I have been thinking a great deal about how to build organizations and institutions which can survive very long periods of time. But how do you justify such investments, especially to a generation the measures time in nano-seconds and measures success by the ROI in the next financial quarter?

In a fairly recent SALT (Seminars About Longterm Thinking) by the Long Now Foundation entitled Long Finance, Stewart Brand read out an extended quote from Robert Heinlein's Time for the Stars.

In the book, the Long Range Foundation take on very long term goals which require such vast amounts of both time and money that from a near-term perspective they are pointless wastes of money.

We got interested in the purposes of the Long Range Foundation. Its coat of arms reads: "Bread Cast Upon the Waters," and its charter is headed: "Dedicated to the Welfare of Our Descendants." The charter goes on with a lot of lawyers' fog but the way the directors have interpreted it has been to spend money only on things that no government and no other corporation would touch. It wasn't enough for a proposed project to be interesting to science or socially desirable; it also had to be so horribly expensive that no one else would touch it and the prospective results had to lie so far in the future that it could not be justified to taxpayers or shareholders. To make the LRF directors light up with enthusiasm you had to suggest something that cost a billion or more and probably wouldn't show results for ten generations, if ever…something like how to control the weather (they're working on that) or where does your lap go when you stand up.

The funny thing is that bread cast upon waters does come back seven hundred fold; the most preposterous projects made the LRF embarrassing amounts of money – "embarrassing" to a non-profit corporation that is. Take space travel: it seemed tailor-made, back a couple of hundred years ago, for LRF, since it was fantastically expensive and offered no probable results comparable with the investment: There was a time when governments did some work on it for military reasons, but the Concord of Bayreuth in 1980 put a stop even to that.

So the Long Range Foundation stepped in and happily began wasting money. It came at a time when the corporation unfortunately had made a few billions on the Thompson mass-converter when they had expected to spend at least a century on pure research; since they could not declare a dividend (no stockholders), they had to get rid of the money somehow and space travel looked like a rat hole to pour it down.

Even the kids know what happened to that: Ortega's torch made space travel inside the solar system cheap, fast, and easy, and the one-way energy screen made colonization practical and profitable; the LRF could not unload fast enough to keep from making lots more money.

The Long Range Foundation projects echos a number of themes found in the Report From Iron Mountain (full text of the book); a hoax or satire (take your pick) published in 1966 by the Dial Press which claimed to be a leaked government report from a government think tank exploring the consequences of long term peace.

I was given a copy of the book around 1978 during a lazy summer in a century old Pennsylvania farmhouse by the wife of a retired vice-president of Harvard University turned gentleman farmer. The ideas explored in the book stuck in my head, unresolved, ever since.

Philip Coppens wrote a excellent article on The Report From Iron Mountain:

Lewin proposed that until substitutes for war were developed, “war” needed to be maintained, if not improved in effectiveness. Part of the “genius” of Lewin is in the type of proposed potential substitutes he proposed – some of which may have given various governments some inspiration… or is it just coincidence that “reality” mimics fiction? The Report’s recommendations were:

• a giant space-research programme whose goal was largely

impossible to achieve (a black hole, budget-wise and hence able to feed the economy);

• create a new, non-human enemy, e.g. the potential

threat of an extra-terrestrial civilisation

• create a new threat to Mankind, e.g. pollution
• new ways of limiting births, e.g. via adding drugs to

food or water supply

• create fictitious alternate enemies
• create an omnipresent, virtually omnipotent

international police force.

Many of these proposals should feel uncomfortably familiar. When the cold war ended, new phantom enemies were erected including the War on Drugs and the War on Terror. These were not real Wars. They had no concrete objectives and no means of ever being concluded. But so long as they could be used to create fear, they justified the existence of the Nation State and the vast sums of money being thrown away to fight them.

The Nation State, as we've known since Peace of Westphalia, is on it's way out. Finance, Transportation, Energy and Communications are now global distributed networks which transcend the ability of any one Nation State to control. Pretty much all services that Nation States provide can be delivered by either local government or the private sector. Over the next decades all that the Nation State will have left to offer their citizens is the threat of physical force and the military industrial complex that Eisenhower warned of in his farewell address in January 1961:

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense. We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States corporations.

Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual –is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

The purpose of the Long Range Foundation seems, on the surface, to be much the same as Lewin's proposals to dump huge amounts of money into projects which will have no practical return on investment. But in fact, as Heinlein points out, the ROI from such projects is potentially enormous. Where war truly is a means of throwing away money, big projects seeking to solve big ideas will often lead to very substantial payoffs. Just not for the generation which initiates them.

This is a message that needs to be relearned. We need to make the distinction between investment whose only purpose is to prop up power structures that are reaching the end of their shelf life and big investments in the future that have a real payoff. This could form the foundation for a Nation State which is not based on fear and phantom enemies.

Some things take time. Sometimes a very long time. But the potential payoff that your grandchildren or perhaps great great great grandchildren will see is very real. And it is our responsibility to lay the groundwork for those who come after we as individuals have passed out of living memory. Bread cast upon the waters indeed.