Antarctic Sea Ice Melt — 02019 (Source: Maxar) The Ancient Greeks had two different words fortime. The first, chronos, is time as we think of it now: marching forward, ceaselessly creating our past, present, and future. The second, kairos, is time in the opportune sense: the ideal moment to act, as captured by . . .   Read More

In an article in Forbes, David Bressan writes that the giant rift in the USA’s political voting blocs is in part a consequence of collisions between continental plates, the literal giant rift that used to separate the two halves of North America, and recent glacial activity: The same region that had once . . .   Read More

Once again on the theme of how the technological/cultural pace layer’s accelerating decoupling from the ecological pace layer in which we evolved poses serious risks to the integrity of both the human body and biosphere: When daycare workers in Finland rolled out a lawn, planted forest undergrowth such as dwarf heather . . .   Read More

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

Archaeologist Stefani Crabtree writes about her work to reconstruct Indigenous food and use networks for the National Park Service. . .   Read More

Alex Ross has written a moving tribute to Long Now’s unofficial mascot, the bristlecone pine, in The New Yorker. What is most astonishing about Pinus longaeva is not the age of any single organism but the collective oldness and otherness of its entire community. No two super-elderly trees look alike, to . . .   Read More

Geologist Marcia Bjornerud and Long Now’s Executive Director Alexander Rose debate about whether going to Mars is a viable long-term sustainability plan for human survival.

When cretaceous-age rocks in the Southern US eroded over millions of years, they produced a uniquely rich, fertile soil that landowners realized was ideal for growing cash crops such as cotton. It was the soil from these rocks that slaves toiled over in the era of American slavery—and the same ground that . . .   Read More

“We need to think globally, we need to think rationally, and above all, we need to think long-term.” – Lord Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, speaking at Long Now.

Watch video of the full talk here. . .   Read More

Figure 1. Bristlecone pines on Mt. Washington, Snake Range, NV.

Wind cutting across my cheek, I marched across a grey, sharp limestone slope at treeline in the Great Basin. The tinkle of rock under shoe and a light whistle of air though bristlecone pine krummholtz were the only sounds heard in a stark, seemingly timeless. . .   Read More