“Long Shorts” – short films that exemplify long-term thinking.  Please submit yours in the comments section…

Not only does this amazing stop-motion film document a huge swath of history (all of it, really) – it looks like it took a huge swath of history to make.  Thousands of photographs of graffiti evolving and interacting with its environment depict the development of life in the universe to create “Big Bang Big Boom: an unscientific point of view on the beginning and evolution of life… and how it could probably end.”

BIG BANG BIG BOOM – the new wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

If this theme piques your interest, by the way, you might want to check out one of our upcoming Seminars About Long-term Thinking featuring Martin Rees: “Life’s Future in the Cosmos.”

“Long Shorts” – short films that exemplify long-term thinking.  Please submit yours in the comments section…

Information Pioneers: Ada Lovelace from Information Pioneers on Vimeo.

This is a nice intro to Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer who wrote programs for Babbage’s mechanical computer. While this computer is similar to the binary mechanical computer used in the first 10,000 Year Clock prototype, Babbage’s computers are decimal based.

“Long Shorts” – short films that exemplify long-term thinking.  Please submit yours in the comments section…

This video is part of the Mammoths and Mastodons exhibit at The Field Museum in Chicago, and was the Long Short for our Seminar with Nils Gilman.

It’s a reverse time lapse put together by Greg Mercer and Emily Ward (editing), and David Quednau (animation). Unwinding 20,000 years of a modern American city and frontier outposts, Native American settlements and the last ice age, we arrive in their world and resurrect them in film.

Perhaps most interesting is that this film is not the only place mammoths can now come alive, but also as Stewart points out, it is now possible to take the DNA of mammoths, blend them with elephants and usher in their return.

And I just noticed there was a segment on just this at 60 Minutes this last weekend, Resurrecting The Extinct.

Final note: If you are in Chicago between now and September 6, 02010, take time to also visit the new 3D film of their T. Rex, lovingly named Sue.  Apparently she escaped a little while ago and the museum documented the ordeal.

This video was created by Claire L. Evans and was commissioned by SEED Magazine for Darwin Day in 2009. By condensing 4.6 billion years of history into a single minute, the artist puts our everyday sense of time in perspective. This video was shown as part of our “Long Shorts” series of short films that convey long term thinking. This Long Short was screened at David Eagleman’s “Six Easy Steps to Avert the Collapse of Civilization” SALT.

The Evolution Of Life in 60 Seconds from universe on Vimeo.

“Long Shorts” – short films that exemplify long-term thinking.  Please submit yours in the comments section…

Art project in progress A History of the Sky features lots and lots of time-lapse videos of the sky that are synchronized so that they’re all showing the same time of day.  Ken Murphy is the artist that created it and he hopes to one day manifest all the data he’s collecting as a video installation that’s always displaying the skies of the last 365 days.  The project was recently featured at the Exploratorium, but it’s still in a need of a home for the installation.

Here’s how it works.

If you’d like to see an installation in person, here are several upcoming opportunities:

• Maker Faire UK, at the Life Science Centre Planetarium, Newcastle UK: March 13-14, 2010
• Google I/O Conference After Hours Party, at Moscone West, San Francisco: May 19, 2010
• Bay Area Maker Faire, at the San Mateo County Event Center: May 22-23, 2010

“Long Shorts” – short films that exemplify long-term thinking.  Please submit yours in the comments section…

Audience members at Arthur Ganson’s Seminar on September 14, 02009 were among the first viewers of The Lava Project Documentary, which premiered in our new Long Shorts series – short videos that explore, explain, or exemplify long-term thinking and responsibility.

The Lava Project Documentary was created by White Elephant DesignLab, a group of designers who explore natural phenomena and experiment with various materials and their external influences. Earlier this year, the group created a piece at the Kilauea volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii that was inspired by our promotion of long-term thinking through use of the five-digit date. Using a “02009″ stamp made of hardwood and aluminum, they imprinted the congealing surface crust of Pāhoehoe lava in order to equip the emerging lithosphere with its date of origin.

“We developed the idea of using this symbol only when we had already arrived on the island,” says Tobias Kestel of the design team. “We thought it was just the right symbol to use in this context of volcanic activity. Processes of new land being formed by lava flows have been going on for billions of years on the planet, which provided the perfect ground for embossing your symbol of long-term thinking.”

“We are aware,” Kestel adds, “that some people might still argue that we actually did alter the environment there. At the same time, the symbolic value and the message and discussions our action will provoke can be and will be of relevance, even if only a few people will start to think differently after having seen the results and having learned about your project, as we will always promote our project together with the reference to The Long Now Foundation.”

For additional photos and information about The Lava Project Documentary, visit the White Elephant DesignLab website.

This time lapse and other footage of driving from San Francisco to the site of the Long Now 10,000 Year Clock in September of 02009 was produced by Sustainable Media. The audio was recorded in interviews on site and shortly after the trip. This 5 minute edit was made as part of our “Long Short” series of short films that convey long term thinking. This Long Short was screened at Stewart Brand’s “Rethinking Green” SALT.

The Big Here – trip to the Long Now Clock site from The Long Now Foundation on Vimeo.

Now with their second installment: Team Digital Preservation and the Aeroplane Disaster. In this episode, Team Digital Preservation takes on the problem of obsolete software by migrating important digital files to the most current formats.

This goes hand-in-hand with Kevin Kelly’s concept of movage. We’ve got to keep our digital information moving; from storage medium to storage medium, from software platform to software platform, and from file format to file format.

I would love to find a way to see this documentary film on the oldest living tree if anyone out there knows how it is being shown…

The Curse of The Methuselah Tree

“I am not part of history. No. History is part of me.” This is the story of the oldest living thing on earth and its unique view of human civilisation. With narration and specially-commissioned poetry by Roger McGough.

This original film combines beautifully shot footage of Methuselah, the 26-foot bristlecone pine, with reconstructions of the thousands of years it has witnessed. But what if such a witness could speak? For the first time this 4,643-year-old is given his own voice.

Hear the tree’s perspective on passing of ancient civilisations, the settlement of America by Europeans and the testing of atom bombs 100 miles away in the Nevada desert.