Long Now

### Finessing the future Instead of one podium there were four chairs on the stage of Wednesday's seminar. In three seats, three Dysons: Esther, George and Freeman. They were appearing together on stage for the first time. The fourth held Stewart Brand who led the three through an evening of queries. The questions came from Stewart himself, from the audience, and from one Dyson to another Dyson -- a first for this format in a Long Now seminar. George introduced his dad with an exquisite slideshow of Freeman's prime documents. He began with a scan of a first grade school paper Freeman wrote on "Astronimy." Besides the forgivable misspellings, the essay was full of fantasy. Freeman did not just copy material from an encyclopedia. He imagined what should be and wrote it as fact. George then showed a later blue-book essay of Freeman's fiction, but it was studded with numbers and calculations. Right there was the pattern for Freeman's many other publications (first pages shown by George): speculations built upon calculations. We saw one paper inscribed by Freeman with the note: "From one crackpot to another!" His most famous speculation is for a solar system-sized enclosure around a sun now called a Dyson Sphere. George's presentation on Freeman ended with a video clip of a Star Trek episode where the befuddle Captain Piccard ponders a mysterious hollow solar-sized ball blocking their way and gasps, "Could it be a dyson-sphere?!!" Freeman followed this with a few minutes of musing on the difficulty of long term predictions. When Von Neumann and others were working on the first computers, none of them could imagine they would be used in toys for 3-year olds. In a theme that he would return to the rest of the evening, Freeman compared that surprise with the coming surprises we'll see in biotech. He said, "It is unfortunate that Von Neumann used the first computers to build nuclear weapons, because computers became associated with institutional destruction. The same thing is happening now with biotech. It is unfortunate that the first biotech is being used for institutional destruction of weeds, but soon biotech will become smaller scale, user-friendly, and employed by gardeners, naturalists, and kids to make their own creations. People's feelings about biotech will also change." "I misjudged a lot of things. Like nuclear power took much longer than I thought. We also thought we had a wonderful spaceship that was going to take us to Saturn (we were really going to go ourselves). The hardest thing to foresee is how long things take." Freeman sang the praises of science fiction as hugely important for science. "It's where the most radical ideas come from first." He wishes he read more of it, a sentiment echoed by George and Esther. Esther chimed in with her interpretation of future study. Freeman, she said, tried to understand things now by speculating on their future, while George mined the past to try to understand the future. She, on the contrary, wasn't interested in understanding the future. She chiefly wanted to affect it. "What good is it to have a conference about future technologies unless you can in some way make things happen?" What won't change? That was a question from the audience. George told about spying inhabited islands off the coast of the northwest 30 years ago and expecting that technology would transform them into places full of humans. But they are still deserted; cities are ever more enticing. The early native tribes he studied would have 12 good friends and 30 close acquaintances. He says that if you check people's cell phones they have on average 12 intimate friends always allowed to ring and 30 names to call out. We haven't changed much. Freeman continued that thread saying he is a skeptic of the singularity notion. "My mother saw more change in her life than I have. She went from traveling in a pony cart to flying across the ocean in a jet. I don't see things going faster. It is an illusion." I asked, "What have you changed you mind about?" Esther said she changed her mind about anonymity. She used to think it was hugely important, but now she believes everything works out better when there is transparency, including in people. "We may become more tolerant because everything is visible." Freeman admitted he was a skeptic on global warming. His problem was not change in the climate. "In the long view we ARE changing the climate." He felt that climate was hugely complex, that we understand very little of it and many people are reducing this unknown complexity into one data point -- the average temperature somewhere. Until we understand what kind of changes we are making in our "solutions" he says he believes the best action on global climate change right now is inaction. Of course this is only a sample of the wide-ranging conversation, which lasted 90 minutes. (Like all past talks, this one will be posted for download streaming on the Long Now site.) The agile wit and intelligence of the three Dysons was in full gear by the end of the seminar. This exchange near the end is paraphrased from my rough notes, which I believe captures the tone of the evening: Stewart: You are 81, Freeman, and pro biotech. What's your take on bio-engineered longevity? Freeman: The worst thing that could happen would be if doctors cured death. There would be no room for young people in power. It would be the end of science! For me it is a black cloud on the horizon. But I think it is unavoidable. First we'll extend life to 100 years, then to 200 years, 300 and so on… George: Just like copyright! Freeman: Really. The only solution is to move far far away, to have other worlds, in space or on planets where the young can dominate. Esther: Even better, send the old guys to Mars! It was great to have the three Dysons on earth, young and old.

