Long Now

**This is one conversation out of the 19 that took place as part of the Long Conversation.[Media links for the other Conversations are available here.](https://longnow.org/seminars/02010/oct/16/long-conversation/)** Long Conversation, an epic relay of one-to-one conversations among some of the Bay Area's most interesting minds, took place over 6 hours in San Francisco on Saturday October 16, 02010. Interpreting the Long Conversation in real time was a data visualization performance by Sosolimited; an art and technology studio out of M.I.T. Long Conversation was presented with a live performance of 1,000 minutes of composer Jem Finer's [Longplayer](https://longnow.org/longplayer/).

### Cosmic Life The pace of astronomic discovery, said the Astronomer Royal, keeps increasing with the constant improvement in our sensing technology. The recent discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe (dark energy) revolutionized cosmology, and with the launch of the Kepler Telescope in 2009, we are beginning to detect and study Earth-sized planets around distant stars. Since the Moon landings, humans in space have done little of scientific interest, but unmanned probes have delivered revelations from the planets and moons of the solar system, with much more to come. The best prospects for finding life elsewhere in our solar system appear to be on Mars, on Saturn's moon Titan, or on Jupiter's moon Europa. (Human space exploration is best pushed by private individuals such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson, rather than governments, Rees feels. Governments aren't allowed to be realistic about the dangers of space travel.) "We are the nuclear waste of stellar fusion," Rees noted, the ash from long-dead stars all over the galaxy exchanging their gases in a complex ecology, and the galaxies show a mega-structure of density contrasts generated by gravity. Poised midway in scale between atoms and stars, biological life appears to be the peak of complexity in the universe---a flea is more complicated than a star. Since we don't know how our own life emerged and haven't discovered any elsewhere, we still have no idea whether life is common in the universe or if we are unique. We can be certain that we are not the culmination of life forms here, because we are less than halfway through the Sun's lifespan. In the six billion years to come, there are likely to be creatures as far beyond humans as we are beyond microbes, and science as far beyond our present understanding as quantum theory is remote to a chimpanzee. Now that we are stewards of this planet, we are responsible for maintaining life's possibilities in this cosmic neighborhood.

### Gaming the World In a glee-filled evening, Schell declared that games and real life are reaching out to each other with such force that we might come to a condition of "gamepocalypse---where every second of your life you're playing a game in some way. He expects smart toothbrushes and buses that give us good-behavior points, and eye-tracking sensors that reward us for noticing ads, and subtle tests that confirm whether product placement in our dreams has worked. The reason games are so inviting is that they offer: clear feedback, a sense of progress, the possibility of success, mental and physical exercise, a chance to satisfy curiosity, a chance to solve problems, and a great feeling of freedom. Accelerating technology has made some people give up on predicting the future, Schell said, but in fact it should make us much better predictors, because we get so much practice in finding out so quickly whether our predictions are right or wrong. He feels confident in predicting a number of driving forces that will make games subsume all other media and occupy ever more of real life. They are: * Nooks & crannies---new niches for games in people's time, in specialty groups, in various world cultures. * Microtransactions---which will really take off when they blend with social networking. * New sensors---tilty smart phones are a glimpse of what disposable sensors everywhere might bring. * New screens---live displays on everything. * REM-tainment---lucid dreams as a play field. * AdverGaming---commercialization money drives powerful innovation. * Beauty---everything is getting gorgeous. * Customization---you can already get personalized M&Ms. * Eye and face tracking---universal face recognition is coming, and so is having your avatar reflect your real-face expressions. * The curious will win---games so reward curiosity and fast learning that the incurious will be left behind. * Authenticity---"real" constantly pushes toward real. * Social networking---Facebook! * Transmedia worlds---Pokemon showed the way, embracing a game, TV, cards, and toys. * Speech recognition---soon you will have to persuade a computer character to do something. * Geotracking---the real world becomes the screen. * Sharing---Wikipedia showed its power. * Quantitative design---detailed real-time analysis of what works in games drives exquisite adaptation. * Extrinsic rewards---gold stars everywhere, but Schell recommends the book Punished by Rewards and believes that intrinsic rewards are better to promote because they last. * Whole life tracking---the endpoint is immersion. Hopefully in what James Carse calls "the infinite game"---where the point is not in winning but in always improving the game. Asked in the Q&A about short versus long games, Schell noted that massive multiplayer games have such scale and scope and offer such endless new goals and progress along with their social intensity that World of Warcraft now has 10 million players. We may well be passing our avatars on to our children and grandchildren.

