Long Now
Episodes
Will Hearst & Chris Anderson: The Long Time Tail
31 May 2006
Contributed by Lukas
### The power law is the shape of our age You know something is up when an audience member is taking cell phone photos of the presenter's slides for ...
Jimmy Wales: Vision: Wikipedia and the Future of Free Culture
15 Apr 2006
Contributed by Lukas
### Community-built content rules Vision is one of the most powerful forms of long-term thinking. Jimmy Wales, founder and president of the all-embra...
Kevin Kelly: The Next 100 Years of Science: Long-term Trends in the Scientific Method.
11 Mar 2006
Contributed by Lukas
### Recursion drives science The co-founding editor of “Wired” magazine and author of _Out of Control_ is working on a new book on “what techno...
Stephen Lansing: Perfect Order: A Thousand Years in Bali
14 Feb 2006
Contributed by Lukas
### Hidden order in the Balinese "religion of water" With lucid exposition and gorgeous graphics, anthropologist Stephen Lansing exposed the hidden s...
Ralph Cavanagh & Peter Schwartz: Nuclear Power, Climate Change and the Next 10,000 Years
14 Jan 2006
Contributed by Lukas
### Climate change and nuclear prospects Given the power to decide who would go first-- anti-nuke Ralph Cavanagh from Natural Resources Defense Couns...
Sam Harris: The View from the End of the World
10 Dec 2005
Contributed by Lukas
### On necessary heresy With gentle demeanor and tight argument, Sam Harris carried an overflow audience into the core of one of the crucial issues o...
Clay Shirky: Making Digital Durable: What Time Does to Categories
15 Nov 2005
Contributed by Lukas
### Categories go nova It is fortunate that the leading thinker in "social software" is one of the best speakers in the high-tech world, a hot ticket...
George Dyson, Freeman Dyson, & Esther Dyson: The Difficulty of Looking Far Ahead
06 Oct 2005
Contributed by Lukas
### Finessing the future Instead of one podium there were four chairs on the stage of Wednesday's seminar. In three seats, three Dysons: Esther, Geor...
Ray Kurzweil: Kurzweil's Law
24 Sep 2005
Contributed by Lukas
### Escape velocity Attempts to think long term, Ray Kurzweil began, keep making the mistake of imagining that the pace of the future is like the pac...
Robert Fuller: Patient Revolution: Human Rights Past and Future
13 Aug 2005
Contributed by Lukas
### The culminating human right What does it take to change human habits of cruelty (such as slavery, genocide) and humiliation (racism, sexism)? Wh...
Jared Diamond: How Societies Fail-And Sometimes Succeed
16 Jul 2005
Contributed by Lukas
### On failing to think long-term Sophisticated societies from time to time collapse utterly, often leaving traces of a civilization that was at a pr...
Robert Neuwirth: The 21st Century Medieval City
11 Jun 2005
Contributed by Lukas
### World squatter reality Humanity is urbanizing at a world-changing pace and in a world-changing way. A billion squatters are re-inventing their li...
: Cities & Time
09 Apr 2005
Contributed by Lukas
### A world made of cities Cities are the human organizations with the greatest longevity but also the fastest rate of change. Just now the world is ...
Spencer Beebe: Very Long-term Very Large-scale Biomimicry
12 Mar 2005
Contributed by Lukas
### The rainforests of home Spencer Beebe is founder and head of Ecotrust, the Portland-based organization that is setting in motion a permanently pr...
Roger Kennedy: The Political History of North America from 25,000 BC to 12,000 AD
26 Feb 2005
Contributed by Lukas
### Ancient American politics Roger Kennedy, the former head of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History and former Director of the US Nat...
James Carse: Religious War In Light of the Infinite Game
15 Jan 2005
Contributed by Lukas
### Finite and infinite games Countless readers have been hooked by the opening line of James P. Carse's [_Finite and Infinite Games_](http://www.ama...
Ken Dychtwald: The Consequences of Human Life Extension
04 Dec 2004
Contributed by Lukas
### What long life means Ken Dychtwald gave a terrific talk Friday evening to a standing-room audience on "The Consequences of Human Life Extension."...
Michael West: The Prospects of Human Life Extension
13 Nov 2004
Contributed by Lukas
### Ever longer life Our germline cells (eggs and sperm) are already immortal. What if the rest of the cells of our body could acquire the same abili...
Paul Hawken: The Long Green
16 Oct 2004
Contributed by Lukas
### The long green The environmental movement has moved on. It has become so deep and wide that it adds up to something new entirely, still unnamed. ...
Danny Hillis: Progress on the 10,000-year Clock
11 Sep 2004
Contributed by Lukas
"How's the Clock coming?" Everyone connected with The Long Now Foundation or with Danny Hillis hears that question all the time. "Progress on the 10,...
Phillip Longman: The Depopulation Problem
14 Aug 2004
Contributed by Lukas
### The depopulation problem Full PDF of the talk [here](http://static.longnow.org/seminars/020040813-longman/salt-020040813-longman.pdf "PDF"), slid...
Jill Tarter: The Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence: Necessarily a Long-term Strategy
10 Jul 2004
Contributed by Lukas
### The long search "The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence: Necessarily a Long-term Strategy" is the title for Jill Tarter's Seminar About Lo...
Bruce Sterling: The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole
12 Jun 2004
Contributed by Lukas
One reason lots of people don't want to think long term these days is because technology keeps accelerating so rapidly, we assume the world will becom...
David Rumsey: Mapping Time
15 May 2004
Contributed by Lukas
### Maps and time David Rumsey's spectacularly illustrated lecture, "Mapping Time" is not just about maps. It is the future of data and knowledge han...
Daniel Janzen: Third World Conservation: It's ALL Gardening
10 Apr 2004
Contributed by Lukas
### Mega gardening Big as life and twice as opinionated, the renowned preservation biologist Daniel Janzen spoke for The Long Now on Friday, April 9,...
Rusty Schweickart: The Asteroid Threat Over the Next 100,000 Years
13 Mar 2004
Contributed by Lukas
### Asteroid threat report Schweickart filled the hall with some 240 at the Presidio Officers Club and gave a dazzling lecture. He left the next day ...
James Dewar: Long-term Policy Analysis
14 Feb 2004
Contributed by Lukas
### Long-term policy analysis Dewar is head of RAND’s Pardee Center on very long-term policy—35 to 200 years For over half a century the RAND Co...
George Dyson: There's Plenty of Room at the Top: Long-term Thinking About Large-scale Computing
10 Jan 2004
Contributed by Lukas
### Long-term thinking about large-scale computing Ever since his 1997 breakthrough book, _Darwin Among the Machines_ , Dyson has become regarded as ...
Peter Schwartz: The Art Of The Really Long View
13 Dec 2003
Contributed by Lukas
### The art of the really long view For such a weighty subject there was a lot of guffawing going on in the Seminar Thursday night. The topic was "T...
Brian Eno: The Long Now
15 Nov 2003
Contributed by Lukas
### The Long Now Brian told the origins of his realizations about the "small here" versus the "big here" and the "short now" versus the "long now." H...