### Escape velocity Attempts to think long term, Ray Kurzweil began, keep making the mistake of imagining that the pace of the future is like the pace of the past. Pondering the next ten years, we usually begin by studying the last ten years. He recommends studying the last twenty year for clues about the rate and degree of change coming in the next ten years, because history self-accelerates. That's Kurzweil's Law of accelerating returns: "technology and evolutionary processes progress in an exponential fashion." Thus, since the rate of progress doubles every ten years or so, we will see changes in the next 90 years equivalent to the last 10,000 years, and in the next 100 years changes equivalent to the last 20,000 years. It is always the later doublings where the ferocious action is. The many skeptics about the Human Genome project being done in 15 years thought they were being proved right at year 10. They were astounded when the project came in on schedule. "People look at short sections of an exponential growth curve and imagine they are straight lines," said Kurzweil. Noticing that his audience was astute as well as large (650 in the Herbst), the speaker gave a dense, fast-moving talk. He said that as an inventor and entrepreneur he found that "you have to invent for when you finish a project, not when you start-- you need to figure out what enabling factors will be in place when your product comes to market." That was what started him studying trends in technology. In rapid succession he showed on the screen graphs of technological advance in microprocessors per chip (Moore's Law), microprocessor clock speed, cheapness of transistors, cheapness of dynamic random access memory, amount and cheapness of digital storage, bandwidth, processor performance in MIPS, total bits shipped, supercomputer power, Internet hosts and data traffic, and then on into biotech with cheapness of genome sequencing per base pair, growth in Genbank, and further on into nanotech with smallness of working mechanical devices, and nanotech science citations and patents. They ALL show exponential growth rates, with no slowing in overall progress, since new paradigms always arise to keep up the pace, as transistors replaced vacuum tubes in computers, and 3D molecular computing and nanotubes will replace transistors. "Everything to do with information technology is doubling every 12 to 15 months, and information technology is encompassing everything." I was impressed that the growth curves ignore apparent shocks. The 1990s dot-com boom and subsequent bust seemed like a big event, but it doesn't even show up as a blip on Kurzweil's exponential growth curve of e-commerce revenues in the US. At dinner with Long Now sponsors after the talk, he proposed that the stringent American regulations on stem cell research will not slow the pace of breakthroughs in that field, because there are so many political (overseas, for example) and technological workarounds. The fate of individual projects is always unknowable, but the aggregate behavior over time of massive and complex arrays of activity is knowable in surprising detail. Kurzweil expects this century to provide dramatic events early and often. "With the coming of gene therapy, before we see designer babies we'll see designer baby-boomers." By 2010 he expects computers to disappear into our clothing, bodies, and built environment. The World Wide Web will be a World Wide Mesh, where all the linked devices are also servers, so massive supercomputing can be ubiquitous. Images will be project right onto retinas, helping lead toward true immersion virtual reality. Search engines won't wait to be asked to offer information. By 2030 he presumes that nanobots will occupy and enhance our nervous systems. The brain will have been reverse engineered so that we will understand the real structure of intelligence. A thousand dollars of machine computation will exceed human brain capacity by a thousand times. Shortly after that intelligence begins to break completely free of its biological constrictions and carries humanity into suffusing energy and matter toward potentially cosmic scale (IF the restricting barrier of the speed of light can be worked around). Kurzweil noted that among "singularitarians" he is known as somewhat conservative, expecting a "soft takeoff" instead of hard takeoff. In the Q & A he dealt with the usual "but what about limitations of resources?" questions with predictions that nanotech would increase efficiencies and make materials so fungible that what are seen now as severe limitations will fall away. Only one question made him pause, and a very long pause it was, sort of a stunned silence. I asked him (through Kevin Kelly), "As everything goes faster and faster, is there anything that will or should remain slow?" Finally Kurzweil said, "Well. You know, even meditation will go quicker." Another pause. "But it might SEEM slow," he said politely.

