Author: LongNow

London, U.K. | Astounding Timepieces

Conceived by Jem Finer of Irish punk band The Pogues, the Longplayer is a musical composition 1,000 years in length. Its first performance began at midnight on December 31, 01999 and will conclude at the end of 02999. It was composed for Tibetan Singing Bowls and is played by layering and looping several recordings of the bowls. The loops are phased just out of sync with each other so that it will take precisely 1,000 years before the pattern they create repeats.

The composition is available for listening on the web(http://longplayer.org/listen/download.php) and in several select locations around the world (http://longplayer.org/where/). The first is in the lighthouse on the Trinity Buoy Wharf in London. It can also be heard at the Royal Observatory in London, the Orangery in Nottinghamshire, the Bibliotheca Alexandia in Egypt, The Long Now Museum & Store in San Francisco, and the Brisbane Powerhouse in Queensland, Australia.

The piece usually exists only in digital form – as a live stream on the internet – and at these listening stations. In September of 2009, Finer arranged the first live performance of LongPlayer at the Roundhouse in London (http://longplayer.org/live/) where 1,000 minutes of the piece were performed on a custom built instrument.

The Longplayer Trust is the organization Finer created, which is charged with researching and implementing the means to sustain, implement, and spread awareness of Longplayer for at least its first 1,000 year-long performance.

In conjunction with the Long Now Foundation. Modified from original video and text by Austin Brown at the Long Now Blog.

Chile, South America | Unusual Monuments

One of the first realizations one has about Easter Island is it’s not an archipelago. There are no other islands surrounding it, no in all directions is nothing but empty ocean, for greater distances than from any other inhabited island on Earth. Easter Island is the ultimate island.

Besides its remoteness, Easter Island is, of course, famous for its massive stone sculptures or “Moais.” The largest of these is “El Gigante” located near the Rano Raraku Quarry and some 72 (well, 71.93 to be exact) feet tall. El Gigante weighs in at an astonishing 160-182 metric tons, more then the weight of two full 737 airplanes. However El Gigante was ambitious even for the master movers of Easter Island. Experts believe that had they finished this Moai, (of which there is some question that they ever intended to) it is unlikely the islanders would have been able to move it. In comparison, Paro, the largest Maoi ever erected was 10 metres (33 ft) high, and 75 metric tons.

Though the giant statues (moais) have been the subject of many conspiracies and myths, one gradually realizes there are few major mysteries left about them. We know who built them, (Polynesian colonizers of the island, the early Rapanui people) how they were built (carved mostly from tuff and polished smooth by rubbing with pumice), likely how they transported them, (wooden sledges, log rollers and ropes) when they were built, (between 1250 and 1500) and very probably why.

They sculptures (often called heads, though they are in fact disproportionate sized full body figures, often seen buried halfway in dirt) represent specific ancestors. These representations were erected between the village and chaos – the ocean – as a wall of protection. The two major tribes of Easter Island lived in a tropical rain-forest, a paradise of food and fishing, with plenty of time to put into the Great Work of the statues.

According to resident archaeologist Edmundo Edwards the Polynesians apparently used to sail back and forth across the great distances among the Pacific islands, but at a certain point they used up all the large trees and lost the ability to make large canoes. At this point they became trapped. The old middens (a dump for domestic waste) show that fish bones got progressively smaller as the Polynesians could no longer sail out to deep fisheries.

The island is only 45 square miles total. In the 16th and 17th century statue building accelerated and so did population, reaching the vicinity of 40,000. Then the whole thing collapsed totally about 1660. Some 2,000 people live on the island now, and the landscape is barren still. No trees except for a few invasive and problematic eucalyptus groves grow.

How could a people smart enough to navigate to tiny landfalls on thousands of miles of Pacific ocean and capable of vast engineering projects like the moia statues be so unable to deal with the coming of a doom which must have been obvious on such a tiny island?

It may have been easier then we imagine. A few years ago locals on Easter Island discovered they could catch and sell lobsters from around the island and the lobsters caught and sold until there were no more.

Though much is known about the Maois there’s lots more archaeology to do on Easter Island then just digging up stone sculptures – they’re just starting on the villages – and the story is one of the most compelling on Earth. Humans can make their own bad luck; and in the case of Easter Island, ever larger statues was not the right defense against it.

In conjunction with the Long Now Foundation. Modified from original video and text by Stewart Brand at the Long Now Blog.

