The Rosh Hashanah holiday involves looking at one's past, and imagining one's future. In that vein, my friend Randall Ross emailed an interesting item about a project called "Talk to the Future":
bq. "With the help of state-of-the-art science, we are creating a Digital Time Capsule, which for the first time will allow us to reliably store vast amounts of data for a period exceeding 10,000 years. This "capsule" will be placed under America's Monument, erected as a beacon to the capsule and as a tribute the contemporary American. Over the next year, it is our goal to build a data repository, which in aggregate, will represent the authentic voice of contemporary America."
Actually, my hopes for such projects are quite limited. As Gregory Benford's excellent book Deep Time notes, it's tremendously difficult to even imagine what would be of interest in 10,000 years. Most of these projects end up storing a lot of junk of little value.
A far more interesting 10,000-year view, I think is the project being undertaken by The Long Now Foundation, a collaboration that includes Stewart Brand, Danny Hillis, Brian Eno, and others:
bq. "Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed-some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where 'long-term' is measured at least in centuries. Long Now proposes both a mechanism and a myth. It began with an observation and idea by computer scientist [and Disney imagineer] Daniel Hillis...."
This project also has a companion book by Stewart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now, that's very much worth your time.
I took a look at the Long Now website, Joe, and I was underwhelmed. This strikes me as just more elitist griping about what clods ordinary people are. Consider these passages:
""The idea of the Clock is to encourage long-term thinking, which is in short supply these days,"said Stewart Brand, president of the foundation."
And:
"Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span."
Where's the evidence that this is true? What is civilization's attention span? How is pathology of span assessed? What should our attention span be? How do they know? Two problems I see with Brand's approach: First, the beauty of the long horizon is you never get embarassed by predictions that don't come true. What sort of person is drawn to that enterprise?
Second, I hear lots of griping of this sort, but life keeps getting better. We have more food, more toys, more communication with each other, more understanding of important interactive processes in nature, more freedom for more people. If that's all produced by short horizons, then give me short horizons.
Yes, politicians have an eye to the next election, but that's not the only thing that moves them - or W wouldn't have invaded Iraq and we wouldn't have blue boxes and no-one would ever talk about unfunded pension fund liabilities. Maybe that timescale - ten to twenty years - is too small for Brand and his pals, but having the urge to look out hundreds or thousands of years doesn't impress me, for the simple reason that any claim they make about next Wednesday is worth treating with skepticism. A year from now, it's anybody's guess. And what will be true 100 years from now is impossible to imagine (try thinking back to 1903 or 1003 and reflect on what those people would have come up with if they had extrapolated developments to 2003).
I'm not arguing for dullness, for refusing to dare or to dream or to imagine. I'm arguing that Brand's distaste for our "short horizon" doesn't come from knowledge. Hundreds of years ago, it was believed that people got sick because they were immoral. You could tell who was immoral that way. When scientists suggested that, no, it wasn't morals it was germs, the idea was resisted for a long time. In fact, the idea that we get sick because we're bad people never disappeared. It just went to Kyoto. And it looks to me like it's going to the top of a mountain with the Long Now foundation, too.
The issue isn't how far into the future can one person predict, it's how much of the current state of the world can one mind represent or contain? Not much of it, in my view, which is the reason that democracy and markets are so important, for knowledge representation. The market, and the electorate, know things no one individual or small group can know. If the market starts making plans for the year 10000, I'll be interested. But the odds that anything Brand and his pals do will make the world better 8000 years from now are very long.
But speaking of long horizons, I better stop here.
Actually, Brand & Co.'s project is a very positive one, on all levels. He sees things as getting better - slowly. I think that's about right. That's very typical of Brand - he's not the carping type, and neither is Hillis, one of the world's more respected computer scientists and a Disney imagineer. I agree their site could communicate that tone better... the book sure did, and so did some of the articles linked from their site. Danny Hillis:
"I think of the oak beams in the ceiling of College Hall at New College, Oxford. Last century, when the beams needed replacing, carpenters used oak trees that had been planted in 1386 when the dining hall was first built. The 14th-century builder had planted the trees in anticipation of the time, hundreds of years in the future, when the beams would need replacing. Did the carpenters plant new trees to replace the beams again a few hundred years from now?"
I don't see a lot of that kind of thinking today, myself.
Given the time spans over which we're able to affect our environment now, it would be good to stretch the time scale on which humans habitually thinks - and the clock and associated ideas all seem like good efforts along those lines to me. The long view imperative doesn't replace the necessity of short term focus, or the mechanisms that rely on them. Think of it as a set of socio-cultural bifocals, if you will, that may change certain perspectives and give us more options.
"First, the beauty of the long horizon is you never get embarassed by predictions that don't come true. What sort of person is drawn to that enterprise?"
The sort of person who envisions a "Responsibility Record" as part of the Millennium Clock project, precisely in order to keep track of long-term predictions and learn from what happens, instead of forgetting about them.
I thought the idea of leaving messages for one's descendents in trust at the site was also kind of cool... and there are numerous other ideas of this type circulating among the group. Not to mention the plans for a 10,000 year library, a vision reminiscent of Alexandria - or Walter M. Miller, Jr., take your pick.
Just the exercise of thinking about designing something to last on this scale has benefits. I'm a contributor to the Long Now Foundation, myself, and hope they have many more productive years doing what they do. It's valuable, and if it takes root, it may indeed outlive us all.