### The culminating human right What does it take to change human habits of cruelty (such as slavery, genocide) and humiliation (racism, sexism)? What do past and present efforts for human rights tell about their future?… Robert Fuller is author of the ground-breaking _Somebodies and Nobodies: Overcoming the Abuse of Rank_. "Personal is political," Robert Fuller began, and he recounted his experience as president of Oberlin College in the early 1970s. It was the time when a number of movements were coming to a focus to empower women, blacks (and native Americans and Latinos), gays, and the disabled. As it happened, Oberlin had dealt with anti-Semitism a half-century earlier, so that was not in the mix but served as an example of how to make things better. Fuller wondered if all the movements have something in common and eventually concluded that they do. Each is a specific instance of a generic wrong-- the abuse of rank. Rank itself is fine, indeed necessary to any functioning hierarchy. The abuse is taking advantage of rank to deal out humiliation. "Rankism ranges all the way from hurt feelings to genocide," said Fuller. Misusing rank defeats what value there is in rank. Organizations and societies that indulge in it are only partially functional. What can be done about it? "The Golden Rule needs teeth." Fuller observed that in the past it always took someone in the oppressor class to get action moving. Once a movement is under way, it has to just keep bearing down over time. You stand down the bullies one by one. Criminal executives, he noted, are now going to jail, even though most people predicted none would. In time politicians who indulge in ad hominem insults of their opponents should be voted out. Rankists in business should find their careers blighted. Television shows that bank on humiliation ("reality" TV, political wrath programs) should lose their advertisers. Humiliation worked as a tool in previous movements-- women ridiculing sexist men-- but it can't work in this one. "If you sneer at someone for driving an obnoxious Hummer, he'll just go out and buy a bigger Hummer." To be treated with dignity you have to treat others with dignity. That was Martin Luther King's genius, and why he won. Fuller observed that enormous changes in what is assumed to be human nature can be accomplished in just a few generations. His great-grandparents would have participated in a lynching; his children date interracially. Democracy, one of the tools for defeating rankism, has been growing exponentially since the Magna Carta in 1215. Rankist behavior could be in full retreat in this century. It will take wide and steady effort. But there no guarantee. If society breaks down from a catastrophic pandemic, climate change, or nuclear war, everything goes backward.

### On failing to think long-term Sophisticated societies from time to time collapse utterly, often leaving traces of a civilization that was at a proud peak just before the fall. Other societies facing the same dangers figure out how to adapt around them, recover, and go on to further centuries of success. Tonight the author of _Collapse_ examines the differences between them… To an overflow house (our apologies to those who couldn't make it in!), Jared Diamond articulately spelled out how his best-selling book, _Collapse_ , took shape. At first it was going to be a book of 18 chapters chronicling 18 collapses of once-powerful societies-- the Mayans with the most advanced culture in the Americas, the Anasazi who built six-story skyscrapers at Chaco, the Norse who occupied Greenland for 500 years. But he wanted to contrast those with success stories like Tokugawa-era Japan, which wholly reversed its lethal deforestation, and Iceland, which learned to finesse a highly fragile and subtle environment. Diamond also wanted to study modern situations with clear connections to the ancient collapses. Rwanda losing millions in warfare caused by ecological overpressure. China-- "because of its size, China's problems are the world's problems." Australia, with its ambitions to overcome a horrible environmental history. And Diamond's beloved Montana, so seemingly pristine, so self-endangered on multiple fronts. He elaborated a bit on his book's account of the Easter Island collapse, where a society that could build 80-ton statues 33 feet high and drag them 12 miles, and who could navigate the Pacific Ocean to and from the most remote islands in the world, could also cut down their rich rain forest and doom themselves utterly. With no trees left for fishing canoes, the Easter Islanders turned to devouring each other. The appropriate insult to madden a member of a rival clan was, "The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth!" The population fell by 90% in a few years, and neither the society nor the island ecology have recovered in the 300 years since. Diamond reported that his students at UCLA tried to imagine how the guy who cut down the LAST tree in 1680 justified his actions. What did he say? Their candidate quotes: "Fear not. Our advancing technology will solve this problem." "This is MY tree, MY property! I can do what I want with it." "Your environmentalist concerns are exaggerated. We need more research." "Just have faith. God will provide." The question everyone asks, Diamond said, is, How can people be so dumb? It's a crucial question, with a complex answer. He said that sometimes it's a failure to perceive a problem, especially if it comes on very slowly, like climate change. Often it's a matter of conflicting interests with