How do you tell a lions age?

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Only male lions have a mane, and it's to give off the impression that they are large. it's more of a territory thing then anything. the larger the mane the less likely other lions will come and fight for his territory. Also, when a male lion is fighting, the thick fur protects him around the shoulders, head and neck, so it is less likely that he will get scratched/bitten and be caused severe damage by the opponent.

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∙ 14y ago

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GBN cofounder Stewart Brand jolts fresh thinking by consistently applying an unusually long-term perspective to issues that often get lost in the present. By Peter Leyden .

The insight that first made Stewart Brand famous essentially was: take the far view. If you look at something from really, really far away, then not only does your view change, but also your understanding: the shift in your vision will prompt a shift in your mind. Back in 1966, Brand was a photographer in San Francisco who one day started musing about what would happen if you pulled your view back from the city so far that you could see the whole earth from space. That prompted him to ask the question why, ten years after Sputnik, had the public not seen a photograph of the entire Earth? And that immediately prompted him to launch a campaign calling for the image (complete with buttons).Thus, some people credit Brand with nudging NASA to release the famous photos taken on Apollo 8.

Today Brand's overarching insight has shifted from take the far view to take the long view-the really, really long view. When Brand talks about long, he doesn't just mean a five to 10 year perspective, which is unusual enough in business circles. He means thinking in centuries, and millennia, even in 10,000-year swaths of time. Thinking in these terms, makes you view current events very differently. For example, Brand said the first thing that comes to mind when he thinks in those larger increments is that civilizations are fragile. He grabbed a small model of an ancient statue on Easter Island from the desk in his office and explained that the creators of that statue were marvelously sophisticated for that time. They could travel anywhere in the Pacific Ocean in large catamaran canoes, yet they proceeded to overpopulate the island, cause an ecological disaster, and wipe themselves out almost overnight.

The conversation with Brand took place in his idiosyncratic office across the Golden Gate from San Francisco. A grounded fishing boat off the Sausalito marina holds his computer and personal work area. An adjacent office complex houses a large library with shelves that organize and label areas by topic: "world histories," "futures," etc. The third part of his office is a meeting room in which the walls are covered with timelines, the histomap of history, an explorer's guide to the surface of Mars, and photographs of ancient ruins. That's where we sat for our conversation, which took place at the end of August, exactly two weeks before the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

The conversation was classic Stewart Brand. Talking with Stewart is the verbal equivalent of browsing a web page of embedded links. He constantly anchors his thoughts with reference to other people and seems as interested in steering you to their ideas as talking about his own. And he always gives credit where credit is due, expanding, for example, on former President Clinton's recent insight that democracies are fundamentally conservative and only progress through crisis. Stewart also talks in pithy aphorisms that seem wiser and more relevant the more you encounter them, such as the one-liner: "Basically, science is the only news." And then there's Stewart's brutal intellectual honesty that gets applied equally in all directions, including towards himself: "Whenever I'm wrong, I'm wrong because I'm optimistic. Often when I'm right, I'm right because I'm optimistic. One needs to take that into account." Indeed, Stewart is steady and optimistic, partly because of his long-term perspective. For that reason, given our recent trauma, it's heartening to hear him take his very long view on our times.

Accentuate the Positive

In a period of widespread doubt and gloom, it often pays to think positively.

Leyden: What should we be thinking about in the next decade?

Brand: At present, we are seeing something similar to the early '90s, when everybody was gloomy and GBN was kind of up. In our project work, we would insist on there being an "up" scenario among the three or four produced because the clients wouldn't do it otherwise. They were absolutely filled with dread. Then things took off and we were right to have had them think positively. It may well be that that's the case now.

Basically, science is the only news, and we are tracking that pretty well. I think the addition of demographer Chris Ertel has been priceless. I wish he'd been with us all along because the demographic stuff is as much destiny as anything. To be ahead of that is a real service.

Leyden: So you believe in the power of positive thinking?

Brand: Whenever I'm wrong, I'm wrong because I'm optimistic. Often when I'm right, I'm right because I'm optimistic. One needs to take that into account. I tend to think things are generally heading toward improvement. I knew in my bones that Al Gore was going to win. So what's my knowledge worth? Squat.

The Loooong View

In the perspective of centuries, there's nothing special about our little economic collapse. An overemphasis on the short term leads to an underestimation of what's waiting for us further out.