Asia, Globe | Subterranean Sites

Built sometime around 1550-1292 B.C. as a capital city for the Nabataeans, an ancient Semetic peoples, Petra is perhaps one of the most astonishing wonders of the ancient world. It lay undiscovered to the modern western world until 1812.

But as high as the reputation of Petra is, the reality surpasses it. The great postcard images of the Treasury, the Monastery, the water channels in the Siq (approach canyon) do not convey the main events of the experience of visiting it, which are: the sequence of arrival, the overpowering geology (endless towering convoluted rocks), the enormous scale (hundreds of monumental-geological tombs going on for miles), and how manifestly yet to be discovered most of the city really is.

The approach to Petra takes almost an hour on foot. Before one enters the Siq (Siq translates to “shaft” and is the narrow gorge entrance to the city of Petra) a few scattered rock tombs introduce the terms of monumental Nabatean discourse — huge cubical forms cut out of vivid sandstone, cliff faces sculpted smooth and vertical with spare bas relief motifs of five ascending steps and Greek-column forms, and abyssal black tomb openings.

Thus prepped and taut with anticipation, one enters the Siq — as narrow, high, extravagant, and nervous-making as the slot canyons of the American southwest. One enters from its top, so the walk is gently downhill, easy and inviting. It it both a wild canyon and profoundly civilized. On each side of the narrow flood-sculpted passageway (sometimes 1 feet wide, 200 feet deep) is a waist-high ancient water channel, carved swervingly along the cliff curves. One was for agriculture, the other for people and animals.
It is conspicuously brilliant hydrology.

There begins to be architectural elements — carved niches almost worn away, bench forms, a watering trough for animals, and — recently discovered — the feet and legs of a realistically sculpted man leading two camels down the Siq, just larger than life size.

You keep anticipating the famous first glimpse of the Treasury framed at the end of the Siq. When it comes, your camera leaps into your hand. Okay! Consummation! Then the surprises begin.

The scale is all wrong. The Treasury is as beautifully shaped, well preserved, and sandy pink as expected, but it is not jewel-like at all. It towers WAY up over you and a day of awe induced neck-craning begins. Inside the large entrance is a vast, perfect cube of space inside the mountain. The ceiling is not arched but absolutely horizontal, 50 feet by 50 feet.

The Treasury is truly amazing, a revelation, but without the Siq leading down to it, it would be merely impressive. Once into Petra the city begins, first a lengthy necropolis of tombs in the widening canyon, then signs of the once-living metropolitan area of 30,000 people. The tombs vie with each other for massiveness, reaching far up the mountains on each side, crowding and overlapping — a teeming, almost overpopulated necropolis.

The fantastic natural rock landscape is so extensively carved, and so much of the carving is so eroded that it looks natural, your eyes can’t stop examining every rock surface near and far, parsing artificial from natural and delighting the more in both.

There are modern amenities in this ancient city, provided by resident Bedouin children and adults. Coffee, camel rides in the canyon, burro rides to the peaks, some books (purveyed by a New Zealand lady who married into the Petra Bedouin) are all available. Past ever grander tombs, a Roman colonnade, a Byzantine church (discovered in 1992), a huge free-standing temple, is lunch and a museum.

A few miles away and very much worth visiting is “Little Petra”, the fountainhead of the whole Nabatean complex — a hydrological masterpiece of water channels, stone stairways, huge echoing cisterns, and dwelling caves.

A hymn of water and rock, ancient and modern, the dead and the living, ultimately, Petra is indescribable.

In conjunction with the Long Now Foundation. Modified from original video and text by Stewart Brand at the Long Now Blog.

Royal London Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, U.K. | Inspired Inventions

Sitting in the Science Museum of London, is the first prototype for the 10,000 year Clock, also known as the Clock of the Long Now, to be built in a a remote mountain site near Ely, Nevada.

Planned as an art/engineering work of heroic scale inside a Nevada mountain, the 10,000 year Clock is meant to embody and inspire long-term thinking. The first working prototype of this 10,000 year Clock was completed in 01999 and is currently on loan to the Science Museum of London, and can be seen as the final piece in the “Making of the Modern World” exhibit. The prototype began to tick on December 31, 01999 after an almost three year research and design effort.

