Long Now
Episodes
Lazar Kunstmann & Jon Lackman: Preservation without Permission
14 Nov 2012
Contributed by Lukas
### Preservation Without Permission Their video showed clandestine urban “infiltration” (trespassing) at its most creative. Paris’s Urban Exper...
Steven Pinker: The Decline of Violence
09 Oct 2012
Contributed by Lukas
### The Long Peace “Nothing can be more gentle than man in his primitive state,” declared Rousseau in the 18th century. A century earlier, Thomas...
Tim O'Reilly: Birth of the Global Mind
06 Sep 2012
Contributed by Lukas
### The global mind is us, augmented As a student of the classics at Harvard in the 1970s, O’Reilly was impressed by a book titled _The Discovery o...
Elaine Pagels: The Truth About the Book of Revelations
21 Aug 2012
Contributed by Lukas
### War in heaven "The _Book of Revelation_ is war literature," Pagels explained. John of Patmos was a war refugee, writing sixty years after the dea...
Cory Doctorow: The Coming Century of War Against Your Computer
01 Aug 2012
Contributed by Lukas
### Who governs digital trust? Doctorow framed the question this way: "Computers are everywhere. They are now something we put our whole bodies into-...
Benjamin Barber: If Mayors Ruled the World
06 Jun 2012
Contributed by Lukas
### City-based global governance Sovereign nation states have conspicuously failed to cooperate well enough to deal with increasingly global problems...
Susan Freinkel: Eternal Plastic
23 May 2012
Contributed by Lukas
### Making plastic even better Plastic is so new, Freinkel began, that among all the objects preserved in the sunken _Titanic_ , none are synthetic p...
Charles C. Mann: Living in the Homogenocene
24 Apr 2012
Contributed by Lukas
### Bio-blender Earth Tumultuous effects resulted and continue to result from the massive mixing of the world’s biota when European ships reconnect...
Edward O. Wilson: The Social Conquest of Earth
21 Apr 2012
Contributed by Lukas
### The real creation story “History makes no sense without prehistory,“ Wilson declared, “and prehistory makes no sense without biology.” He...
Mark Lynas: The Nine Planetary Boundaries
07 Mar 2012
Contributed by Lukas
### The Quantified Planet “About 74,000 years ago,” Lynas began, “a volcanic event nearly wiped out humanity. We were down to just a thousand o...
Jim Richardson: Heirlooms
23 Feb 2012
Contributed by Lukas
### Save Agricultural Biodiversity Humanity’s agricultural legacy is on a par with any of our great cultural legacies, Richardson said, but preserv...
Lawrence Lessig: How Money Corrupts Congress and a Plan to Stop It
18 Jan 2012
Contributed by Lukas
### Public Funding for Public Elections Larry Lessig gave a rousing performance for the 100th Seminar About Long-Term Thinking. In a lawyerly fashion...
Rick Prelinger: Lost Landscapes of San Francisco, 6
09 Dec 2011
Contributed by Lukas
Held at the historic Castro Theater, almost 1,400 enthusiastic San Francisco history buffs packed in to partake of guerrilla archivist Rick Prelinger’...
Brewster Kahle: Universal Access to All Knowledge
01 Dec 2011
Contributed by Lukas
### All knowledge, to all people, for all time, for free Universal access to all knowledge, Kahle declared, will be one of humanity's greatest achiev...
Laura Cunningham: Ten Millennia of California Ecology
18 Oct 2011
Contributed by Lukas
### Eco-continuity in California California ecology used to be much more driven by floods and fires, Cunningham said, showing with her paintings how...
Timothy Ferriss: Accelerated Learning in Accelerated Times
15 Sep 2011
Contributed by Lukas
### Learning to learn fast To acquire "the meta-skill of acquiring skills," Ferriss recommends approaching any subject with some contrarian analysis:...
