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

Long Now Member Jason Crawford, founder of The Roots of Progress, is starting up a weekly learning group on progress with a steep discount for Long Now Members: The Study Group for Progress is a weekly discussion + Q&A on the history, economics and philosophy of progress. Long Now members can get 50% . . .   Read More

It is with great sadness that we share the news that Michael McElligott, an event producer, thespian, writer, long-time Long Now staff member, and relentless promoter of the San Francisco avant-garde, has died.. . .   Read More