Leyden: Your reperception of long is a big element of GBN thinking. You're thinking in terms of 1,000 or 10,000 years. Does that gives us any insight into the present?

Brand: Maybe. The long view makes the prospect of total collapse seem thinkable.

Leyden: Total collapse of what?

Brand: Oh, the whole ball of wax. Every now and then, civilizations decline steadily or come to relatively sudden ends. It's normal. In the perspective of centuries, there is nothing special about it. The sense that "that's something those poor fools in history did" goes away because you realize that in their way, they were just as smart about what was going on as we are about us in our times. The fragility of things becomes interesting.

Another thing that emerges is Ray Kurzweil's idea of the self-acceleration of technology and, thereby, of the pace of history, which has been a pretty secular trend of logarithmic increase for many centuries. There is no reason to expect that to suddenly turn into an "S" curve that levels off on its own terms. There may be external terms that make that happen, but technology accelerates itself and is accelerating itself more and more, and that singularity is a way to think about the present that is clear and productive-that a whole bunch of technologies accelerate themselves and each other to the point where basically it's a new world every week.

There are countervailing intelligent and sometimes not-so-intelligent forces against the pace of change. As [technology pioneer] Jaron Lanier said recently at a Fortune magazine conference in Aspen, all of the rhetoric of the hyper-acceleration of technology absolutely freaks people out. People feel that engineers are messing with their essence and they're not going to stand for it. They think: "I've got to protect my children. I've got to protect my family. I've got to protect my church. I've got to protect all of these things against the nitwits who think they'll just give us a pill so we can live forever."

They've got a point. The rhetoric is overwrought. Nevertheless, the statement made by [Institute for the Future director] Paul Saffo and others that we overestimate how rapidly change is coming in the short term and underestimate how much change is coming in the long term continues to be the case. While the country is focused on stem cells, eight other things are swarming ahead with no attention paid at all. Somebody creates an advanced birth control pill without asking anyone's permission and it changes the world. Doom is plausible when you take a long-term view, and acceleration matters when you take a long-term view. Fundamentalism and all these things matter.

They were actually called mega-trends once upon a time; they're large trends with sudden manifestations. A major acceleration of everything in ten years' time is a sudden manifestation. Tipping over some edge into a place you can't get back from could be a sudden manifestation. There's a mild form of that going on in Japan at the present. They fell out of their bubble economy into a place where they can't pick themselves up. They've fallen down and can't get up. Israel has fallen down and can't get up. It's a sudden event that is part of the overall, long-term picture.

Leyden: Do you think this is a defining feature of what we're watching?

Brand: No, the defining feature is that it happens anyway. Things will come to odd stops. Air travel came to an odd stop at one point. Architecture came to a stop some while ago.

There's a question right now about whether there are rewards for better information technology. People are saying, "Do I really need a new computer when every time I get a new computer I just get a new set of problems? Do I need a new cell phone when the cell coverage I have now is crappy enough as it is? Why would I convert more of my life to e-mail when it's one-third spam and one-third viruses?"

There's a malaise of progress going on that I think is somewhat part of the long view. It was in a way predicted by cyberpunk Science Fiction writers. The Bruce Sterlings and the Bill Gibsons saw it coming that there would be a noir version of high-tech that was not going to be glossy-it was going to be ugly. It was not going to be freeing; it was going to be enslaving. It wasn't going to make everybody rich; it was going to make some people rich.

All those are ways of saying that technology acceleration goes on and that all these concomitant things go with it. The deepening of fundamentalism, liberal resistance, conservative resistance. Liberal resistance is building preservation. Conservative resistance is to stop stem cell research or cloning or whatever. It isn't likely that the bioethicists are going to solve all of the problems and there won't be any new ones. People who say that this is sort of like resistance to Darwinism are absolutely accurate. Darwin knew that he was basically saying, "God is not only dead, he never existed." Humans weren't designed by a great designer; they were designed by their own lives. People said at the time, "You may be the grandchild of a monkey, but I'm not." That debate hasn't changed a bit.

One World, One Civilization

We've got a global economy; now we need a global society.

Leyden: Is that where the action is going to be? Is this deepening of resistance what we should be watching?

Brand: The thing I keep expecting and that keeps not happening, is the sale of that which is forbidden in some countries to other countries-whether it's mind-altering drugs, surgery to make you smarter, or whatever else it may be. Even terrorist bioweapons. If it's easy for a terrorist to make something scary, it's also increasingly possible, using the same tools, for an overseas startup to make something desirable that hasn't happened yet.

