Eleven Five-Minute Visions of the Long Term: Long Now's 2024 Member Ignite Talks
The Long Now Foundation
The Long Now Foundation's fifth Ignite evening gave eleven members five minutes each to make a case about long-term thinking. The topics ranged from a metric clock on a desk to a DNA archive bound for the Moon, and from a 3,000-year-old chalk horse to simulated votes on geoengineering. The talks were separate, but several ideas came up again and again. Many speakers argued that imagining better futures is a prerequisite for building them. Others argued that anything meant to last depends on people who keep caring for it. This article follows the talks in the order they were given.
The Format
Host Brady Forrest, who started Ignite, opened by explaining the rules. Each speaker gets 20 slides that advance automatically every 15 seconds, for five minutes total, and cannot control them once the talk begins. He described this as the fifth Ignite held with Long Now's membership and framed it as a chance to hear from peers around the world who support the foundation's mission. He told the audience their job was to laugh at the jokes, react to the interesting points, and be sad at the sad parts.
Jenny Johnston: Pulling Toward a World Without Nuclear Weapons
Jenny Johnston, editorial director of Horizons 2045, opened with "protopian" stories. These are stories that are neither utopian nor dystopian: they imagine better but not perfect futures and accept messy progress. In her view they are surging now because humanity faces a tangle of existential threats it struggles to see past. People know huge change is coming and that current ways of thinking won't carry them through, but the destination is hard to see. She argued that we are good at telling ourselves terrifying stories about the future, and protopian stories do the opposite by reorienting people around hope.
Her example had launched that same morning, and she described it as possibly the first concerted effort to apply protopian storytelling to nuclear weapons. She framed the field's difficulty as a "push-pull problem." Most disarmament work is push: risk reduction, disarmament, policy change. She called that work necessary. What is missing, she said, is the pull. Advocates know what they want the world to move away from, but not what it is moving toward. The field focuses on creating an absence, specifically the absence of 13,000 weapons, and she described the corresponding "presence" as almost completely unexplored terrain.
Horizons 2045 and Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination wrote a prompt: it is 2095, 50 years after the last nuclear weapon was disarmed; what does that world look like? They assembled a team that included prominent science fiction writers, a nuclear anthropologist, someone who leads innovation projects for the United Nations, an award-winning slam poet, a composer to imagine what 2095 sounds like, and a Brazilian illustrator.
Johnston summarized the world these creators imagined. It still has plenty of problems, including new ones. But the resources now tied up in nuclear weapons are redeployed, and former weapons facilities become "environmental revivification centers." There are protocols for retiring technologies capable of mass harm, even ones that could also do some good. People act on behalf of future generations, and new forms of planet-scale coordination appear. Her broader point was that thinking which starts from constraints stays blinkered, while leading with possibility changes what becomes possible.
She closed with a bracelet she had given her daughter as a toddler, which reads "beautiful girl, you can do hard things," and which she wore that night. Protopian stories, she said, remind us that humanity can and must do hard things and can come out better for it. She added that our darkest thinking is neither our only thinking nor our best. Her final question was whether a better future can only be reached by first doing the work of imagining it.
Mike Olson: Building a Solar Metric Clock
Entrepreneur Mike Olson gave the evening's clock talk. He started with an oddity: length and volume have metric systems, but time does not. He traced the pieces of our system back to their origins. Hours come in twelves, which he attributed to the Babylonians counting to twelve on one hand. "Minute" and "second" come from Latin terms for the first and second small divisions of the hour. The base-60 counting he credited to the Assyrians, possibly by way of the Akkadians, while noting "we don't really know." The result is 86,400 seconds in a day, which he called "a hot mess" that nobody can do mental math with. He noted that the French Revolution tried a 10-hour day of 100-minute hours, which "just didn't last that long."
He decided to build a metric clock that tracks deci-days, centi-days, milli-days, and units of 100 micro-days. He calls that last unit a "mic," and it is 8.64 seconds long. A metric day runs from 0000 to 9999; 1 a.m. is about 0420. He wired components to an Arduino and photographed the finished clock reading 8802 on the evening he completed it. A GPS module supplies the correct time.
That module led him to question what "correct time" means. He described it as imposed "by the man," dependent on time zones and daylight saving, and called the time-zone map a geopolitical and legislative disaster. So he added "true" solar time, based on the sun's position. Solar noon shifts as you move in longitude, and because Earth's orbit is an ellipse, it also drifts a little every day. The gap between clock time and a sundial is called the equation of time. He described its curve over the year as ugly. He found a good approximation online, put it into code, and built a second prototype. On the day of his photo, it showed 6175 solar against 6246 civil metric at his house. He then soldered the components and 3D-printed a case to make a desk clock.
He also described living on metric time. He wakes before 2500, 9000 isn't too late, but 9500 is getting up there. He schedules in units of 100 mics, a bit under 14 minutes by his description, which he finds a good minimum unit. He likes that 3900 tells him he is 39% of the way through the day, calling it an interesting way to position himself in time. Because the hardware is hard to build, he taught himself Swift and iOS interface design and released an app called MultiClock (searchable as "multiclock civil solar metric"). He said it collects no data, costs nothing, and has its code on his GitHub. By its measure, he noted, an Ignite talk lasts just over 35 mics.
Ben Haldeman: A DNA Seed Bank on the Moon
Ben Haldeman, introduced as a rocket scientist, began with a belief. He argued that the Earth is like an organism, perhaps even conscious, and has done almost everything an organism can do except reproduce. He believes part of humanity's purpose is to spread life to the stars, that "the Earth grew us with this purpose," and that humans are meant to be stewards of life in the universe. He said the vision came to him in a rainforest, and he called it a long-range vision for the species: to "ripple life across the Galaxy" and "green the universe."
He said he also cares about Earth's present-day problems and wanted the vision to matter now. Humans have kept seed banks for thousands of years, he noted, and a backup should never be stored in one place. So he proposed a seed bank of DNA from Earth's species, placed on the Moon. He chose the Moon because it is far enough away to be separate but close enough for an advanced civilization to retrieve. This became LifeShip.
He described the project in steps. Early prototypes held plant seeds and the DNA of hundreds of species preserved in a polymer the team calls "synthetic amber," likened to tree amber in Jurassic Park. A kit let people add their own DNA, and thousands have done so, which helped fund the mission and involve the public. Through a partnership with NASA, two capsules went to the International Space Station on SpaceX rockets, carried aboard by astronauts on crewed missions. The next step was a mission to the Moon planned for that October on a Firefly Aerospace lander, launching on a SpaceX rocket. The lander stays on the Moon with the capsule aboard, to remain there permanently.
Because DNA may last only tens of thousands of years, he said, the team also etched the full human genome using nano-etching with a partner. They also included a cultural archive of thousands of pages about Earth and humanity, etched in nickel "nanofiche" readable under a microscope. Artist Amy Carl created cover art identifying the capsule as coming from humanity, along with a Milky Way map referenced to pulsars, which Haldeman said works as both a location and a timestamp. The capsule has become a platform: partners have added children's art from around the world, stories, podcasts, and museum material. He argued that thinking about humanity's long-range future is really about who we choose to be today and how we care for Earth's species now. He invited people to add their DNA, stories, and wishes.
Christopher Daniel: 3,000 Years of Maintaining the Uffington White Horse
Christopher Daniel gave a recorded talk from England about the White Horse of Uffington in Oxfordshire. For most of its history, he said, no one knew who made it; it had simply been there as long as anyone remembered. Only about 35 years ago did its age become known. In 1990, a team from Oxford Archaeology used optically stimulated luminescence testing. It showed that the chalk beneath the horse had last been exposed to sunlight sometime between 1380 and 550 BCE.
He explained how hill figures work. Chalk downland, found mainly in the British Isles, western continental Europe, and some parts of the western US, has rolling hills with soft chalk underneath. Cutting back the turf exposes bright white chalk, forming a geoglyph. Southern England has many, and many are dated. For older ones like the Cerne Abbas Giant in Dorset or the Long Man of Wilmington, the history gets "fuzzy."
