Posts Tagged ‘long now foundation’
“For himself (and only for a short time) a man may postpone enlightenment in what he ought to know, but to renounce it for posterity is to injure and trample on the rights of mankind”*…
The 10,000-year clock is neither a ‘frightening’ ‘distraction,’ as its critics scorn, nor the ‘admirable objective’ its fans claim. It’s something else — a monument to long-term thinking that can unlock a deeper and more thoughtful spirit of interpretive patience. Vincent Ialenti considers The Clock of the Long Now…
… Stonehenge was not (to our knowledge) created with the intent of drawing people to think about the far future. However, like the clock, it can also relay a few relatively coherent messages across time. Its monolithic slabs were designed to align with the summer solstice’s sunrise and the winter solstice’s sunset. The clock was likewise designed to synchronize each day at solar noon.
As a result, the architectures of both can exhibit, for future societies, evidence of deliberate human-astronomical calibration. These features could, when encountered by successive generations, foster an ongoing awareness of humanity’s enduring attunement to the heavens. This could serve as a transgenerational reminder that, in the deeper time horizons of the universe, all of us humans are, ultimately, contemporaries — living and dying by the same star.
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Long Now’s atmosphere of unhinged creativity and unapologetic eco-pragmatism provided a near-constant drip of bold, stimulating, outside-the-box ideas. There is, to my knowledge, no better setting for pondering the planetary challenges of climate adaptation, nuclear weapons risk and sociopolitical division we will all need to face in the years ahead.
If [Clock designer Danny] Hillis’ clock is a monument to this, then surely it stands for something important. Yet to appreciate why, one must first commit to approaching all timebound commentaries on the clock — including this one — with a patient, non-tempocentric, interpretive ambivalence. Five thousand years from now, after all, it may well be captivating millions, just as Stonehenge does today. What’s certain is that neither its designers nor its critics will live to find out.
The Long Now Foundation (@longnow) and its monumental incitement to take the long view: “Keeping Time Into The Great Beyond,” from @vincent_ialenti in @NoemaMag.
* Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?
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As we resolve to be good ancestors, we might spare a thought for another long-term thinker, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin; he died on this date in 1955. A Jesuit theologian, philosopher, geologist, and paleontologist, he conceived the idea of the Omega Point (a maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which he believed the universe was evolving) and developed Vladimir Vernadsky‘s concept of noosphere. Teilhard took part in the discovery of Peking Man, and wrote on the reconciliation of faith and evolutionary theory. His thinking on both these fronts was censored during his lifetime by the Catholic Church (in particular for its implications for “original sin”); but in 2009, they lifted their ban.
“The speed of time is 1 hour per hour, no matter what else is going on in the universe”*…
The most commonly-used noun in the English language is, according to the Oxford English Corpus, time. Its frequency is partly due to its multiplicity of meanings, and partly due to its use in common phrases. Above all, “time” is ubiquitous because what it refers to dictates all aspects of human life, from the hour we rise to the hour we sleep and most everything in between.
But what is time? The irony, of course, is that it’s hard to say. Trying to pin down its meaning using words can oftentimes feel like grasping at a wriggling fish. The 4th century Christian theologian Saint Augustine sums up the dilemma well:
But what in speaking do we refer to more familiarly and knowingly than time? And certainly we understand when we speak of it; we understand also when we hear it spoken of by another. What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.
Most of us are content to live in a world where time is simply what a clock reads. The interdisciplinary artist Alicia Eggert is not. Through co-opting clocks and forms of commercial signage (billboards, neon signs, inflatable nylon of the kind that animates the air dancers in the parking lots of auto dealerships), Eggert makes conceptual art that invites us to experience the dimensions of time through the language we use to talk about it.
