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I highly recommend Kishore Mahbubani's Long Now Foundation Talk on China. I am not the expert of eastern geo-politics that he is, so I have no idea if his thinking is correct or not, but it's very interesting.

He states that China's move to democracy is almost inevitable, but it will take a long time. He said that Chinese officials saw what happened with the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union, going briefly into democracy before Russia emerged with totalitarianism and Putin. They don't want to go down that road. But it's clear that there are many democratic reforms happening in China right now. It's not the China I grew up learning about in the 70's and 80's, and the people of that country are benefiting from those reforms.

All of that said, they are still a very long way away from what most of us would deem as acceptable when it comes to human rights. I think in 50 years though, China will look very different from both inside and outside their borders.

Doubt it. The thing is being built at the top of a mountain in the middle of the West Texas desert, in an area with negligible pre-industrial population.

Its own website admits it is difficult to get to even with the aid of cars and planes, which will be gone in 100 years after the Oil Age is over.

Maybe the Long Now foundation could make use of it as a power source for their 10,000 year clock?

There is another state religion that denies evolution. This religion is being taught in all public schools. This is so because it is also uniformly taught in higher education. It forms the central dogma of what are called "the social sciences". As anti-science, this religion is far more damaging than the "dinosaurs and man walked side by side" theocrats because it actually informs most of what we call "public policy" at the Federal level. It is exemplified by (though hardly limited to) the widely praised writings of Harvard professors Richard "Dick" Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould who, together with other fellow travelers, attempted to get Edward O. Wilson ejected from Harvard because Wilson dared posit evolution might apply to signiicant aspects of human social behavior, as well as to that of other organisms.

Those who weren't around in the late 1970's watching all this might not be aware of exactly how virulent and organized -- let alone wrong-headed -- the attacks were.

But one thing is for certain: The dogma that human biodiversity is an insignificant consideration in the social sciences is under increasing attack by the scientific evidence and, at the same time, it is ever more influential on public policy.

So-called "creationism" as theocratic anti-science threat is a red-herring.

Quoting The IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report (discussed here):

Achieving deep cuts [in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions] will require more intensive use of low-GHG technologies such as renewable energy, nuclear energy, and CCS.

So, someone who is completely anti-nuclear is in conflict with the IPCC, which is supposed to be the standard for technical consensus, right? It's only those crazy global warming denialists who think they know better than the IPCC.

In this piece by Joe Romm (linked to here by timothy) I think the first step is to note that he's critiquing something over at the Guardian UK site written by James Hansen, Kerry Emanuel, Ken Caldeira and Tom Wigley, Nuclear power paves the only viable path forward on climate change (it's distantly possible that you're better off reading something by James Hansen rather than by some guy who actually quotes Mark Jacobson approvingly).

Please note the sub-title on that Hansen piece: "Alongside renewables, Nuclear will make the difference". Joe Romm insists it's likely nuclear power will be just a "bit player", but conceeds we should keep working on it, e.g. he likes research into small, modular reactors. Hansen and company don't dispute that renewables have a role to play, they just insist we can't solve the problem without nuclear. Arguably, the great fight here is over whether we need renewables plus nukes, or nukes plus renewables.

Hansen and company say:

For example, a build rate of 61 new reactors per year could entirely replace current fossil fuel electricity generation by 2050. Accounting for increased global electricity demand driven by population growth and development in poorer countries, which would add another 54 reactors per year, this makes a total requirement of 115 reactors per year to 2050 to entirely decarbonise the global electricity system in this illustrative scenario. We know that this is technically achievable because France and Sweden were able to ramp up nuclear power to high levels in just 15-20 years."

Joe Romm argues:

According to the online database of the International Atomic Energy Agency, France has 58 operational reactors, which took the country more than two decades to connect to the grid! That would be a rate of under three per year.

Actually, 58 reactors over two decades is in fact nearly 3 per year, and that's built by a single country.

Why, that would mean that to build 115 reactors per year we might need the efforts of nearly 40 countries! Oh my god where are we going to find that many?

Seriously: you need to grasp the sheer scale of the problem of decarbonizing the world economy. If you look at what we need to do to ramp up any clean energy source, it's absolutely huge. Take a look at some of the numbers Saul Griffith crunched back in 2009:

Two terawatts of photovoltaic would require installing 100 square meters of 15-percent-efficient solar cells every second, second after second, for the next 25 years. (Thatâ(TM)s about 1,200 square miles of solar cells a year, times 25 equals 30,000 square miles of photovoltaic cells.) [ ... and so on ... ]

Another version of that talk is here. Anything we do is going to involve incredible magnitudes of rapid construction, and we really need to get started on it.