no resolution at a higher level than the interests-- warring clans, greedy industries. Or there may be a failure to examine and understand the past. Overall, it's a failure to think long term. That itself has many causes. One common one is that elites become insulated from the consequences of their actions. Thus the Mayan kings could ignore the soil erosion that was destroying their crops. Thus the American wealthy these days can enjoy private security, private education, and private retirement money. Thus America itself can act like a gated community in relation to the rest of the world, imagining that events in remote Somalia or Afghanistan have nothing to do with us. Isolation, Diamond declared, is never a solution to long-term problems. I'll add two items to what Diamond said in his talk. One good sharp question came from Mark Hertzgaard, who asked the speaker if he agreed "with Stewart Brand's view that the threat of climate change justifies adopting more nuclear power." To my surprise, Diamond said that he was persuaded by last year's "Bipartisan Strategy to Meet America's Energy Challenges" to treat nuclear as one important way to reduce the production of greenhouse gases. (In the commission's report, the environmentalist co-chair John Holdren wrote: ""Given the risks from climate change and the challenges that face all of the low-carbon and no-carbon supply options, it would be imprudent in the extreme not to try to keep the nuclear option open.") While I was driving Jared Diamond back to the El Drisco hotel, we got talking about how to separate the good actors from the bad actors among corporations. He said that third-party validation was absolutely essential. For instance, he studied the exemplary environmental behavior of Chevron in Papua New Guinea and reported on it in "Discover" magazine. As a result of that favorable report, validated by the World Wildlife Fund (where Diamond is a director), Chevron was able to land an immensely valuable contract with Norway, who was demanding environmentally responsible behavior from any oil company it would deal with. The new term taken seriously in oil and mining corporations, Diamond said, is "social license to operate." A company must earn that from the public in order to stay in business. And we the public must do our vigilant part so that "social license" means something.

### World squatter reality Humanity is urbanizing at a world-changing pace and in a world-changing way. A billion squatters are re-inventing their lives and their cities simultaneously. One of the few to experience the range of the phenomenon first hand is Robert Neuwirth, author of _Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World_. He took up residence in the scariest-seeming parts of squatter cities in Rio, Nairobi, Istanbul, and Mumbai. They vary profoundly. What Neuwirth found in the new "slums" is the future via the past. Hence his title: "The 21st-century Medieval City," Robert Neuwirth, For his talk "The 21st-century Medieval City," Robert Neuwirth took an overflow audience to "the cities of tomorrow," the developing-world shanty-towns where a billion people live now, and three billion (a third of humanity) are expected to be living by 2050. With vivid stories and slides (shown for the first time publicly), Neuwirth detailed how life works for the squatters in Rio, Nairobi, Istanbul, and Mumbai. It's hard for new arrivals-- 1.4 million a week around the world, 70 million a year. They throw together mud huts and make do with no water, no electricity, no transportation, no sewage, and barely room to turn around amid square miles of dense crowding. What brings them from the countryside is the hope of economic activity, and it abounds. Restaurants, beauty shops, bars, health clinics, food markets. No land is owned, but a whole low-cost real estate economy takes shape, managed without lawyers or government approval. (Hernando de Soto is wrong about land ownership being necessary for growth.) People build their house, a wall at a time when they have a bit of money, and then sell their roof space for another family to build a home there, and so on up, story after story. Devoid of legal land title there are prospering department stores and car dealerships in the older squatter towns of Istanbul. Forty percent of Istanbul, a city of 12 million, is squatter built. Rio is a famously dangerous city, for tourists and natives alike, except in the squatter neighborhoods where no police go. There security is provided by drug gangs, who have become surprisingly communitarian, building day care facilities and soccer fields along with providing safety on the "streets"-- narrow stairways kinking up the steep mountainside amid overhanging upper stories looking indeed medieval. There are wires and pipes everywhere carrying stolen electricity and water. (Enlightened power companies realized the thieves are potential customers and are making it easy for them to buy into legitimate service.) Neuwirth pointed out that squatters "do more with less than anybody." All that the rest of us have to do is meet them halfway for their new cities to thrive. There are two crucial ingredients for success. One is what the UN calls "security of tenure"-- confidence that you will not be arbitrarily evicted. The second is access to politics-- some avenue to growing legitimacy and participation in the larger city. This is the historic process, after all. All the great cities, including San Francisco, began as dense warrens of illegal huts. "It is a legitimate form of urban development."

