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

In May 02009 author and food activist Michael Pollan spoke for Long Now about Deep Agriculture. At the time Barack Obama was recently elected President, and Pollan takes the opportunity to give a “state of the movement” on efforts to reform the US food system.
Full audio and video of this Seminar is free for. . .   Read More

This lecture was presented as part of The Long Now Foundation’s monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking.

Nature is Rebounding: Land- and Ocean-sparing through Concentrating Human Activities
Tuesday January 13, 02015 – San Francisco

Video is up on the Ausubel Seminar page.
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Audio is up on the Ausubel Seminar page, or you can subscribe. . .   Read More

Pandora’s Promise, a new documentary by filmmaker Robert Stone, takes a look at nuclear power as a possible player in the mix of technologies we’ll need to meet energy demand without pushing atmospheric CO2 beyond safe levels. Long Now co-founder Stewart Brand and other former SALT speakers Mark Lynas, Gwyneth Cravens and. . .   Read More

In 02005, Daniel K. Simon, believing the effects of Peak Oil to be close at hand, wrote,

The U.S Department of Transportation Bureau of Transportation Statistics (www.bts.gov) will report a lower number of total highway vehicle miles traveled in 2010 than in 2005.

His Challenger, Glen Raphael, responded,
“Five years is too. . .   Read More

This lecture was presented as part of The Long Now Foundation’s monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking.

The Nine Planetary Boundaries: Finessing the Anthropocene
Tuesday March 6, 02012 – San Francisco

Video is up on the Lynas Seminar page for Members.
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Audio is up on the Lynas Seminar page, or you can subscribe to our. . .   Read More

“The Nine Planetary Boundaries: Finessing the Anthropocene”
Tuesday March 6, 02012 at the Cowell Theater, San Francisco

Journalist and environmentalist Mark Lynas has a knack for getting deep down into the crux of problems and scraping out the science. Though we shouldn’t ever mistake a clear view for a short distance, this knack is. . .   Read More

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

A computer defeats humans on a television game show. An information network brings down a series of dictatorships. We are witnessing a massive explosion in data, and an equally massive explosion in our ability to process and. . .   Read More

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

It’s obvious energy will be one of the great challenges of this century. But it’s possible to hope that the current BP oil spill might help prompt a broader conversation about possible alternatives.

Over the. . .   Read More

Imminent fusion power

All the light we see from the sky, Moses pointed out, comes from fusion power burning hydrogen, the commonest element in the universe—3/4 of all mass. A byproduct of the cosmic fusion is the star-stuff that we and the Earth are made of.

On Earth, 4 billion years of. . .   Read More