By the way, Hansen and company did an extended presentation at COP21.

http://longnow.org/

DNA mutates when alive and degrades when dead, there have to be other options

If you haven't heard of the Long Now Foundation, check it out - http://longnow.org/ I think the whole paradigm is pretty cool - civilization has been in existence for 10,000 years, so let's build stuff now that will last for another 10,000 years. Surely by then any civilization will wonder what the hell we were thinking. Anyway, one of their projects is the cryptically named "Long Server". Now, assuming humans just disappeared tomorrow, it's completely possible that Hoover Dam could run for 50-100 years and thereby entire data centers could stay up and running. That's a blink of an eye in geologic terms though.

Whatever it is, I think it will be inside a mountain. Maybe there should be an digital computer version of the 10,000 year clock (mechanical not electrical) or something like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.

Building something capable of surviving a 10,000-year journey is no mean feat, I'll grant you that. But there's no reason to think we can't do it. People are already working on a clock designed to last for 10,000 years: http://longnow.org/clock/ . The technologies used to do that aren't even that advanced. Plus, most of the issues with that clock have to do with Earth-specific problems (temperature fluctuations, humidity, theft, and so on). Deep space is actually a much better environment for preserving things.

From the description of "The Devourer," it sounds like Cixin could relate to "The Pagan Bible" by Melvin Gorham and "The Social Conquest of Earth" by E. O. Wilson.

Both describe civilization as a eusocial superorganism -- with Gorham being more pessimistic than Wilson as to the potential for containing its ecological conquest of sexual species.

Virtually all sexual species exhibit aggression. The problem is war, not mere aggression. And this problem goes beyond mere conflict between human groups. E. O. Wilson's "The Social Conquest of Earth" describes how group selection dominates the environment and, in the case of human eusocial organization, degrades biodiversity.

The price of civilization is eusocial organization and the price of eusocial organization is war.

One way of addressing this failing is to turn civilization outward, away from the biosphere, toward "war" on lifeless rock in space -- converting it to life -- leaving the biosphere free of human eusocial organization.

Is there a place for humans in the biosphere?

Yes, but only if individual sovereignty is ruthlessly enforced.

The Long Now Foundation has been covering this issue pretty well, too, with its 'Manual for Civilisation project'. They actually built a place with airtight shelves and started stockpiling actual books, which beats piling PDF files in a webserver anyday in long-term storage and techno-breakup resilience. They even store spores and seeds of all kinds of useful plants, and have a project for preserving animal DNA & eggs too.

The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996* to develop the Clock and Library projects, as well as to become the seed of a very long-term cultural institution. The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide a counterpoint to today's accelerating culture and help make long-term thinking more common. We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.

About

The optimists:
http://longnow.org/

the pessimists:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Abides

the second kind doesn't need any storage of information I would think.
Some might not even call them optimists or pessimists.

If you're not familiar with The Long Now Foundation you should check them out. They have a project to build a clock that will last 10,000 years (about as long again as there's been civilization on earth), and are making progress constructing it in a cave in a mountain in Nevada.

Of course, the next questions are things like "well, who is going to be around to read it?" and "how will they read it?", and "how do we maintain a level of civilization where people can create replacement parts for it?"

Neal Stephenson consulted with them for his book Anathem, which I highly recommend, which is based around these sorts of questions.

If you're not familiar with The Long Now Foundation you should check them out. They have a project to build a clock that will last 10,000 years (about as long again as there's been civilization on earth), and are making progress constructing it in a cave in a mountain in Nevada.

Of course, the next questions are things like "well, who is going to be around to read it?" and "how will they read it?", and "how do we maintain a level of civilization where people can create replacement parts for it?"

Neal Stephenson consulted with them for his book Anathem, which I highly recommend, which is based around these sorts of questions.

A project of the Long Now Foundation, who don't just think about what to do about long term preservation as an academic exercise. They actually do something about it. With money. (Still not very much money though.)

Check out their purely mechanical multi-millennial clock project too.

We need more like him: Stewart fuckin' Brand.

See also Long Now Foundation.

We need more like him: Stewart fuckin' Brand.