### A world made of cities Cities are the human organizations with the greatest longevity but also the fastest rate of change. Just now the world is going massively and unstoppably urban (governments everywhere are trying to stop it, with zero success). In a globalized world, city states are re-emerging as a dominant economic player. Environmental consequences and opportunities abound. As the author of _How Buildings Learn_ I kept getting asked to give talks on "How Cities Learn." With a little research I found that cities do indeed "learn" (adapt) impressively, but what cities mainly do is teach. They teach civilization. I started with a spectacular video of a stadium in Philadelphia being blown up last year. The announcer on the video ends it, "Ladies and gentlemen, you have just witnessed history!" Indeed demolition is the history of cities. Cities are humanity's longest-lived organizations (Jericho dates back 10,500 years), but also the most constantly changing. Even in Europe they consume 2-3% of their material fabric a year, which means a wholly new city every 50 years. In the US and the developing world it's much faster. Every week in the world a million new people move to cities. In 2007 50% of our 6.5 billion population will live in cities. In 1800 it was 3% of the total population then. In 1900 it was 14%. In 2030 it's expected to be 61%. This is a tipping point. We're becoming a city planet. One of the effects of globalization is to empower cities more and more. Communications and economic activities bypass national boundaries. With many national governments in the developing world discredited, corporations and NGOs go direct to where the markets, the workers, and the needs are, in the cities. Every city is becoming a "world city." Many elites don't live in one city now, they live "in cities." Massive urbanization is stopping the population explosion cold. When people move to town, their birthrate drops immediately to the replacement level of 2.1 children/women, and keeps right on dropping. Whereas children are an asset in the countryside, they're a liability in the city. The remaining 2 billion people expected before world population peaks and begins dropping will all be urban dwellers (rural population is sinking everywhere). And urban dwellers have fewer children. Also more and more of the remaining population will be older people, who also don't have children. I conjured some with a diagram showing a pace-layered cross section of civilization, whose components operate at importantly different rates. Fashion changes quickly, Commerce less quickly, Infrastructure slower than that, then Governance, then Culture, and slowest is Nature. The fast parts learn, propose, and absorb shocks; the slow parts remember, integrate, and constrain. The fast parts get all the attention. The slow parts have all the power. I found the same diagram applies to cities. Indeed, as historians have pointed out, "Civilization is what happens in cities." The robustness of pace layering is how cities learn. Because cities particularly emphasize the faster elements, that is how they "teach" society at large. Speed of urban development is not necessarily bad. Many people deplored the huge Levittown tracts when they were created in the '40s and '50s, but they turned out to be tremendously adaptive and quickly adopted a local identity, with every house becoming different. The form of housing that resists local identity is gated communities, with their fierce regulations prohibiting anything interesting being done by home owners that might affect real estate value for the neighbors (no laundry drying outside!). If you want a new community to express local life and have deep adaptivity, emphasize the houses becoming homes rather than speculative real estate. Vast new urban communities is the main event in the world for the present and coming decades. The villages and countrysides of the entire world are emptying out. Why? I was told by Kavita Ramdas, head of the Global Fund for Women, "In the village, all there is for a woman is to obey her husband and family elder, pound grain, and sing. If she moves to town, she can get a job, start a business, and get education for her children. Her independence goes up, and her religious fundamentalism goes down." So much for the romanticism of villages. In reality, life in the country is dull, backbreaking, impoverished, restricted, exposed, and dangerous. Life in the city is exciting, less grueling, better paid, free, private, and safe. One-sixth of humanity, a billion people, now live in squatter cities ("slums") and millions more are on the way. Governments try everything to head them off, with total failure. Squatter cities are vibrant places. They're self-organized and self-constructed. Newcomers find whole support communities of family, neighbors, and highly active religious groups (Pentacostal Christians and Islamicists). The informal economy of the squatter cities is often larger than the formal economy. Slum-laden Mumbai (Bombay) provides one-sixth of India's entire Gross Domestic Product. The "agglomeration economies" of the burgeoning mega-cities leads to the highest wages, and that's what draws ever more people. So besides solving the population problem, the growing cities are curing poverty. What looks like huge cesspools of poverty in the slums are actually populations of people getting out of poverty as fast as they can. And cities also have an environmental dimension, which has not yet been well explored or developed. There has been some useful analysis of the "ecological footprint" that cities make on the landscape, incorporating the impacts of fuel use, waste, etc. but that analysis has not compared the per-person impact of city dwellers versus that of people in the countryside, who drive longer distances, use large quantities of material, etc. The effect of 1,000 people leaving a county of 1,000 people is much greater than that of the same 1,000 people showing up in a city of one million. Density of occupation in cities has many environmental advantages yet to be examined. At present there's little awareness among environmentalists that growing cities are where the action and opportunities are, and there's little scientific data being collected. I think a large-scale, long-term environmental strategy for urbanization is needed, two-pronged. One, take advantage of the emptying countryside (where the trees and other natural systems are growing back fast) and preserve, protect, and restore those landscape in a way that will retain their health when people eventually move back. Two, bear down on helping the growing cities to become more humane to live in and better related to the natural systems around them. Don't fight the squatters. Join them.