His central point was that a hill figure lasts only if it is maintained; left alone, it would be overgrown within a decade. The work of scouring and re-chalking is simple. But he compared it to harvesting a crop or raising a barn: easier and more fun when done socially. Nobody knows how the horse was tended in its first millennia. In recent centuries, the local landowner would call a "pastime," a festival held roughly every seven years, when the horse was tended and people came from across the county or even the country. Daniel cited archaeologist David Miles, who notes that the creation of many lesser horse figures lines up with the dates of pastimes. Daniel added that it is easy to imagine people returning home and saying, "let's make our own."
Long Now London, he said, has met with varying frequency since at least 2010, and since 2018 in a pub on the second Thursday of each month. In 2019 the group was looking for something to maintain together and began helping with the horse. He described a typical day. Earlier in the year the horse is weeded. On chalking day, chalk from the other side of the hill is broken up, bagged, and brought close. Members take early trains against London's commuter flow, joined by people from Bristol, Oxford, nearby towns, and occasionally overseas. They use lump hammers, gloves, and gardeners' foam kneelers, and take turns carrying buckets. The National Trust team aims for an even spread over a few days, until the greying horse is bright white again. When people ask if the work is hard, the group answers that it is as hard as you make it. The chalk breaks easily, and the main hazards are sore knees for office workers. Above all, he said, the work is social: conversations start in small groups and cross-pollinate as people switch roles, then continue at a village pub until the train home.
He connected this to a Long Now idea he said he had heard in its circles: there are four ways to make things last a long time. You can make them tough, forget about them, make them hard to reach, or encourage people to care for them. He cited Jem Finer, who said he deliberately designed the Longplayer project to require upkeep because he was interested in the social structures that would let a piece of music last 1,000 years. The horse has lasted 3,000 years, Daniel said, only because people cared for it. Their reasons may have changed, but it was their gift, and now it is our turn to pass it on.
He ended with news. During the 2020 lockdowns, a researcher in Australia compared early-20th-century aerial photographs with recent ones. He found that while the horse kept the same overall length and height, it had lost a large share of its volume since the 1930s. With English Heritage's approval (the site is a scheduled ancient monument), plans were underway to "fatten up" the horse. That same month, Long Now London had been asked to help the National Trust and an archaeology partner carry out the work. He asked the audience what near them they would want to last, and invited anyone in London on a second Thursday to the pub.
Rose Bloomin: Plurality as an Upgrade for Democracy
Rose Bloomin, executive director of the Plurality Institute, began with what she said the audience already knew. Democracy is broken and barely keeping up, media and society are polarized, and over half the world's countries are experiencing some form of democratic backsliding. Social media is still ungoverned, and now "the AIs are here," which she called the most powerful tools since the atomic bomb, able to help and hurt. She said she was not there as a doomer but to explain why plurality gives her hope as the future of democracy and technology.
She defined plurality as an emerging field focused on human cooperation at scale. It combines a social movement, a science, tools and technologies, and a culture that help people connect across differences. She argued it is the norm in biology, citing healthy ecosystems and the human body's trillions of human, bacterial, and fungal cells working together, and said it can be deliberately cultivated in social systems. Where governance moved from top-down rule to one person, one vote, plurality could upgrade democracy so people "agree more and disagree more productively."
Her examples included ranked-choice and approval voting, which she said help elect candidates more people want and reduce polarization. She described quadratic funding, which instead of dollar-for-dollar matching favors projects with many small donors over those with a few large ones. She showed output from Polis, a tool that lets hundreds of thousands of people take part in one society-wide conversation and steers it toward rough consensus. She called citizens' assemblies its in-person counterpart: they gather a representative group, help it get past polarized debate, and let it shape policy. She also mentioned Community Notes, which promotes content agreed on by groups of users who usually disagree. What all these share, she said, is that they surface deeper layers of agreement that already exist among large, diverse groups.
On the world stage, she pointed to Audrey Tang. Tang helped protesters organize and broadcast their message during Taiwan's 2014 Sunflower Movement and, instead of being jailed, was promoted to digital minister, where she brought transparency and citizen engagement. Bloomin described vTaiwan, which incorporates tools like Polis and Talk to the City so citizens can petition the government directly. She said over half of Taiwanese citizens are registered and a quarter are active users, and asked what it would take for others to get there. She mentioned further applications she couldn't cover: language models for moderation, social identity systems, and collaborative events like Burning Man. She pointed to a book by Audrey Tang and her collaborator Glen Weyl with some 500 contributors, available at plurality.net. She argued that a movement toward plurality is needed to make a planet-sized society function well enough to tackle global poverty and climate change, and described the Plurality Institute as a hub for researchers and practitioners building such tools.
Andrew Hessel: The Age of Programming Life
Biologist Andrew Hessel said he chose cell biology and genetics as a child because nobody knew how life worked. He studied bacteria like E. coli, which is single-celled and clearly alive but far from simple. Like all cells, it has a DNA genome that he likened to a ticker tape of molecular instructions. Change the code, and you change the organism.
DNA can be read (sequenced), he noted, but fewer people know it can also be written (synthesized). Write a gene and you can make a protein; write a genome and you can make an organism. He credited Eckard Wimmer as the first to do so, with a virus. But Wimmer himself called a virus "a chemical with a life cycle," so Hessel dated the age of programming life to 2010. That year, the first cellular genome was synthesized, assembled, and "booted up," producing an organism the media called Synthia. Because its genome was fully synthetic, researchers embedded "Easter eggs," including a website, researcher names, an email address, and quotations, which every bacterium carries as watermarks.
Yet in the years since, he said, only a handful of synthetic organisms have been booted up. He blamed a huge gap between reading and writing DNA: sequencing a genome is fast and cheap, while synthesizing and booting one is at least a thousand times more expensive and time-consuming. Synthetic biology labs are capital-intensive and full of robots, which limits who can use them and what projects get done. He compared this to early computing. The 1975 Cray-1 cost $8 million and sold about a hundred units. A few years later, cheap microprocessors made personal computers possible. Those were weak "toys," he said, but they seeded a generation of programmers who changed the world.
He sees an analogous shift in emerging biochips, showing one DNA sequencer chip and one DNA synthesizer chip, and called this a new branch of chipmaking. He speculated it could enable desktop sequencers at home, viral detectors in phones, and printers for vaccines, medicines, and even organisms. With organism printers, he said, you could download and print an organism or "fax" one between locations, from space to Earth or bedside to doctor, turning cell engineering into a branch of software engineering. He proposed making E. coli glow or blink as its "hello world," something kids could do. He contrasted this with chip fabs costing billions and predicted cell engineering will move much faster, advancing "at the rate that we can write new genetic software": microbes today, plants and animals tomorrow. He argued biotech is about to be disrupted and democratized, and that no other technology will change the world more, giving tools for sustainability, climate, and disease. He closed with Stewart Brand's line, "we are as gods and might as well get good at it."
Dustin Bajer: Planting a Thousand Thousand-Year Trees
Dustin Bajer, an urban tree farmer and beekeeper from Edmonton, opened with a scene: walking a dark street in the future and turning a corner to find a tree planted a thousand years earlier, in 2024. He asked what living among thousand-year-old trees would do to people's relationship with time and responsibility. He believes cultural narratives have turned dystopian in recent years and that better futures must first be imagined.
His group, the "Secret Long Tree Society," a name he called cheeky since they are open about their work, aims to foster long-term thinking by propagating, distributing, and tending a thousand thousand-year-old trees. Much of its activity, he said, is conversation about the philosophy and practicalities of doing this, a thought experiment they are trying to make real. Edmonton, which he described as the continent's northernmost city of a million people, swings from −40°C in winter to +40°C in summer, limiting which long-lived species can survive. The group has focused on ginkgo biloba and the Rocky Mountain bristlecone pine, Pinus aristata. He held up 1,500 bristlecone seeds, each able to live over a thousand years, which by his math represent about 1.5 million years of growth. The group has made resources including step-by-step propagation videos, distributes seeds locally, and records the growers' names as propagators of each tree.
