Stewart Brand
Stewart Brand (one cool guy) on the idea of the Big Here and Long Now. How we need to look at things with a 10,000 year perspective as opposed to the me, me, me; now, now, now that we’ve gotten used to. Thinking about the world not just as we’ll leave it to our children or their children, but 100 generations from now might just make us think twice about burning up a beautiful woodland for suburban tract housing, etc. The Long Now Foundation.
The rates, scales, kinds, and combinations of changes occurring now are fundamentally different from those at any other time in history; we are changing the Earth more rapidly than we are understanding it. 9, Human Domination of Earth’s Ecosystems
So who burned the Library of Alexandria? War did three times, inadvertently. Religious bigotry did twice, on purpose. We are right to grieve. Only one in ten of the major Greek classics survived. Nothing like Alexandria’s library was seen again for a thousand years. 73
The accumulated past is life’s best resource for innovation. 75
Bill Cosby says that in college he ran into the question, “Is the glass half empty, or half full?” He took the question home, and his father told him, “It depends if you’re pouring or if you’re drinking.” 109
Governance itself is being rethought. “The proper role of government in capitalistic societies in an era of man-made brain power industries,” writes the economist Lester Thurow, “is to represent the interest of the future to the present.” Commerce has too short a time horizon to take the larger future seriously, therefore governance must do it. 122
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