Geoffrey B West: Why Cities Keep on Growing, Corporations Always Die, and Life Gets Faster
26 Jul 2011
Contributed by Lukas
### Superlinear Cities "It's hard to kill a city," West began, "but easy to kill a company." The mean life of companies is 10 years. Cities routinely...
Peter Kareiva: Conservation in the Real World
28 Jun 2011
Contributed by Lukas
### Environmentalism for THIS Century Kareiva began by recalling the environmental "golden decade" of 1965-75, set in motion by the scientist Rachel ...
Carl Zimmer: Viral Time
08 Jun 2011
Contributed by Lukas
### What's time to a virus? "Everything about viruses is extreme," Zimmer began. The number of viruses on Earth is estimated to be 1 followed by 31 z...
Tim Flannery: Here on Earth
04 May 2011
Contributed by Lukas
### Wallace beats Darwin The great insight of natural selection was published simultaneously by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace in 1858, Fl...
Ian Morris: Why the West Rules - For Now
14 Apr 2011
Contributed by Lukas
### Geographical determinism Historians and others who try to explain the world dominance by the West since the 18th century usually put it down to l...
Alexander Rose: Millennial Precedent
06 Apr 2011
Contributed by Lukas
Alexander Rose, Long Now Executive Director and project manager for the Clock of the Long Now, discussed lessons learned in multi-millennial site desi...
Matt Ridley: Deep Optimism
23 Mar 2011
Contributed by Lukas
### Undeniable Progress Hominids had upright walking, stone tools, fire, even language but still remained in profound stasis. What led to humanity's ...
Mary Catherine Bateson: Live Longer, Think Longer
10 Feb 2011
Contributed by Lukas
### Parenting Earth The birth of a first child is the most intense disruption that most adults experience. Suddenly the new parents have no sleep, no...
Philip K. Howard: Fixing Broken Government
19 Jan 2011
Contributed by Lukas
### Government 4.0 Americans have made major adjustments to our government before, Howard declared. At the beginning of the 20th century a Progressiv...
Rick Prelinger: Lost Landscapes of San Francisco, 5
17 Dec 2010
Contributed by Lukas
### Lives of San Francisco "You are the soundtrack," Prelinger told the capacity audience at the Herbst Theater, and they responded to his mostly sil...
Rachel Sussman: The World's Oldest Living Organisms
16 Nov 2010
Contributed by Lukas
### The Missing Science of Biological Longevity Creative photographer Sussman showed beautiful slides of very elderly organisms. The captions were as...
Lera Boroditsky: How Language Shapes Thought
27 Oct 2010
Contributed by Lukas
### Languages are Parallel Universes "To have a second language is to have a second soul," said Charlemagne around 800 AD. "Each language has its own...
Jane McGonigal & Stewart Brand: Long Conversation 19 of 19
17 Oct 2010
Contributed by Lukas
**This is one conversation out of the 19 that took place as part of the Long Conversation.[Media links for the other Conversations are available here....
Jane McGonigal & Tiffany Shlain: Long Conversation 18 of 19
17 Oct 2010
Contributed by Lukas
**This is one conversation out of the 19 that took place as part of the Long Conversation.[Media links for the other Conversations are available here....
Paul Hawken & Tiffany Shlain: Long Conversation 17 of 19
17 Oct 2010
Contributed by Lukas
**This is one conversation out of the 19 that took place as part of the Long Conversation.[Media links for the other Conversations are available here....
Paul Hawken & Katherine Fulton: Long Conversation 16 of 19
17 Oct 2010
Contributed by Lukas
**This is one conversation out of the 19 that took place as part of the Long Conversation.[Media links for the other Conversations are available here....
Katherine Fulton & Stuart Candy: Long Conversation 15 of 19
17 Oct 2010
Contributed by Lukas
**This is one conversation out of the 19 that took place as part of the Long Conversation.[Media links for the other Conversations are available here....
Danese Cooper & Stuart Candy: Long Conversation 14 of 19
17 Oct 2010
Contributed by Lukas
**This is one conversation out of the 19 that took place as part of the Long Conversation.[Media links for the other Conversations are available here....