Where to plant them is a central question. One strategy is to find spots likely to remain untouched. But the group is also interested in places expected to see lots of change, where the trees could serve as anchor points reminding people of the bigger picture. Looking at trees Edmontonians love, they noticed most are tied to specific people, places, or events. The trees people love have stories reflecting those who planted and tended them, so the group asks what story its own plantings tell.
Bajer said he loves projects he will never see finished, which relieve some pressures and open playful possibilities. The group has toyed with a thousand-year birthday party for some trees, handing out tickets with each seedling that will admit the holder in a thousand years. Another idea is collecting a couple of dollars per tree for an endowment to accrue interest for a millennium in support of the trees and future long-term projects. Citing Stewart Brand's saying that long-term thinking is the opposite of long-term planning, he said the deeper they go, the more the project is less about the trees than about cultivating the conversations and culture needed to "propagate better futures." He urged listeners to start something "ambitious and quirky and weird" beyond their current abilities.
Elle Miller: Public-Private Partnerships for Climate Finance
Strategist Elle Miller started with the Seychelles, whose waters face coral bleaching, coastal erosion, and overfishing, but whose government lacked the funding to respond. It swapped part of its debt for conservation, in effect a refinancing that redirected savings to nature, and this, she said, funded protection of 30% of its waters. Her larger point was about public and private institutions combining to address long-term climate change, which requires immense funding for often risky projects with uncertain returns.
Public-private partnerships, she said, are as hard to coordinate as they are to say, but they apply private-sector efficiency to public goals. She pointed to a multi-trillion-dollar gap between available public climate funding and what 2050 net-zero goals require. She argued that only cross-sector partnership can close it, and that the key is creating demand, because "anything you can demonstrate demand for, you can finance."
Her main case was Blended Finance at Lake Turkana Wind Farm, which she called Africa's largest. The Kenyan government wanted 15–20% of the country's energy supply to come from this wind project, to move away from polluting oil-fired plants, provide low-cost power, and improve energy security. To afford it, the government built the transmission lines and roads and signed long-term power agreements. Those agreements provided revenue that de-risked the project enough to draw $700 million in private investment, and private partners supplied project management and expertise. By her account, the results included significant emissions reductions, national energy security, 2,200 construction jobs and 200 permanent jobs, $35 million a year to the government, and local benefits in health care, education, and clean water access. Her conclusion was that private investment coupled with public support yields impact at scale, and that the goal is to shape financial infrastructure that unlocks global capital for long-term climate solutions.
Mark Bonchek: The Longing for Belonging
Mark Bonchek, founder of Shift Thinking, began by asking the audience to breathe and notice how it felt to sit in the room together, a feeling he promised to return to. Thirty years ago, he was a Harvard PhD student writing about the savings and loan crisis. Sick and feeling sorry for himself on Thanksgiving, he logged into The WELL, an early online forum he noted was another Stewart Brand creation. On that primitive board he felt a sense of belonging and connection he said he would never have gotten from TV or a movie. The experience changed his dissertation and his life.
He switched to studying the early internet. Harvard "didn't know what to do with" him, so he connected with MIT's AI Lab, which gave him a broadband connection in 1994. Drawing on Marshall McLuhan's "the medium is the message," he concluded the internet was a fundamentally new medium akin to the printing press. He noted that before the press there were no corporations or nation-states, and he saw the internet's potential to create community and belonging. "But we didn't quite get that," he said, citing statistics that many people don't feel they belong in their country, community, or company, and that 20% feel they belong nowhere.
He quoted Buckminster Fuller on changing things by creating a new reality rather than fighting the existing one, and linked it to Johnston's protopian theme. His diagnosis was that the system isn't broken but "doing exactly what it was designed to do": get people to buy, vote, fight, and stay disconnected from what matters to them. He argued that new institutions of belonging will arise from digital media as others arose after the printing press. That will take a metamorphosis, he said, and just as everything the butterfly needs is already in the caterpillar, the seeds already exist, citing Burning Man as a glimpse of society at scale. He called for symbiosis across humanity, nature, spirit, science, and technology.
He then returned to the opening feeling and asked the audience to imagine a series of things. What would an economy of belonging feel like? What about money as a currency of contribution that sparks relationships instead of ending them in a transaction? A government that fosters gratitude? A company built on belonging and co-creation? Technology seen as contributing to connection? "We can create institutions — we've done it before and we can do it again," he said, ending with "let's be long now."
Andrew Warner: A Sneak Peek at the Interval's Redesign
Andrew Warner of Long Now was unable to attend, so a recording was played previewing a redesign of the Interval, Long Now's headquarters and bar-café-museum-library-event space. The redesign was due to open in September and was meant to guide the Interval through its next 25 years. Warner recalled that opening a bar was a "pretty out there" idea for a long-term-thinking nonprofit, but it succeeded. It gained recognition as one of the country's best bars and made it far easier to host events. Still, many visitors didn't realize it belonged to a larger nonprofit, and for the Interval's 10th anniversary Long Now is rebuilding its displays to highlight its mission and projects.
He toured the planned sections:
- Long-term thinking: anchored by a 12-by-4-foot painting by an artist on Long Now's staff depicting the "long now," the previous and next 10,000 years.
- The Clock of the Long Now: a full-size, 5-foot clock face made from actual spare parts of the clock in Texas. Because people struggle to picture a clock described as 500 feet tall, there will also be an 8-foot full-size replica of one gear hung from the ceiling, plus a model showing that gear inside the clock with a human figure for scale.
- Engineering for 10,000 years: the equation-of-time cam, which converts the sun's position to the correct time and must account for factors like the 26,000-year precession of the equinoxes. The long-requested orrery is also being restored so visitors can see the planets move.
- The bristlecone preserve in eastern Nevada: home to the bristlecone pine that serves as Long Now's "tree mascot," and to art and long-term science projects. It will be anchored by a 2,200-year-old bristlecone cross-section marked with dates, to let people visually experience multi-millennial time spans.
- The Interval itself: a tiny diorama of the space in lecture mode, "full of tiny people enjoying tiny drinks," for visitors who only know it as a daytime café.
- The Rosetta Disk and off-world archives: a microscope to explore the disk's pages, and a 3D-printed (not to scale) model of Comet 67P, where one of Long Now's language archives was sent in 2004.
Signage would be redone in glass, walnut, and 316 stainless steel with integrated lighting to make it museum-quality. Because fully explaining the space currently requires an hour-long tour from staff or a knowledgeable friend, which is impractical for the Interval's 40,000 annual visitors, Long Now is also producing a multimedia tour featuring board members, staff, and clock engineers. Installation was planned for late August, ahead of an early September opening. Afterwards, Forrest singled out the time cam, calling it "beautiful" to create the sun's position for the next 10,000 years in metal.
Jane McGonigal: Social Simulations of Unthinkable Futures
Game designer and futurist Jane McGonigal closed with a game of "what if," asking the audience to imagine waking up in three futures.
In the first, it is 2033. Heat, wildfires, and droughts have exceeded the worst climate predictions, and 9 billion people vote on "Sun Exit," a 10-year plan of aggressive solar radiation management that injects sulfate particles into the atmosphere. Supporters say it could solve major climate problems; critics warn of a possible 10-year winter. How would you vote, and how would you prepare to vote? Then the update: it passed, and it begins in 10 days. What do you do? A year later, the geoengineering is working, but trust in science has hit an all-time low amid claims of mental and physical side effects, and it's unclear whether these are misinformation. How do you keep yourself healthy?
In the second, it is 2029 and your government has gone "full-blown zero-waste authoritarian." Throwing anything away is illegal, trash cans have been confiscated, composting is allowed, and recycling "never worked." Psychologists have coined "zerophoria" for the pride, joy, and resourcefulness of wasting nothing. Do you adapt, help others, join the resistance, or become a reformer?
In the third, it is 2031. Countries with low fertility rates compete for climate migrants by building climate-resilient "welcome cities" and paying people to move, in a movement called the Welcome Party. Up to a billion people are expected to relocate with assistance over the next decade. A survey asks you to name three climate-resilient cities you would move to with support. Which would you choose, and how ready do you feel to answer?