See also Long Now Foundation.

In case anyone reading this hasn't heard of it, the 10,000 year clock being built by the Long Now Foundation will contain the coolest mechanical computer that I've heard of.

10,000 year clock

Very slow computer. But unlike the one in the article, very reliable. And it was designed by Danny Hillis, who has designed supercomputers.

While I love cool things like the Turbo Entabulator, it is cool beyond words that that the computer in the 10,000 year clock has a serious purpose for being designed the way that it is.

I think this is more than just Microsoft. It's crazy the lengths I have to go to sometimes if I want to resurrect a 10-year-old game on my modern PC. Switching to 64-bit Windows also killed a number of old programs I used to run in x86--even though they should run in x86 mode, they don't. I agree with you that the vast majority of issues are with proprietary software, but discontinued open-source projects regularly suffer the same fate.

Kevin Kelly had a good article on this at the Longnow blog, where he makes the argument that the only way to preserve digital data is to perpetually migrate it to new systems and formats. It seems extreme, but I don't know if I see an alternative; othewise, if not for the work of volunteers we will loose much of our digital history.

Discrete problems are often approximations of some continuous problems, and the continuous problems may be easier to pose or easier to make proofs about. So, here comes one of my favorite Feynman stories:

The router of the Connection Machine was the part of the hardware that allowed the processors to communicate. It was a complicated device; by comparison, the processors themselves were simple. Connecting a separate communication wire between each pair of processors was impractical since a million processors would require 1E12 wires. Instead, we planned to connect the processors in a 20-dimensional hypercube so that each processor would only need to talk to 20 others directly. Because many processors had to communicate simultaneously, many messages would contend for the same wires. The router's job was to find a free path through this 20-dimensional traffic jam or, if it couldn't, to hold onto the message in a buffer until a path became free. Our question to Richard Feynman was whether we had allowed enough buffers for the router to operate efficiently.

During those first few months, Richard began studying the router circuit diagrams as if they were objects of nature. He was willing to listen to explanations of how and why things worked, but fundamentally he preferred to figure out everything himself by simulating the action of each of the circuits with pencil and paper.

[...]

By the end of that summer of 1983, Richard had completed his analysis of the behavior of the router, and much to our surprise and amusement, he presented his answer in the form of a set of partial differential equations. To a physicist this may seem natural, but to a computer designer, treating a set of boolean circuits as a continuous, differentiable system is a bit strange. Feynman's router equations were in terms of variables representing continuous quantities such as "the average number of 1 bits in a message address." I was much more accustomed to seeing analysis in terms of inductive proof and case analysis than taking the derivative of "the number of 1's" with respect to time. Our discrete analysis said we needed seven buffers per chip; Feynman's equations suggested that we only needed five. We decided to play it safe and ignore Feynman.

The decision to ignore Feynman's analysis was made in September, but by next spring we were up against a wall. The chips that we had designed were slightly too big to manufacture and the only way to solve the problem was to cut the number of buffers per chip back to five. Since Feynman's equations claimed we could do this safely, his unconventional methods of analysis started looking better and better to us. We decided to go ahead and make the chips with the smaller number of buffers.

Fortunately, he was right. When we put together the chips the machine worked. The first program run on the machine in April of 1985 was Conway's game of Life.

Saber-tooth cats (incorrectly referred to as tigers) are on the list. http://longnow.org/revive/candidates/

As long as their higher on the list than sabre-wielding-cats, which for the record, scare the bajeezus out of me!

To be fair, you are quoting the summary and that is not said on the project's main website. However, they do say:

" Its DNA has already been sequenced... The genomes of the two birds will be compared in close detail, to determine which differences are most crucial. Then the data and analysis goes to George Church’s lab at Harvard’s Wyss Institute to begin the process of converting the viable band-tailed DNA into viable passenger pigeon DNA... There are some 1,500 preserved specimens with extractable DNA."

http://longnow.org/revive/projects/

Saber-tooth cats (incorrectly referred to as tigers) are on the list.

http://longnow.org/revive/candidates/

Actually on the list of candidates they list the Smilodon (saber-toothed cat).

"How soon will some extinct creature live again?