Power for the Clock comes from the two helical weight drives on either side of the Clock. The timing for the Clock is generated both by a torsional pendulum, with a one minute period, and by a Solar Synchronizer that re-calibrates the Clock to solar noon on any sunny day. The display on the Clock is made of two elements; the Serial Bit Adders and the dials. The Adders convert the timing generated from the pendulum, using their binary mechanical system, to changes in the Clock’s dials. The six dials represent the year, century, horizons, sun position, lunar phase, and the stars of the night sky.

It was determined that the site for the monument sized Clock had to be remote enough to require some serious travel, and was a place that was itself mythic. The creators of the clock also wanted a site that would allow the Clock to be built underground, in solid rock, but still have amazing views. This site was found, in eastern Nevada, adjacent to the Great Basin National Park.

Since purchasing the site in 01999, the Long Now Foundation has made dozens of research trips to the site. The roughly 250 acres of private land stretches over a vertical mile from the valley floor at 6,000 feet, to the 11,600 foot peak of Mt. Washington. The Foundation is studying the site to determine the best way to design the experience of accessing it, and working with mining enginees and other experts, to determine how best to proceed with the underground work.

The 10,000 year Clock will be placed inside Mt. Washington, and while there is no date for completion set yet, you can follow the project at www.longnow.org and see the prototype at the Science Museum of London.

In conjunction with the Long Now Foundation. Modified from original text by Stewart Brand at the Long Now Blog.

Asia, Globe | Long Now Locations

It is a small monastery hung far up on a cliff overlooking a spectacular valley. It is also one of thirteen small monasteries or “tiger’s lairs” where the Guru Rinpoche or “Precious Master” also known as the “second Buddha” of Bhutan is said to have meditated.

Padmasambava was a Brahmin royal who spread Tentric Buddhism through Bhutan and Tibet, in the 700s, and is seen in those areas as nearly as holy as the Buddha himself.

As legend has it, Padmasambava landed at Paro Taktsang to meditate when he brought Buddhism to Bhutan in the seventh century. He is said to have arrived on a flying tiger which had recently been his Tibetan concubine. He then meditated in a cave high on the mountain for four months after which hs subdued the local ‘demons’ and began the conversion of the Bhutanese to Buddhism.

For those without flying tiger concubines, getting to the Tiger’s Nest is significantly more difficult. There is a two hour climb from the valley floor, which is already quite high at 7000 feet, to the Tiger’s Nest 3000 feet above, 10,000 feet above sea level. As one climbs the well-maintained but very steep trail over ever more vertical switchbacks, the monastery seems to appear and disappear in and out of the trees and the mists. After two hours of a long slow climb — going slow is recommended to help manage the pace of the altitude — one arrives at the only beginning of the entrance to the Tiger’s Nest, a rock outcropping overlooking a vast chasm, with the monastery on the other side.

Beneath the promontory of rock, and across the chasm from the monastery, the cliff drops a couple of thousand feet to the gorge below. Carved into the exposed cliff face are stone steps with absolutely no handrails. This is they way to the Tiger’s Nest monastery.

Despite the reservations of visitors to navigate the terrifying looking steps, Bhutanese mothers with small babys can be seen floating up the steps with the greatest of ease. The steps lead down into the gorge, which provides the separation, and isolation the Tiger’s Nest has enjoyed for all these centuries.

As one climbs into the canyon, a one hundred meter high water fall at the deep end of the canyon appears immediately in front, with the path traversing directly across it’s base. Once down and across the front of the water fall the steps start back up toward the Tiger’s Nest once again, over 700 steps in all.

After removing one’s shoes one can enter the Tiger’s Nest and climb the several levels within, visiting three temples and gasping at the unreal view. High and deep inside is the cold cave where Padmasambabva is said to have meditated and one can feel the chill breath coming from the cave.

The return journey is much faster, but equally dramatic.

In conjunction with the Long Now Foundation. Modified from original text by Peter Schwartz at the Long Now Blog.

Oxfordshire, U.K. | Extraordinary Flora

The anthropologist/philosopher Gregory Bateson used to tell this story:

Founded in 1379, New College, Oxford is one of the oldest Oxford colleges. It has, like other colleges, a great dining hall with huge oak beams across the top, as large as two feet square, and forty-five feet long each.

A century ago, some busy entomologist went up into the roof of the dining hall with a penknife and poked at the beams and found that they were full of beetles. This was reported to the College Council, which met the news with some dismay, beams this large were now very hard, if not impossible to come by. “Where would they get beams of that caliber?” they worried.