She explained why she asks these questions with two graphs of how often journalism uses the words "unimaginable" and "unthinkable." She described the surge as exponential and argued that we are increasingly shocked and blindsided by how the future unfolds. That is why she leads Urgent Optimists, an online community for the nonprofit Institute for the Future, which runs monthly social simulations of otherwise unthinkable events. Hundreds of participants write and share journal entries describing in detail how they would feel and what they would do to help themselves and others.
The goal is to raise each participant's scores by at least one point on three 1-to-10 measures of future imagination. The first is mental flexibility: how plausible does the scenario feel, or is it thinkable to you? The second is realistic hope: how worried or excited would you be to wake up there? This measure is meant to capture both risks and opportunities for positive transformation. The third is future power: how ready do you feel to help yourself and others in that world? She said this last number rises the most after a simulation. She invited the audience to join a simulation team and help build a society that can say, in her closing words, "there are no unthinkable futures — there are no futures we refuse to imagine."
Hi, welcome to Ignite the Long Now. We have an amazing slate of speakers for you tonight. I'm Brady Forest. I started Ignite a long time ago, we don't need to get into that, but more importantly, this is the fifth time that we are doing an Ignite with the Long Now membership. So this is a chance to hear from your peers, other people around the world who are thinking about long-term thinking and who support the mission of the Long Now, one of my favorite nonprofits.
So in case you haven't been to an Ignite, just a little bit about that. Ignite is both a talk format and a talk series, and it is a talk format where the speakers all get 20 slides, 15 seconds a slide, for a total of 5 minutes on stage. They have no control. Once the train leaves the station, everything on the track is decimated, and that means that you, the audience, have a job. Your job is to laugh at their jokes, to ooh and ahh at their interesting points, and be sad when they tell something sad.
Please welcome out Jenny Johnston. She's the editorial director for Horizon 2045, and she's going to be talking about protopian futures. Come on out, Jenny.
So hi. Protopian stories are having a moment right now. They're everywhere. And if you don't know what a protopian story is, think of it as not utopia and not dystopia. Protopian stories imagine better futures but not perfect futures. They embrace a kind of messy progress. The reason we're seeing this protopian surge right now is because humanity is in a weird place. We have this tangle of existential threats in front of us that we're having hard times seeing past, and certainly our way through. We know that huge change is coming and that our ways of acting and thinking are not going to carry us forward, but the thing that we're moving towards is hard to see in the distance. So we're really good at telling stories to ourselves that just terrify us about the future, and protopian stories do the opposite. They're powerful tools for reorienting us around hope and possibility and not dystopian dread.
I'm going to illustrate this with an example, because just this morning there was a launch of what might be the first ever concerted effort to bring protopian storytelling to one of the most difficult existential threats we have, which is nuclear weapons.
Now, ridding the world of nuclear weapons is daunting for a whole bunch of reasons, but one of them has to do with vision. Think of it as the push-pull problem. So many efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons focus on the push. It's pushing for risk reduction, pushing for disarmament, pushing for policy change. It's push, push, push to make progress, and that's all really necessary work. But what's notably absent from this space is any focus on the pull. We know what we're trying to move the world away from, but what are we moving it towards? There's so much focus on creating an absence, in this case an absence of 13,000 weapons, but what is the presence? What is the thing that we're moving towards? It turns out this is almost completely unexplored terrain. So here's what we did.
My organization, Horizon 2045, and Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination cooked up this provocative protopian prompt: the year is 2095, 50 years after the last nuclear weapon has been disarmed. What does that world look like? So then we got this amazing team of creatives to help us: some of the best science fiction writers of our time, a leading nuclear anthropologist, a brilliant thinker who leads innovation projects for the United Nations, an award-winning slam poet, a composer who could help us imagine what 2095 sounds like, a Brazilian illustrator to bring the whole thing to life visually. It was like a creative full-court press. And then they started, one by one, to go into the darkness and imagine what that future could be, asking what future becomes possible when nuclear weapons have been removed from the human story.
So based on what they came up with, let me tell you a little bit about that world they're envisioning. We still have problems, plenty of them, and new ones. It's messy. But in so many of these stories, we see the resources that are tied up right now in nuclear weapons redeployed for better purposes. We see nuclear weapons facilities turned into environmental revivification centers, for example. We have protocols in place for retiring technologies that can do mass harm, even if some of them can do some good. We remember who we are and that we have a responsibility to one another and to all species on the planet. We start acting on behalf of future generations and not just ourselves. We see a blossoming of new forms of collaboration and coordination at planet scale.
Now, all of this is deep change coming from the pull side. The thing is, when we start to think about the future and we start with constraints, our thinking stays blinkered. But when we lead with possibility, what becomes possible becomes different.
So why does all this matter? This is a bracelet that I gave to my daughter when she was still a toddler, and it says, "Beautiful girl, you can do hard things." I'm wearing it tonight. Protopian stories remind us that we can all do hard things, and that humanity can do hard things, and humanity must now do hard things, and that we can come out the other side better for having done that hard work. Our darkest thinking is not our only thinking, and it is certainly not our best thinking, and we need our best thinking now to lift us up and out of our problems and into a more secure and more flourishing future. What if we can only get to that better future by doing the advanced work of imagining it? Thank you.
Thank you very much, Jen. You know, this is the Long Now, so we were of course going to have a clock talk. This next one is about a solar metric clock. Please welcome out entrepreneur Mike Olson.
It is weird, if you think about it, that there's no metric system for time. We got feet and meters, we got quarts and liters, but for time we got seconds, minutes, and hours. And hours come in twelves, not tens. 12, by the way, a gift from the Babylonians, who could count to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 on one hand, and therefore 24 hours in the day.
Seconds, likewise, ancient. We get the names minute and second from ancient Latin: pars minuta prima, the first small division; pars minuta secunda, the second small division of the hour. Minute, small; second, second small. Okay. Seconds and minutes, of course, come in 60s, that number a gift from the Assyrians, possibly by way of the Akkadians, we don't really know. But 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, 86,400 seconds in a day. Guys, it's a hot mess. You can't do math in your head on numbers like that.
It'd be way easier if there were a simple base-10 metric system for time. Now, I'm not the first guy to think about this. The French actually had a revolution aimed, at least in part, at replacing the 24-hour clock with a 10-hour day of 100-minute hours. Great idea, off to a good start. As you remember from history class, it just didn't last that long. But a good idea. I decided I wanted to work on that idea. I decided that I wanted to build a metric clock.
If you're going to keep metric time, you have to track decidays and centidays and millidays and 100 microdays. A mic is 8.64 seconds long. A metric day starts at 0000 and goes to 9999. This number, 420, yeah, that's what you call 1 a.m. I got a bunch of components and an Arduino, I wired it up, and you can see I took this picture at 8802 on the evening that I finished building the clock. The clock, by the way, knows what time it is because up in the corner there's a component that talks to the GPS satellite network to get the correct time. And that started me thinking about correct time.
You guys, the correct time is imposed on us by the man. It depends on what time zone you're in and whether daylight saving time is in effect. This map is a geopolitical legislative disaster.
So I decided maybe I'd also track another kind of time, the true time, based on the position of the sun in the sky. The sun's at its highest point at noon, of course, and that depends on where you are on the earth. If you move west or east in longitude, noon moves as well. But it's more complicated than that, because the Earth's orbit around the Sun is an ellipse, not a circle. So every single day the angle between you and the sun changes just a scooch. Noon moves just a scooch. The difference between the clock and the sundial is called the equation of time, and this curve shows you the equation of time over the course of the year. It's an ugly curve.
It turns out that there's a good approximation that you can find on the internet. I grabbed it, I rendered it into code, and I added it to my metric clock, and I had a solar metric clock. I got some more components, I built another prototype, and got it working as well. You can see in the picture that on the day that I took this picture, 6175 solar was 6246 civil metric. Now, that's on that day at my house; it changes a scooch every day. But I soldered these components up, I 3D printed a case, and I had a nice desk clock.
When I'm keeping metric time, I wake up before 2500 every single day. 9000 is not that late, but 9500 is getting up there for me. I schedule things in 100-mic units. That's just under 14 minutes, a good minimum scheduling unit for me. And 3900 is 39% of the way through the day. It's an interesting way to position yourself in time.