### History-savvy Policy Why do policy makers and historians shun each other? Gavin observed that policy people want actionable information, certainty, and simple explanations. Meanwhile historians revel in nuance, distrust simple explanations and also distrust power and those who seek it. Thus historians keep themselves irrelevant, and policy makers keep their process ignorant. Gavin proposed five key concepts from history that can inform understanding and improve policy dramatically... **Vertical History.** What are the deep causative patterns behind a current situation? For example, America's deep involvement in the Mideast appears to be caused by concern about oil and terrorism and by support of Israel. But none of those elements applied in the mid-60s when we dove into the Mideast. Britain was Israel's keeper in those days and in financial trouble, the US was overextended in Vietnam and in financial trouble, and Soviet influence was the main threat in the Mideast. After the profound shock of the Six-Day War in 1967, Britain withdrew and America took over on the cheap with its "Pillar Strategy"---we would support Israel, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. That arrangement drives everything today, and policy people have almost zero memory of its origins. **Horizontal History.** The interconnecting events of a particular moment---all the things simultaneously on the plate of a decision maker---profoundly affect decisions. For example, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson in the 60s were obsessed with America's balance of payments deficit and had to draw down our troop commitment in Germany, but Europe was obsessed with keeping Germany from building nuclear weapons, and so the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty was invented as a workaround. That situational artifact leads US policy 40 years later. **Chronological Proportionality.** "The New York Times always gets it wrong, and they're the best of the media," Gavin noted. Dramatic events take our attention away from what's really going on. For example, the Vietnam War dominated American attention in the 1960s and still looms large in every policy discussion. But the war was of no real geopolitical consequence, particularly when compared with the huge consequences from other little-noted 60s events---the Six-Day War, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, growing stability in Central Europe, and the thaw in relations between China and America. That raises the question: what is Afghanistan distracting us from these days? **Unintended Consequences.** Suppose America had won in Vietnam? We would have had to commit huge resources to Southeast Asia indefinitely, and China and the USSR would have had to ally in the face of our military presence there. With our humiliating defeat, China and the Soviets split permanently, China and the US became friendly, and America profoundly reassessed and improved its own policies and institutions. So it goes in real life: things turn out differently than we expect. **Policy Insignificance.** What policy people do is often not the main event at all. For example, in the mid-70s policy makers in Washington were trying to fix an America they saw in a steep decline and locked in an endless Cold War. They paid no attention to three events going on in California. Apple's computer in 1976 signaled a coming American dominance in computer and information technology. Also in 1976 a California wine (Stag's Leap) defeated the best French wines in a blind-taste contest, signaling our competitiveness in high culture internationally. And in 1977 "Star Wars" became the highest-grossing film ever, signaling American dominance of world pop culture. America's greatest economic and cultural boom took off, totally without Washington's involvement or even awareness. During the Q&A Galvin noted that Kennedy got the Cuban Missile Crisis right by locking all the dangerous heavy-hitters in a small room for thirteen days while he applied his own "historic sensibility" to finding a back-channel way to defuse the crisis rather than exacerbate it. These days, Gavin observed, policy people are worrying excessively about terrorism and nuclear weapons proliferation when in fact nuclear weapons are on the wane everywhere and have been for decades. Historians, he said, can bring a well supported, authoritative, helpful message to the public discourse and to policy makers at such times: "Don't freak out."

