If human societies are founded on the accumulation of knowledge through the ages, then the long-term transmission of information must be the cornerstone of a durable civilization. And as we accelerate ever more rapidly in our expansion of knowledge and technological capability, the development of durable storage methods becomes ever more important.

In the. . .   Read More

Tom Chatfield from BBC online writes about the newest flavor of the digital dark age…  Lost tweets and social media:
On January 28 2011, three days into the fierce protests that would eventually oust the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, a Twitter user called Farrah posted a link to a picture that supposedly showed an. . .   Read More

A book is much more than a collection of information. It is also a physical object, and this materiality plays an important role in shaping the way we relate to literature. Think of how the pages of your favorite story feel between your fingers, and the way its spine creases as you immerse yourself further. . .   Read More

Reported in Science today, scientists George Church, Yuan Gao and Sriram Kosuri report that they have written a 5.27-megabit “book” in DNA – encoding far more digital data in DNA than has ever been achieved.

Writing messages in DNA was first demonstrated in 1988, and the largest amount of data written in DNA previously. . .   Read More

You may dream of freaky new physics, but sometimes freaky old physics is all you need. (New York Times)
Slava G. Turyshev, an expert on gravity at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, recently proved that the tried and true theories of Einsteinian physics are as powerful as ever – and he used technology from the 01970s. . .   Read More

The Rosetta Project was created to begin the work of filling Long Now’s 10,000 Year Library and in 02011 student filmmaker Scott Oller offered to help tell the story of the project’s aspirations and achievements. This short documentary, Oller’s senior thesis, was shot over the course of several weeks in the. . .   Read More

In 01994, The Economist first launched its very own website. Before long, America Online pronounced it one of the world’s best news sites, and numerous readers depended on it for their updates on current events.

Yet 18 years later, this once valued page is nowhere to be found. (The Wayback Machine’s records only. . .   Read More

In April 02010, Dr. David Eagleman addressed the Seminars About Long-term Thinking with a lecture called “Six Steps to Avert the Collapse of Civilization.”

Central to Dr. Eagleman’s proposal for a resilient global society was the internet. As a high-volume, distributed communication system, the net offers new ways to contain disease, back. . .   Read More

On July 9, Rosetta Project director Laura Welcher will be giving a talk in the Long Now museum on “Bringing the World’s ~ 7,000 Languages Online.” This talk is part of an ongoing series offered by SF Globalization, a San Francisco meetup group interested in software localization and internationalization.

“There are nearly 7,000. . .   Read More

There are many many businesses that will store your data online for you, but few that actively address the problems of the digital dark age. While many people fear that incriminating or unflattering photos will live online forever, the opposite problem also lurks – your crucial or sentimentally valuable data can disappear when servers crash, products. . .   Read More