I wanted to share this with a lot of people, but these are hard to build. So I taught myself a new programming language, Swift. I learned some iOS UX interfaces and abstractions, and I built an application called MultiClock. This clock has been uploaded to the App Store; it's been up there for a while. You can search for MultiClock civil solar metric and get it on your iPhone. It collects no data, costs no money, all the code is up on my GitHub. And if you had the app on your clock, you'd know that an Ignite talk lasts just over 35 mics.
Bringing it home. Thank you, Mike. All right, next up we have an actual rocket scientist out to talk about how sending things into space can also help us steward the Earth. Please welcome out Ben Haldeman.
The Earth is like an organism. It may even be conscious. And it's done just about everything an organism can do except for reproduce. I believe that part of humanity's purpose here is to help spread the seeds of life to the stars, and that the Earth grew us with this purpose, that we're here to be stewards of life in the universe and to help continue life. I had this vision in the rainforest of the Earth reproducing and spreading life outwards. And I believe this is a beautiful long-range vision for the future of our species: to ripple life across the galaxy and to be the ones that green the universe and help continue life.
Now, this vision hooked me, but I'm passionate about Earth here today, and we have real challenges on Earth today. So I wanted to figure out how to make this actually matter here today. And humans have built seed banks for thousands of years. We know that it makes sense to save life as it is for our kids, for our grandkids, for seven generations, for 7,000 generations from now. And so I came up with the vision of: let's save a seed bank of the DNA of all different species from Earth for the far future. And DNA is tiny, so we can save copies of it. And if you're going to save a backup of something, you never want to save all copies in one spot.
So the Moon is the next logical place to save a copy. It's far enough away to be separate and close enough to potentially get to by an advanced civilization. So I started LifeShip with this vision, both to preserve life for future generations as well as take steps towards this long-range vision of spreading life in the universe and continuing life.
We started with prototypes. I believe in taking small steps. This is both plant seeds and then DNA of hundreds of species preserved in a polymer that we call synthetic amber, kind of like tree amber in Jurassic Park. And then we created a kit for people to add their DNA, and thousands of people have added their DNA so far. And this helped us fund the mission and get us going, and helped include humans in it.
NASA loved the mission. We partnered with NASA and got to send two of these up to the International Space Station, and these went up on SpaceX rockets and astronauts carried them on board on crewed missions. And then in October this year we're on a mission to the Moon. This is a lander made by Firefly Aerospace, and it'll launch on a SpaceX rocket, and the lander goes to the Moon, stays on the Moon, and our capsule stays on board it, and it'll stay there forever.
Now, DNA can only last perhaps tens of thousands of years. We wanted it to last longer, so we etched the full human genome into ceramic in nano-etching with our partners at Coby. And then we also wanted to include a cultural archive and a message from humanity, and so we etched thousands of pages of information and text about Earth and humanity and our story in nickel nanofiche, viewable in a microscope. We worked with a local artist, Amy Carl, to do the cover art, to show who this is from, humanity, and then the Milky Way galaxy and a map to pulsars of where this came from. So that's both a map and a time; it tells you the time.
And then this really has become a platform where we have all sorts of partners that are adding art collections from kids around the world, or stories, or podcasts, or museums, and so we work with groups. And I really believe that a long-range future of humanity rippling life across the galaxy can help who we are today and our next steps as a species, and really us being stewards of life in the universe. We're taking on this role of continuing this precious miracle of life. And really, thinking long term about who we are as a species and where we're going is really about who we choose to be today, and how we care for Earth today, and how we care for all the precious species on Earth today.
And so I invite you to join. You're welcome to add your DNA, your stories, your wishes, your dreams, to create a whole program and engage others in space through our platform. And let's dream an inspiring future for both Earth and humanity in the universe.
Thank you very much, Ben. So the Long Now membership is around the world, and we want to be representative of folks from everywhere. So this is one of the first recorded talks. Christopher is coming to us from England, where he's going to talk about the White Horse of Uffington, a 3,000-year-old piece of land art. Take it away, Christopher.
This is the White Horse of Uffington, in what is now Oxfordshire in the UK. We don't know who made it. For most of its history, all we knew was that it had been there as long as anyone could remember. It was only 35 years ago that we learned these marks had first been carved into this hillside over 3,000 years ago.
Chalk downlands are an ecosystem found primarily in the British Isles, western continental Europe, and some parts of the western US. The rolling hills and soft underlying chalk lend themselves to the making of hill figures, geoglyphs formed by cutting back the turf to expose the bright white chalk beneath. There are geoglyphs of varying sizes, styles, and themes across the south of England. We have a good idea when many of them were made, but for the older ones, like the Cerne Abbas Giant in Dorset or the Long Man of Wilmington, the history does get quite fuzzy.
The age of the Uffington Horse was established in 1990 by a team from Oxford Archaeology. Optically stimulated luminescence testing showed that the chalk beneath the horse's markings had been last exposed to sunlight sometime between 1,380 and 550 BCE.
In order for a hill figure to last, it must be maintained. If left untended, the figure would be overgrown within a decade. The work of scouring and re-chalking them is relatively simple, but like gathering a crop or raising a barn, it is made much easier and more fun if approached as a social occasion.
We don't know how the horse was maintained in its first millennia, but in recent centuries the local landowner would call for a pastime, a festival during which the horse would be tended. These were roughly every s
years and people might travel from across the county or even the country for them. Many of the other geoglyphs of England are also horses. Archaeologist David Miles notes that the creation of many lesser horses aligns with the dating of a pastime. It's not hard to imagine people returning to their villages and saying, let's make our own.
So what about us? Long Now London have been meeting with varying degrees of frequency and effort since at least 2010. Since 2018 we've met in a pub every second Thursday of the month. In 2019 we were looking for something we could maintain together, and here's how it goes.
Earlier in the year the horse is scoured, which means weeded, before the chalking. Chalk from the other side of the hill is broken into rubble sacks and brought close enough to be hand carried as necessary. We set off early in the train, going against the flow of London's remaining commuters. Many of us come from London, but others come from Bristol, Oxford, the towns nearby, or on occasion they come from overseas.
We'll each take a lump hammer, gloves and the kind of foam kneeler used by gardeners. People take turns in carrying buckets of chalk from the bags to where it is needed next. The National Trust team aimed for an even spread across the whole horse, carried out over a period of a few days. By the end, the graying horse is bright white and ready for a new year.
Every year someone asks if the work will be hard. We tend to say it will be as hard as you make it. The chalk breaks easily and quietly under the weight of the hammer; there's not much swinging required. The main hazard is for those used to sitting in chairs indoors: sore knees and lumbar.
What the work definitely is, is social. Conversations strike up in groups working on particular areas. Discussion cross-pollinates as people switch roles or positions. By late afternoon it's time to take the conversation down to one of the nearby village pubs. The local beers flow with enthusiasm until it's time to catch a train home.
I've heard it said in Long Now circles, and I'm sure I've read it somewhere, that there are four ways that we can allow things to last a really long time: we can make them tough, we can forget about them, we can make them hard to reach, or we can encourage people to care for them. Jem Finer says of the Longplayer project that he deliberately designed it to require upkeep. He was interested in the social structures required to allow a piece of music to last for 1,000 years, as he was in the way that music might sound.
This horse has been there for 3,000 years. We don't know why, who made it or what it was for, but we do know that it only lasted that long because people cared for it. Their reasons may have changed, but ultimately they gave us this horse. It was their gift to us. Now it is our turn to pass it on.
During the 2020 lockdowns, Ian Godfrey, a researcher in Australia, compared aerial photos from the early 20th century to recent pictures of the horse. He found that while remaining the same overall length and height, the form had lost a large percentage of its volume since the 1930s. With the approval of English Heritage, as the site is a scheduled ancient monument, plans are currently underway for the horse to be fattened up. Just this month we at Long Now London have been asked to assist the National Trust and Oxford Archaeology with carrying out the works.
So what might you maintain? What near you do you want to last? And if you think of something, why don't you come and tell us? If any of this has been of interest, do please get in touch, and if you find yourself in London on the second Thursday of any month, come meet us in the pub.
