The Psychedelic Tourist
3.18.2004
Future Thinking
I've been mulling over some thoughts for the past couple of days. They all stemmed from hearing the program "The Ideas of Stewart Brand" on Ideas (CBC RadioOne). Ideas is a program meant to expand, transform, and possibly perplex your mind on a nightly basis.
But, I digress. Back to Stewart Brand. Brand is a heavy-duty thinker, calls himself a futurist, and from what I gather has been thinking ahead of the curve of current ideas for some time. He's the editor of the Whole Earth Catalog in the late '60's/early '70's, has been part of the MIT Media Labs, and has got a few current projects on the go.
One idea I particularly like is the The Long Now Foundation, based on the idea that our civilization needs to develop thinking for the long term, not just the next couple of decades. How about more like the next 10,000 years! Using a "slower/better" approach as opposed to the current "faster/cheaper" style of thinking which is near all-pervasive in today's societies. The Long Now Foundation is actively developing a 10,000 year clock. Conceived by Danny Hillis, named the "Clock of the Long Now" by Brian Eno. The founding idea was to have it tick once a year, and have a century hand that advances once every hundred years, with a cuckoo that will come out once a millennium. It's being built to remind us that there is a future to plan for, that we must look beyond our narrow vision of time to try to perceive what may lie ahead for generations to come.
The Long Now Foundation has a few diagrams which help to show us the passage of time out of the context of our short human lifespan. For the most part we seem to have forgotten, or are unable to cope with, the idea that much of what happens with the Earth is in a time span which barely notices our own existence. An individual human life is next to nothing, the whole of human existence is barely discernible, the pace of Nature is exceedingly long! For us to maintain this planet in a livable form, we must adopt to the Long Now vision of thinking.
How did these ideas come into place? Maybe it was through extraordinary thinking by ordinary people or maybe it's just ordinary thinking from extraordinary people. Don't know for sure, but I had a laugh when Stewart Brand explained an idea-burst of his own. On LCD one evening, he walked out onto the roof-top of some building and looked down. Seeing the street from above, his mind traveled up to greater heights, imagining what this street might look like from 100 ft up, 200 ft up, 300 ft up, and so on. Then he wondered, "Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole earth yet?" This got him to make buttons, with the above question on it, which he distributed to everyone he could think of, including politicians. It is believed that these buttons helped accelerate the making of photographs of Earth from distant space during NASA's Apollo program.
The second current program, Brand is involved in, is to document every life form on Earth in the next 25 years. It is estimated that there are 10 - 100 million species on Earth, yet we have only documented 1.6 million. This means we have been able to account for only, at most, 16% of the worlds organisms. Collectively, we know very little about the biology of our planet, either from a point of view of what exists or from the point of view of how it works. It's probably easier to say that we know next to nothing about how the world works, even though we seem to have advanced so far. At any rate, to see what is being done about our lack of knowledge, see the All Species Foundation .
Future thinking is visionary. It's likely also very hard work, but it is an activity which is necessary for us to undertake. It is in the best interest of this planet that we all learn to think in a bigger time scale.
