In November 02011 Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, spoke for Long Now. “We are really striving to build The Library of Alexandria version 2,” says Brewster, near the start of his talk, “So that everyone anywhere who is curious to want access can access the world’s knowledge.” He proceeds to assess, one…  Read More

  When The Long Now Foundation first began thinking about long-term archives, we drew inspiration from the Rosetta Stone, a 2000-year-old stele containing a Ptolemaic decree in Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, Demotic script, and Ancient Greek. Our version of the Rosetta Stone, the Rosetta Disk, includes parallel texts in more than 1,500 languages. Since creating the…  Read More

This Wednesday, November 12 02014, the European Space Agency‘s Rosetta Mission will deploy the Philae lander onto the 67P Comet after over a decade-long journey.  When this mission was first conceived, the ESA asked to put one of Long Now’s Rosetta Disks on the craft, making the Rosetta Probe the first off-world long-term archive of human language….  Read More

On November 12, 02014 from 6:00am to 9:00am PT, you can watch the live stream of the Rosetta Space Probe (which carries our Rosetta Disk) sending its lander, Philae, down to comet 67P. Here in the Bay Area, The Long Now Foundation is partnering with the Chabot Space Center and swissnex SF to host a…  Read More

After ten years, five months, and four days of travel, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta Mission has finally rendezvoused with the 67P comet. The Rosetta mission woke up back in May and has subsequently been maneuvering towards the comet. This is the first mission dedicated to exploring comets, a little understood but important part of…  Read More

Laura Welcher, David Evan Harris, and Mandana Seyfeddinipur speak on Tuesday, July 22 at The Interval This Tuesday at The Interval “The Future of Language” featuring Dr. Laura Welcher of Long Now’s Rosetta Project and Global Lives Project‘s David Evan Harris, and special guest Dr Mandana Seyfeddinipur of the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme who is visiting from London….  Read More

The European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe has sent some great images back to Earth illustrating its approach as it has pulls to within 2 million kilometers of 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko the comet it is targeting. Later this year it will drop a lander on the comet to conduct important experiments on its composition–more on that below. During…  Read More

The Algonquian Linguistic Atlas is a project helping to preserve and celebrate North America’s linguistic diversity. The Algonquian family of languages have an estimated 50,000 speakers and the atlas allows viewers to explore the roughly 30 languages within it. The project gives speakers and researchers a common tool to study and share the cutural diversity…  Read More

In October 02010 Lera Boroditsky spoke for Long Now on How Language Shapes Thought in a talk that resonates with the Rosetta Project, Long Now’s language preservation project. SALT audio is free for everyone on our Seminar pages and via podcast. Long Now members can see all Seminar videos in HD. Video of the 12…  Read More

In 02008 Kevin Kelly called for movage (as opposed to storage) as the only way to archive digital information: “Proper movage means transferring the material to current platforms on a regular basis— that is, before the old platform completely dies, and it becomes hard to do. This movic rythym of refreshing content should be as…  Read More