### Imminent fusion power All the light we see from the sky, Moses pointed out, comes from fusion power burning hydrogen, the commonest element in the universe---3/4 of all mass. A byproduct of the cosmic fusion is the star-stuff that we and the Earth are made of. On Earth, 4 billion years of life accumulated geological hydrocarbons, which civilization is now burning at a rate of 10 million years' worth per year. In 1900, 98% of the world's energy came from burning carbon. By 1970, that was down to 90%, but it has not decreased since. It has to decrease some time, because there is only so much coal, oil, and gas. During this century every single existing power plant (except some hydro) will age and have to be replaced, and world energy demand is expected to triple by 2100. To head off climate change, fossil fuel combustion has to end by about 2050. The crucial period for conversion to something better is between 2030 and 2050. The ideal new power source would be: affordable; clean; non-geopolitical; using inexhaustible fuel and existing infrastructure; capable of rapid development and evolution. Moses' candidate is the "laser inertial fusion engine"---acronym LIFE---being developed at Lawrence Livermore. The question, Moses said, is "Can we build a miniature Sun on Earth?" The recipe involves a peppercorn-size target of hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium heated to 200 million degrees Fahrenheit for a couple billionths of a second. To get that micro-blast of heat, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) uses lasers---coherent light---at a massive scale. Laser engineer Moses notes that photons are perfect for the job: "no mass, no charge, just energy." Moses ran a dramatic video showing how a shot at the NIF works. 20-foot-long slugs of amplified coherent light (10 nanoseconds) travel 1,500 yards and converge simultaneously through 192 beams on the tiny target, compressing and heating it to fusion ignition, with a yield of energy 10 to 100 times of what goes into it. Successful early test shots suggest that the NIF will achieve the first ignition within the next few months, and that shot will be heard round the world. To get a working prototype of a fusion power plant may take 10 years. It will require an engine that runs at about 600 rpm---like an idling car. Targets need to be fired at a rate of 10 per second into the laser flashes. The energy is collected by molten salt at 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit and then heats the usual steam-turbine tea kettle to generate electricity. The engine could operate at the scale of a standard 1-gigawatt coal or nuclear plant, or it could be scaled down to 250 megawatts or up to 3 gigawatts. The supply of several million targets a year can be manufactured for under 50 cents apiece with the volume and precision that Lego blocks currently are. Moses said that 1 liter of heavy water will yield the energy of 2 million gallons of gas. Fusion power, like nuclear fission power, would cost less per kilowatt hour than wind (and far less than solar), yet would be less capital intensive than fission. For the constant baseload power no carbon is involved, no waste stream, no possibility of meltdown or weaponization, and there is no such thing as peak hydrogen.

### The anti-state economy Gilman described deviant globalization as "the unpleasant underside of transnational integration." There's nice tourism, and then sex tourism, such as in Thailand and Switzerland. The vast pharmacology industry is matched by a vast traffic in illegal drugs. The underside of waste disposal is the criminal dumping in the developing world of toxic wastes from the developed world. Military activities worldwide are fed by a huge gray market in weapons. Internet communications are undermined by floods of malware doubling every year. Among the commodities shipped around the world are exotic hardwoods, endangered species, blood diamonds, and stolen art worth billions in ransom. Illegitimate health care includes the provision of human organs from poor people---you can get a new kidney with no waiting for $150,000 in places like Brazil, the Philippines, Istanbul, and South Africa. Far overwhelming legal immigration are torrents of illegal immigrants who pay large sums to get across borders. And money laundering accounts for 4-12% of world GDP---$1.5 to 5 trillion dollars a year. These are not marginal, "informal" activities. These are enormous, complex businesses straight out of the Harvard Business Review. The drug business in Mexico, for example, employs 400,000 people. A thousand-dollar kilo of cocaine grows in value by 1400-percent when it crosses into the US---nice profit margin there. The whole phenomenon is driven by state regulators acting on ethical taboos. When we outlaw or tax certain goods and services, we reduce supply while demand increases, and that provides an irresistible opportunity for risk-taking entrepreneurs. Also, historian Gilman points out, international development practices are partially to blame. From 1949 to 1989 the Cold War was played out with the US and USSR trying to create new states like themselves. It mostly failed, and it ended with the end of international Communism. Then came the neoliberal "Washington Consensus" theory of structural adjustment---governments in developing countries must "stabilize, privatize, and liberalize." That sort of worked, but it hollowed out the governments and dismantled their regulatory capacity. People in those countries realized they were on their own, forced to "survival entrepreneurship." In some places like Eastern Europe criminals took over the economy. There is a certain Robin Hood effect on the large scale. Serious money is moving from the rich global north to the poor global south and enriching some people there. Politically, the deviant entrepreneurs don't want to take over the state, just undermine it. For their own communities they often provide state-like services of infrastructure, health care, and even education. They are "post-modern, post-revolutionary, and post-progressive." They resort to violence against the state only when the state suddenly attacks them---as is playing out in Mexico now. What to do? If you try to shut down the deviant economy, you just make the profit margins greater and exacerbate the problem. If you shrug and legalize everything, you condone hateful practices like child sex slavery and the total deforestation of tropical hardwoods. We are left with making judicious choices about which deviant practices to take most seriously, and then dealing with them patiently in a non-sudden way, realizing that the unsavory economy will never be fully eradicated.

