It’s been an annual tradition since 01998: with a new year comes a new Edge question.
Every January, John Brockman presents the members of his online salon with a question that elicits discussion about some of the biggest intellectual and scientific issues of our time. Previous iterations have included prompts such as “What should. . .   Read More

Imagining the future can be daunting, but The Thing from the Future card game makes it fun. While its creators the Situation Lab (a project of artist/designer Jeff Watson and Long Now fellow Stuart Candy) simply call it “an imagination game”, it’s quite an elegant factory for generating alternative futures.
Through collaboratively and. . .   Read More

“Wanderers”, a short film by director Erik Wernquist, depicts a not-so-far future in which humanity has expanded throughout the solar system. The film starts with a panorama of humans 10,000 years ago at the dawn of civilization, a key point of reference in Long Now’s own intellectual ecosystem.

There are two. . .   Read More

In April, Long Now board member Esther Dyson wrote a letter to Carne Ross as part of the Artangel Longplayer Letters series. The series is a relay-style correspondence: The first letter was written by Brian Eno to Nassim Taleb. Nassim Taleb then wrote to Stewart Brand, and Stewart wrote to Esther Dyson, who wrote. . .   Read More

About two years ago, we shared with you a set of enhanced photographs that visualized the transformation of World-War-II-era Leningrad into contemporary St. Petersburg.
We recently came across a similar photographic experiment in picturing historical change. The temporal lapse is similar: this interactive series compares 1940s images of European sites that played. . .   Read More

On Tuesday September 30, 02014 Ariel Waldman (Spacehack.org)
leads us to the stars. Tickets are almost sold out!

Ariel Waldman selfie by Ariel Waldman

Ariel Waldman: The Future of Human Spaceflight
Tuesday September 30, 02014 at 7:30pm
at The Interval (doors at 6:30)
Advanced Tickets are encouraged
Download the Pathways to Exploration. . .   Read More

In September 02013 futurist Peter Schwartz spoke for Long Now about realistic scenarios for human interstellar travel. Peter, a founding Long Now Board member, participated in “The 100-year Starship” project and contributed to the book Starship Century (Edited by Gregory Benford and James Benford) with scientists and science fiction authors positing realistic ways humanity. . .   Read More

Our next talk at The Interval takes as its subject the complexities of our collective global future:
Mathew Burrows: The Future Declassified
hosted by Paul Saffo
Tuesday September 23, 02014 at 7:30pm
at The Interval (doors at 6:30)
Advanced Tickets are encouraged
as space is limited

The volatility of today’s world is. . .   Read More

In The Life and Death of Buildings: On Photography and Time Joel Smith writes:
Imagine making a picture using film so insensitive to light – so slow, in photographic parlance – that to burn an image onto it required an exposure of twenty-five centuries. Geologically speaking, the blink of an eye. The picture from that negative. . .   Read More

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

A History of the Future in 100 Objects
Wednesday July 16, 02014 – San Francisco

Video is up on the Hon Seminar page.
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Audio is up on the Hon Seminar page, or you can subscribe to our podcast. . .   Read More