Episode 1

• “Love and Power” – Ayn Rand

Episode 2

• Internet Utopianism to Global Economics to Ecosystems – balance and stabilisation without authoritariannism
• This is “the dream of the machines – it reflects how they are organised – it has nothing to do with nature…”
• The dream of the self organising system – machine fantasies of nature

• London at the Height of the British Empire
  • Arthur Tansley – natives / wife – Sigmund Freud – 1922
  • Freud’s brain as a circuit –
  • Applying the model of the mind – to the whole of nature – energy flows
  • “Ecosystem”
  • Peder Anker – Historian of Ecology – “very mechanical indeed”
  • The Great Universal Law of Equilibrium – constant tendency towards balance and equilibrium
  • Scientific basis to the ‘underlying mechanism that regulates nature as if it were a machine’
• Jay Forester – Systems Theorists
  • early warning system – radar installation – Cold War
  • feedback – “we live in these networks of feedback loops, that are controlling us and the things we interact with”
  • Norbert Weiner
  • Fred Turner – cybernetic theorists
  • Glympse of the deep cybernetic truth – that machine and man are linked
  • Cybernetics leads ecology into being the dominant science of the 20th century.
• Howard & Eugune Odum… 
  • circuits of energy
  • real electrical circuits to adjust the environments
  • Peter J Taylor – Historian of Science
  • Oversimplification of circuit models
• Fuller
  • Deemphasis of the human being – the welfare of the system
• Ecotechnics – Randall Gibson – Synergia – man machine biological system working in combination
• Stuart Brand
• Richard Brautigan – All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace – “people pass computers as if they were spinning 
  
• Jay Forrester and the Club of Rome – advising the group to model the world as a system
• Alexander King – The Club of Rome – world a system – The Limits to Growth – What was in it

• Holism – General Smutz – the whole world was a system – disappearing nations and having the
• The abuse of vegetational concepts
• Tod Bjork – Environmental Activist – claim nature has a balance, and that society needs to follow this balance
• Gaia, internet utopia, web of life, running the planet as a single system
• Enlightenment ideals of independence were under threat

• Dr. Stewart Pickett – no stable patterns – offended the comfortable idea that nature is stable
• Dr. Daniel Botkin – wolves + moose – found no steady states
• Van Dyne – models of ecosystems – no steady state is ever reached – chaotic instability of nature

Ep2 – The Message of Myth

• “Old testament god with a lot of rules and no mercy”
• Eisenhower – “Is there a god” – NOW THERE IS
• “all things speak of god” – inside computers is a hierarchy of angels
• Is the machine becoming a myth? 
  • The forms of the tools
  • The new powers are being surprisingly announced to us by what the machines can do
  • We can’t have a mythology for a long time to come
  • The individual has to find the aspect of myth that has to do with the conduct of his life
• No Indra before you.. 
  • Indra’s Universes

april 7 – 1978 – buckminster fuller (83 years old) – minnesota

• how to earn a living – blinding the world
• S.O.S.
• born into the world at a time when technology was disproving cynicism – Wright Brothers… 90% illiteracy to 90% literate
• military – weaponry
• British Empire – Thomas Malthus – humanity designed to be a failure – the inadequacy of resources
• Carl Marx / Darwin – survival of the fittest – no where near enough to go around, the worker knows how to survive and others are parasites – those on top of the heap thought they were the ‘fittest’
• you do it through artefacts – committing yourself to artifacts – not through ‘talking’
• Westinghouse – the electromagnetic spectrum – reality is 99% non-directly contactable by the human senses – there is human contact but only through instruments

• Thomas Malthus left out a great deal – last book right before the telegraph
• acceleration of doing more with less – we might one day so much with so little that we can do something with nothing – and all the rules of political economics may be invalid
• earning a living – “earning the right to live”
• get out of the military and see what doing more with less would do outside the military
• geodesic domes – mathematically you can enclose the most volume with the least amount of material investment

• 99% of humanity is ignorant of the operation of technology

• combustion – internal combustion energy (15% efficient), turbine (30% efficient), jet (60% efficient)

• telephone – multiplexing in the copper wire – originally 1 signal per wire, then 20000

• 175,000 tons of copper replaced by satellites

• industrial lags from research to implementation – electronics 2 years, aeronautics 6 years, cars 4 years – the more we can see things move the more cautious we are…
• lags in arts – 1936 – metals have a lag of 22 years. the history copper as having a spike at the WWI – and the scrap of copper after the war would be overwhelming.