Thank you very much for the invitation to the pub, Christopher. I'll take you up on that next time. Our next speaker is the executive director of the Plurality Institute and is here to talk about what is plurality. Please welcome out Rose Bloomin.
Before I talk about plurality, let's start with what we already know. Our democracy is broken and barely keeping up. Media and society are polarized, just adding to the dysfunction. And I'm not just talking about the US; democracy is at risk around the world, with over half the world's countries experiencing some form of democratic backsliding. We haven't really figured out how to govern social media yet, but now there's a whole new factor in the mix: the AIs are here. They're the most powerful tools since the atomic bomb. They can help us and hurt us, but we better figure it out quickly before democracy falls apart.
It's a lot, but I'm not here to be a doomer. I'm here to tell you why this new idea called plurality gives me hope and why I see it as the future of democracy and technology.
So what is plurality? Plurality is an emerging field focused on human cooperation at scale. It's a social movement, a science, tools, technologies and culture that help us connect across our differences. Plurality is actually the norm in biology, like healthy ecosystems and even the human body that's made up of trillions of human, bacterial and fungal cells all working together. And we can intentionally cultivate it in our social systems too.
Let's look at it in terms of governance. We moved from a top-down system to a democracy with a focus on one person per vote. Plurality can help us upgrade our democracy so we can agree more and disagree more productively.
Let's look at some examples, starting with voting. I'm sure some of you have heard of ranked choice and approval voting that let you vote for multiple candidates. These help get politicians elected that more people want and help reduce polarization in our elections. There's also quadratic funding: instead of dollar-for-dollar matching, it optimizes for projects with lots of small donors as opposed to those with just a few big ones.
This is output from a tool called Pol.is that lets hundreds and thousands of people participate in one giant society-wide conversation, and it helps drive that conversation toward a rough consensus. There's also the in-person version of that called a citizen assembly that brings together a representative group of people and helps them get past polarized debate so that they can help shape policy.
This next example I am sure some of you have seen before. It is a tool called Community Notes, and it helps promote tweets that are agreed on by groups of users that typically disagree with each other, so it helps reduce polarization online by promoting unifying content.
What all these examples have in common is that they help us get to deeper layers of agreement that already exist between very big groups of very different people.
So plurality is starting to play out on the world stage too. This is Audrey Tang. She got involved in politics during Taiwan's 2014 Sunflower Movement, where she helped protesters get organized and broadcast their message. Instead of putting her in prison, the Taiwanese government promoted her and made her the digital minister, where she helped bring transparency and citizen engagement across the country. She helped launch a tool called vTaiwan that incorporates tools like Pol.is and Talk to the City so citizens can petition the government directly. Over half of Taiwanese citizens are registered and a quarter are active users on the platform, which is amazing, and it makes me ask: what does it take for us to get there too?
Plurality is more than just politics. It's so much more than I could fit in a five-minute talk, like using language models for moderation, social identity systems, and even collaborative creation events like Burning Man. You can read all about it in a new book by Audrey and my collaborator Glen Weyl and 500 other contributors. You can join in even, at plurality.net.
But why should you care? I think it's going to take a movement toward plurality to get our planet-sized society really functioning, and that's what we need to tackle our biggest problems like global poverty and climate change. That's why I helped launch a nonprofit called Plurality Institute. We're a hub for researchers across disciplines and practitioners who are building tools and technologies for plurality. You can check us out at plurality.institute. You can contact me through the site, and I hope that you will make plurality your North Star and join us. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Rose. Our next speaker is a biologist who's going to take us out to the frontiers of synthetic biology and talk about how it can help us with core planetary challenges. Please welcome out Andrew Hessel.
As a kid I wanted to know how everything worked, and I took everything apart that I could get my hands on, except the cat. I settled on cell biology and genetics because no one knew how life worked. It was a mystery.
I studied bacteria like this E. coli. It's single-celled, it's clearly alive, but it's not simple. In fact, this organism has been around for billions of years. Like all cells, it has a DNA-based genome, which is a ticker tape of molecular instructions telling the cell what to be. If you change the genetic code, you actually change the organism.
Now, most people know that DNA can be read or sequenced, but most people don't know that DNA can actually be written or synthesized. If you write out a gene, you can make a protein. If you write out a genome, you can make an organism. And the first person to do this was Dr. Eckard Wimmer. He wrote out a genome for a virus, but a virus isn't really alive. In fact, Wimmer himself called it a chemical with a life cycle and even provided an empirical formula.
The age of programming life really started when the first cellular genome was synthesized, assembled and booted up in 2010. The media called this organism Synthia. Now, Synthia had a completely synthetic genome, and so the researchers were able to incorporate Easter eggs into the genome: a website, researcher names, an email address and some choice quotes. Every single bacterium carries those watermarks in its DNA.
Life science has become life engineering, but it's still really new. In the 15 years since Synthia, only a handful of synthetic organisms have been booted up. And one of the reasons for this is that there's a huge technological gulf between DNA read and DNA write. Sequencing a genome is fast and cheap; synthesizing and booting up a genome is at least a thousand times more expensive and time-consuming. Synthetic biology labs today are capital intensive, filled with robots, and this really limits the access to these laboratories and the projects that can be done.
And this is reminiscent of the early days of computing. This is a Cray-1 supercomputer from 1975. It cost $8 million, and so only about a hundred units were ever sold. But just a few years later, cheap microprocessors became available, making personal computers affordable and accessible, and this was a game changer. They weren't powerful, they were just toys, but they seeded a new generation of programmers that went on to change the world.
And today we're starting to see the appearance of biochips. On the left is a DNA sequencer; on the right is a DNA synthesizer. And this is a completely new branch of chip making that could change biotechnologies. It could power desktop DNA sequencers in our homes, it could put viral detectors in our phones, and it could make printers for vaccines and medicines and even organisms.
And organism printers would be game changers. You'd literally be able to download an organism and print it. You'd be able to fax organisms from location A to location B, whether it's from space to Earth or bedside to doctor. And it would make genetic engineering, cell engineering, just a new branch of software engineering. The hello world of engineering a cell, I think, is just making an E. coli glow or blink. Not a complicated experiment, one kids could do, but it's a gateway into much more sophisticated programming.
A chip fab like this costs billions of dollars to set up and operate. Cell engineering is going to go so much faster, and this is why: cells will advance at the rate that we can write new genetic software. Microbes today, but as DNA printers get better and more sophisticated, plants and animals tomorrow.
Biotech is about to be fundamentally disrupted and democratized, and this is going to have huge implications for humanity and for planet Earth, because there is no other technology than programming life that is going to change the world more. It will give us the tools for sustainability, for climate change, for curing diseases and more. Stewart Brand said famously, we are as gods and might as well get good at it. And as we enter the age of programming life, I don't think there are any wiser words to keep top of mind. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Andrew. Our next speaker is coming from Canada. He is an urban tree farmer and beekeeper, and he's going to be talking about planting thousand-year-old trees, or planting trees in the hopes that they live for a thousand years. Thank you, Dustin Bajer.
It's the future and you're walking down a dark street when you turn a corner and you come across an ancient tree that was planted there a thousand years ago, in the year 2024. What would it be like to live in a future with thousand-year-old trees? What would be their relationship to time and their sense of responsibility to the future?
It seems to me that a lot of our cultural narrative has turned dystopian over the last few years, and I've come to believe that in order to cultivate better futures, we need to be able to imagine them.
My name is Dustin Bajer, and I belong to a group in the city of Edmonton that is trying to foster long-term thinking and responsibility by propagating, distributing and tending a thousand thousand-year-old trees. We call ourselves the Secret Long Tree Society, though that's a little bit cheeky; we're pretty open with what we're trying to do, and in fact we'd love to invite you to be a part of it. We spend a lot of time hanging out and having conversations around the philosophy of planting thousand-year-old trees and how we might actually be able to practically do it. It's generally a pretty interesting thought experiment that we're trying to make a reality.
For a little bit of context, we're in Edmonton, which is the most northern city of a million on the continent. We have a pretty extreme climate, ranging from minus 40 degrees Celsius in the winter to plus 40 in the summer, which somewhat limits the species that can live for a thousand years here. The two that we've been looking at are Ginkgo biloba and the Rocky Mountain bristlecone pine, Pinus aristata.
