In a new essay for BBC’s Deep Civilisation series, British philosopher Tom Chatfield explores how technology has co-evolved alongside humans. While humans have only existed as a brief interval on the cosmic timescale, the process of “recursive iteration” that defines our relationship with our tools has led to us having an outsized impact. . .   Read More

“Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from outside, is available…a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.“ — Astronomer Fred Hoyle, 01948 I. “Why Do You Look In A Mirror?” InFebruary 01966, Stewart Brand, a month removed from launching a multimedia psychedelic festival that inaugurated the hippie counterculture, sat on the roof of his apartment…  Read More

Long Now Partners with Zebra Movement to Help Bring Long-Term Thinking to Startups and Venture Capital The disruptive potential of Silicon Valley, epitomized in the mantra to “move fast and break things”, was once praised as its killer feature. These days, it is increasingly perceived as a bug.  Startups come and go, but the underlying…  Read More

In 01872, California Governor Leland Stanford hired the famed photographer Eadweard Muybridge to settle a question of popular debate—whether all four of a horse’s feet ever left the ground when it galloped. The resulting series of photographs, Sallie Gardner at a Gallop, showed without a doubt that horses do indeed go airborne at a full…  Read More

In a widely-shared essay first published in Backchannel, Kevin Kelly, a Long Now co-founder and Founding Editor of Wired Magazine, argues that the inevitable rise of superhuman artificial intelligence—long predicted by leaders in science and technology—is a myth based on misperceptions without evidence. Kevin is now Editor at Large at Wired and has spoken in the Seminar…  Read More

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

Technological advances are revolutionizing the field of archaeology, resulting in new discoveries that are upending our previous understanding of the birth of civilization. Many scholars believe that few will be as consequential as Göbekli Tepe. The ruins of Göbekli Tepe. Photograph by Vincent J. Musi. IN 01963, anthropologists from the University of Chicago and the…  Read More

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 those who might wish to weaponize it, where to store it, by what methods, for how long,…  Read More

“The age of exploration and the industrial revolution completely changed the way people measure time, understand time, and feel and talk about time,” writes Derek Thompson of The Atlantic. “This made people more productive, but did it make them any happier?” In a wide-ranging essay touching upon the advent of the wristwatch, railroads, and Daylight…  Read More

One of the most popular pieces of writing on our site is Long Now co-founder Danny Hillis’ remembrance of building an experimental computer with theoretical physicist Richard Feynman. It’s easy to see why: Hillis’ reminisces about Feynman’s final years as they worked together on the Connection Machine are at once illuminating and poignant, and paint…  Read More