Signs are there will be some impressive milestones in this decade. Technically one extinction has already been partially reversed. The last Pyrenean ibex (also called a bucardo) died in 2000. A Spanish team used frozen tissue to clone a living twin in 2003, birthed by a goat. The baby ibex died of respiratory failure after ten minutes (a common problem in early cloning efforts). Funding dried up, so no further work has been done on this species as yet. As George Church reminds people, the first airplane flight in 1903 lasted 12 seconds."

From the FAQ - http://longnow.org/revive/faq-recommended-reading/

Let us take a hypothetical example. Suppose I wanted to dry my hands as fast as possible and I happened to be at the top of a tall building with on towel. Well, a good stiff breeze helps, so if pragmatism was about *now* with no regard to the future, the best option would be to jump off the building and wave my hands in the breeze.

Reductio ad absurdam - unfortunately for your point, a pragmatist would recognize the idiocy of committing suicide in order to dry his hands.

A pragmatist - in REALITY - would say, "I'll shake my hands briskly to remove as much excess moisture as I can, and then perhaps wipe them on the leg of my pants or my shirt." A pragmatist would NOT say, "I need to assemble a solar-powered hand dryer using only the materials available to me on this rooftop, then leave it behind when I go for other people to use it, and launch a worldwide campaign to install a hand dryer on every roof of every building, everywhere!"

How is it pragmatic to set myself up for future pain and suffering which high certainty? In 5 years, I certainly won't feel I made the pragmatic choice when I have to fix the mess again.

A pragmatist would either print a hard copy for future reference and safe keeping, or dump the relevant information out to a plain text file and files that away so he could access it later. It is not pragmatic to embark on a crusade to change the entire software industry to support standards that will magically protect everybody, somehow, in the future. Shit gets old and obsolete. A pragmatist deals with that fact by saying, "Well what's the longest-lived format I can think of and use?" (hard copy printout, or text-file dump.) An idealist deals with this fact by launching the Long Now project and its affiliates, to ensure that mankind in the future has access to the numerous digital resources and cultural artifacts produced today.

By your reckoning RMS as an idealist would have taken a scorched arth approach and eschewed everything proprietary.

Which he has. He will - grudgingly - use non-free software when he has to, and he will bitch about it the whole time, kicking and screaming and fighting it. His move to a 'completely free' computer that you referenced also comes at tremendous sacrifice in the number of things that he can accomplish with his computer. He has chosen his ideals over practical efficiency - in other words, he is an idealist, not a pragmatist. His many semantic quibbles with other Open Source / Free Software people (Open Source vs. Free Software... GNU/Linux vs. Linux... slagging off on Canonical for their misdeeds here... i'm sure you've heard numerous others, I know I have) is also indicative of his "scorched earth" view - if you do not agree with him, you are wrong, evil, immoral, and, if not ACTUALLY the enemy, certainly lending aid and comfort to him.

Don't misunderstand me - I respect him for walking the walk when it comes to his ideals. But trying to call him a "pragmatist" where Free Software is concerned is pretty silly by any stretch of the imagination.

Augmented reality HUD glasses combined with a few other devices for analyzing the environment around you and then connected to any massive and fast database would yield some interesting things.

Read Daemon and Freedom by Daniel Suarez for some of the best use of this technology I have seen in recent fiction. Noting, of course, that Google was credited on the project (along with others)...

This page also discusses the technology used in the books.

This page and this page are examples of the sort of dialogue ensuing from these books. Everyone I have suggested them to is now dreaming of life in D-Space. ;)

What is amazing is that he wrote the first book in 2004 and saw so much of this coming... It reminds me of Ender's Game and its predictions of the common use of tablets, web forums, anytime/anywhere connectivity, adaptive learning systems, etc... even though it was written in the 80s.

It's interesting how on one end of the scale you have the sort of people who want to build a clock that will last 10,000 years and on the other end you have people who say "SETI hasn't found any evidence of ET's in 35 years - why fund it?".

At least we've found that there is no evidence so far. If we hadn't looked, we wouldn't even know that much. If I'm not mistaken, SETI@Home was a pioneer in in distributed public computing. That's a pretty cool output of the program. I'm not trying to suggest any conclusions - just a few thoughts that occurred to me.

I know that most cities were protected by seawalls after the 1896/1933 tsunamies and I had also heard about Fudai on the longnow blog, but not about other villages/towns/cities (I realize those terms have very differnt meanings throughout the world).