One of the Junior Fellows stuck his neck out and suggested that there might be some worthy oaks on the College lands. These colleges are endowed with pieces of land scattered across the country which are run by a college Forester. They called in the College Forester, who of course had not been near the college itself for some years, and asked him if there were any oaks for possible use.

He pulled his forelock and said, “Well sirs, we was wonderin’ when you’d be askin’.”

Upon further inquiry it was discovered that when the College was founded, a grove of oaks had been planted to replace the beams in the dining hall when they became beetly, because oak beams always become beetly in the end. This plan had been passed down from one Forester to the next for over five hundred years saying “You don’t cut them oaks. Them’s for the College Hall.”

A nice story, one which raises an immediate question, “What about the next time? Has a new grove of oaks been planted and protected?”

The answer to this is both yes and no. The truth of the story, is that there was probably no single patch of trees assigned to the beams. It was standard practice for the Foresters to plant oaks, hazel, and ash. While they would harvest the Hazel and Ash every twenty years or so, they allowed the oaks to grow quite large for use in major construction work. (The oaks were also occasionally used in ship building.)

Additionally, the trees from which the oaks used to rebuild the hall came from land that was not acquired by the college until 1441, nearly sixty years after the hall was originally built, and the roof of the hall had already rebuilt once before in 1786 using pitch pine timbers, because the large oak timber was apparently unavailable.

The answer to the question, have new oaks been planted, is probably. Somewhere on the land owned by the New College are oaks that are, or will one day, be worthy of use in the great hall, assuming that they are managed in the same way they were before. It is in this management by the Forester in which lies the point. Ultimately, while the story is perhaps apocryphal, the idea of replacing and managing resources for the future, and the lesson in long term thinking is not.

In conjunction with the Long Now Foundation. Modified from original video and text by Stewart Brand at the Long Now Blog.

Nevada, US | Subterranean Sites

Yucca Mountain in southern Nevada is more a ridge than a mountain. Created by an extinct supervolcano, it slowly rises from a height of four thousand feet to six thousand feet along its’ length of six miles.

To enter it, one rides an open train into one of the biggest holes in the world, bored straight into the face of Yucca Mountain, into a five-mile long U shaped tunnel which curves through the huge ridge.

In 1997 a 25-foot diameter borer machine emerged from the face of the mountain to open the other end of the tunnel three miles south of the north portal. For most of its length the tunnel is about a thousand feet beneath the summit of the mountain and even more important a thousand feet above the water table. That’s important because, of course, this tunnel in Yucca Mountain is where the United States government is intending to store the nation’s high level nuclear waste for the next ten thousand years and beyond.

Yucca was chosen as the site for storing the high level nuclear waste after being chosen as one among three — the others in Texas and Washington — capable of the task of storing the material for 10,000 years. Partially, Yucca was chosen arbitrarily after Congress balked at spending the money to test the other sites, much to the frustrations of Nevada citizens who opposed the project.

The more than five miles of tunnels, cross drifts and alcoves that have been drilled so far are really part of what is called the Exploratory Studies Facility. It is a research program, costing $8 billion so far, intended to prove the absolute safety of the repository for ten thousand years. If it morphs into the actual nuclear waste site then they will bore another sixty miles of tunnels branching off the main one where they will actually store the hot waste.

Deep in the tunnel tests are conducted to find out the effects of the enormous amount of heat that the sealed in nuclear waste will produce. In sealed of tunnels row of huge heaters are lined up to raise the temperature to several hundred degrees. The waste itself will be stored in something called Alloy 22, a metal which will survive the oxidization over the long time spans involved in the plan. The design of the Yucca Mountain Repository is capable of holding up to 125,000 metric tonnes of heavy metal.

Currently, the country’s 104 nuclear plants and the nuclear weapons program have produced over 40, 000 metric tonnes of spend fuel, and will have produced an estimated 63,000 MT by 2014. In 2035 it will be two times that. Most of that waste is currently stored in 33 states at a few Dept. of Energy sites, and at the sites of 72 nuclear power plants in what are euphemistically called “swimming pools.” These were designed as temporary storage sites where the risks of dangerous failures are increasing over time.

