Long Bets to be decided in 02010

Thomas Jefferson and the Clock of the Long Now

One thousand years from now, much of what we know will be forgotten. That’s been true in the past. We have only a fragmentary cultural memory of what happened 1,000 years ago. And what we think we know about 1000 may in fact be quite garbled. In a very witty demo of this. . .   Read More

The Long News: stories that might still matter fifty, or a hundred, or ten thousand years from now.

Hollywood notwithstanding, it seems fairly unlikely that mankind will be wiped out in 02012. But unfortunately, tales of mass extinction turn out to have some basis in reality; some even say we are already in the midst. . .   Read More

You’ve seen Seattle-based artist Chris Jordan‘s work before — at this very blog, for instance. Aside from the unmistakable green thread of ecologically conscientious, socially critical themes running through it, a signature element is his use of scale: a pattern that looks one way at a distance is revealed as something else up close. Often […]

This week, the New York Times ran an article about a recent scientific discovery in the predator alert calls of Campbell’s monkeys.   Strikingly, they seem to have the ability to create complex calls out of multiple elements – a “morphological” (word building) process previously thought to only take place in human language.

Human languages do. . .   Read More

Visualizing empires decline from Pedro M Cruz on Vimeo.

This video timeline was sent in by Bryan Campen and covers the last 200 years of major world powers.  Fun visualization over time. . .   Read More

Gas Stations, Not Flowers

The fourth incarnation of Lost Landscapes of San Francisco played to a sold out house at the Herbst Theater with the chanteuse Suzanne Ramsey opening the evening with a selection of historical San Francisco songs including the 01926 gem Masculine Women Feminine Men.

Rick Prelinger prefaced the footage with a brief. . .   Read More

Long Now friend and supporter Ken Wilson sends in this awesome concept for the Stockholm Library.  This design seems like it would lend itself well to a 10,000 year library…

The image above is a rendering by a team of students at the Architecture School of Paris La Seine. You can see the un. . .   Read More

Back 02002 Peter Schwartz wrote a great piece about our visit to the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste site.  We often refer to it as “the other 10,000 year project”.  However 10,000 years is just the legally binding time congress set forth.  They actually have a design problem that spans millions of years.  This. . .   Read More