Since I guess that you are Japanese (brilliant guess, I know), can you say something about the general Japanese perception of the earthquake? Here in Germany it has become perfectly acceptable to refer to the earthquake and tsunami simply by saying Fukushima, without even mentioning that whole cities were destroyed. A recent talk show on TV (admittedly about nuclear power) introduced the topic by stating there was an earthquake and a "heavy tsunami" in Japan, while showing the exploding reactor buildings - not even mentioning or showing the destruction and casualties of the tsunami or the fact that a coastline as long as the distance from Hamburg to Munich was devastated (basically all the way from north to south of Germany).

I stopped reading a popular German online magazine (Telepolis) altogether after one of their articles on march 13th 2011 compared the then-official death toll of about 1000 people to the (inflated) figure of 200,000 in the Haiti earthquake. Talking down the severity of the earthquake and tsunami. I was shouted down in the forum for daring to mention that several cities had basically vanished, saying that I was merely "trying to distract from the nuclear power plant".

What makes his story interesting is his dedication to a problem that most people seem to think is intractable to the average problem solver.
It is the dedication of man to a task -- Learning and experimenting for knowledge sake.

The same could be said true of a 10,000 year clock: http://longnow.org/clock, the Beach Pneumatic Transit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beach_Pneumatic_Transit, or reasons to learn Calculus, ring theory and other pure mathematics even though most people will probably never ever use them.

Thanks for the example on trees. I guess that is the value in a symbolic project like "The Long Now", to help get people thinking about that:
    http://longnow.org/

I've found my optimism has increased with trying to list all the things I'm thankful for before I got to sleep each day, and also getting more sunlight (and vitamin D) and eating better, etc..

The good news is, lots of people are planting all sorts of "trees", like in that Paul Hawken book:
    http://www.blessedunrest.com/
"A leading environmentalist and social activist's examination of the worldwide movement for social and environmental change
    Paul Hawken has spent over a decade researching organizations dedicated to restoring the environment and fostering social justice. From billion-dollar nonprofits to single-person dot.causes, these groups collectively comprise the largest movement on earth, a movement that has no name, leader, or location, and that has gone largely ignored by politicians and the media. Like nature itself, it is organizing from the bottom up, in every city, town, and culture. and is emerging to be an extraordinary and creative expression of people's needs worldwide.
    Blessed Unrest explores the diversity of the movement, its brilliant ideas, innovative strategies, and hidden history, which date back many centuries. A culmination of Hawken's many years of leadership in the environmental and social justice fields, it will inspire and delight any and all who despair of the world's fate, and its conclusions will surprise even those within the movement itself. Fundamentally, it is a description of humanity's collective genius, and the unstoppable movement to reimagine our relationship to the environment and one another."

But he says in that book how unaware everyone is of what other people around them are doing that is positive. I guess the mainstream media does not focus much on those planting "trees"? Although, maybe, sometimes focusing attention on new trees would get them vandalized? So that inattention may not be all bad.

The number one thing suggested in the book "Small is Possible" (by George McRobie about EF Schumacher's work, from 1981) is to figure out what is going on around you.

Maybe we need a Google Maps for good news about new trees being planted? :-) But maybe we just need something simpler and more local.

Any chance this will be used by the folks at The Long Now Foundation?

This service will require an accurate measure of time, I think they should each have one of these.

http://longnow.org/clock/

I didn't read the article, but more than three nodes would suffice, along with other measurements of time.

May I recommend the first track of David Stutz's Iolet: The Music of Anathem

I have Linux From Scratch on my Dell Inspiron 1545, the CD needs hammered into place, i have moved source code into the new system, i had trouble copying files to my vfat thumb drive from OBSD, so I used my Mac at work and gave my coworker a list of systems that will help with a command line server, stuff like screen, told him to look for a cli version of pidgin, email, browser, mc, etc. OBSD runs my desktop development environment, including selected bits from gutenberg, tldp, ocw.mit.edu, OBSD documentation, All RFCs, I don't have DMOZ, nor wikipedia, but the LFS system is not complete so there you go. OBSD runs black box, imagemagick, lynx, vlc, xpdf, python 2, wxpython, and some of the above options. Open BSD is chosen for it's stability and lfs for it's flexibility. They compliment each other well. and my desktop is clearly transferable to LFS and vice versa.

I also have the long now foundations rosetta disk http://blog.longnow.org/2008/11/03/macro-to-micro-etching/ on dvd. My friend's list on myspace is an approximation of advogato's trust metric that verifies cultural significance within that web site (it's old right now, almost a photograph, but significant). On my book shelf I have the ashley book of knots and the CRC handbook of chemistry and physics.