Today the future of Yucca Mountain is still very much in flux. On February 14, 2002 Secretary of Energy Spencer Abrams recommended the approval of Yucca Mt to President Bush who acted the next day to notify the Congress of his intention to move ahead with the project. However, in 2009 Obama reversed this position and as along with Energy Secretary Steven Chu said that “the Yucca Mountain site no longer was viewed as an option for storing reactor waste.” While this may be the case, and the project has no official opening date, it continues to move forward. With a 2008 budget of $390 million, the lowest since 2002, the project is underfunded but the DoE has managed to reroute funds and is still being perusing the project.

In 2006 a committee of 96 doctoral degree-granting institutions and 11 associate member universities was put together to review the project for safety and viability. A previous review from the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Work was favorable towards the site.

Whether Yucca mountain ends up being used as a storage facility, or another, better option for the waste comes along such as re-using it as nuclear fuel, the question of nuclear waste storage and disposal is a continually mounting one, one which must be answered within a few decades and be the correct, or at least viable, for the next 10,000 decades.

In conjunction with the Long Now Foundation. Modified from original text by Peter Schwartz at the Long Now Blog.

Utah, US | Cultures and Civilizations

There are a number places which embody the ideas of long now thinking: Nuclear waste repositories, historical sites, and other long term structures are all excellent places to look for long now inspiration. But there is one facility, though hard to gain access to, which is an amazing example of long term thinking, and it is not what you might expect.

Welcome to the underground bunker where the Mormons keep their genealogical backup data, deep in the solid granite cliffs of Little Cottonwood Canyon, outside Salt Lake City. UT.

The Mormon Church has been collecting genealogical data from all the sources it can get its hands on, from all over the world, for over 100 years. They have become the largest such repository, and the data itself is open to anyone who uses their website, or comes to their buildings in downtown Salt Lake City.

While the Mormon Genealogical Archives don’t give public tours of the Granite Vaults where all the original microfilm is kept for security and preservation reasons, in special cases, (in this case to Steward Brand and Alexander Rose of the Long Now Foundation) access is granted.

The largest contaminate of their microfilm is, in fact, blue jean lint brought in by the workers! The archivists use microfilm mainly because there is not yet a longer lasting digital equivalent. However, they are also digitizing their holdings and collecting more and more information digitally for easier dissemination.

Upon entering the gate the first question comes up… “Why doesn’t anyone park near the entrance?” There is a good reason. It turns out that boulders occasionally cleave off the rock face above, caused by the freezing and thawing of water in the cracks of the rock. These boulders then come down the cliff and crush peoples cars. (This is an excellent lesson in long now thinking: anything under a rock cliff is on borrowed time.) No pictures were allowed beyond this point.

Once safely inside the building looks like just about any other office building. The only thing giving away the strangeness of the location was the curved corrugated metal ceiling and walls. Another difference from an average office building is that the design life of the archive is said to be “1000 years.” The facility was built in the 60’s (likely a product of cold war fear) so it is now about 45 years into its intended design life, and roughly sixty full time workers currently bustle about with microfilm, scanning in the front lateral tunnel near the daylight.

Past the front lateral tunnel one steps through double doors, and a large bank vault style door, into one of the 750 foot long tunnels going back into the archives. These are all connected by lateral tunnels holding impossibly long rows of skinny microfilm drawers. The infinite repetition and forced perspective reminds one of the “we need lots of guns” scene from the matrix. Each drawer is numbered with a simple set of digits, the film number, given in order of collection, and is indexed “in an Oracle database” according to the lead archivist, though this begs some questions about the long term viability of such database software.

The real highlight of the Mormon Genealogical Archives is the reservoir. In the deepest tunnel, through a door, is the only part of the facility where one can see exposed rock. A small cement wall is built up here to trap the water dripping from the micro cracks in the rock above. The narrow long hallway filled with water from a slow drip reminds one of the Fremen water caches of Frank Herbert’s Dune. The water itself, having dripped through the huge filtration system that is the mountain, is cold and quite tasty.

The facility, while impressive, has its share of engineering difficulties. It has already had to relieve water pressure under the floors and walls, and allow it to drain. (Another big Long Now lesson: don’t think you can keep the water out, it’s far better to accept it will come through, and just route it.) Giant air movers keep the space ventilated, but at a large energy cost, another potential issue with the long term design.

Regardless, the Mormon Genealogical Archives are an inspiration for long now thinking and in showing the Archives the Church was both helpful and open. At the very least, new allies in the long term.

In conjunction with the Long Now Foundation. Modified from original text by Alexander Rose at the Long Now Blog.