Danese Cooper & Peter Schwartz: Long Conversation 13 of 19
17 Oct 2010
Contributed by Lukas
**This is one conversation out of the 19 that took place as part of the Long Conversation.[Media links for the other Conversations are available here....
Pete Worden & Peter Schwartz: Long Conversation 12 of 19
17 Oct 2010
Contributed by Lukas
**This is one conversation out of the 19 that took place as part of the Long Conversation.[Media links for the other Conversations are available here....
Ken Foster & Pete Worden: Long Conversation 11 of 19
17 Oct 2010
Contributed by Lukas
**This is one conversation out of the 19 that took place as part of the Long Conversation.[Media links for the other Conversations are available here....
Melissa Alexander & Ken Foster: Long Conversation 10 of 19
17 Oct 2010
Contributed by Lukas
**This is one conversation out of the 19 that took place as part of the Long Conversation.[Media links for the other Conversations are available here....
Melissa Alexander & Ken Wilson: Long Conversation 9 of 19
17 Oct 2010
Contributed by Lukas
**This is one conversation out of the 19 that took place as part of the Long Conversation.[Media links for the other Conversations are available here....
John Perry Barlow & Ken Wilson: Long Conversation 8 of 19
17 Oct 2010
Contributed by Lukas
**This is one conversation out of the 19 that took place as part of the Long Conversation.[Media links for the other Conversations are available here....
John Perry Barlow & Violet Blue: Long Conversation 7 of 19
16 Oct 2010
Contributed by Lukas
**This is one conversation out of the 19 that took place as part of the Long Conversation.[Media links for the other Conversations are available here....
Violet Blue & Robin Sloan: Long Conversation 6 of 19
16 Oct 2010
Contributed by Lukas
**This is one conversation out of the 19 that took place as part of the Long Conversation.[Media links for the other Conversations are available here....
Jill Tarter & Robin Sloan: Long Conversation 5 of 19
16 Oct 2010
Contributed by Lukas
**This is one conversation out of the 19 that took place as part of the Long Conversation.[Media links for the other Conversations are available here....
Emily Levine & Jill Tarter: Long Conversation 4 of 19
16 Oct 2010
Contributed by Lukas
**This is one conversation out of the 19 that took place as part of the Long Conversation.[Media links for the other Conversations are available here....
Saul Griffith & Emily Levine: Long Conversation 3 of 19
16 Oct 2010
Contributed by Lukas
**This is one conversation out of the 19 that took place as part of the Long Conversation.[Media links for the other Conversations are available here....
Jem Finer & Saul Griffith: Long Conversation 2 of 19
16 Oct 2010
Contributed by Lukas
**This is one conversation out of the 19 that took place as part of the Long Conversation.[Media links for the other Conversations are available here....
Jem Finer & Stewart Brand: Long Conversation 1 of 19
16 Oct 2010
Contributed by Lukas
**This is one conversation out of the 19 that took place as part of the Long Conversation.[Media links for the other Conversations are available here....
Martin Rees: Life's Future in the Cosmos
03 Aug 2010
Contributed by Lukas
### Cosmic Life The pace of astronomic discovery, said the Astronomer Royal, keeps increasing with the constant improvement in our sensing technology...
Jesse Schell: Visions of the Gamepocalypse
28 Jul 2010
Contributed by Lukas
### Gaming the World In a glee-filled evening, Schell declared that games and real life are reaching out to each other with such force that we might ...
Frank Gavin: Five Ways to Use History Well
13 Jul 2010
Contributed by Lukas
### History-savvy Policy Why do policy makers and historians shun each other? Gavin observed that policy people want actionable information, certaint...
Ed Moses: Clean Fusion Power This Decade
17 Jun 2010
Contributed by Lukas
### Imminent fusion power All the light we see from the sky, Moses pointed out, comes from fusion power burning hydrogen, the commonest element in th...
