Long Now

### The Missing Science of Biological Longevity

Creative photographer Sussman showed beautiful slides of very elderly organisms. The captions were as crucial as the images---naming the species, the place, and the approximate age. You can see many of them here: http://rachelsussman.com/portfolios/OLTW/main.html

The series began with the only animal---an eighteen-foot brain coral in the waters of Tobago, thought to be 2,000 years old. An enormous baobob in South Africa might be 2,000 years old. Then there is the astounding welwitschia mirabilis of the Namibian desert, a conifer that feeds on mist, with the longest leaves in the plant kingdom. After 2,000 years it looks like this:


Of course there was a redwood in our Sequoia National Park dated precisely to 2,150 years in age. On a remote Japan island, a two-day hike was needed to track down a gorgeous cedar somewhere between 2,000 and 7,000 years old. In Perthshire, Scotland, a churchyard was long ago build around huge yew tree that now is between 2,000 and 5,000 years old. In Chile the Patagonian cypress gets up to 2,200 years old, and a chestnut tree on the island of Sicily has been there for 3,000 years. On Crete there's an olive tree that might be the oldest in the world---3,000 years. It still bears olives. It may well have been preserved because its hollow trunk served for generations as a chicken coop.

Lichen in Greenland grows 1 centimeter every 100 years. So a large specimen could be dated to 3,000 years. In the Atacama Desert at 15,000 feet in Chile, a shrub called La Llareta grows only 1.5 centimeters a year and is so dense you can stand on its leaf structure. They get to 3,000 years old. The bristlecone pines much beloved at Long Now have been dated up to 5,000 years old.

Send in the clones. Cloned forests are basically one individual that sends up a multitude of stems from a single extensive, very long-lived root system. Sussman found a clonal forest of spruce in Sweden that is 9,550 years old; box huckleberry in Pennsylvania 13,000 years old; aspens in Utah 80,000 years old; and clonal sea grass off of Spain that is 100,000 years old.

So far the age champion is an actinobacteria that lives in Siberian permafrost---alive for 400 to 600,000 years---half a million years.

Sussman found all these creatures with the guidance of remarkable field biologists who have never met each other, because biological longevity is not yet a science. Artist Sussman is startled to be its first practitioner. She has two more years to go on this project. Long Now would love to see a conference mustered at the end of her project to bring together all the scientists she's gotten to know, to see what aggregating their knowledge might conjure up. If sponsors are interested, Long Now would be glad to organize the event.

Thanks to Tom Lowe for the use of his short film [Timescapes](http://www.timescapes.org/)

### Languages are Parallel Universes

"To have a second language is to have a second soul," said Charlemagne around 800 AD. "Each language has its own cognitive toolkit," said psychologist/linguist Lera Boroditsky in 2010 AD.

Different languages handle verbs, distinctions, gender, time, space, metaphor, and agency differently, and those differences, her research shows, make people think and act differently.

Take a sentence such as "Sarah Palin read Chomsky's latest book." In Russian, the verb would have to indicate whether the whole book was read or not. In Turkish the verb would signify whether the speaker saw the event personally, or it was reported, or it was inferred. Russians have two words for blue, and when those words are present in their mind, they can distinguish finer gradations of the color than English speakers can.

Gender runs deep in some languages, affecting nouns (including number words and days of the week), adjective endings, pronouns and possessives, and verb endings. And that affects how people think about every named thing. In German the Sun is female and the Moon male; it's the reverse in Spanish. In French, "liberty" and "justice" are each female, and thus the Statue of Liberty is a female, and so is the blindfolded lady of justice in American courtrooms.

"'Time' is the most common noun in the English language," said Boroditsky. (Followed by "person," "year," "way," and "day.") Time is often expressed as travel in space: "We're coming up on Christmas." But some languages put the future in front of us, and others put it behind us. For Aborigines that Boroditsky studied in north Australia, time and sequence gets blended into their profound orientation to the cardinal directions. They don't use relative terms like "left" and "right," but absolute compass terms ("There's an ant on your southwest leg"), and they have extraordinary orientation skills.

When Boroditsky asked these aborigines to place a sequence of photos (a progressively eaten apple) in sequential order, they did not do it like English speakers (left to right) or Hebrew and Arabic speakers (right to left), they did it by the compass: from east to west. "These are not differences of degree," said Boroditsky, "but a parallel universe."

Different languages assign blame (agency) differently. English is uncommonly agentive, and so Dick Cheney had difficulty distancing himself from the fact that he shot his friend in a hunting accident: "Ultimately I'm the guy who pulled the trigger that fired the shot that hit Harry." In Spanish, accidents are expressed in terms such as "The vase broke" rather than "John broke the vase." Political distancing language such as "Mistakes were made" doesn't sound awkward in Spanish. Fate looms larger.

Thus, "learning new languages can change the way you think," said Boroditsky. Multilingual speakers have more mind.

