As the new year begins, here’s a look back at the Seminars About Long-term Thinking of 02017. Our long-term thinking lecture series is now well into its second decade. This past year’s speakers included an astrobiologist; a theoretical physicist; an ecosystem ecologist; a Buddhist teacher who discussed what death can teach us about life; a US government employee who works to make cutting edge technology safe; and an entrepreneur dedicated to making the US government’s technology better. And more. Watch video of any talk by clicking on images or links below.
January 02017: Steven Johnson — Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World
Steven Johnson has written ten books, hosted a PBS TV series, and writes about science, technology, innovation and more for publications like Wired and the New York Times.
In January 02017 he spoke in our Seminar series about his latest book Wonderland which documents how “serious advances in science, technology and society have been propelled by games, fashion, music, illusion, food — and people just trying to have fun.”
An excerpt from Stewart Brand’s summary of the talk:
It looks frivolous, but Johnson proposed that the pursuit of delight is one of the prime movers of history — of globalization, innovation, and democratization.
February 02017: Jennifer Pahlka — Fixing Government: Bottom Up and Outside In
From Stewart Brand:
How did such grotesquely bad software design become the norm? Pahlka points to laws such as the “comically misnamed” Paperwork Reduction Act of 01980, which requires six months to get any public form approved, and the 775-page Federal Acquisition Regulation book, which requires that all software be vastly over-specified in advance. “That’s not how good software is built!”
March 02017: Bjorn Lomborg —
From Feel-Good to High-Yield Good: How to Improve Philanthropy and Aid
From Stewart Brand:
Poverty is hard to fix directly, and so is corrupt government, but working in areas that do have known solutions can affect them indirectly. Better education helps everything, and the form of education that has far the highest yield is tripling preschool in Africa. But what helps education more than anything is making sure that there’s good nutrition for infants up to two years old, which gives them better brains, making them better and happier students, and follow-up research shows that they have far better lives
April 02017: Frank Ostaseski — What the Dying Teach the Living
From Stewart Brand:
That is one message that dying gives to living. “Reflection on death,” he said, “causes us to be more responsible — in our relationships, with ourselves, with the planet, with our future.”
May 02017: Geoffrey West — The Universal Laws of Growth and Pace
From Stewart Brand:
“Bigger cities are better,” said West. Each time they increase in size, they are 15% more innovative socio-economically at the same time they are 15% more efficient in terms of energy and materials. Furthermore, they apparently live forever. They create most of civilization’s problems, but they are capable of solving problems even faster than they create them.
June 02017: James Gleick — Time Travel
From Stewart Brand:
“Time,” Richard Feynman once joked, “is what happens when nothing else happens.” Gleick suggests, “Things change, and time is how we keep track.” Virginia Woolf wrote, “What more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment? That we survive the shock at all is only possible because the past shelters us on one side, the future on another.”
July 02017: Carolyn Porco — Searching for Life in the Solar System
From Stewart Brand:
In our own Solar System there are four promising candidate habitats — Mars, Europa (a moon of Jupiter), Titan (a moon of Saturn), and Enceladus (“en-SELL-ah-duss,” another moon of Saturn). They are the best nearby candidates because they have or have had liquids, they have bio-usable energy (solar or chemical), they have existed long enough to sustain evolution, and they are accessible for gathering samples.
August 02017: Nicky Case — Seeing Whole Systems
From Stewart Brand:
Case urges attention to variation, harnessing networks and chaos from the bottom up via connecting various people from various fields, experimenting with lots of solutions, and welcoming a certain amount of randomness and play. “Design for evolution,” Case says, “and the system will surprise you with solutions you never thought of.”
September 02017: David Grinspoon — Earth in Human Hands
From Stewart Brand:
“Potentially,” Grinspoon suggested,”we’re at another eon boundary now, with an equally profound transition in the relationship between life and the planet, when cognitive processes become planetary processes. Is intelligence a planetary property, like life? Can it become a self-sustaining property, like life? Is civilization adaptive, or will it be a dead end?”
Read more or watch full video of David Grinspoon’s talk. Here’s a clip:
October 02017: Renee Wegrzyn — Engineering Gene Safety
Genome editing technologies provide the unprecedented ability to modify genetic material in a manner that is targeted, rapid, adaptable, and broadly accessible. Dr. Renee Wegrzyn is a Program Manager at DARPA working to apply the tools of synthetic biology to support biosecurity and outpace infectious disease.
November 02017: Elena Bennett — Seeds of a Good Anthropocene
From Stewart Brand:
That is one message that dying gives to living. “Reflection on death,” he said, “causes us to be more responsible — in our relationships, with ourselves, with the planet, with our future.”
December 02017: Rick Prelinger — Lost Landscapes of San Francisco, 12
For more than a decade Long Now has hosted a December showing of film archivist Rick Prelinger’s unique historical portrait of San Francisco, assembled lagely from home movies shot by residents in the early and mid 20th century. Rick creates a new collection each year, always with a mix of recent discoveries and audience favorites from showings past. In recent years we’ve hosted these at San Francisco vintage treasure The Castro Theatre.
Most of this year’s Lost Landscapes had never been shown before. It ranged from footage of dancers on the Barbary Coast in the 01910s to 01970s behind-the-scenes footage of Barbara Streisand and Ryan O’Neal making the film What’s Up Doc. As always the films showed a wide range of San Francisco neighborhoods from North Beach to Portola to Ocean Beach to Market Street.
Now in its 15th year, the Seminars About Long-term Thinking (SALT) is Long Now’s premier lecture series which is curated and hosted each month by our president and co-founder Stewart Brand in San Francisco. These events are recorded and released in our Seminar podcast: over 200 episodes so far featuring a wide range of accomplished authors, historians, scientists, artitsts, and others all of whom share a long-term perspective.
Here’s what’s next if you’d like to attend a Seminar live.
Want to see more pix? Our Flickr has more 02017 Seminar photos.
Join Long Now to support this series and all of our projects. You’ll get free tickets and access to a video livestream of more than 30 talks each year.
Thanks to everyone for a great year! Much more to come!