### The rainforests of home Spencer Beebe is founder and head of Ecotrust, the Portland-based organization that is setting in motion a permanently prosperous conservation economy for the entire Pacific Coast from San Francisco north to Alaska-- the temperate rain forest also known as "Salmon Nation." Spencer Beebe began his Seminar About Long-term Thinking last night with some quotes. First was from Janine Benyus, with her evoking of Nature as model, as measure, and as mentor for proper human biomimicry. Then came quotes from Jane Jacobs insisting that humans are so embedded in nature we can't imitate it, but only use its methods. (Spencer observed, "Nature not only bats last, it owns the stadium.") Finally, Dave Foreman of Earth First! once was asked what's the best thing an individual can do for the environment, and his advice was "Stay home." (That was challenged later.) Our home, said Spencer, is a coastal temperate rain forest, the largest in the world (they're rare.) It is 2,000 miles long north to south, spanning far more latitudes than any other uniform environment. (That may help make it robust against climate change.) It has more standing biomass than any other natural system, three to four times that of tropical rain forests. Temperate rain forests are shaped by rain through 80% of the year, with no summer drought, hence few fires, hence huge and old trees. A red cedar can live 1,500 years. Since the forest is relatively recent, just 5,000 years old, that's just five generations of cedars. It is all salmon country. Ecotrust has named the region "Salmon Nation." Spencer noted that European impact on the region has been to drastically reduce the forests, the salmon, and the native tribes, with a gradient of damage from south to north, from here to Alaska. The greatest damage comes from clear-cutting the forest. With vivid pictures and economic analysis he showed the much greater long-term yield that can be accomplished with biomimetic forest practices, expanding on the storm-damage patchiness that occurs naturally. Thus selective logging with patch cuts and thinning brings out plenty of marketable timber but leaves a fully intact and healthy forest producing an ever-growing harvest of jobs, clear water, carbon capture, and rich biodiversity. Ecotrust has an astonishing array of projects-- working with the Haisla tribe in Canada to permanently protect the only remaining unlogged watershed on the Pacific coast; working with the variety of groups in Clayaquot Sound in BC to convert the area to an "eco-economy;" spending $12-million on rebuilding a historic warehouse in Portland, Oregon, to generate an urban center for eco-activities; running vast geographic inventories of the whole region; publishing an array of inspirational and technical works (our book table sold out all the Ecotrust publications)… "Societies do what societies think," said Spencer. He quoted Jane Jacobs and Kevin Kelly to the effect that "Systems make themselves up as they go along. That means you don't have to figure out everything in advance, you can just jump in." In the Q & A, Paul Hawken asked how Ecotrust was able to so quickly win the trust and active collaboration of tribal groups like the Haisla. Spencer said, "You just listen. I went fishing with them. They've been here for ten or twelve thousand years. You respect that knowledge and work with it." Later at dinner Kevin Kelly disputed Spencer's assumption that humans are wholly immersed in Nature-- "I think we're just partly immersed, and that's what makes us human and effective." I linked Kevin's question to mine wondering about the "Stay home" admonition. Spencer brought passionate perspective and array of skills to saving the "rainforests of home" by having LEFT his five-generation home in Oregon, to work first as a Peace Corps volunteer in Central America, then as a professional environmentalist saving tropical rain forests for decades. He didn't just think globally, he acted globally, THEN returned and acted locally to great and satisfying effect.

