The Long Now Foundation's blog covers long-term thinking, with posts on civilization, books, astronomy, and projects built to last millennia.
HN links it for long-view topics, including Jesse Ausubel's talk, David Graeber's Debt, the Library of Utility, and the Anathem connection.
Precis of a new detail the last HN post in 2010. They will be seeking suggestions from all over the world for a Library of Ltility http://blog.longnow.org/02011/04/25/the-library-of-utility/
Seems to me as if it might be fun to come up with some arguments for what might constitute an optimally efficient booklist.
"It would be a very selective library. It would not contain the world’s great literature, or varied accounts of history, or deep knowledge of ethnic wonders, or speculations about the future. It has no records of past news, no children’s books, no tomes on philosophy. It contains only seeds. Seeds of utilitarian know-how. How to recreate the infrastructure and technology of civilization so far
"It is an interesting thought exercise to ask yourself what information you might want if you had to truly start over.
"And in our forthcoming Salon space at Fort Mason Center, we’ll house approximately 3,500 volumes in a floor-to-ceiling library featuring carefully selected books that could be used to help restart civilization. We are not trying to be apocalyptic or at all predictive, but the conversation that is inspired by this exercise seems to be endless and valuable.
"We will collaboratively curate this corpus with Long Now’s members and the public. We understand that by definition we ourselves will have a western-centric viewpoint of what might be collected, but as the project gets going we plan to seek submissions that represent views from as many cultural…
The sun getting bright is different than a meteorite impact. The latter has a Poisson distribution; a big one could hit next year, and the one following that in 10, but it also could be many thousands of years before the next big hit.
On the other hand, if our understanding of astrophysics is even remotely correct, the sun will not get too bright for the first 100,000 years. So, it makes perfect sense to not worry about the sun now, as it will not happen soon.
As to the limit: the Dutch design their sea defences for “once in a 10,000 year” events and their river defences for “once in 1,250 year” events (http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2005/2005_30-39/2005-39/pdf/43-47_38_ecodutch.pdf, http://blog.longnow.org/02011/03/09/the-10000-year-storm/)
I also expect some governments have spent time thinking of what to do in case of impending “once in 500 million years” events (probably lumped together with all smaller ‘end of life on earth’ events. The big question here will be: (when) do you tell the public?)
The way I understand it, long term thinking is neither about the future nor about predicting it or planning something significant for it; it is rather a thought model which tries to extend beyond the timeframes humans might feel at home with cognitively. An off-the-cuff, superficial yet interesting example is the lack of a common word in English language to express units of time longer than 1000.
This style of thinking sometimes has its benefits, like gathering together a community to build a mechanical clock, create a manual for restarting a civilization[1], or write a non-fiction book about "earth without people"[2].
It's just an interesting intellectual, cultural endeavor.
[1]: http://blog.longnow.org/category/manual-for-civilization/
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Without_Us.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb ( 2014 July 1. ) :
"The latest version of our precautionary principle, with application to GMOs, refined thanks to more fallacies in arguments countering it. For discussion before we move to the final version."
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B8nhAlfIk3QIbGFzOXF5UUN3N2c/edit
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"What people miss is that the modification of crops impacts everyone and exports the error from the local to the global.
I do not wish to pay —or have my descendants pay — for errors by executives of Monsanto.
We should exert the precautionary principle there —our non-naive version — simply because we would discover errors after considerable damage."
http://blog.longnow.org/02013/07/08/the-artangel-longplayer-letters-nassim-taleb-writes-to-stewart-brand/
I like the direction that this author is going. He's certainly not the only person to be thinking along these lines. The Long Now Foundation in particular seems to be invested in pursuing answers to some of the overarching questions posed by this column.
One recent post on the Foundation's blog caught my eye: "Kevin Kelly’s Selected Books for the Manual for Civilization" (http://blog.longnow.org/02014/03/18/kevin-kelly-books/), in which Kevin Kelly (author of Cool Tools) offers his additions to the Foundation's growing "corpus which could sustain or rebuild civilization."
Definitely. A few years back Jesse Ausubel gave a great talk in SF on this: http://blog.longnow.org/02015/02/06/jesse-ausubel-seminar-media/
A core point was that economic growth has now decoupled from many resources. Computers are an obvious aid here; look at how much time we spend in front of one screen or another. My laptop is hugely valuable to me, but it took something like 1g of materials per hour of use to build it, and uses way less power than the lightbulb I previously would have read a book by.