## 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...
Oct 21, 2014•1 hr 31 min
## 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? ...
Sep 17, 2014•1 hr 36 min
## 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...
Aug 07, 2014•1 hr 29 min
### 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...
Jul 17, 2014•1 hr 21 min
### 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 cha...
Jun 11, 2014•1 hr 39 min
### 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 ...
May 21, 2014•1 hr 36 min
### 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 corpo...
Apr 23, 2014•1 hr 34 min
### Government as radical, patient VC The iPhone, Mazzucato pointed out, is held up as a classic example of world-changing innovation coming from business. Yet every feature of the iPhone was created, originally, by multi-decade government-funded research. From DARPA came the microchip, the Internet, the micro hard drive, the DRAM cache, and Siri. From the Department of Defense came GPS, cellular technology, signal compression, and parts of the liquid crystal display and multi-touch screen (join...
Mar 25, 2014•1 hr 38 min
### Make the next legal U-turn "Bitching Betty," they call the robotic voice of the car’s GPS guidance system. Eno and Hillis, on their road trips, always become so engrossed in conversation that they get lost—one time, driving to Monterey they wound up in Sacramento, 200 miles wrong. So they turn on GPS, and Betty joins the conversation with helpful advice about U-turns. Hillis observed, "The GPS is very good at giving you instructions to get someplace. But Brian and I have no idea where we’re ...
Jan 22, 2014•1 hr 29 min
### American objects Figuratively holding up one museum item after another, Kurin spun tales from them. (The Smithsonian has 137 million objects; he displayed just thirty or so.) The Burgess Shale shows fossilized soft-tissue creatures ("very early North Americans") from 500 million years ago. The Smithsonian’s Giant Magellan Telescope being built in Chile will, when it is completed in 2020, look farther into the universe, and thus farther into the past than any previous telescope---12.8 billion...
Nov 19, 2013•1 hr 22 min
### Mighty daring on Mars Engineer Steltzner took his rapt audience striding with him through the wrong solutions for landing a one-ton rover on Mars that his team worked through a decade ago. Previous rovers had weighed 50 pounds, 385 pounds. This traveling “Mars Science Laboratory” would weigh 1,984 pounds. The old airbag trick wouldn’t work this time, nor would a palette, or legs. After exhausting everything that looked reasonable but could not work, the team settled on a mini-rocket “sky cra...
Oct 16, 2013•1 hr 30 min
### Starship destiny We now know, Schwartz began, that nearly all of the billions of stars in our galaxy have planets. If we can master interstellar travel, "there’s someplace to go." Our own solar system is pretty boring---one planet is habitable, the rest are "like Antarctica without ice" or worse. So this last year a number of researchers and visionaries have begun formal investigation into the practicalities of getting beyond our own solar system. It is an extremely hard problem, for two pri...
Sep 18, 2013•1 hr 17 min
### On taking thought Before a packed house, Kahneman began with the distinction between what he calls mental “System 1”---fast thinking, intuition---and “System 2”---slow thinking, careful consideration and calculation. System 1 operates on the illusory principle: _What you see is all there is_. System 2 studies the larger context. System 1 works fast (hence its value) but it is unaware of its own process. Conclusions come to you without any awareness of how they were arrived at. System 2 proce...
Aug 14, 2013•1 hr 18 min
### How the world keeps ending “This Earth is a story teller,” Childs began. “And it is not a stable place to live. It is always ending. We think of endings as sudden, but it is always a process.” For his book _Apocalyptic Planet_ he sought out some of the world’s most terminal-feeling places, where everything is reduced to fundamental elements in total upheaval or total stasis, and a visitor is overwhelmed by the scale and power of a planet going about its planetary business. In Yosemite Valley...
Jul 30, 2013•1 hr 36 min
### The last killer asteroid Kevin Kelly wrote the following about Ed Lu’s Seminar About Long-term Thinking (SALT) titled “Anthropocene Astronomy: Thwarting Dangerous Asteroids Begins with Finding Them”... Last night's SALT talk was one of the most important ones we ever hosted. For several reasons: 1. Nine years ago, SALT hosted Rusty Schweickart's talk on the long term asteroid problem, wherein he presented the problem and challenge. Now nine years later, Ed Lu presented a very workable soluti...
Jun 19, 2013•1 hr 30 min
### De-extinction begins The new tools of synthetic biology, I began, are about to liberate conservation in a spectacular way. It is becoming possible to bring some extinct species back to life. A project within Long Now called “Revive & Restore” is pushing to make de-extinction a reality, starting with the fabled passenger pigeon and moving on to the woolly mammoth. The project’s director, Ryan Phelan, organized a series of three conferences bringing together molecular biologists and conser...
May 22, 2013•1 hr 30 min
### A world of convergence In education, Negroponte explained, there’s a fundamental distinction between "instructionism" and "constructionism." "Constructionism is learning by discovery, by doing, by making. Instructionism is learning by being told." Negroponte’s lifelong friend Seymour Papert noted early on that debugging computer code is a form of "learning about learning" and taught it to young children. Thus in 2000 when Negroponte left the Media Lab he had founded in 1985, he set out upon ...
Apr 18, 2013•1 hr 32 min
### The digital big bang When the digital universe began, in 1951 in New Jersey, it was just 5 kilobytes in size. "That's just half a second of MP3 audio now," said Dyson. The place was the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. The builder was engineer Julian Bigelow. The instigator was mathematician John von Neumann. The purpose was to design hydrogen bombs. Bigelow had helped develop signal processing and feedback (cybernetics) with Norbert Wiener. Von Neumann was applying ideas from Alan T...