Nils Gilman: Deviant Globalization
04 May 2010
Contributed by Lukas
### The anti-state economy Gilman described deviant globalization as "the unpleasant underside of transnational integration." There's nice tourism, ...
David Eagleman: Six Easy Steps to Avert the Collapse of Civilization
02 Apr 2010
Contributed by Lukas
### Averting Collapse Civilizations always think they're immortal, Eagleman noted, but they nearly always perish, leaving "nothing but ruins and scat...
Beth Noveck: Transparent Government
05 Mar 2010
Contributed by Lukas
### Dot.Gov Noveck began with the example of patents, first devised in Renaissance Florence and Venice to protect techniques such as glass manufactur...
Alan Weisman: World Without Us, World With Us
25 Feb 2010
Contributed by Lukas
### Humanity's impact, nature's resilience Weisman's book, _The World Without Us_ , grew out of two questions, he said. One was, "How can I write a b...
Alexander Rose, Brian Eno, & Stewart Brand: Long Finance: The Enduring Value Conference
01 Feb 2010
Contributed by Lukas
### Enduring Value In February 02010, [Brian Eno](../../../../people/board/prospect4/), [Stewart Brand](../../../../people/board/sb1/), and [Alexande...
Wade Davis: The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World
14 Jan 2010
Contributed by Lukas
### Native guidance What does it mean to be human and alive? The thousands of different cultures and languages on Earth have compellingly different ...
Rick Prelinger: Lost Landscapes of San Francisco 4
05 Dec 2009
Contributed by Lukas
### Gas Stations, Not Flowers The fourth incarnation of _Lost Landscapes of San Francisco_ played to a sold out house at the Herbst Theater with the ...
Sander van der Leeuw: The Archaeology of Innovation
19 Nov 2009
Contributed by Lukas
### History of Innovation The development of human mental ability can be tracked through the progressive crafting of stone tools, Van der Leeuw expla...
Stewart Brand: Rethinking Green
10 Oct 2009
Contributed by Lukas
### Globalizing Green Brand built his case for rethinking environmental goals and methods on two major changes going on in the world. The one that mo...
Arthur Ganson: Machines and the Breath of Time
15 Sep 2009
Contributed by Lukas
### Dancing chairs "You follow the feeling of the piece," Ganson explained, "and then wrestle it into physicality." As long as the idea is nonphysic...
Wayne Clough: Smithsonian Forever
18 Aug 2009
Contributed by Lukas
### The Smithsonian's long now [Note for those who mentally enunciate words while reading: the last name is pronounced "Cluff."] Secretary Clough re...
Raoul Adamchak & Pamela Ronald: Organically Grown and Genetically Engineered: The Food of the Future
29 Jul 2009
Contributed by Lukas
### Engineered organic Organic farming teacher Raoul began the joint presentation with a checklist for truly sustainable agriculture in a global cont...
Paul Romer: A Theory of History, with an Application
19 May 2009
Contributed by Lukas
### New Cities with New Rules This talk was the first in a series of public discussions of an idea that Romer has been working on for two years. His...
Michael Pollan: Deep Agriculture
06 May 2009
Contributed by Lukas
### Making farmers cool again Farming has become an occupation and cultural force of the past. Michael Pollan's talk promoted the premise - and hope ...
Gavin Newsom & Stewart Brand: Cities and Time
09 Apr 2009
Contributed by Lukas
### Sustainable Cities Mayor Newsom began with how moved he was by hosting the UN's World Environment Day in San Francisco in 2005. For that event, ...
Daniel Everett: Endangered languages, lost knowledge and the future
21 Mar 2009
Contributed by Lukas
### Language Revolution The Piraha tribe in the heart of the Amazon numbers only 360, spread in small groups over 300 miles. An exceptionally cheerf...
Dmitry Orlov: Social Collapse Best Practices
14 Feb 2009
Contributed by Lukas
### Managing social collapse With vintage Russian black humor, Orlov described the social collapse he witnessed in Russia in the 1990s and spelled ou...
