Stewart Brand

How about a Statue of Continuity?

And that's what this thing is.

It's become kind of a genre of land art, which, in a sense, our clock is.

It also happens that the Long Knapp Foundation owns the only privately owned grove of bristlecone pine trees up on top of a mountain in eastern Nevada.

And one artist has gone up there and has figured out a way to measure bristlecone pine time, different from clock time, and then it changes from year to year.

He's measuring it basically by the growth characteristics of the bristlecones.

And so this is an exhibit in Reno, Nevada at an art school there showing bristlecone pine time for the next maybe 10,000 years.

Well, sure.

A lot of people working on that.

My goodness.

You and I will probably die of old age, but I certainly will.

But that may become optional.

I mean, there's a lot of people who want it to be optional.

either through downloading our mental capabilities and experience into something not so edible, not flesh.

And we've had those flaky people forever offering that kind of stuff, some of them in the guise of religion.

But we're also having some non-flaky people.

That's what's different now.

Part of the argument that this book is putting forward is humanity has gotten to the point of terraforming Earth.

We have planetary scale impacts, and that's been going on actually for quite a while, but we now have, thanks to science, full awareness of it, full awareness of what the impacts largely are, and with climate change, a major

And for us, quite dangerous potential effect.