremendously popular, though they were found to increase anxiety badly in some users. Later spinoffs included the Microfun Detector and Micromorals Detector. Signs of ancient life were found on Mars in 2028, on Europa in 2048. “By the time extrasolar alien life was first imaged in 2055, celebrations were considerably smaller, the wonder and excitement having been eroded by the slow drip of discoveries. By then, everyone had simply assumed that life was out there, everywhere.“ One planet now discovered to have signs of intelligent life is 328 light years away. Thus the _Armstrong Expedition_ , using an antimatter-fueled lighthugger craft bearing only artificial intelligences set out to make contact in 02079. “This century,” Hon summarized, “we learned what it means to be human.”

### The Sahara and civilization “Almost everything breaks in the desert,” Kröpelin began. He showed trucks mired in sand, one vehicle blown up by a land mine, and a Unimog with an impossibly, hopelessly broken axle. (Using the attached backhoe, it hunched its way 50 miles back to civilization.) The eastern Sahara remains one of the least explored places on Earth, and it is full of wonders. Every year for 40 years Kröpelin has made multi-month expeditions to figure out the paleoclimatological changes and human saga in the region over the last 17,000 years. There are no guides, no roads. When you find something—astonishing rock art (there are thousands of sites), an amazing geological feature—you know you’re the first human to see it in thousands of years. A great river, 7 miles wide, 650 miles long, once flowed into the Nile from the desert. Now called Wadi Howar, its rich, still unstudied archeological sites show it used to be a thoroughfare from the deep desert. A vast spectacular plateau called the Ennedi Highlands, as big as Switzerland, has exquisite rock art detailing pastoral herds of cattle and even dress and hair styles. Mouflon (wild sheep) and crocodiles still survive there. Most remarkable of all are the remote Ounianga Lakes, some of them kept charged with ancient deep-aquifer fresh water because of the draw of intense evaporation from a hypersaline central lake. In 1999 Kröpelin began a stratigraphic study of another lake’s sediment, eventually collecting a treasure for climate study---a 52-foot core sample which shows every season for the last 11,000 years. For Kröpelin, many strands of evidence spell out the sequence of events in the eastern Sahara. From 17,000 to 10,500 BP (before the present), there were only a few human settlements along the Nile. But the Sahara was gradually getting wetter in the period 10,500 to 9,000 BP, and people moved up from the south. The peak of the African Humid Period, when the Sahara was green and widely occupied, was 9,000 to 7,300 years ago. Then a gradual desiccation from 7,300 to 5,500 BP drove people to the Nile, and the first farms appeared there. From 5,500 BP on, the Nile’s pharaonic civilization got going and lasted 3,000 years. Unique artifacts such black-rimmed pots and asymmetric stone knives, once used in the far desert, turn up in the settlements that created Egypt. Kröpelin concluded: “Egypt was a gift of the Nile, but it was also a gift of the desert.” And of climate change.

### Oceans alive Neither of them eats fish. Both marine biologists applaud the improved regulation of American fishing and the resulting recovery of important fisheries, but they note that 90% of our seafood is imported, and one-third of that is caught illegally. Two-thirds of global fisheries are overfished. Eating a tuna, Earle points out, is like eating a wolf or a tiger. It is a magnificent predator often decades in age. We no longer commercially harvest wildlife on land. Why do we do it in the sea? Noting that 15% of land has become protected in the last 100 years, the speakers said we have just started on protecting the ocean. About 3% is now protected, in 8,000 Marine Protected Areas. The goal is 20% by 2020. One hero of the movement is Palau’s president Tommy Remengesau, who this year declared that commercial fishing would be banned in its entire ocean economic zone—230,000 square miles. Likewise New Caledonia just created a 500,000 square mile “Natural Park of the Coral Sea.” Ocean science keeps yielding profound discoveries. A sea-going photosynthetic bacteria named Prochlorococcus was identified as recently as 1986, yet it may be the most abundant photosynthetic species on Earth, responsible for 5-10% of all the oxygen in the atmosphere. Without their ancestors we wouldn't exist. Deep-diving Earle noted that daylight only reaches about 1,000 feet down in the ocean. Most of the world’s life therefore lives in total darkness, and “bioluminescence is the most common form of communication on Earth.” Thys observed that the greatest need is for coordinated, consistent remote-sensing in the ocean, and that is increasingly being provided by small robots that travel on their own on and under the surface, sending their data to satellites as well as cabled observatories. Small satellites also are multiplying, providing daily, detailed information from above. Citizen science is growing along with the Maker movement. “Life came from the ocean,” Thys concluded. “And the life in it continues to nurture life everywhere. We owe the ocean some nurture back.”

### The downtown company The business advice that Tony Hsieh most took to heart came from an ad executive: “A great brand is a story that never stops unfolding.” With his own company, Zappos, he determined that “brand equals culture,” and made quality of culture the top corporate priority, followed by customer service, and then selling shoes and clothing. The formula worked so well that Zappos outgrew its collection of buildings in suburban Las Vegas. Time to build a campus. Other suburban corporate campuses—Google, Nike, Apple—struck him as isolated and insular. He wondered if a company could be like New York University, embedded in downtown Manhattan, with all of its buildings and no end of urban amenities within a five-minute walk. Edward Glaeser’s book _The Triumph of the City_ described how cities unfold forever, driven by density and intense variety, while companies all eventually go stagnant and die. Maybe immersion in a downtown could help keep his company unfolding, and maybe bringing company start-up culture to a decaying urban core could restart its vitality. Zappos bet the company on the idea. They took over the abandoned city hall in the dead-end part of Las Vegas known as Fremont East and spent $200 million buying up nearby properties, $50 million on local small businesses, $50 million on tech start-ups, and $50 million on education, arts, and culture. Hsieh’s strategy is to increase: “Collisions” (serendipitous encounters); “Co-learning” (a community teaching itself); and “Connectedness” (density, diversity, and reasons to engage). They built a Shipping Container Park with three stories of shops, amusements, and tech start-ups wrapped around a courtyard for food, play, and hanging out. They planted Burning Man mega-art on corners throughout the neighborhood “to keep you walking one more block.” Inspired by TED, the Summit Series, and especially SXSW (the South by Southwest festival in Austin), they built a theater for frequent talks and organized an annual “Life is Beautiful” music festival attracting 60,000. Hsieh figures that “collisionability” can be quantified and designed for. He thinks that street-level interaction can be made so rich that it compensates for the lower density of low-rise buildings, with 100 residents/acre. Thus he blocked off the skyway from Zappos’s parking lot to its headquarters in the city hall. Use the street. Make street activities really attractive. Active residents, he calculates, will experience 1,000 collisionable hours a year (3.6 hours/day, 7 days/week, 40 weeks/year). Ditto for “purposeful visitors” (12 hours/day, 7 days/week, 12 weeks/year)—you are invited to be one. If Zappos helps foster an urban “culture of openness, collaboration, creativity, and optimism,” Hsieh says, then the city can prosper, and the company with it, and both can keep unfolding their stories indefinitely.