Once again on the theme of how the technological/cultural pace layer’s accelerating decoupling from the ecological pace layer in which we evolved poses serious risks to the integrity of both the human body and biosphere: When daycare workers in Finland rolled out a lawn, planted forest undergrowth such as dwarf heather . . .   Read More

Inside Finland’s Olkiluoto nuclear waste repository, 1,500 feet underground. Photo Credit: Peter Guenzel 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 . . .   Read More

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.  I want to lead you through some of the research that I’ve been doing on a meta-level around long-lived institutions, as well as some observations of the ways various systems have lasted for hundreds of thousands of years.  Long . . .   Read More

Join the Long Now Community for a night of films that inspire long-term thinking. On October 27, 02020, we’ll screen Samsara followed by 2001: A Space Odyssey at Fort Mason. SAMSARA Drive-in Screening on Tuesday October 27, 02020 at 6:00pm PT Get Tickets SAMSARA is a Sanskrit word . . .   Read More

How many mass extinctions has the Earth had, really? Most people talk today as if it’s five, but where one draws the line determines everything, and some say over twenty. However many it might be, new mass extinctions seem to reveal themselves with shocking frequency. Just last year researchers argued for another . . .   Read More

A six-part podcast from Emergence Magazine explores the plight of four Indigenous languages spoken in California—Tolowa Dee-ni’, Karuk, Wukchumni, and Kawaiisu—among the most vulnerable in the world: “Two centuries ago, as many as ninety languages and three hundred dialects were spoken in California; today, only half of these languages . . .   Read More

Although the sensitive can feel it in all seasons, Autumn seems to thin the veil between the living and the dead. Writing from the dying cusp of summer and the longer bardo marking humankind’s uneasy passage into a new world age (. . .   Read More

A new statistical study of 8,000 musical compositions suggests that there really is a difference between music and noise: time-irreversibility. From The Smithsonian: Noise can sound the same played forwards or backward in time, but composed music sounds dramatically different in those two time directions.Compared with systems made of millions of . . .   Read More

This animated flight through the universe was made by Miguel Aragon of Johns Hopkins University with Mark Subbarao of the Adler Planetarium and Alex Szalay of Johns Hopkins. There are close to 400,000 galaxies in the animation, with images of the actual galaxies in these positions (or in some cases their near cousins . . .   Read More

Musicologist Phil Ford, co-host of the Weird Studies podcast, makes an eloquent argument for the preservation of the “Chants to Minimalism” Western Music History survey—the standard academic curriculum for musicology students, akin to the “fish, frogs, lizards, birds” evolutionary spiral taught in bio classes—in an age of . . .   Read More