• 85% of all our metals are now (1978) coming from reclamation, not the mines

• 2,000,000 design decisions for NASA – the critical path of solving problems
• comprehensive anticipatory design
• exchanging cows for shoes – “you can’t cut up the cow and still milk it” – so we invented money
• making money on money – money has not been interested at all – “how do you put a meter on the wind/sun?”
• the big thing i wanted to get at is… “sometimes i laugh at my own joke and forget what i was talking about”
• The World Game
• “Not living on the savings account of the universe”
• What does it cost nature to create petroleum? Geologist calculatees $1,000,000 / gallon in cosmic costs to the universe

• the king – military is about not being able to ‘take on two big men,’ and then dividing people into specialities/industries is a power game to keep people from bothering the king, keep them busy (Foucault)

• science and technology – 70% of industries are not life-supporting industries

• group womb of ignorance – took a lot of resources to realise that the mind is everything
• kids are not allowing their optimism and idealism to be exploited
• the young have no faith in political revolution -

• what does a building weigh?
• don’t understand the efficiencies of things on the ‘home front’ – using the scraps of low-performance materials
• “NO SCIENTIST HAVE EVER BEEN ASKED TO LOOK AT THE PLUMBING!” – we don’t turn our high-capability to the home-front.

• Rushkoff – “the disconnection between the money industry and money as a utility is costing us dearly”
  • the utility of money is being removed through the hoarding of
  • the derivative economy – doesn’t support the “real economy”
  • Zizek and Buckminster – Zizek and the speculative economy must be kept alive – the Marxist
  • doing this with design instead of weaponry
  • the guns of first world nations are being used to preserve the semiotic systems – the labelling, the currency, the derivative
  • human beings are responsible for the design of their society – scientists don’t know how plumbing works, architects don’t know how much buildings weigh
  • technology as design contest, not an inheritance

EP1  

• “it is time that makes us uniquely human” - michio kaku
• grunion mating cycle – arriving within a precise time on newport beach
• time is not an abstract – if mating cycles are not timed proper – they disappear as a species
• 1962 – michelle siffre – lived in a cave for 2 months – don’t take a watch – living without any time cues. live based on feelings of hunger, based on feelings of tiredness. roughly 24hr cycle of the body – there is an ‘isolated’ body clock
• effects of time on the body – feelings, strength, pain threshold – physical performance changes dramatically throughout the day
• pain threshold changes during the day – nerves are less sensitive later on in the day
• small – superchiasmatic nucleus – master clock
• all plants, animals – share the genes for the superchiasmatic
• Stephen Kern – the invention of “public time” -
• Frederick_Winslow_Taylor – studying brickmakers, timing events
• WWI – prompted developments in timing – the wrist watch became a main ‘weapon’ for movements of troops – watches were synchronised at headquarters and sent out
• pace of living – FedEx – overnight
• driven by time – feels like an external force

• comic timing

• Warren Meck – Duke University
• fMRI – centres of the brain for timing – sense for time passing is embedded in the cells of the brain – neurochemical released, neurons fire – different rates – the pattern of beats gives the sense of timing the world around us

• phenomenon of ‘time slowing down’ in moments of crisis/near death
• freefall experiment – 12 stories free fall – chronometer – time slowing down / brain speeding up

• drugs – rat experiments – trained to get a pellet at a certain time – with cocaine, marijuna drugs
• chemicals released that change our experience of time

• why does time run forward and not backward – the laws of physics state that the reversal of time is not impossible, but it is very very improbable
• the past is always fixed in our memories, and the future is yet to come – the arrow of time (the angel of history)
• is this a purely human experience?

• how long is the present
• Cliver Wearing – the worst case of amnesia ever known
• “it’s been like death – i’ve never seen a person before…”

EP2

• does time really speed up when you get older?
• young people time a minute too quickly – older people finish counting after a minute
• the internal clock in the brain is slowing down the older we get – everything else seems to speed up
• why can’t we live forever
• the oldest inhabitant on earth – bristle-conded pine tress – methusela (4781 years old – older than the pyramids, older than recorded history itself)
• oldest person
• we are the only living things who ‘know’ that our time is limited (elephants…?)
• young people remember a wide range of pictures in experiments – older people remember the positive set – with age people begin to take account of the time they have left
• the portrait – tarnia cooper – memento mori – paintings that remind us of death/mortality (skulls, rotting fruit, candle – flesh will rot)
• family portraits / photos
• hypnotism – islands of memory
• newness – vivid emotional experiences can slow down our perception of time