Saul Griffith: Climate Change Recalculated
17 Jan 2009
Contributed by Lukas
### The Terawatt World Engineer Griffith said he was going to make the connection between personal actions and global climate change. To do that he's...
Rick Prelinger: Lost Landscapes of San Francisco
20 Dec 2008
Contributed by Lukas
### Four Dimensional Cities Cities are designed and built in three dimensions. Watching Prelinger's historic footage of San Francisco last night (to...
Drew Endy & Jim Thomas: Synthetic Biology Debate
18 Nov 2008
Contributed by Lukas
### Terms of Biocontainment "I want to develop tools that make biology easy to engineer," Drew Endy began. The first purpose is better understanding ...
Huey Johnson: Green Planning at Nation Scale
04 Oct 2008
Contributed by Lukas
### Green Plans Green Plans, said Johnson, are government-run environmental programs that rise to the scale and longevity of environmental problems. ...
Peter Diamandis: Long-term X-Prizes
13 Sep 2008
Contributed by Lukas
### Beyond Audacious Pursuing the idea of “revolution through competition” via huge-purse prizes was inspired for Peter Diamandis by reading abou...
Neal Stephenson: ANATHEM Book Launch Event
09 Sep 2008
Contributed by Lukas
### _Anathem_ book launch Neal Stephenson's nearly thousand page tome [_Anathem_](https://longnow.org/anathem/) was inspired in part by Long Now's [1...
Daniel Suarez: Daemon: Bot-mediated Reality
09 Aug 2008
Contributed by Lukas
### Bot-dominated Reality [Daniel Suarez, originally published as Leinad Zaurus, delivered a talk on the themes developed in his (originally self pub...
Edward Burtynsky: The 10,000-year Gallery
24 Jul 2008
Contributed by Lukas
### Stone Ink Gallery Photographer Edward Burtynsky made a formal proposal for a permanent art gallery in the chamber that encloses the 10,000-year C...
Paul Ehrlich: The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment
28 Jun 2008
Contributed by Lukas
### Becoming a Benign Dominant To track how humans became Earth's dominant animal, Ehrlich began with a photo of a tarsier in a tree. The little prim...
Iqbal Quadir: Technology Empowers the Poorest
22 May 2008
Contributed by Lukas
### Making Money WITH the Poor When Iqbal Quadir applied to US colleges from his home town in Bangladesh he was surprised to discover that not all Am...
Niall Ferguson & Peter Schwartz: Historian vs. Futurist on Human Progress
29 Apr 2008
Contributed by Lukas
### Past vs. Future In what turned out to be a riveting evening, historian Niall Ferguson and futurist Peter Schwartz fire-hosed each other with enou...
Craig Venter: Joining 3.5 Billion Years of Microbial Invention
26 Feb 2008
Contributed by Lukas
### Decoding and recoding life To really read DNA accurately and understand it thoroughly, you need to be able to write it from scratch and make it l...
Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The Future Has Always Been Crazier Than We Thought
05 Feb 2008
Contributed by Lukas
### Dispatches from Extremistan A "black swan," Taleb explained, is an event which is 1) Hard to predict; 2) Highly consequential; 3) Wrongly retro-p...
Paul Saffo: Embracing Uncertainty: the secret to effective forecasting
12 Jan 2008
Contributed by Lukas
### Rules of Forecasting Reflecting on his 25 years as a forecaster, Paul Saffo pointed out that a forecaster's job is not to predict outcomes, but t...
Joline Blais & Jon Ippolito: At the Edge of Art
15 Dec 2007
Contributed by Lukas
### Artibodies Art, like the antibodies in our immune system, creates alien forces in service of the whole. It anticipates threats and models them. I...
Rosabeth Moss Kanter: Enduring Principles for Changing Times
10 Nov 2007
Contributed by Lukas
### Principles against panic "Everything looks like a failure in the middle." Any new enterprise, Kanter explained, encounters roadblocks. As the obs...
