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

A new paper by archaeologists Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo addresses one of the longstanding mysteries of the monuments of Easter Island: their location.

Four hundred of the statues, known as muai, are located miles away from where they were originally quarried, and sit on megalithic platforms, or ahu. An analysis of the locations of. . .   Read More

What makes a species invasive? What makes a species native? Ecologist and evolutionary biologist Chris Thomas on the need to think on a global, international scale when it comes to conservation. From Chris Thomas’s Long Now Seminar “Are We Initiating the Great Anthropocene Speciation Event,” which you can watch in full here.

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Earlier this month, the bristlecone pine, one of the oldest and most isolated organisms on Earth, found itself in unfamiliar territory: in the headlines. News outlets such as the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Post reported that the bristlecone pine was “in peril” and threatened by extinction due to a warming climate. The news came. . .   Read More