Cities and Time

The Long Now Foundation
San Francisco, CA
Apr 8th, 2005

Stewart Brand addresses The Long Now Foundation on Cities and Time.
Cities are humanity's longest-lived organizations (Jericho dates back 10,500 years), but also the most constantly changing. Even in Europe they consume 2-3% of their material fabric a year, which means a wholly new city every 50 years. In the US and the developing world it's much faster.
Every week in the world a million new people move to cities. In 2007 50% of our 6.5 billion population will live in cities. In 1800 it was 3% of the total population then. In 1900 it was 14%. In 2030 it's expected to be 61%. This is a tipping point. We're becoming a city planet.
One of the effects of globalization is to empower cities more and more. Communications and economic activities bypass national boundaries. With many national governments in the developing world discredited, corporations and NGOs go direct to where the markets, the workers, and the needs are, in the cities. Every city is becoming a "world city." Many elites don't live in one city now, they live "in cities" - The Long Now Foundation







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Sam Harris - The View From The End Of The World

The Long Now Foundation
San Francisco, CA
Dec 9th, 2005

The View From The End Of The World with Sam Harris.
With gentle demeanor and tight argument, Sam Harris carried an overflow audience into the core of one of the crucial issues of our time: What makes some religions lethal? How do they employ aggressive irrationality to justify threatening and controlling non-believers as well as believers? What should be our response? - The Long Now Foundation







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Glut: Mastering Information Though the Ages

The Long Now Foundation
San Francisco, CA
Aug 17th, 2007

Glut: Mastering Information Though the Ages with Alex Wright speaking at a seminar hosted by The Long Now Foundation.
Alex Wright is a writer and information architect who currently works for the New York Times. His first book, "Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages" is an impressive survey on how societies have dealt with information overload through time. As an information architect, Alex has led projects for The New York Times, IBM, Microsoft, Harvard University, our own Rosetta Project, the Internet Archive, Yahoo!, Macromedia and Sun Microsystems, among others - The Long Now Foundation







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Paul Saffo: The Secret to Effective Forecasting

The Long Now Foundation
San Francisco, CA
Jan 11th, 2008
As part of The Long Now Foundation's Seminars About Long-term Thinking, technology forecaster and strategist Paul Saffo presents Embracing Uncertainty: The Secret to Effective Forecasting.







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The Future Has Always Been Crazier Than We Thought

The Long Now Foundtion
San Francisco, CA
Feb 4th, 2008

The Future Has Always Been Crazier Than We Thought with Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Author Nassim Nicholas Taleb discusses his book, The Black Swan in relation to predicting the future, learning from the consequences of the unknown, and the power of randomness.







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Peter Schwartz and Ralph Cavanagh, Nuclear Power, Climate Change and the Next 10,000 Years

The Long Now Foundation
The Herbst Theater - San Francisco, CA
Jan 13th, 2006

The Long Now Foundation presents a discussion between Peter Schwartz and Ralph Cavanagh: Nuclear Power, Climate Change and the Next 10,000 Years
It is the threat of "abrupt climate change" that converted him to support new emphasis on nuclear power, Schwartz said. Gradual global warming is clearly now under way, and there is increasing reason to believe that human activity is driving it, mostly through the burning of coal and oil. If warming is all that happens, it will be an enormous problem, but some regions of the Earth would gain (Russia, Canada) while many others would lose.
In the event of abrupt climate change, though, everyone loses. The most likely change would be a sudden (in one decade) shift to a much colder, drier, and windier world. The world's carrying capacity for humans would plummet, driving human population from the current 6.5 billion to as low as 2 billion, with most of the losses from war. It would be a civilization-threatening catastrophe. From research Schwartz has led for the Pentagon as well as from his own training in fluid dynamics, he thinks that continuation of the current warming is very likely to trigger the kind of radical climate instability that has been the norm in Earth's past, except for the last 10,000 years of uncharacteristically stable climate. Therefore everything must be done to head off the shift to climate instability.
Meanwhile, Schwartz said, world demand for energy will continue to grow for decades, as two billion more people climb out of poverty and developing nations become fully developed economies. China and India alone will double or quadruple their energy use over the next 50 years. We will run out of oil in that period. That leaves coal or nuclear for electricity. Conservation is crucial, but it doesn't generate power. Renewables must grow fast, but they cannot hope to fill the whole need. Nuclear technology has improved its efficiency and safety and can improve a lot more. Reprocessing fuel will add further efficiency - Stewart Brand, The Long Now Foundation







FORA.tv - Peter Schwartz and Ralph Cavanagh