**This is one conversation out of the 19 that took place as part of the Long Conversation.[Media links for the other Conversations are available here.](https://longnow.org/seminars/02010/oct/16/long-conversation/)**

Long Conversation, an epic relay of one-to-one conversations among some of the Bay Area's most interesting minds, took place over 6 hours in San Francisco on Saturday October 16, 02010. Interpreting the Long Conversation in real time was a data visualization performance by Sosolimited; an art and technology studio out of M.I.T.

Long Conversation was presented with a live performance of 1,000 minutes of composer Jem Finer's [Longplayer](https://longnow.org/longplayer/).

**This is one conversation out of the 19 that took place as part of the Long Conversation.[Media links for the other Conversations are available here.](https://longnow.org/seminars/02010/oct/16/long-conversation/)**

Long Conversation, an epic relay of one-to-one conversations among some of the Bay Area's most interesting minds, took place over 6 hours in San Francisco on Saturday October 16, 02010. Interpreting the Long Conversation in real time was a data visualization performance by Sosolimited; an art and technology studio out of M.I.T.

Long Conversation was presented with a live performance of 1,000 minutes of composer Jem Finer's [Longplayer](https://longnow.org/longplayer/).

**This is one conversation out of the 19 that took place as part of the Long Conversation.[Media links for the other Conversations are available here.](https://longnow.org/seminars/02010/oct/16/long-conversation/)**

Long Conversation, an epic relay of one-to-one conversations among some of the Bay Area's most interesting minds, took place over 6 hours in San Francisco on Saturday October 16, 02010. Interpreting the Long Conversation in real time was a data visualization performance by Sosolimited; an art and technology studio out of M.I.T.

Long Conversation was presented with a live performance of 1,000 minutes of composer Jem Finer's [Longplayer](https://longnow.org/longplayer/).

**This is one conversation out of the 19 that took place as part of the Long Conversation.[Media links for the other Conversations are available here.](https://longnow.org/seminars/02010/oct/16/long-conversation/)**

Long Conversation, an epic relay of one-to-one conversations among some of the Bay Area's most interesting minds, took place over 6 hours in San Francisco on Saturday October 16, 02010. Interpreting the Long Conversation in real time was a data visualization performance by Sosolimited; an art and technology studio out of M.I.T.

Long Conversation was presented with a live performance of 1,000 minutes of composer Jem Finer's [Longplayer](https://longnow.org/longplayer/).

**This is one conversation out of the 19 that took place as part of the Long Conversation.[Media links for the other Conversations are available here.](https://longnow.org/seminars/02010/oct/16/long-conversation/)**

Long Conversation, an epic relay of one-to-one conversations among some of the Bay Area's most interesting minds, took place over 6 hours in San Francisco on Saturday October 16, 02010. Interpreting the Long Conversation in real time was a data visualization performance by Sosolimited; an art and technology studio out of M.I.T.

Long Conversation was presented with a live performance of 1,000 minutes of composer Jem Finer's [Longplayer](https://longnow.org/longplayer/).

**This is one conversation out of the 19 that took place as part of the Long Conversation.[Media links for the other Conversations are available here.](https://longnow.org/seminars/02010/oct/16/long-conversation/)**

Long Conversation, an epic relay of one-to-one conversations among some of the Bay Area's most interesting minds, took place over 6 hours in San Francisco on Saturday October 16, 02010. Interpreting the Long Conversation in real time was a data visualization performance by Sosolimited; an art and technology studio out of M.I.T.

Long Conversation was presented with a live performance of 1,000 minutes of composer Jem Finer's [Longplayer](https://longnow.org/longplayer/).

**This is one conversation out of the 19 that took place as part of the Long Conversation.[Media links for the other Conversations are available here.](https://longnow.org/seminars/02010/oct/16/long-conversation/)**

Long Conversation, an epic relay of one-to-one conversations among some of the Bay Area's most interesting minds, took place over 6 hours in San Francisco on Saturday October 16, 02010. Interpreting the Long Conversation in real time was a data visualization performance by Sosolimited; an art and technology studio out of M.I.T.

Long Conversation was presented with a live performance of 1,000 minutes of composer Jem Finer's [Longplayer](https://longnow.org/longplayer/).

**This is one conversation out of the 19 that took place as part of the Long Conversation.[Media links for the other Conversations are available here.](https://longnow.org/seminars/02010/oct/16/long-conversation/)**

Long Conversation, an epic relay of one-to-one conversations among some of the Bay Area's most interesting minds, took place over 6 hours in San Francisco on Saturday October 16, 02010. Interpreting the Long Conversation in real time was a data visualization performance by Sosolimited; an art and technology studio out of M.I.T.

Long Conversation was presented with a live performance of 1,000 minutes of composer Jem Finer's [Longplayer](https://longnow.org/longplayer/).