I have all of the presidential addresses as well as the us constitution. In a way, in a zombie apocalypse, I carry the sum total of human knowledge as available online.

I still need to write a package manager though.

This might be my favorite talk of all the internet: Bruce Sterling's "The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole"

It's funny, insightful, interesting, informative, underrated with just the right amount of flamebait.

The list of areas Vinay Deolalikar pulls his ideas from is just amazing, I mean who'd have thought of using statistical physics to solve a deterministic logic problem.

I think Feynman was close enough.

By the end of that summer of 1983, Richard had completed his analysis of the behavior of the router, and much to our surprise and amusement, he presented his answer in the form of a set of partial differential equations. To a physicist this may seem natural, but to a computer designer, treating a set of boolean circuits as a continuous, differentiable system is a bit strange. Feynman's router equations were in terms of variables representing continuous quantities such as "the average number of 1 bits in a message address." I was much more accustomed to seeing analysis in terms of inductive proof and case analysis than taking the derivative of "the number of 1's" with respect to time. Our discrete analysis said we needed seven buffers per chip; Feynman's equations suggested that we only needed five. We decided to play it safe and ignore Feynman.

The decision to ignore Feynman's analysis was made in September, but by next spring we were up against a wall. The chips that we had designed were slightly too big to manufacture and the only way to solve the problem was to cut the number of buffers per chip back to five. Since Feynman's equations claimed we could do this safely, his unconventional methods of analysis started looking better and better to us. We decided to go ahead and make the chips with the smaller number of buffers.

Fortunately, he was right. When we put together the chips the machine worked. The first program run on the machine in April of 1985 was Conway's game of Life.

Exactly! New is the new old. A million processors? Pah! Old hat. There has been done lots of interesting research into parallel processing in the past. Read the Connection Machine book It's a great read.

Feynman was also involved with the machine at a certain point. There's a great writeup on him and it for a quick introduction: '.. It was a complicated device; by comparison, the processors themselves were simple. Connecting a separate communication wire between each pair of processors was impractical since a million processors would require $10^{12]$ wires. Instead, we planned to connect the processors in a 20-dimensional hypercube so that each processor would only need to talk to 20 others directly. ..'

The C-5 looked awesome as well. And I'll just keep quiet about all the cool Lisp stuff they did on it.

The Long Now Foundation is thinking about and working on projects like The Rosetta Disk, which crams a bunch of languages onto a 4 inch metal disk. "This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 13,000 pages of language documentation. The text begins at eye-readable scale and spirals down to nano-scale. This tapered ring of languages is intended to maximize the number of people that will be able to read something immediately upon picking up the Disk, as well as implying the directions for using it—‘get a magnifier and there is more.’" That's just part of their "10,000 year library."

Okay, not really related to ancient Mayan plumbing, but that article did make me think about this great talk by neuroscientist and writer David Eagleman:
http://www.longnow.org/seminars/02010/apr/01/six-easy-steps-avert-collapse-civilization/

Why on earth is this comment marked as Flamebait? This is a fair point.

As for the grandparent:

there is absolutely nothing positive about them, they cannot "teach us" anything

If you are committed to not learning from extreme situations, you are committed to ignorance. Brand's goal is to find a way for the human population to live on this planet in a sustainable way before something catastrophic happens. Slums are dirty, nasty places, for sure. But they exemplify a social self-organization that does have positive consequences from a sustainability perspective. So if we can learn how the positive aspects of slums work, we might be able to see the pattern and apply it to a non-slum.

Stewart Brand is part of the Long Now Foundation, an organization to foster long-term thinking about how to live on Earth without killing each other. I highly, highly recommend listening to Brian Eno's lecture about how the foundation got its name, and what the whole thing is about.

Why on earth is this comment marked as Flamebait? This is a fair point.

As for the grandparent:

there is absolutely nothing positive about them, they cannot "teach us" anything

If you are committed to not learning from extreme situations, you are committed to ignorance. Brand's goal is to find a way for the human population to live on this planet in a sustainable way before something catastrophic happens. Slums are dirty, nasty places, for sure. But they exemplify a social self-organization that does have positive consequences from a sustainability perspective. So if we can learn how the positive aspects of slums work, we might be able to see the pattern and apply it to a non-slum.

