Bertrand Russell speaks to the future

Construction of the "clock of the long now" has commenced, time to think seriously about what we mean for it to say to remote posterity. Bertrand Russell gave this question some thought:

purpose

On a day when I found myself compelled to visit a famed oak tree, a couple of miles from school ("sprouted in the 1770s, over sixty inches in diameter, considered to be middle-aged")-  wondering about its power to symbolize a longer Now- I also found myself explicating the Taoist conception of death as reconfiguration (not termination) with Freddie the Leaf. Simple, profound. (That story Alexander Rose repeated about the 500-year replacement beam oak tree at New College in Oxford, I'm sorry to report, apparently is an "embroidery"-but still a good story.)

"What's a purpose?" Freddie had asked.

"A reason for being," Daniel had answered. "To make things more pleasant for others is a reason for being. To make shade for old people who come to escape the heat of their homes is a reason for being. To provide a cool place for children to come and play. To fan with our leaves the picnickers who come to eat on checkered tablecloths. These are all the reasons for being."

                ***

"Each of us is different. We have had different experiences. We have faced the sun differently. We have cast shade differently. Why should we not have different colors?" Daniel said matter-of-factly. Daniel told Freddie that this wonderful season was called Fall.

                ***

"Where will we go when we die?"

"No one knows for sure. That's the great mystery!"

"Will we return in the Spring?"

"We may not, but Life will." 

There are early glitches in this old video, but they're worth "tolerating." 

The Clock

Long Now Foundation's Alexander Rose explains, via prototype, the Clock of the Long Now:



[Sunday Morning]

1. The part of himself that he wants to preserve for the future, Danny Hillis say, is the part that _______...

2. If we want to contribute to a tenable future, says Brian Eno, we have to reach what frame of mind with respect to our descendants? What must we extend far forward in time? What must we first do,what must we create, in order to begin to create that frame of mind?

3. Stewart Brand hopes the Clock of the Long Now will do what for time?  (By analogy with what?)

4. The least selfish, most constructive attitude we could adopt would enact what Zen prescription, and in what kind of time?

5. Danny Hillis defines technology as _____...?

6. Vernor Vinge applied the metaphor of a ___________ to human events, according to which a techno-rapture is forecast for the year _____ (give or take a few years). Stewart Brand calls it _________.

7. Louise Boulding proposes defining the present as ________; Brand says we're at civilization's ________ (beginning, middle, end).

8. On the scale of eons, says Freeman Dyson, the unit of survival is the _______ (culture, species, web of life); (T/F) long-term thinkers must, therefore, adapt exclusively to the entire biosphere.

9. ________ is invisible to adolescents, who are obsessed with _______.

10. The Long Now operates at the level of _______, but now must begin to engage the Longer Now of _______.

"Life's Future in the Cosmos"

Martin Rees is a technological optimist, a political pessimist, and-- citing Darwin's remark that "not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness" to the future-- an evolutionary realist. Will future life ("life"?) be human, post-human, trans-human, or robotic? Or none of these? And, the more pressing question: will we get out of this century? (TED)

future of life

Sir Martin Rees, thinking deep and long at a Long Now Foundation seminar [video]:

We tend to get a distorted view of history as a long, boring past during which nothing much happened, and then a very short period of rapidly accelerating change leading up to the present. In reality, however, the Sun isn’t yet even halfway through its life cycle.

Despite that, people who predict things “a million years from now” are considered to be talking about the unimaginably distant future, but a million years is only a few dozen clock ticks of cosmological time. We as humanity are responsible for the future of not just the next few thousand years (the timescale on which civilization has so far existed) but for “spans of time six or more orders of magnitude greater than that.”

Over the truly long term, our posthuman descendants will become — not just second-generation intelligences — but thousand-generation or million-generation intelligences. He quoted Darwin on how no species can pass its likeness into the distant future unaltered; in a billion years of biological evolution, we’ve gone from bugs to humans, and technological evolution is a lot faster than biological. Our distant descendants will be not just strange, but completely alien to us.

During this century, we not only have unprecedented opportunity, but unprecedented responsibility. If the new technologies we build have a high chance of causing civilization-wide catastrophe (and Rees thinks they do) for the first time in history, then we are, all of us, are responsible for actively preventing that from happening, not just trying to predict it or understand it. The key thing here is the commitment to taking action to alter the future instead of just trying to predict it.

another vital question

A few students have taken me up on my final essay suggestion: explore alternative responses to the Vital Question (as posed by William James): "What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself?"

It's a question about human nature, the possibility of progress, of our capacity for cooperation and kindness and compassion, and of many particular facets that James could not have imagined.

I'll be interested to see where people choose to take the question. One possibility is the biotech angle:

"Where will synthetic biology lead us?" asks Michael Specter (author of Denialism). Some think life's about to start making of itself a creator of brand-new forms of life-- not in the Wittgensteinian sense, but for real. What might await our form of life, at the other end of that rabbit-hole?

"If the science truly succeeds, it will make it possible to supplant the world created by Darwinian evolution with one created by us." O brave new world, that has such reasonable-sounding "biological engineers" as Drew Endy in it...

Thing is, this isn't really even "long-term" thinking,

the future is now.

Bill McKibben, for one, says "Enough!"