Juan Enriquez: Mapping the Frontier of Knowledge
13 Oct 2007
Contributed by Lukas
### Mapping Life "All life is imperfectly transmitted code," Enriquez began, "and it is promiscuous." Thus discoveries like the one last month of an ...
Rip Anderson & Gwyneth Cravens: Power to Save the World
15 Sep 2007
Contributed by Lukas
### Nuclear Footprint In the early 1980s Gwyneth Cravens was one of the protesters against the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant on Long Island, and also ...
Alex Wright: Glut: Mastering Information Though the Ages
18 Aug 2007
Contributed by Lukas
### A Series of Information Explosions As usual, microbes led the way. Bacteria have swarmed in intense networks for 3.5 billion years. Then a hierar...
Francis Fukuyama: 'The End of History' Revisited
29 Jun 2007
Contributed by Lukas
### Democracy versus Culture Francis Fukuyama began by describing the four most significant challenges to the thesis in his famed 1992 book,_[The End...
Paul Hawken: The New Great Transformation
09 Jun 2007
Contributed by Lukas
### Humanity's immune system The title of Paul Hawken's talk, "The New Great Transformation," has two referents, he explained. Economist Karl Polanyi...
Steven Johnson: The Long Zoom
12 May 2007
Contributed by Lukas
### Consilience defeats miasma Steven Johnson began his long zoom survey with the "prior art" of Joyce's Stephen Daedalus locating himself in himself...
Frans Lanting: Life's Journey Through Time
28 Apr 2007
Contributed by Lukas
### The deep past in the remote present It began on a New Jersey beach. Frans Lanting was photographing horseshoe crabs for a story about how they ar...
Brian Fagan: We Are Not the First to Suffer Through Climate Change
10 Mar 2007
Contributed by Lukas
### Catastrophic drought is coming back There are two kinds of historians, Brian Fagan says, parachutists and truffle hunters. Parachutists command a...
Vernor Vinge: What If the Singularity Does NOT Happen?
16 Feb 2007
Contributed by Lukas
### Non-Singularity scenarios Vinge began by declaring that he still believes that a Singularity event in the next few decades is the most likely out...
Philip Tetlock: Why Foxes Are Better Forecasters Than Hedgehogs
27 Jan 2007
Contributed by Lukas
### Ignore confident forecasters "What is it about politics that makes people so dumb?" From his perspective as a psychology researcher, Philip Tetl...
Philip Rosedale: 'Second Life:' What Do We Learn If We Digitize EVERYTHING?
01 Dec 2006
Contributed by Lukas
### 2nd Life takes off What is real life coming to owe digital life? After a couple years in the flat part of exponential growth, the steep part is ...
Larry Brilliant, Richard Rockefeller, & Katherine Fulton: The Deeper News About the New Philanthropy
04 Nov 2006
Contributed by Lukas
### Philanthropic stamina 10,000 families in the US, Katherine Fulton reported, have assets of $100 million or more. That's up from 7,000 just a coup...
John Baez: Zooming Out in Time
14 Oct 2006
Contributed by Lukas
### Welcome to the Anthropocene The graphs we see these days, John Baez began, all look vertical-- carbon burning shooting up, CO2 in the air shootin...
Orville Schell: China Thinks Long-term, But Can It Relearn to Act Long-term?
23 Sep 2006
Contributed by Lukas
### Giant contradictions “China is the most unresolved nation of consequence in the world,” Orville Schell began. It is defined by its massive co...
John Rendon: Long-term Policy to Make the War on Terror Short
15 Jul 2006
Contributed by Lukas
### Only connect John Rendon, head of The Rendon Group, is a senior communications consultant to the White Houses and Departments of Defense. His sub...
Will Wright & Brian Eno: Playing with Time
27 Jun 2006
Contributed by Lukas
### Generative play In a dazzling duet Will Wright and Brian Eno gave an intense clinic on the joys and techniques of "generative" creation. Back in...