### Ancient American politics Roger Kennedy, the former head of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History and former Director of the US National Park Service, is so eloquent that Walt Kelly based a "Pogo" character on him (the bear P.T. Bridgeport, whose speech balloons are circus posters). Roger Kennedy's most driving current interest is the long-term effects of long-term abuse of natural systems, and he means seriously long term. Kennedy knows politics. For decades a major player himself in Washington DC, he has written redefining biographies of Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and Aaron Burr. Kennedy knows history. Besides writing and hosting a number of television series on American history, he wrote _Rediscovering America_ and _Hidden Cities: The Discovery and Loss of Ancient North American Civilization_. And Kennedy knows natural systems. As a highly popular Director of the National Park Service, he pushed the whole Park System toward greater emphasis on science. Roger Kennedy also found the mountain in Nevada where The Long Now Foundation aims to build the 10,000-year Clock. In this talk he defines the continental frame of the Clock. Most of Roger Kennedy's audience Friday night had no idea that a multi-millennia sequence of major cultures, cities, and earth monuments of enormous size once occupied the Mississippi valley and areas in Ohio and the Southeast. They had never heard of the vast ruins at places such as Poverty Point and Cahokia. But American founding fathers Washington and Jefferson knew of the ancient works and honored them with new-made earth mounds at Mt. Vernon and Monticello. The continent was seething with activity before whites arrived. The native woodland farmers of the Great Lakes who were driven west into the plains by the Chippewayan tribes were transforming into fierce horseback warriors known as the Sioux. The Iroquois League was building into a major military empire. Apaches and Navahos were streaming down from the northwest and challenging the dry farming Pueblo tribes. From time to time whole areas, such as Ohio, had their carrying capacity exceeded and emptied out of people and were afterward known as "cursed" regions. Misuse of natural systems was common of old on the continent. It has accelerated lately. Roger focussed in particular on the new levels of hazard to people from wildfire, caused by "sprawling into danger"-- the growth of human habitation (often government subsidized) into known highly flammable environments. The situation is akin to what was finally figured out about flood plains. Roger expects some disasters with thousands killed unless the mechanisms of prudence are figured out. Every small increment of climate warming will greatly increase the danger. At the intense dinner with Sponsors later, Roger urged a tax revolt against the government paying for people's losses to wildfire. If private insurers won't give coverage in some flammable areas, the government should not either. Roger jolted the San Francisco audience with frequent Christian quotes and allusions, noting the MORAL reverence of natural systems advocated by Genesis, by Saint Francis, and by the great New England pilgrim preacher Jonathan Edwards. Roger noted that Americans occasionally get their nerve up and change the nation's behavior at a profound level. In 1830 most American men went to bed drunk. By a decade later, the alcoholism had been cut by 60%, without draconian laws. In the 1860s moral force overcame economic force, and slavery was abolished, at great cost eventually deemed wholly worth it. Yet another gathering of nerve is needed, Roger opined, to deeply adjust our behavior in relation to the continent's natural systems. He sees signs that the moral strength needed is indeed building.

James Carse, author of 'Finite and Infinite Games,' discusses the relationship between religion and war. He explores the concepts of finite and infinite games, reflects on belief, religion, and warfare, and delves into the longevity of religions and the concept of non-identity. The speaker also discusses maintaining balance, uncovering true selves, and explores Freud's concept of the unconscious and ontological questions about existence.

### What long life means Ken Dychtwald gave a terrific talk Friday evening to a standing-room audience on "The Consequences of Human Life Extension." The growing--and soon overwhelming--prevalence of the old in developed nations is leading to a "new old." Ken described meeting a bright-eyed apparent 70-year-old who talked about his gym workouts. "I asked when he started, and he told me, 'Oh, a couple years ago when I was 100. I'm getting in shape for the Senior Olympics.' When he competed he not only won every event he entered, he set the World Record. He was alone in his age category-- a two-foot shot put was the best ever. That's typical. Everything the new old do is a first in human history." Ken gave an expertly graphic presentation, but much is quotable… "Of all the human who have ever lived over 65, two-thirds are now alive now." "I went to a conference of cosmetic surgeons. All their wives looked identical." "Heart disease kills more people than all the other leading causes of death put together, including cancer. Cure heart disease and you create 20 million demented people. Our health system is not geared for chronic disease." "In the US the old used to be the poorest segment of society. Now they're the richest. For instance, they buy 80% of luxury travel. So why are they still getting discounts?" "People vote their age. 30% of 30-year-olds vote. 50% of 50-year-olds vote. 70% of 70-year-olds vote. We have a gerontocracy." "The old do the least volunteering of any age group, and for every 11 cents that children get from government, the old demand and get a dollar. The concept of giving back is still foreign to them. If the now-aging Baby Boomers decide to reverse that, they'll earn the title, "The Grandest Generation." "What people really want, and what they're going to get, is longer HEALTH span. We should be asking now, What is the PURPOSE of longer life?"