Long Now Blog

Definitely. A few years back Jesse Ausubel gave a great talk in SF on this: http://blog.longnow.org/02015/02/06/jesse-ausubel-seminar-media/ A core point was that economic growth has now decoupled from many resources. Computers are an obvious aid here; look at how much time we spend in front of one screen or another. My laptop is hugely valuable to me, but it took something like 1g of materials per hour of use to build it, and uses way less power than the lightbulb I previously would have read a book by.

Oh Graeber's book is out! Lovely! I have been passing around his essay by the same name for some time now. Should be a good intro to the book http://blog.longnow.org/2010/04/22/debt-the-first-five-thousand-years/ I would also recommend anything by David Harvey. Start out with this animated version of one of his talks: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOP2V_np2c0 Then move on to his Capital vol. 1 lecture series. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBazR59SZXk There is also a book format of his reading guide

There is also the connection between the Long Now project and Neal Stephenson’s excellent novel Anathem: http://blog.longnow.org/2008/07/21/anathem-and-long-now/

The sun getting bright is different than a meteorite impact. The latter has a Poisson distribution; a big one could hit next year, and the one following that in 10, but it also could be many thousands of years before the next big hit. On the other hand, if our understanding of astrophysics is even remotely correct, the sun will not get too bright for the first 100,000 years. So, it makes perfect sense to not worry about the sun now, as it will not happen soon. As to the limit: the Dutch design their sea defences for “once in a 10,000 year” events and their river defences for “once in 1,250 year” events (http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2005/2005_30-39/2005-39/pdf/43-4… http://blog.longnow.org/02011/03/09/the-10000-year-storm/) I also expect some governments have spent time thinking of what to do in case of impending “once in 500 million years” events (probably lumped together with all smaller ‘end of life on earth’ events. The big question here will be: (when) do you tell the public?)

Precis of a new detail the last HN post in 2010. They will be seeking suggestions from all over the world for a Library of Ltility http://blog.longnow.org/02011/04/25/the-library-of-utility/ Seems to me as if it might be fun to come up with some arguments for what might constitute an optimally efficient booklist. "It would be a very selective library. It would not contain the world’s great literature, or varied accounts of history, or deep knowledge of ethnic wonders, or speculations about the future. It has no records of past news, no children’s books, no tomes on philosophy. It contains only seeds. Seeds of utilitarian know-how. How to recreate the infrastructure and technology of civilization so far "It is an interesting thought exercise to ask yourself what information you might want if you had to truly start over. "And in our forthcoming Salon space at Fort Mason Center, we’ll house approximately 3,500 volumes in a floor-to-ceiling library featuring carefully selected books that could be used to help restart civilization. We are not trying to be apocalyptic or at all predictive, but the conversation that is inspired by this exercise seems to be endless and valuable. "We will collaboratively curate this corpus with Long Now’s members and the public. We understand that by definition we ourselves will have a western-centric viewpoint of what might be collected, but as the project gets going we plan to seek submissions that represent views from as many cultural…

Oh, it's just a bit of fun: https://blog.longnow.org/02013/12/31/long-now-years-five-digit-dates-a…

I would have thought he is a crackpot of the Germanic variety (hyper “rational”) of Argentine extraction... but there is such a thing as Long Now Years https://blog.longnow.org/02013/12/31/long-now-years-five-digit-dates-a…

I was going to give you the usual "now there are 15 different standards" but this is actually really well thought out. How does it handle leading zeros in the year, like Long Now likes to do? https://blog.longnow.org/02013/12/31/long-now-years-five-digit-dates-a…

I just saw an e-fluencer use it, so I decided I might as well also. No hidden agenda here. But yes, that's the intention behind the action here: https://blog.longnow.org/02013/12/31/long-now-years-five-digit-dates-a…

Granted, it's a very special ship. And 50,000 acres of forest is its own reward. The New College At Oxford story of replacing the oak beams in the dining hall is more fact than legend (though it's usually told in a very Just-So way that's a little too tidy), and it's not alone in this sort of husbandry: https://blog.longnow.org/02014/12/31/humans-and-trees-in-long-term-par…

Also relevant is Long Now's "Manual for Civilization" https://blog.longnow.org/02014/02/06/manual-for-civilization-begins/

> Side question, why do you write your years with a leading zero? I've never seen that before and it has quite a cognitive strain for me. That's likely a Long Now reference: https://blog.longnow.org/02013/12/31/long-now-years-five-digit-dates-a…

The 5-place date is meant to draw attention to a longer view of time, a position advocated for by the Long Now Foundation.[0] [0] https://blog.longnow.org/02013/12/31/long-now-years-five-digit-dates-a…

A project in a similar vein https://blog.longnow.org/02014/02/06/manual-for-civilization-begins/

Changed from https://blog.longnow.org/02019/09/01/the-amazon-is-not-the-earths-lung… Thanks.