In my hand here I'm actually holding 1,500 bristlecone pine seeds, each capable of living for more than a thousand years. So if my math is correct, that represents about 1.5 million years of growth. And we've been putting together different kinds of resources to support this project, including step-by-step propagation videos. And so we distribute our seeds locally and we get folks to grow them out, and their names are attached to those trees as the propagators.
A big question, obviously, is where do you plant a thousand-year-old tree? One strategy might be to find spaces in the city that are likely to go untouched, but we're also interested in finding locations throughout the city that are expected to see lots of change, and perhaps these trees could actually act as anchor points to remind us of the bigger picture. And so this is actually a photograph from this morning.
When taking a look at a lot of the trees that we love here in Edmonton, we've realized that most of them are attached to specific people or places or events. And so in short, the trees we love have stories, and they're kind of a reflection of the people that plant them and the people that tend them. And so a question for us is, what story are we telling ourselves with the trees that we're planting?
I love a long-term project like this. I love a project that I'm never going to see the end of, which sort of alleviates a lot of pressures in some ways, but also it allows you to do some really interesting things. We've been playing around with the idea of hosting a thousand-year birthday party for some of our trees, and in order to do that, we're thinking about handing out tickets as people get their thousand-year-old seedling, and if you show up in a thousand years with your ticket, you're in. Or what if we could take a
couple dollar donation for each tree and we could put that into an endowment fund and we could let that accrue interest for a thousand years. How could that support the trees? How could that support long-term thinking projects in the future?
Stewart Brand has this great saying that long-term thinking is the opposite of long-term planning. And it's true that we're planning on, you know, planting a thousand thousand-year-old trees, but the further into this we go, the more we've realized that it's less about the trees and it's more about cultivating the kinds of conversations and the culture that is necessary in order to propagate better futures.
And so I encourage you to think about the kind of future you'd like to propagate and start something ambitious and quirky and weird that is beyond what you're capable of doing now, because it's worth it. Thank you very much.
Dustin, I'll be there. Our next speaker is a strategist who tries to think about how society can fund big solutions. Please welcome out Elle Miller.
Thank you, Brady.
The crystal clear waters of the Seychelles are home to valuable biodiversity, but underneath these waters is a pressing threat of coral bleaching, coastal erosion and overfishing, and the government didn't have the funding required to solve these problems. Fortunately, they were able to swap a portion of their debt for conservation, in effectively a refinance that allowed the savings to go toward nature. And this innovative financing solution provided for a 30% amount of protection for the Seychelles' waters. This is wonderful.
But this story isn't just about the Seychelles, it's about the power of what can happen when public and private institutions come together to solve long-term climate change. These programs require immense funding and often are high risk with uncertain returns. So how then can we address this problem? Public-private partnerships. What a tongue twister. They're as difficult to coordinate sometimes as they are to say, but what they do is leverage the efficiency of the private sector to accomplish goals for the public good.
This is highly desirable because we know that the climate solutions require immense amounts of funding, and the only way that we're going to get that funding for these long-term solutions to climate is with the partnership between these sectors. We know that there's a huge amount of gap, a multi-trillion dollar gap, between how much we have for public funding for climate mitigation and what we need to reach our 2050 net zero goals and beyond.
So how then do we create demand so that the private sector can get involved to close that gap? Because we know anything you can demonstrate demand for, you can finance.
Let's take a look at this concept of blended finance between public and private at work at Africa's largest wind farm. The Lake Turkana Wind Farm was highly desired by the government. The Kenyan government wanted to see the power grid shift to have 15 to 20% of its entire energy supply come from renewables from this wind power plant, so that it can switch off of heavily polluting power plants running on oil, and so that it can provide a low-cost solution across the country for energy supply. And it also needed energy security for all of these citizens. So how then to afford it?
The Kenyan government partnered with private interests to allow for scale and efficiency of this project. The government participated: they provided the power lines, the transmission lines and the roads for the construction of the project, and they also provided power agreements to provide long-term revenue for this program so that it could be de-risked in order to interest the private sector, which brought in $700 million of investment. The private sector also offered the project management required and the expertise to implement such a large-scale program.
And it worked. Let's look at some of the impacts. They saw a significant reduction in greenhouse gases and emissions because they were able to rely on wind power instead of those polluting power plants, and it provided energy security across Kenya. Other improvements were to local employment: 2,200 jobs were created in the construction process and 200 jobs were created full-time at the windmill. It also doesn't hurt that $35 million annually is going to the government. Auxiliary benefits included health care, education access and an increase to clean water access for the local communities bordering Lake Turkana.
So as we saw in this example, where we have private investment coupled with public support, we can get scaled impact. It's back to our tongue twister of public-private partnerships. Our goal here is to shape financial infrastructure so that globally we can unlock the flow of capital. We're looking to scale long-term, large-scale solutions to climate change so that we can impact generations to come. Thank you.
Awesome, thank you, Elle. You know, the original tongue twister was Peter Piper picked public-private partnerships.
Our next speaker is an entrepreneur and the founder of Shift Thinking, and he's going to talk about how models from nature can help us build better institutions in the future. Please welcome out Mark Bonchek.
I want you all to take a breath with me and feel yourself in your seat, feel the people next to you, and feel this room, and feel what it feels like to be in this room. We're going to come back to that.
So our story begins 30 years ago. I was a PhD student at Harvard working on a dissertation on the savings and loan crisis, and then I got sick on Thanksgiving and I started to feel sorry for myself. And then I remembered that I had joined an online discussion forum called The WELL, which was another Stewart Brand creation, and I had a really remarkable experience of being on this very primitive discussion board. I had a sense of belonging. I had a sense of being connected in a way that I never would have felt if I had just been watching TV or a movie, and it led me to completely rethink what I wanted to do my dissertation on, and then the rest of my life.
I switched my dissertation topic to study the early internet. Harvard didn't know what to do with me, so I hooked up with the AI Lab at MIT, and they gave me a broadband connection in 1994, which was a really great thing. And I got interested in Marshall McLuhan's work, that the medium is the message, and I was able to see that the internet was really going to change everything because it was a fundamentally different medium, akin to the printing press. Now, before the printing press there was no corporation, no nation-state, and I could see that the internet had the potential to create community and that sense of belonging that I experienced on that Thanksgiving. But we didn't quite get that.
So what happened exactly? If you look at the statistics, it's really quite sad that so many people don't experience a sense of belonging in their country, their community, their company, and 20% of the people don't experience belonging anywhere.
Now, Buckminster Fuller said you don't change things by changing the existing reality, you have to create a new one. I like the protopian future, very consistent here. So how do we think about creating that new reality? Well, we have to start by recognizing that the system isn't broken. It's doing exactly what it was designed to do: to get us to buy, to get us to vote, to get us to fight, to get us to not be connected with what's important to us. So we need a different kind of system.
So I'm interested in what are the institutions that create belonging. Now remember, only a few hundred years ago, before the printing press, we had an entirely different set of institutions. There's no reason, in fact there's a lot of reason why we should see new institutions that are arising out of digital, but it's going to take a metamorphosis. And everything that the butterfly needs to be a butterfly is already in the caterpillar, and we already have what we need. We have the seeds of belonging. We can see it all around us. Many of us know Burning Man, and we can see the seeds of what it would take to create a new kind of society at scale. But it's going to take a symbiosis and a symbiotic relationship across humanity and nature and spirit and science and technology, and we've got to bring all of that together into something new.
So I have lots of ideas about what to do, but I want you for a moment to go back to that original feeling you had at the beginning. What would it feel like to have an economy of belonging? Feel that for a moment. What would it be like to exchange with money that actually was a currency of contribution, that wasn't just a transactional relationship that ended a relationship, but actually sparked something? What would it be to have a government that fostered gratitude? Feel that for a moment. Hard to imagine, and yet we can.