Freeman Dyson says that scientists all talk to each other globally. They certainly have national loyalty, but it's only a part of what they do. They have a greater loyalty to the soundness of science and the well-being of humanity. That's what scientists have in mind, and they're all connected. He thinks that there is not a technological determinism that will drive all of these things. There is a constant permission giving, which is not giddy, it is reluctant. Scientists want to prove things five times over before they feel OK about going ahead with something. There are no rogue scientists out there worth mentioning. He's been right and I've been wrong. Chances are he's on to something.

Leyden: It seems like technology and the economy really accelerated and globalization got into a space that was not deliberated in the 1990s. Do you think we have a debt to pay for that now? Will it take us another decade to unscramble all of this stuff and find the norms?

Brand: Yeah, it might. It might manifest as a global recession or some other form of back-to-basics. The '60s were supposedly a back-to-basics time, and to some extent they were. The '60s crowd was both revolutionary and extremely conservative; they wouldn't even use fertilizer on their gardens, which as a result did not grow, by and large.

Frankly, I think that it's a completely valid scenario, but I don't think it's going to happen. I think we are, in fact, in a long boom. The opportunities of globalization drastically outweigh the downside. It is going ahead and can't be stopped. There will be other avenues that will emerge for managing it. That's what very good people like Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright, whom I happened to hear last week at Aspen, are basically bearing down on: how to make a global system that can progress pretty rapidly without breaking.

Leyden: Making the global system work from a really long-term perspective, is that a phase shift? I hate to use the word civilization, but on some level what you're talking about is on that scale.

Brand: Yes, I'm talking about civilization. What Bill Clinton said in Aspen was, "Look, we have a global economy without a global society," which is almost the same language I used in the Media Lab in 1987, where I said we have a global economy without a global body politic. We're developing a global body politic and we're developing a global society and a global civilization. The global economy is forcing that. We've had a century of a global economy without a global body politic. At least a third of the next century-maybe half, maybe the whole thing-will be spent sorting out the global society in terms of global governance, global civilization, global frame of reference. We may have one big currency or just a few big currencies. We all see the same entertainment. What things are increasingly unique, and how fine-grained can uniqueness go?

Madeleine Albright was saying in Aspen that not everyone can be a nation and have their own currency , their own parliament, and their own airline. Sorry, you'll have to be a certain scale, unless you're Singapore. Kosovo is probably not going to be a nation. It may want to be, but it's not in the cards. I think one of the interesting things is going to be which states are permitted to fail and which are not. States in central Africa are permitted to fail; Argentina is not. The most hardcore Republicans, holding their noses the whole way and trying to do it almost in secret, will come to the rescue of Argentina when it's in trouble. The system simply will not tolerate it. That's pretty interesting.

Leyden: What you're describing will go on not just in this decade but further out.

Brand: It's a centuries-scale project, building a global society. In the past, when civilizations have failed, other civilizations have taken up the slack. When Europe is in a dark age, Islam is having its own renaissance and helps the European renaissance. Once it's an all-encompassing thing, you've got all eggs in one basket. If you drop the basket, all of your eggs are broken. You have to build in the comeback capabilities internally.There's a certain rent you have to pay to have a relatively safe global civilization and we don't know what that is yet.

Leyden: What parts of that project will be tackled in the next ten years?

Brand: It'll depend on the issues. One of Clinton's points was that democracy is preceded only by crises. Democracies are very conservative; they're on the increase, but there's a present-oriented conservatism that goes with that. So you will probably get crises- some that aren't real, and maybe others that sneak up on you are really deep, with no easy fix.

Leyden: So beware the crises?

Brand: What are the crises that change behavior? A lot of it is perception.

Leyden: It might not be objectively a crisis, but something that at least ignites people's fears and passions and compels them to act?

Brand: I don't really know what I'm talking about yet. I think that the Seattle/Genoa type of ruckus looks like a crisis, but it's not. Not yet. But it probably refers to something that is real. The collapse of the euro would be something that would not happen on a given Tuesday, but could be something that would occur and people would say, "Well, that kind of convergence is not in the cards. They gave it their very best effort, it had everything going for it, but it doesn't hold water." I'm way out of any realm of expertise here, but that's something that is potentially profound.

Leyden: With the long boom, we found that it's hard for people to grasp on to huge, civilization-level change.