• are we programmed to die?
• yeast cells are immortal – 1985 – perhaps the same mechanism could exist in humans (last common ancestor – 1,500,000 years ago we had a common strand)
• there are no genes for oldness – no ageing genes
• “biological age” – system assessment – HB Health
• mitochondria – energy producers – create free radicals and these free radicals damage DNA/gene which tells our skin cells how to produce skin cells, etc.
• so we age

• radioactivity – from the atomic bomb – in sea urchins
• individual sea urchins can be 100~150 years – no indication of ageing
• “it lives outside time”
• Gordon Lithgow’s lab – Buck Institute for Ageing Research – worms
• Aubrey David Nicholas Jasper de Grey

EP3

• just how far back and into the future does time go?
• the huge scale of time – beginnings and ends
• crazy-horse – the world’s largest sculpture – corjack – standing bear
• shoulders of giants – no shakespear without the greeks, etc…
• when did time begin:
  • James Usher – Dr. Elizabethanne Boran
  • adds up the ages of the biblical families
  • 4004 BC – established as the moment of God’s creation (pronounced in 17th century)
  • James Hutton – geology opening up the idea of deep time
  • Sam Bowring – zircon mineral… uranium/zircon ratio will give you its age. the oldest fragment of earth ever found – 4000 000 000 years.
  • Berringer meteor crater in arizona – 300 000 tons of rock collided with rock
  • 1955 all ways to date the earth agree that it is: 4,600,000 000 000 (4.6 billion) years old
• change over millions of years – earth time
• lava – volcanoes – Pangea
• the body as a museum – asian eye features coming from ice-age survival strategies
• pulling life from a crystal – living creatures
• Danny Hillis – The Long Now Foundation – the planets as a universal language of time

• the sun – when will it die? 5,000, 000 000 000 (5 billion) years from now.
• the earth is 1/2 way through its life…

EP4

• nuons
• Bern – Albert Einstein – special relativity
• time changes depending on relative speed
• immutability – unchangeable
• Tom Bolten – signal 6-1 – the first blackhole
• H. G. Wells – Time Machine
• particle accelerator – subatomic particles – the building blocks of our universe
• time isn’t necessarily one way – theoretical blueprint
• the space-time foam in quantum states – worm holes
• we make these by injecting a lot of energy – particle accelerator – a million times greater than the nuclear explosion
• stabilizing space time foam – creating a wormhole – then enlarging the wormhole with negative energy
• 1948 Hendrik Casmir – negative energy – anti-gravitational properties

• we live in a very extreme corner of the universe – where time is constant…
• time only has one direction FORWARDS
• the 3 other dimensions – we have full freedom of motion – so why not time?

• Hubble – 1919 – discovered that the milky way was not the limit of our universe…
• oct 4th 1923 – tiny spec in the adromeda nebula – which were thought to be part of our own milky way universe – he discovered that this was another universe – so the universe would have to be much older
• he doppler effect – the compression of sound waves at the front of an object, and the stretching out of sound waves at the back of a moving object
• ‘the red shift’ – similarly proved that the universe was expanding – from an event… – galaxies are moving away from us
• rays of light from space that have been overstretched – radio static as the sound of creation
• The Big Bang – 13.7 billion years ago – is when all space and tim were created
• time is eternal – but time came into being at a precise moment

• buddhism – time eternal – no biggining or end
• christianity – adam and even, initiation
• norse myth – the forces of good and evil – the winter of winters – an epic ice age

• Saul Perlmutter
• most thought the expansion of the universe is collapsing back in on itself – the big crunch… stopping time (and space, of course…)
• supernova – the aftermath of exploded stars -
  • it’s peak brightness gives you how far away it is and hence how old the star is
  • it’s red-shift – which is the dopplr effect resulting from the expansion rate of the universe and the light waves of the supernova itself

• apparently the universe is not slowing down but speeding up

• 5 ages of the universe
  • primordial – the birth of time until 350,000 year s
  • Stelliferous Age – 100 000 000 000 000 years from now
  • degenerate age – the last stars burn out and die, and matter begins to decay – only black holes remainf
  • the age of photon – invisible indestructible, low energy particles
  • dark age