Many Swadesh lists are micro-etched on the Rosetta Disk made by the Long Now's "Rosetta Project" - an effort to preserve and document as many languages as possible. https://blog.longnow.org/02010/09/24/swadesh-list-data-now-re-enabled-…

Long Now charter member here: Yes, they try to do that everywhere as part of their "long term thinking" mission. http://blog.longnow.org/02013/12/31/long-now-years-five-digit-dates-an…

The foundation claims that Anathem was inspired by this project: http://blog.longnow.org/02008/07/21/anathem-and-long-now/

The way I understand it, long term thinking is neither about the future nor about predicting it or planning something significant for it; it is rather a thought model which tries to extend beyond the timeframes humans might feel at home with cognitively. An off-the-cuff, superficial yet interesting example is the lack of a common word in English language to express units of time longer than 1000. This style of thinking sometimes has its benefits, like gathering together a community to build a mechanical clock, create a manual for restarting a civilization[1], or write a non-fiction book about "earth without people"[2]. It's just an interesting intellectual, cultural endeavor. [1]: http://blog.longnow.org/category/manual-for-civilization/ [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Without_Us.

Yeah, "decent care" means "kept away from moisture, fire, and bugs." Such care can be difficult in the long term, but yields results like the beautiful 700 year-old woodwork in this English cathedral. (And of course the comments mention the Buddhist temple Hōryū-ji.) http://blog.longnow.org/02009/01/12/how-long-can-wood-last/

The Long Now foundation did something along these lines a few years back[1]. I'd probably go for a bit of 60s SF for my "inspirational" choices. Have a soft spot for John Seymour's "Practical Self Sufficiency" too. [1] http://blog.longnow.org/02014/02/06/manual-for-civilization-begins/

If you're in San Francisco, at The Interval, they have a chalkboard drawing robot similar to Chalkbot: http://blog.longnow.org/02014/03/13/interval-chalk-board-robot/ Also, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpQzIaH90f8 These projects are really cool.

How about 2,000 ~ 10,000 years? http://blog.longnow.org/02008/08/20/very-long-term-backup/

> There is no write and forget media as far as I can tell. Sure there is, you just micro-engrave it onto a nickel disc with a laser... http://blog.longnow.org/02009/05/21/what-13500-pages-micro-etched-into… Edit: Also paper. Low-acid paper in dry cabinets keeps a long, long time.

And Anne Neuberger blathers about reaching some new "social contract:" http://blog.longnow.org/02014/08/11/the-nsa-reaches-out/ It would be like a social contract with a venomous snake.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb ( 2014 July 1. ) : "The latest version of our precautionary principle, with application to GMOs, refined thanks to more fallacies in arguments countering it. For discussion before we move to the final version." https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIbGFzOXF5UUN3N2c/edit --- "What people miss is that the modification of crops impacts everyone and exports the error from the local to the global. I do not wish to pay —or have my descendants pay — for errors by executives of Monsanto. We should exert the precautionary principle there —our non-naive version — simply because we would discover errors after considerable damage." http://blog.longnow.org/02013/07/08/the-artangel-longplayer-letters-na…

This "Hang this up in your time machine" poster is a similar take: http://blog.longnow.org/02009/04/14/all-you-need-to-jump-start-civiliz…

I like the direction that this author is going. He's certainly not the only person to be thinking along these lines. The Long Now Foundation in particular seems to be invested in pursuing answers to some of the overarching questions posed by this column. One recent post on the Foundation's blog caught my eye: "Kevin Kelly’s Selected Books for the Manual for Civilization" (http://blog.longnow.org/02014/03/18/kevin-kelly-books/), in which Kevin Kelly (author of Cool Tools) offers his additions to the Foundation's growing "corpus which could sustain or rebuild civilization."