Museums have an opportunity to play a constructive role in generating action on climate change. Long Now co-founder Brian Eno’s concept of The Big Here and Long Now can help.. . .   Read More

Even now, even in shallow waters, the sea continues to surprise us with new wonders . . .   Read More

As detailed in the exquisite documentary Proteus, the ocean floor was until very recently a repository for the dreams of humankind — the receptacle for our imagination. But when the H.M.S. Challenger expedition surveyed the world’s deep-sea life and brought it back for cataloging by now-legendary illustrator Ernst Haeckel (. . .   Read More

Two new projects are making million-year time frames more relatable
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The “Big Here” doesn’t get much bigger than Neal Agarwal‘s The Size of Space, a new interactive visualization that provides a dose of perspective on our place in the universe. Starting with an astronaut, users can arrow through to different objects, celestial bodies and galaxies, ultimately zooming out . . .   Read More

Peter Brannen, writing in The Atlantic, details why a popular claim being made on social media isn’t true—not to downplay the impact of the fires, but to educate audiences on how the various systems of our planet interact   Read More

50 years ago, the Apollo 11 moon landing was televised live to some 600 million viewers back on planet Earth. One of them was future Long Now co-founder Brian Eno, then 21. He found himself underwhelmed by what he saw. 

Footage from the television transmission of the moon landing.

Surely, there was more. . .   Read More

Earlier this month, a study appeared in Science that found that a global reforestation effort could capture 205 gigatons of CO2 over the next 40-100 years—two thirds of all the CO2 humans have generated since the industrial revolution:

The restoration of trees remains among the most effective strategies for climate change mitigation. We. . .   Read More

Last year, we wrote about one of the jewels of Stanford University’s Rumsey Map Collection, Urbano Monte’s planisphere of 01587. The planisphere was an ambitious map of the world across sixty individual sheets that, were it to be stitched together as Monte’s instructions dictated, would be the largest world map made in. . .   Read More

Former Seminar speaker Stephen Pyne was recently interviewed for a piece in New York Magazine about what it means to build permanent structures in California—a state that was always meant to continually burn and shake. 

So quickly, according to the fire historian Stephen Pyne, we forget the threat is even real. “We think. . .   Read More