Brand: That might change. Scientific knowledge is increasing and archeology never stops. We know more and more about everything. Science is increasingly able to tell us things like global warming is real, methane at the bottom of the ocean is released or not released and has this effect. These are multi-century, deeply important trends. As soon as you take seriously the idea of the oceans rising X feet in your lifetime, or the Gulf Stream turning off in the period of a couple of years and freezing Europe in your lifetime, it's a different story.

I think that science is giving us this long-term perspective, and it gets out there through the media, through the schools. Kids care about it. That starts to yield a long-term frame of reference in terms of responsibility, in terms of things that are going on for which you can't buy a solution. One nation alone can't unilaterally fix it or be ignored by the others if they're part of the problem. There's a globalization of concern, and one has reason to think in century terms because science gives you both the need and the tools to do that.

I think part of the increased awareness in long-term thinking is the increasing life span of some people. If the eight-year-old in a couple of years starts to assume that 150 to 200 years is a plausible lifespan, personally, that's going to change thinking and probably behavior. People never used to know their great-grandparents. Now everybody does. That will go on to great-great-grandparents. In turn, they're going to know their own great-great-grandkids. What's life going to be like for them? What will I do now about that? I think that that, in addition to science, creates a personal lengthening of the frame of reference. The "now" of one's life is extending. Things will change around that.

All Species, All the Time

Our data about the range of biological life on the planet is obscure at best. We don't know what's out there or what's coming - but we're starting to.

Leyden: Will another driver be the environment? Is this the global equalizer that is going to help spur the civilizational shift?

Brand: We got a taste of it at the end of the 1960s with going to the moon. That was a global event. We saw a photograph view from space, but there was a sense that we, humanity, went to the moon, not just Americans. In a period of about five years, the image of the Earth really did replace the mushroom cloud as the governing icon of thinking about the big, strange picture. It was an optimistic vs. pessimistic icon.

As [technologist] Larry Smarr said in Aspen, there's a perfect storm coming at the 100-nanometer level. Information technology, biotechnology and Nanotechnology are all converging on that scale. Quantum corrals are there and viruses are there. There's a lot of action. We're seeing with the All Species Project that most of the life forms on Earth are microbial. In the past we just sort of said, "Everybody has parasites. We'll study the ones that are pathogenic and let the rest go." That's changing.

Leyden: Changing because we're finding that they have adapted at the 100-nanometer level?

Brand: Changing because we are beginning to have the instrumentation that can work there. You're getting instrumentation that can work at the 100-nanometer level in biology. You can do information technology at that level. You can begin to do structural engineering at that level.

Leyden: When he says the perfect storm, he means that that is an ideal space to be operating in?

Brand: It's a space where there is going to be all kinds of news, new scientific information, new technological tools. It's an area of science technology that is now open to humanity that wasn't before.

Leyden: You mentioned the All Species Project, and we've been talking about the "long." Is there a way you see the two connected by a kind of continuity?

Brand: Not especially. It's just a project that Kevin Kelly came up with. It's a nice big mega-science project that could change everything. A whole lot of policy is run around the idea of endangered species. The idea is pretty clear, but the data is absolutely obscure. We don't know what's out there, what's coming, what's going. But it's knowable, so we shouldn't mess around. We need to go out and get the data.

Leyden: You're saying that people will respond to the data somehow?

Brand: Yeah. [Biodiversity scientist] Ed Wilson and [phylogeneticist] David Hillis are both saying that if we are able to find and identify all of the life forms on Earth, biology becomes a predictive science. That's a pretty big difference. We're biological, we live in a biological world. If biology becomes predictive, that's as consequential as satellites.

Leyden: If you knew all the species, to what extent would it become predictive?

Brand: Imagine doing chemistry with one-tenth of the Periodic Table. That's how we're doing biology. We simply do not know who, what, where, when, or how it's going on. We have these grand gestures of ecological succession, but a whole lot of it is based on models. Models are easy to find, fun to do, and that's sort of where the fads are. But the models aren't based on detailed data at all. It's not a predictive science because we don't know what's going on. Every time you look you find, oh, here's a spider that has parasites. It turns out the parasites have parasites. Well, how many levels down do parasites go? Seven and counting.

Leyden: That's true?

Brand: Yeah!

Leyden: You mention the one-tenth. In talking to Kevin Kelly, he's saying there's a possibility we might have one-tenth or even only 5 percent of all of the species really documented.