What would it be to have a company that created belonging, that fostered co-creation, where we wanted to go to work and we were appreciative of each other and knew that the organization was appreciative of us? And what would it be if technology was seen as something that was contributing to our sense of connection and belonging? We can create institutions. We've done it before and we can do it again. So let's be long now. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Mark. We are now on to our penultimate talk. Unfortunately, Andrew was unable to be here tonight, but we have a recording. Andrew, as you may know, is with Long Now, and he is giving us a sneak preview of The Interval's new face, which will be revealed later this year in September, and it's in hopes to guide The Interval into the next 25 years. So please welcome Andrew's recording.
Hi, my name is Andrew Warner, and I'm here today to tell you about a project we at Long Now have been working on for many months and are telling the public about for the first time. Almost exactly 10 years ago, Long Now opened The Interval, our headquarters in Fort Mason, and that's also a bar, cafe, museum, library and event space. Hindsight's 20/20, but when we first came up with this idea it was pretty out there: a long-term thinking nonprofit opening a bar. Thankfully it was a success. Press has called The Interval one of the best bars in the country. It's an amazing cafe during the day. Having our own venue made a huge difference in being able to host more events and lectures.
Yet we always knew it could be so much more. People would come to The Interval and not know it was part of a larger nonprofit. For The Interval's 10-year anniversary, we want to remedy this. We're completely redoing the display space to better highlight Long Now's mission and projects. I'm going to spend the rest of this talk giving a whirlwind tour of some of the parts of this project.
First challenge is explaining what Long Now is. If you've ever tried to tell a friend about us, you know we aren't the easiest organization to give an elevator pitch on. Anchoring our long-term thinking section will be a 12-foot by 4-foot painting by artist and Long Now staff member Casey C, showing the long now, the previous and next 10,000 years. Here's a preview of what that painting looks like so far.
After that section, we get to the Clock of the Long Now. To showcase the clock, we are hanging a full-size, 5-foot diameter clock face made from the actual spare parts from the clock in Texas. We're really honored to be hosting this part and we're really excited about it.
One of the things we've noticed in explaining the clock is people have a hard time visualizing the size of the clock. You can say it's 500 feet tall, but it's hard to picture that. To help solve this, we're building an 8-foot, full-size diameter replica of one of the gears of the clock that will hang from the ceiling so that visitors can understand how big it is. Pairing with that gear is a model of what this gear will look like inside the clock, with a person for scale.
Next, to explain the challenges of engineering for 10,000 years, we're featuring the equation of time cam, the sculptural light clock piece that converts the sun's position to the correct time and has to take factors into account like the 26,000-year precession of the equinoxes.
One of the requests we've had for years is to get the beloved orrery spinning again. We're currently busy restoring the orrery to working order so that people can see the planets move.
Moving on from the clock, the next display focuses on Long Now's bristlecone preserve in eastern Nevada. This beautiful mountain is home to our tree mascot, the bristlecone pine, but also hosts some of our long-term thinking art projects and long-term science initiatives. The anchor piece for this section is a 2,200-year-old bristlecone cross-section. We're using this tree as a way to visually experience multi-millennial time spans and filling it with dates that are long now real they did or long now at.
Next, we have a display about The Interval itself. Many people only experience The Interval during the day when it's in cafe mode, and so we're building a tiny little Interval diorama where there will be a tiny lecture full of tiny people enjoying tiny drinks.
We've had a Rosetta Disk on display since opening, but it wasn't very interactive. For this next iteration, we're going to include a microscope so that one can look at the different pages on the disk and explore yourself. To tell people about our off-world language archives, we're 3D printing a model of Comet 67P, where we put one of our language archives in 2014. Note, this comet will not be to scale.
Taking a step back, all of our signage is going to get a revamp with materials that match the space: glass, walnut, 316 stainless steel. We're also going to integrate lighting to make all these feel like museum-worthy displays.
Finally, we really want to provide the opportunity for people to deep dive and learn more about these projects. Right now, to fully understand what's going on in this space, a Long Now staff member or a very knowledgeable friend has to give a full hour-long tour, which is hard to arrange for the 40,000 visitors we get every year. So we're building a multimedia tour featuring Long Now board, staff members and clock engineers talking about all our different projects.
We've been hard at work at this. We're going to be installing in late August for an early September opening. Please come visit when it's done. It should be a really special experience, and we're really excited to share it with you. Thank you.
Thank you, Andrew, feel better. I just love the time cam. I mean, just creating the position of the sun for the next 10,000 years in metal, it's just beautiful. We are now on to our final talk. Our next speaker is a game designer and futurist who runs a mass-scale community focused on future possibilities. Please welcome out Jane McGonigal.
Let's play a game of what if. I'll describe three hypothetical futures. You try to imagine how you would feel and what you would do if you woke up in these strange new worlds.
Imagine it's 2033. Extreme heat, wildfire and droughts have been worse than even the most dire climate predictions, so now geoengineering is up for a global vote. 9 billion people are eligible to vote yes or no on a 10-year plan of aggressive solar radiation management, injecting sulfate particles into the atmosphere to block some of the sun's rays. The election is called Sunexit, and they're saying a yes on Sunexit could lead to a 10-year winter, but it could also solve some of our biggest climate challenges. Is it worth the risks, the unintended consequences? How would you vote? How would you educate yourself to be ready to vote?
Oh, scenario update: Sunexit passed. We're doing it. Solar radiation management starts in 10 days. How do you feel now? What do you do in these 10 days to prepare? Okay, it's one year later. The geoengineering is working. Yes, amazing. But paradoxically, trust in science is now at an all-time low. People are saying there are mental and physical side effects. Is it just misinformation? What do you do to keep yourself healthy?
Okay, new future. It's 2029 and your federal government has gone full-blown zero-waste authoritarian. It is now illegal to throw anything away. They literally took your trash cans. Yeah, composting still allowed. Recycling never worked. And garbage, you are not allowed to create any of it, nothing. But there's some good news: psychologists have invented a new word to describe the positive emotion that defines life in a zero-waste society. Zerophoria. It's a combination of pride, joy and resourcefulness, a lightness of being that comes from wasting nothing and
leaving no trace behind. How do you react to these changes? Do you adopt new habits, help others, or do you rise up and join the protor resistance? Maybe become a reformer, propose ways to make zero-waste society better.
Okay, one more future. It's now 2031, and climate migration is on the rise, and countries with low fertility rates are competing with each other for immigrants. They are building climate-resilient welcome cities and paying people to move there. It's part of a new geopolitical movement called the Welcome Party, and up to 1 billion people are expected to climate relocate with assistance over the next decade.
You have been asked to take a survey of personal climate risk and intention to migrate, because the Welcome Party is collecting data to simulate and plan a safe and equitable mass climate migration. You have to name three climate-resilient cities you would be willing to move to with social and economic support. Which three cities do you name? How ready do you feel to consider this question?
Why am I asking these hypotheticals? Well, let me show you some data. These two graphs show how often we use the terms "unimaginable" and "unthinkable" in our journalism. Look at those trend lines. The surge has been exponential. We are increasingly shocked and blindsided by how the future unfolds.
That's why I lead an online community called Urgent Optimists for the nonprofit Institute for the Future, where I lead monthly social simulations of otherwise unthinkable events. Hundreds of team members gather together online to write and share journal entries describing in vivid detail how we would feel and what we would do to help ourselves and others if we woke up in these strange new worlds.
Our goal is to move every team member's numbers at least plus one on three different measures of future imagination, like mental flexibility: on a scale of 1 to 10, how plausible or realistic is this future scenario? In other words, is it thinkable to you? Also realistic hope: how worried or excited would you be to wake up in this future? We want you to be able to anticipate risks, yes, and also opportunities for positive transformation. And then future power: how ready do you feel to help yourself and others if you were to wake up in this future? This is the number we see go up the most after a social simulation.
So I hope you will consider one day joining a social simulation team, playing with some possibilities, and help us become a society that can confidently say: for us, there are no unthinkable futures. There are no futures we refuse to imagine. Thank you.
Awesome, thank you, Jane. Thank you to all of our [Applause] speakers. Those talks were really amazing, thank you. Thanks to all of you for supporting the Long Now. I think it's a great institution, and your donations mean a lot to it, and we'll see you soon. I was Brady Forest. Bye. Or I am.
[Applause]
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