### Averting Collapse Civilizations always think they're immortal, Eagleman noted, but they nearly always perish, leaving "nothing but ruins and scattered genetics." It takes luck and new technology to survive. We may be particularly lucky to have Internet technology to help manage the six requirements of a durable civilization: 1\. "Try not to cough on one another." More humans have died from epidemics than from all famines and wars. Disease precipitated the fall of Greece, Rome, and the civilizations of the Americas. People used to bunch up around the infected, which pushed local disease into universal plague. Now we can head that off with Net telepresence, telemedicine, and medical alert networks. All businesses should develop a work-from-home capability for their workforce. 2\. "Don't lose things." As proved by the destruction of the Alexandria Library and of the literature of Mayans and Minoans, "knowledge is hard won but easily lost." Plumbing disappeared for a thousand years when Rome fell. Inoculation was invented in China and India 700 years before Europeans rediscovered it. These days Michelangelo's David has been safely digitized in detail. Eagleman has direct access to all the literature he needs via [PubMed](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed), [JSTOR](http://www.jstor.org/), and [Google Books](http://books.google.com/). "Distribute, don't reinvent." 3\. "Tell each other faster." Don't let natural disasters cascade. The Minoans perished for lack of the kind of tsunami alert system we now have. Countless Haitians in the recent earthquake were saved by [Ushahidi.com](http://www.ushahidi.com/), which aggregated cellphone field reports in real time. 4\. "Mitigate tyranny." The USSR's collapse was made inevitable by state-controlled media and state-mandated mistakes such as Lysenkoism, which forced a wrong theory of wheat farming on 13 time zones, and starved millions. Now crowd-sourced cellphone users can sleuth out vote tampering. We should reward companies that stand up against censorship, as Google has done in China. 5\. "Get more brains involved in solving problems." Undertapping human capital endangers the future. Open courseware from colleges is making higher education universally accessible. Crowd-sourced problem solving is being advanced by sites such as [PatientsLikeMe](http://www.patientslikeme.com/), [Foldit](http://fold.it/portal/) (protein folding), and [Cstart](http://cstart.org/) (moon exploration). Perhaps the next step is "society sourcing." 6\. "Try not to run out of energy." When energy expenditure outweighs energy return, collapse ensues. Email saves trees and trucking. Online shopping is a net energy gain, with UPS optimizing delivery routes and never turning left. We need to expand the ability to hold meetings and conferences online. But if the Net is so crucial, what happens if the Net goes down? It may have to go down a few times before we learn how to defend it properly, before we catch on that civilization depends on it for survival.