Stewart Brand is part of the Long Now Foundation, an organization to foster long-term thinking about how to live on Earth without killing each other. I highly, highly recommend listening to Brian Eno's lecture about how the foundation got its name, and what the whole thing is about.

Why on earth is this comment marked as Flamebait? This is a fair point.

As for the grandparent:

there is absolutely nothing positive about them, they cannot "teach us" anything

If you are committed to not learning from extreme situations, you are committed to ignorance. Brand's goal is to find a way for the human population to live on this planet in a sustainable way before something catastrophic happens. Slums are dirty, nasty places, for sure. But they exemplify a social self-organization that does have positive consequences from a sustainability perspective. So if we can learn how the positive aspects of slums work, we might be able to see the pattern and apply it to a non-slum.

Stewart Brand is part of the Long Now Foundation, an organization to foster long-term thinking about how to live on Earth without killing each other. I highly, highly recommend listening to Brian Eno's lecture about how the foundation got its name, and what the whole thing is about.

That's not the real problem. Nickel pages 1.27 microns thick simply don't have enough stiffness for you to be able to pick up a page without crinkling it, never mind any risk to the skin on your fingers, which is quite resilient by comparison. What Mr. Edison wasn't thinking about -- I assume he was speaking off the cuff to the interviewer, as he certainly had the technical knowledge -- was the tensile strength of nickel. If you think it's hard to handle a sheet of aluminum foil without getting it crinkled, good luck with nickel leaf.

The other problem is that layers of printing ink have thickness. It doesn't matter a whole lot with paper (for most inks, anyway) because paper is so thick relative to the ink, but relative to 1.27 micron metal leaf, it's another matter altogether. Bear in mind that most of the ink sits on or near the surface of the paper -- if it soaked in too much it would cause the outlines of the letters to blur. And with paper, there is actually lots of empty space in the fibers for the pigment particles (mostly carbon) and the binder to settle in. Nickel leaf, on the other hand, is not fibrous, and while I suppose it might eventually be possible to cheaply mass produce sheets of nanoscale nickel fibers, it's not possible now and sure as heck wasn't in Edison's day.

The idea of using nickel isn't an entirely bad one, though printing isn't the way to go. The Long Now Foundation -- the current project of Stewart Brand, the guy who gave us the classic hippie Whole Earth Catalog -- is working on using an excimer laser to etch 350,000 pages onto 2.8-inch nickel discs. This will be actual, unencoded, human-readable text -- if the human in question has a student-grade microscope capable of 650x magnification. The required technology already exists; the main problem, aside from the sheer expense of the equipment, is that it takes a day and a half to etch a single disc this way. I can't help but think that Brand would be better off using a chip fab to crank out more or less the same thing using the same technology we use for making tiny circuits.

I just stumbled across this on the Long Now web site.
http://blog.longnow.org/2009/10/22/millenniata-now-shipping/

Neal Stephenson: Anathem (weird society)

Others have suggested Anathem, but you've illustrated quite well why it would be unsuitable. Basically, I feel that high school students won't have a mature enough understanding of philosophy and mathematics to understand what the book's actually about. I'm currently reading it for the third time, and but it's been clear to me from the start that the "weird society" is simply a vehicle for a commentary on long-term thinking and the philosophy of science.

I completely agree that Anathem is one of the most important science fiction works of the 21st century so far, but to say that it's worthy of study because it has a "weird society" is completely missing the point.

Neal Stephenson: Anathem (long-term thinking, philosophy of science)

Fixed that for you.

They need something like a millennial continuity contest.

Coincidentally I already have a plan. People have noticed that lowest consumption trajectories to the planets exist that take a long time to complete.

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/07/215211&mode=thread&tid=160

Now pick one that takes you ~1000 years to reach some planet. The contestants will then develop spacecraft to travel this path for 1000 years and send them on their journey. Technically they could all arrive at the same time, so we have to add a little difficulty. The price goes to the descendant of the original contestant whose family has been involved with monitoring the probe throughout the whole travel time.

This is going to teach society a lesson.

There is a similar project here:
http://www.longnow.org/

Ever since I heard this talk (ogg vorbis, mp3) by Bruce Sterling, I can no longer take this singulatarians very seriously. That talk is probably the best talk that I have ever found on the internet, and it should be a part of everyone's introduction to thinking about this singularity stuff. The title is: "The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole."