On December 3rd, 02018, Trevor Paglen’s Orbital Reflector launched into low orbit as part of the payload on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. The 100-foot-long diamond shaped mylar balloon was intended to be the world’s first space sculpture. It would be visible to the naked eye, appearing as a slowly-moving. . .   Read More

In our opening Conversation at The Interval for 02019, Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly and Executive Director Alexander Rose discuss a 02018 research trip that witnessed the ongoing restoration of a part of Siberia back to its Pleistocene-era ecosystem. The team brought back DNA samples to evaluate for mammoth de-extinction, and lots of photos. . .   Read More

Executive Director Alexander Rose recently sat down with John Brockman of Edge.org to discuss Long Now. (Brockman recently gave a talk at Long Now in February about A.I.).
There are almost no artifacts that have been built for very long periods of time. With things like the pyramids or Stonehenge—we knew the. . .   Read More

Past Interval speaker Geoff Manaugh has written a feature for the May issue of WIRED about the Walker Lane in the Eastern Sierra, “an emerging fault system along the Nevada border [that] is shaking up the tech industry’s latest frontier—and only a small group of scientists is paying attention.”

In the hours after news broke that the Cathedral of Notre Dame suffered extensive fire damage, many found hope in a story that circulated on social media about a centuries-old protocol the fire department in Paris followed when battling the fire. The story originated with Twitter. . .   Read More

This much is certain: The sun, like all stars, will one day die. Its demise will begin five billion years from now, when it starts running out of fuel. It will slowly bloat into a red giant, becoming over two hundred times larger than it is. . .   Read More

There’s not going to be a ‘fix’ for climate change, says science journalist Jeff Goodell. There will only be adaptations. From the Long Now Seminar, “The Water Will Come. . .   Read More

Researchers in Copenhagen have discovered a catalog containing thousands of summaries of books from 500 years ago, many of which no longer exist.

Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology and philosophy at UC-Berkeley, believes that the changes AI will bring to humanity will be profound, but that we won’t notice them.

From John Brockman’s Long Now Seminar “Possible Minds. . .   Read More

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