### Dot.Gov Noveck began with the example of patents, first devised in Renaissance Florence and Venice to protect techniques such as glass manufacture. In England, conferring a monopoly on a tool or technique became a prerogative of the king. In contemporary America, the process of getting a 20-year monopoly on your invention from the US Patent Office is mired in a morass of litigation costs, a huge backlog, insufficient reviewers with insufficient science education, and what Noveck calls "an outmoded conception of expertise." Her revolutionary approach is to "reengineer institutions to bring in expertise from outside." Thus she developed Peer-to-Patent, which publishes patent applications to the Internet. The online community researches prior art, organizes the most excellent reviewers that emerge, and greatly accelerates and refines the patent review process. A pilot program proved the concept, and it is now being institutionalized at the Patent Office. Noveck describes the methodology as "focussed collaboration" and as a way to move power "downwards and outwards." On President Obama's first day in office he signed a memorandum on Open Government, committing all the departments and agencies to "transparency, participation, and collaboration." They were asked to begin by identifying high-value datasets that could be put online in downloadable form immediately. The result was [Data.gov](http://www.data.gov/), which went public in May 2009 and quickly had 64 million hits for its raw data files. An [IT Dashboard](http://it.usaspending.gov/) of the government's information technology spending got 86 million hits. The White House made its [visitor logs](http://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/disclosures/visitor-records) public. Noveck said the government is replacing its reflex "there's a form for that" habits with "there's an app for that," and a panoply of cloud-based apps, including 165 social media platforms, are on offer at [Apps.gov](https://apps.gov/cloud/advantage/main start_page.do). Just within the Department of Defense, the entire department has adopted (Long Now co-founder) Danny Hillis's [Aristotle](http://www.whitehouse.gov/open/innovations/Dod-Aristotle) software to link all military expertise; the [Army field manuals](http://www.whitehouse.gov/open/innovations/wikifiedArmy) are being wikified---collaboratively updated by soldiers in the field; and troops are encouraged to learn and use social media. The formidable Code of Federal Regulations used to cost $17,000. Now the price is zero for the "[e-CFR](http://ecfr.gpoaccess.gov/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=ecfr&tpl=%2Findex.tpl)." "Loved data lives longer," Noveck declared. She encourages citizens to "adopt a dataset," and to demand ever wider release of government data troves. (One audience member requested that all the aerial photographs ever made by the US Geological Survey be digitized and published.) The Obama administration is finding that the whole process of opening up government digitally doesn't have to wait for perfection. It can move ahead swiftly on the Internet standard of "rough consensus and running code." PS. As a government employee, Noveck is not allowed to plug her book, [_Wiki Government_](http://www.amazon.com/Wiki-Government-Technology-Democracy-Stronger/dp/0815702752/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1267818242&sr=1-1). But I can.

### Humanity's impact, nature's resilience Weisman's book, _The World Without Us_ , grew out of two questions, he said. One was, "How can I write a best-seller about the environment?" The answer to that was the second question: "How would the rest of nature behave without the constant pressure we put on it?" On the border of Ukraine and Belarus is a small intact remnant---500,000 acres---of the primordial forest that once covered Europe from Siberia to Ireland. In the Puszcza Bialowieska, with its towering ash and linden trees and dense growth, Weisman felt he was in the forest of Grimm's tales. "It felt primally familiar. It felt like being home. I realized that people really want that back." Buildings and cities without us around don't last long, his research showed. Water gets into every building, followed by rot, birds, and trees, and pretty soon all that's left is the bathroom tiles. The same with cities. New York is built on top of 40 streams. To keep the subways functioning, 13 million gallons of water have to be pumped out every day. If the water returns, it won't be long before the tall buildings lose their footing and topple. Maintenance people emerged as the heroes of the book, Weisman said. Without their vigilance and toil, everything collapses. They are the bedrock of civilization. At the New York Botanical Garden Weisman found that the 40-acre preserve of carefully protected original forest has transformed itself over the years into a new woods dominated by alien plants such as ailanthus and cork trees. The garden's curator told him something radical: "Maintaining biodiversity is less important than maintaining a functioning ecosystem. What matters is that soil is protected, that water gets cleaned, that trees filter the air, that a canopy generates new seedlings to keep nutrients from draining away into the Bronx River." Plastic, Weisman discovered, is astonishingly durable, gradually accumulating in continent-sized gyres of floating garbage in the oceans. Instead of dissolving, the plastic just gets smaller in size and is ingested harmfully by every scale of animal all the way down to zooplankton. Weisman's message is one of reconciliation. Wherever humanity backs its impact off even a little, nature comes swarming back. From the new part-wolf coyotes taking up residence in New England to the rare and exquisite red-crowned cranes prospering in Korea's Demilitarized Zone, accommodating nature always rewards humans.

### Enduring Value In February 02010, [Brian Eno](../../../../people/board/prospect4/), [Stewart Brand](../../../../people/board/sb1/), and [Alexander Rose](../../../../people/staff/zander/) spoke at the [Long Finance conference](http://www.zyen.com/index.php/long-finance/long-finance-events/633.html) hosted by [Gresham College](http://www.gresham.ac.uk/text.asp?PageId=3) in London. The conversation was moderated by [Faisal Islam](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faisal_Islam), an economics correspondent with Channel 4 news in the UK. [Long Finance](http://www.zyen.com/long-finance.html) is an initiative begun by Professor Michael Mainelli in 02007 to establish a World Centre Of Thinking On Long-Term Finance. The aim of the Long Finance Institute is "to improve society's understanding and use of finance over the long-term".