Deep time
Combining the logical rigor with the lyrical finesse of a novelist, award-winning author Gregory Benford explores these and other fascinating questions in this provocative analysis of humanity's attempts to make its culture immortal. In "Deep Time" he confronts our growing influence on events hundreds of thousands of years into the future and explores the possible "messeges" we may transmit to our distant descendants in the language of the planet itself, from nuclear waste to global warming to the extinction of species. As we begin our incredible journey down the path of eternity, Gregory Benford masterfully calls forth some of the intriguing, astounding, undreamed-of futures which may await us in deep time.
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What Hacker News says
- Regarding the RFC - check out the publication date.
From my impressions on the Long Now (and I found Deep Time a rather interesting read) the issue is not just sticking a zero on to say "think about the future" but rather that our current culture doesn't think about the future beyond the next news cycle, quarterly report, or election.
I'd contend that The Clock of the Long Now (and the intended level of technology to repair it) and the Rosetta Project are very pessimistic about the future of humanity. ( https://rosettaproject.org/about/ )
The recent HN post about the oak grove for repairing the USS Constitution reminds me of https://blog.longnow.org/02014/12/31/humans-and-trees-in-lon...
> 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.”
That a several hundred year old grove was planted because the builders, being familiar with wood construction, knew that in a few hundred years that it would need to be repaired and they'd need the materials to do the repair.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/oak-beams-new-college-ox...
> 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.
- If you're interested in it - get a copy of Deep Time - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2014020.Deep_Time
> Human civilization has evolved to the point at which we have begun consciously sending messages into the far future. How should we communicate who we are, what we know, to asyet-unmet intelligent beings elsewhere in both time and space? Will they be able to decipher what we say? And what information will we leave to Earth's occupants a million years hence? How can we address an unknown destiny in which human culture itself may no longer exist?
> Combining the logical rigor of a scientist with the lyrical beauty of a novelist, Gregory Benford explores these and other fascinating questions in a provocative analysis of humanity's attempts to make its culture immortal, to cross the immense gulf that such deep-time messages must span in order to be understood. In clear, crisp language, he confronts our growing influence on events hundreds of thousands of years into the future, and explores the possible "messages" we may transmit to our distant descendants in the language of the planet itself -- from nuclear waste to global warming to the extinction of species.
- Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia Paperback by Gregory Benford explores some of those questions. It comes into practical questions when trying to mark nuclear waste dumps.
- For anyone interested in things like this, I'd recommend "Deep Time" by Gregory Benford[1]. It has a chapter devoted to WIPP[2] and this messaging.
[1] Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Time-Humanity-Communicates-Mille...
[2] Seems to be online, albeit poorly formatted, here: https://www.physics.uci.edu/~silverma/benford.html
- One book more than any other: The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe.
Why?
Darwin opens up the door of Deep Time when he explained his discovery. An appreciation of the immensity of time happens to be linked to explanations of how and why things are. Wolfe also deals with Deep Time but in the context of society.
What Gene Wolfe does is he creates books where you need to read between the lines, you need to create hypotheses to understand what's going on. I won't describe it further because it may lose some of the import, it's probably the most important fiction book written in the 20th century.
What I'd like is a photograph of Peter Thiel's library, I'm fascinated by the range of ideas, the meta-ideas he explores. Maybe @sama can smuggle in a camera or we could hijack a roomba.
- If you found that article interesting, you might want to read Gregory Benford's "Deep Time" (978-0380975372). Benford was part of the same panel (though in a different group), and the first half of the book is in-depth discussion of the various aspects of the problem that they had to consider.
