Long Now

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 become unrecognizable in a few years and then move on to unimaginable. Long-term thinking must be either impossible or irrelevant. The commonest shorthand term for the runaway acceleration of technology is "the Singularity"--a concept introduced by scienc...

### Maps and time David Rumsey's spectacularly illustrated lecture, "Mapping Time" is not just about maps. It is the future of data and knowledge handling. People literally gasp at the things Rumsey shows can be done. I love it when techies, artists, and historians all gasp at the same time. That happened with David Rumsey's spectacularly illustrated Seminar About Long-term Thinking on May 13-14,...

### Mega gardening Big as life and twice as opinionated, the renowned preservation biologist Daniel Janzen spoke for The Long Now on Friday, April 9, 2005. His perspective on preservation may be jarring to some: "It's ALL Gardening". Dan Janzen is most widely known for his heroic efforts helping set all of Costa Rica on a preservation path, ensuring that the mega-diverse nation continues indefinit...

### 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 for Washington DC to lobby Congress to apply its will to making the Earth safe for the very long term. "For life to survive in planetary systems," said Schweickart, "it has to figure out how to deal with massive asteroid impacts. Who knows how many ad...

### 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 Corporation has influenced national policy and invented major intellectual tools. Packet switching (Paul Baran) came from RAND; so did scenario planning (Herman Kahn); so does the current understanding of “net warfare” (John Arquilla). For all of its power,...

### Long-term thinking about large-scale computing Ever since his 1997 breakthrough book, _Darwin Among the Machines_ , Dyson has become regarded as a leading historian and interpreter of computer science, bringing a rigorous and unconventional perspective. Thus his willingness to examine the long-term prospects for mega-scale computing. Most computer people are averse to discussing seriously any...

### 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 "The Art of the Really Long View." Peter Schwartz chatted through his slides for tonight's lecture, then the discussion waded in. Present were Danny Hillis, Leighton Read, Angie Thieriot, Ryan Phelan, David Rumsey, Eric Greenberg, Kevin Kelly, Anders Hov...

### 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." He noted that the Big Here is pretty well popularized now, with exotic restaurants everywhere, "world" music, globalization, and routine photos of the whole earth. Instant world news and the internet has led to increased empathy worldwide. But empathy...