Inside Finland’s Olkiluoto nuclear waste repository, 1,500 feet underground. Photo Credit: Peter Guenzel With half-lives ranging from 30 to 24,000, or even 16 million years, the radioactive elements in nuclear waste defy our typical operating time frames. The questions around nuclear waste storage — how to keep it safe from . . .   Read More

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.  I want to lead you through some of the research that I’ve been doing on a meta-level around long-lived institutions, as well as some observations of the ways various systems have lasted for hundreds of thousands of years.  Long . . .   Read More

The oldest beds known to science now date back nearly a quarter of a million years: traces of silicate from woven grasses found in the back of Border Cave (in South Africa, which has a nearly continuous record of occupation dating back to 200,000 BCE). Ars Technica reports: Most of the artifacts that . . .   Read More

Human history in the Americas may be twice long as long as previously believed — at least 26,500 years — according to authors of a new study at Mexico’s Chiquihuite cave and other sites throughout Central Mexico. According to the study’s lead author Ciprian Ardelean: “This site alone can’t be considered . . .   Read More

Science Fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson has written a powerful meditation on what the pandemic heralds for the future of civilization in The New Yorker. . . .   Read More

As someone who spent my childhood moving from epidemic to epidemic with my virologist father and epidemiologist mother, I am surprised at the degree of certainty expressed by both optimists and pessimists regarding their predictions of the COVID-19 epidemic. . .   Read More

In the hours after news broke that the Cathedral of Notre Dame suffered extensive fire damage, many found hope in a story that circulated on social media about a centuries-old protocol the fire department in Paris followed when battling the fire. The story originated with Twitter. . .   Read More

BBC Future has launched a new series about “the long view of humanity” called “Deep Civilization:”

[Deep Civilization] aims to stand back from the daily news cycle and widen the lens of our current place in time. Over the coming months, we will explore multi-generational thinking in all its forms, and hear from writers. . .   Read More

In 02011, anthropologist Michael Frachetti discovered a lost city that holds clues to how civilizations rise and fall when diverse communities integrate. From Michael Frachetti’s Long Now Seminar “Open Source Civilization and the Unexpected Origins of the Silk Road” which you can watch in full here. . .   Read More

Alan Moore (left) chose comedian Stewart Lee as the recipient of his Longplayer letter.

In January 02017, Iain Sinclair, a writer and filmmaker whose recent work focuses on the psychogeography of London, wrote a letter to writer Alan Moore as part of the Artangel Longplayer Letters series. The series is a relay-style correspondence, with. . .   Read More