Brand: Or less. There's just really no way to know at this point. That just seems like such a fundamental ignorance that it's definitely worth fixing. If we change that in a generation, which is doable, that is a paradigm shift in itself.

Leyden: Is this essentially an early experiment in working at such a global level?

Brand: No, it's not unusual. Global science is not unusual. We're about the seventh one to try and take this on.

Leyden: Did others fail because of the scale?

Brand: It was because of bad funding models and bad management models. We're trying to fix both of those. It might be five that tried, might be eight; it depends on how you count. Linneus set out to name every living thing and Aristotle was interested in naming everything. This is not a new project.

Leyden: It feels like it's in the same trajectory as a lot of mad projects you've taken on in the past.

Brand: That's true.

Leyden: It seems like it would accelerate not just the science but the public understanding.

Brand: One of the contradictions that's out there in the world is that all the taxonomists are in the north and all of the species are in the south. Part of what the All Species Project is trying to do is fix that, making sure there are taxonomists where the species are. Once you do that, a whole bunch of things get better. In developing nations, one of the great assets is that their mega-diversity becomes protected by them, for them. It's not northerners coming down and saying, "You shouldn't burn down half of the rainforest because you'll be sorry." They quite legitimately say, "Well, you cut yours down." Temperate rainforests on the West Coast - come on. That's part of the global political situation. It's part of bio-prospecting. There are a whole lot of issues that come together.

Don't Worry, Be Happy

No world wars on the horizon, no major calamity around the corner. Sorry, doomsayers: We're living in an age of possibility.

Leyden: One of the things I've been seeing in other interviews with GBN members is a struggle to understand this different phase of globalization. There's a sense of the significance of the moment, that there is something ponderous and important going on here, but it's not clear.

Brand: The assumption I'm working under is that there's nothing special about now at all. The acceleration of the singularity makes it seem as if we're approaching some kind of phase change into a whole other thing. Maybe that's true, but maybe that was always true and always will be true. Maybe we're always approaching a phase shift.

I think there are advantages and disadvantages to imagining that one's time is particularly special. There's an interesting last goodbye to the Second World War going on right now, which means it's finally become irrelevant. After living in its shadow for decade after decade, we finally just said, "OK, we'll do the interviews and thank everybody and bye-bye!"

Leyden: But is it legitimate to say that we've never operated on a global level?

Brand: Well, that's what I'm looking at. I think there was a sense of crisis in World War II. There was a great choice that humanity, somewhat as a whole, was making. It was a world war. It was worth putting everything into resolving that. I think we're finally looking back with enough perspective and enough respect to acknowledge that.

How do we look in comparison to that? We look like a day at the beach. Nothing that big is going on. No big wars and no prospect of any big wars. Lots of brushfire wars that are ethnically oriented and are not going to be fixed any time soon, but there's not a hair trigger, Cold-War type of situation where they could go into nuclear exchange. In the '90s, we were to some extent relaxed enough to feel very comfortable and optimistic doing whole new kinds of startups - dot-coms and biotechs and what-not. A certain kind of speculative prosperity emerged from that, and with interesting new layers.

I'm suggesting that it's kind of a relaxed time. There's nothing really to be worried about. It turns out that the new world order was, for a time, a benign superpower that was not going around telling people what to do and not to do. It was getting some of its own house in order and having an economic boom that was pretty well managed by fiscally responsible Democrats, which used to be a contradiction in terms. It was post Cold War, so there was no sense of doom. That went away and was replaced by a sense of possibility. People invested in accelerated possibility, which turned out to be exaggerated but not deeply wrong.

Leyden: So the '90s were essentially a technology and economy decade?

Brand: In the West and in parts of Asia.

Leyden: People are struggling with whether it's a people-driven, society-driven, culture-driven. or value-driven decade. Does that strike you as being something we're grappling with as we approach this next decade?

Brand: It's plausible, but I don't think it's a crisis. I think this is what one has the luxury to do when things are not in crisis. "Oh, rethinking values. Let's sort this out." You don't have time to do that when you're saving a deeply endangered world.

Leyden: So you're steady and optimistic as opposed to anxious and cautious. A lot of people are feeling really freaked.

Brand: I'm not, in that sense, anxious or cautious. For example, as regards the 10,000-year clock and library, people ask, "Do you think civilization is doomed? Is that why you're building this thing that's supposed to last a long time. The answer is that it's not a pessimistically-driven project. It's an optimistically-driven project. There will be people around long enough to enjoy the perspective offered by the long-term clock.