During the Cold War, this underground bunker in Culpeper, Virginia was where the government would have taken the president if a nuclear war broke out. Now, the Library of Congress is using it to preserve all manner of films, from Casablanca to Harry Potter. The oldest films were made on nitrate, a fragile and highly. . .   Read More

From National Geographic comes a video profiling the durable windmills of Nashtifan, Iran. These windmills constructed over a thousand years ago out of clay, straw and wood are not only still standing; they work just as well as they did when they were first built.

In designing and building the Clock of the Long Now. . .   Read More

Lake Lappajärvi (Photo Credit: Hannu Oksa)About 73 million years ago a meteorite crashed into what is now Finland’s Southern Ostrobothnia region. Today, serene Lake Lappajärvi rests in the twenty-three kilometer wide crater made in the distant past blast’s wake. Locals still enjoy boating to Lappajärvi’s Kärn. . .   Read More

We under-imagine benefits and over-imagine problems with civilian infrastructure projects, yet we do the opposite with military infrastructure-scale weapons systems.  Both behaviors defy reason and cause harm.
— Stewart Brand
James Fallows recently wrote a piece for the Atlantic describing common bias in dealing with military infrastructure vs. public infrastructure, expanding on the. . .   Read More

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

Civilization’s Infrastructure
Tuesday, October 6 02015 – San Francisco

Video is up on the Fallows Seminar page.
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Audio is up on the Fallows Seminar page, or you can subscribe to our podcast.
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Infrastructure investment tricks – a summary. . .   Read More

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

Infrastructure & Climate Change
Monday September 21, 02015 – San Francisco

Video is up on the Griffith Seminar page.
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Audio is up on the Griffith Seminar page, or you can subscribe to our podcast.
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Green infrastructure – a summary. . .   Read More

We rarely see in full the cities that we live in. Focused on our daily lives, urban dwellers are often only dimly aware of the numerous, enmeshed layers of critical infrastructure that quietly hum in the background to make modern life possible.
Come and explore the amazing stories and surprising histories to be found lurking. . .   Read More

Writing for Aeon Magazine, Colin Dickey, visited the Svalbard Global Seed Vault and discusses the apocalyptic rhetoric often associated with the project. He points out that apocalyptic thinking, while sometimes an effective motivator, can be a barrier to long-term thinking.
This obsession with impending disaster suggests that we see nature on a particularly human. . .   Read More

Long Now Executive Director Alexander Rose, also the Project Manager for the 10,000-Year Clock, collects inspiring examples (or in some cases, failures) of long-term thinking, architecture and design. In a talk called Millennial Precedent, he discussed some of these examples and the lessons he draws from them. Among them is a Japanese. . .   Read More

Towers that reach 15 kilometers into the sky and autonomous 3D-printing robots on the Moon aren’t just great fodder for sci-fi; they’re also plausible enough to be considered as audacious, but realistic engineering goals. That sweet spot is exactly what the Hieroglyph project is aiming for. A collaboration between Arizona State. . .   Read More