What was the biggest empire in history? The answer, writes Benjamin Plackett in Live Science, depends on whether you think in terms of fraction of living humans or number of living humans, revealing the challenges inherent in attempting to compare time periods: That’s without getting into the pros and cons of the . . .   Read More

Antarctic Sea Ice Melt — 02019 (Source: Maxar) The Ancient Greeks had two different words fortime. The first, chronos, is time as we think of it now: marching forward, ceaselessly creating our past, present, and future. The second, kairos, is time in the opportune sense: the ideal moment to act, as captured by . . .   Read More

This is a map of North America. It was made by a Dutch map maker by the name of Herman Moll, working in London in 01701. I bought it on Portobello Road for about 60 pounds back in 01981. . . .   Read More

In an article in Forbes, David Bressan writes that the giant rift in the USA’s political voting blocs is in part a consequence of collisions between continental plates, the literal giant rift that used to separate the two halves of North America, and recent glacial activity: The same region that had once . . .   Read More

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

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