Long Now co-founder Danny Hillis was recently interviewed by e-flux for its Digital X collaboration with the Norman Foster Foundation. He spoke about his inspiration and process for building the 10,000 Year Clock, as well as the value of long-term thinking.

The value of the clock is mostly in thinking about. . .   Read More

Fig. 1. The Equation of Time Cam. In the collections of the Royal Observatory of Greenwich, amongst the myriad time-keeping and navigational devices of the past, there sits a curious artifact built to last into a future none of us will witness. Standing half-a-foot tall, it looks more like a sculpture than an instrument of time,…  Read More

  “The Long Now is the recognition that the precise moment you’re in grows out of the past and is a seed for the future.”                   – Brian Eno (founding board member of The Long Now Foundation) After over a decade of design and fabrication, we have…  Read More

Danny Hillis, Long Now co-founder and designer of the 10,000 Year Clock, has a new essay, “Long-Term Timekeeping in the Clock of the Long Now” in the book The Science of Time 2016: Time in Astronomy & Society, Past, Present and Future (published November 02017). The Science of Time 2016 presents “information on the science and history of time and…  Read More

Long Now Executive Director Alexander Rose and former Evernote CEO Phil Libin recently spoke with the design agency Dialogue about the layers of civilization, the future of products, and the Clock of the Long Now. The interview is wide-ranging, covering everything from the early tech, design and science fiction influences in Rose and Libin’s childhoods to…  Read More

As visitors to Fort Mason amble past The Interval, the Long Now Foundation’s cafe-bar-museum-venue space, some are drawn, as if by gravitational pull, to an unusual eight foot-tall stainless steel technological curiosity they glimpse through the glass doors. Metal gears sit stacked one on top of the other to form a tower, with geneva wheels jutting…  Read More

From National Geographic comes a video profiling the durable windmills of Nashtifan, Iran. These windmills constructed over a thousand years ago out of clay, straw and wood are not only still standing; they work just as well as they did when they were first built. In designing and building the Clock of the Long Now, we…  Read More

ONE OF THE MOST FAMOUS SCENES in the Paleolithic cave paintings in Lascaux, France depicts a confrontation between a man and a bison. The bison appears fixed in place, stabbed by a spear. The man has a bird’s head and is lying prone on the ground. Scholars have long puzzled over the pictograph’s meaning, as…  Read More

Eleven years ago this month, Pulitzer Prize winning author Michael Chabon published an article in Details Magazine about Long Now and the Clock.  It continues to be one of the best and most poignant pieces written to date… The Future Will Have to Wait Written by Michael Chabon for Details in January of 02006 I was reading, in…  Read More

Our first ever global gathering is less than two weeks away! Join us in San Francisco on October 4th, 02016. In 01996: The Long Now Foundation was established to foster long-term thinking and responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years. In 02007: The Long Now Foundation’s Membership program was launched. The list of…  Read More