Her art draws on theories of time from physics and philosophy, like the inseparability of time and space and the difference between being and becoming. She expresses these oftentimes complex ideas through simple words and phrases we make use of in our everyday lives, thereby making them tangible and relatable…
From Ahmed Kabil (@ahmedkabil) and The Long Now Foundation, a (wonderfully-illustrated) appreciation of the art of Alicia Eggert (@AliciaEggert) and the questions it addresses: “How Long is Now?“
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As we tackle time, we might recall that it was on this date in 585 BCE that a solar eclipse occurred. According to The Histories of Herodotus, the Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus accurately predicted the event. (If Herodotus’s account is accurate, this eclipse is the earliest recorded as being known in advance of its occurrence.)
According to Herodotus, the appearance of the eclipse was interpreted as an omen, and interrupted a battle in a long-standing war between the Medes and the Lydians. The fighting immediately stopped, and they agreed to a truce. Because astronomers can calculate the dates of historical eclipses, Isaac Asimov described this battle as the earliest historical event whose date is known with precision to the day, and called the prediction “the birth of science”; any case “the eclipse of Thales” is one of the cardinal dates from which other dates can be calculated.
“The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope”*…
After this post, your correspondent is heading into his customary Holiday Hiatus; regular service will resume in early 2021. In the meantime, a piece to ponder…
“Civilizations with long nows look after things better,” says Brian Eno. “In those places you feel a very strong but flexible structure which is built to absorb shocks and in fact incorporate them.”undefined You can imagine how such a process could evolve—all civilizations suffer shocks; only the ones that absorb the shocks survive. That still doesn’t explain the mechanism.
In recent years a few scientists (such as R. V. O’Neill and C. S. Holling) have been probing the same issue in ecological systems: how do they manage change, how do they absorb and incorporate shocks? The answer appears to lie in the relationship between components in a system that have different change-rates and different scales of size. Instead of breaking under stress like something brittle, these systems yield as if they were soft. Some parts respond quickly to the shock, allowing slower parts to ignore the shock and maintain their steady duties of system continuity.
Consider the differently paced components to be layers. Each layer is functionally different from the others and operates somewhat independently, but each layer influences and responds to the layers closest to it in a way that makes the whole system resilient.
From the fastest layers to the slowest layers in the system, the relationship can be described as follows:
All durable dynamic systems have this sort of structure. It is what makes them adaptable and robust…
Stewart Brand (@stewartbrand) unpacks a concept that he popularized in his remarkable book How Buildings Learn and that animates the work of The Long Now Foundation, which he co-founded– pace layers, which provide many-leveled corrective, stabilizing feedback throughout the system. It is in the contradictions between these layers that civilization finds its surest health: “Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning.” Do click through and read in full…
* Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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As we take the long view, we might recall that it was on this date in 1872 that HMS Challenger set sail from Portsmouth. Modified for scientific exploration, its activities over the next four years, known as The Challenger Expedition, laid the foundation for the entire academic and research discipline of oceanography.
No habla Tamahaq…
Further to “How Quickly We Forget…” and the all-too-real dangers of data loss through the withering of the systems, the “lexicons,” and the people needed to translate and understand that data…
It’s estimated that fifty to ninety percent of the world’s languages will disappear in the next century, many with little or no significant documentation… so much for the utility of any news archives in those tongues, or for access to their cultural heritage via their fiction or drama.
Into the breach, The Long Now Foundation and its Rosetta Project. A National Science Digital Library collection, the Rosetta Archive now serves nearly 100,000 pages of material documenting over 2,500 languages—the largest resource of its kind on the Net.
…another reason (as if one needed another reason) to love librarians.
(Interested readers can see/hear a Long Now Seminar talk by linguist Daniel Everett, recounting his experiences with the Piraha in the Amazon (an experience that has revolutionized linguistics) at the Long Now site. Concerned readers can join your correspondent in supporting The Foundation for Endangered Languages.)
As we sharpen our sibilants, let us spare a grateful thought for Louis and Auguste Lumiere, who unveiled their “cinematograph” publicly (albeit, in a private screening) for the first time on this date in 1895. The French brothers had patented the combination movie camera-projector the month before, and went on to demonstrate it with the first film newsreels– and with what most consider the world’s first movie, “Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory.”
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