Mar 20, 2013•1 hr 31 min
### Desktop manufacturing changes world We’re now entering the third industrial revolution, Anderson said. The first one, which began with the spinning jenny in 01776, doubled the human life span and set population soaring. From the demographic perspective, "it’s as if nothing happened before the Industrial Revolution." The next revolution was digital. Formerly industrial processes like printing were democratized with desktop publishing. The "cognitive surplus" of formerly passive consumers was ...
Feb 20, 2013•1 hr 30 min
### Easter Island reconsidered In the most isolated place on Earth a tiny society built world-class monuments. Easter Island (Rapa Nui) is 1,000 miles from the nearest Pacific island, 3,000 miles from the nearest continent. It is just six by ten miles in size, with no running streams, terrible soil, occasional droughts, and a relatively barren ocean. Yet there are 900 of the famous statues (moai), weighing up to 75 tons and 40 feet high. Four hundred of them were moved many miles from where they...
Jan 18, 2013•1 hr 41 min
### Light and beauty “The naturalist’s task,” Warshall began, “is to observe without human-centered thoughts and human-centered agendas, to observe with a Gaian perspective and with the perspective of the organisms you’re watching. The naturalist considers all species in space/time as equally beautiful.” There’s a connection between art and science---between the poetic organization of thought and the pragmatic organization of thought. Light operates at a distance. That inspires anticipation, whi...
Nov 29, 2012•1 hr 58 min
### Preservation Without Permission Their video showed clandestine urban “infiltration” (trespassing) at its most creative. Paris’s Urban Experiment group (UX), now in their fourth decade, have a restoration branch called Untergunther. They evade authorities to carry out secret preservation projects on what they call “nonvisible heritage.” Being clandestine, they do not reveal their activities except for instances that become publicized in the media; then they reveal everything to set the record...
Nov 14, 2012•1 hr 34 min
### The Long Peace “Nothing can be more gentle than man in his primitive state,” declared Rousseau in the 18th century. A century earlier, Thomas Hobbes wrote, “In the state of nature the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The evidence shows that Rousseau was wrong and Hobbes was right, said Pinker. Forensic archaeology (“CSI Paleolithic”) reveals that 15 percent of prehistoric skeletons show signs of violent trauma. Ethnographic vital statistics of surviving non-state so...
Oct 09, 2012•1 hr 34 min
### The global mind is us, augmented As a student of the classics at Harvard in the 1970s, O’Reilly was impressed by a book titled _The Discovery of the Mind: In Greek Philosophy and Literature_ , by Bruno Snell. In the four centuries between Homer and classical Athens, wrote Snell, the Greeks invented the modern human mind, with its sense of free will and agency. (In Homer, for example, no one makes a decision.) O’Reilly sees a parallel with the emerging of a global mind in this century. Global...
Sep 06, 2012•1 hr 36 min
### War in heaven "The _Book of Revelation_ is war literature," Pagels explained. John of Patmos was a war refugee, writing sixty years after the death of Jesus and twenty years after 60,000 Roman troops crushed the Jewish rebellion in Judea and destroyed Jerusalem. In the nightmarish visions of John’s prophecy, Rome is Babylon, the embodiment of monstrous power and decadence. That power was expressed by Rome as religious. John would have seen in nearby Ephesus massive propaganda sculptures depi...
Aug 21, 2012•1 hr 16 min
### Who governs digital trust? Doctorow framed the question this way: "Computers are everywhere. They are now something we put our whole bodies into---airplanes, cars---and something we put into our bodies---pacemakers, cochlear implants. They HAVE to be trustworthy." Sometimes humans are not so trustworthy, and programs may override you: "I can’t let you do that, Dave." (Reference to the self-protective insane computer Hal in Kubrick’s film "2001." That time the human was more trustworthy than ...
Aug 01, 2012•1 hr 29 min
### City-based global governance Sovereign nation states have conspicuously failed to cooperate well enough to deal with increasingly global problems such as climate change, environmental degradation, and organized crime, Barber said. Nations focus on their borders, which are seen as competitive zero-sum games. “But if we shift our gaze, in thinking about global governance, from nation states to cities, things suddenly become possible that seemed impossible. Cities are apart from one another, se...
Jun 06, 2012•1 hr 28 min
### Making plastic even better Plastic is so new, Freinkel began, that among all the objects preserved in the sunken _Titanic_ , none are synthetic plastic, because there was hardly any available in 1912. Natural plastic, however, was a familiar material. Amber was popular. Rubber was essential (all plant cellulose is made of long-chain polymers). Ivory for everything from billiard balls to piano keys was in such high demand that an 1867 paper warned about the looming extinction of elephants. Th...
May 23, 2012•1 hr 28 min
### Bio-blender Earth Tumultuous effects resulted and continue to result from the massive mixing of the world’s biota when European ships reconnected the American continent to the rest of the world. Mann traced several of the cascading consequences of "the biggest ecological convulsion since the death of the dinosaurs." The first momentous change came from microbial exchange---20 lethal diseases came from Europe to the Americas while only one (syphilis) went the other way. North America, which h...
Apr 24, 2012•1 hr 40 min
### The real creation story “History makes no sense without prehistory,“ Wilson declared, “and prehistory makes no sense without biology.” He began by noting that every religion has a different creation story, all of them necessarily based on ignorance of what really happened in the past. Religions thus can’t give valid answers on the meaning of life---Gauguin’s questions: “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?” Philosophy gave up on the questions long ago. The task was left to...
Apr 21, 2012•1 hr 33 min
