As soon as we sense the possibility of a more desirable world, we begin behaving differently, as though that world is starting to come into existence, as though, in our minds at least, we're already there. I think we can. Footage from the television transmission of the moon landing. It was 1978. Can we grasp this sense of ourselves as existing in time, part of the beautiful continuum of life? But there is no reason to believe this. The longer your sense of Now, the more past and future it includes. Read More, by Ahmed Kabil - Twitter: @ahmedkabil on May 15th, 02019. Join our community of long-term thinkers from around the world. Read More, by Ahmed Kabil - Twitter: @ahmedkabil on April 17th, 02019, This much is certain: The sun, like all stars, will one day die. One of them was future Long Now co-founder Brian Eno, then 21. Everything was exciting, fast, current, and temporary. We imagine other ways of thinking about our world and its future. . The media attract bigger audiences by spurring instant and heated reactions to human interest stories while overlooking longer-term issues - the real human interest. . Humans are capable of a unique trick: creating realities by first imagining them, by experiencing them in their minds. I asked. . But when the H.M.S. We don't even want to start thinking about it. We face a future where almost anything could happen. Our conversation about time and the future must necessarily be global, so it needs to be inspired and consolidated by images that can transcend language and geography. But he hadn't. Read More, by Michael Garfield - Twitter: @michaelgarfield on August 8th, 02020, As detailed in the exquisite documentary Proteus, the ocean floor was until very recently a repository for the dreams of humankind — the receptacle for our imagination. Can we extend our empathy to the lives beyond ours? Later I got into conversation with the hostess. Huge industries feel pressure to plan for the bottom line and the next shareholders meeting. In this, the 21st century, we may need icons more than ever before. It was undeniably lively, but the downside was that it seemed selfish, irresponsible and randomly dangerous. . The Clock of the Long Now The Interval As visitors to Fort Mason amble past The Interval, the Long Now Foundation’s cafe-bar-museum-venue space, some are drawn, as if by gravitational pull, to an unusual eight foot-tall stainless steel technological curiosity they glimpse through the glass doors. . Read More, by Ahmed Kabil - Twitter: @ahmedkabil on June 4th, 02019, Last year, we wrote about one of the jewels of Stanford University’s Rumsey Map Collection, Urbano Monte’s planisphere of 01587. Sometimes this is quite explicit - as in Walter de Maria's "Lightning Field", a huge grid of metal poles designed to attract lightning. Read More, by Ahmed Kabil - Twitter: @ahmedkabil on September 1st, 02019, Peter Brannen, writing in The Atlantic, details why a popular claim being made on social media isn’t true—not to downplay the impact of the fires, but to educate audiences on how the various systems of our planet interact Read More, by Ahmed Kabil - Twitter: @ahmedkabil on July 12th, 02019. . Finally he stopped at the doorway of a gloomy, unwelcoming industrial building. I was new to New York. "Do you like it here?" This changed as we began to realise, perhaps it was partly the glory of their music, that they were real people, and that it was no longer acceptable that we should cripple their lives just so that ours could be freer. when I rang the bell, and I thought - knowing her sense of humour - "Oh this is going to be some kind of joke!" "But I mean, you know, is it an interesting neighbourhood?" Finally he stopped at the doorway of a gloomy, unwelcoming industrial building. Danny Hillis's Clock of the Long Now is a project designed to achieve such a result. Read More, The Long Now Foundation • Fostering Long-term Responsibility • est. . More », The Long Now Foundation • Fostering Long-term Responsibility • est. The same type of change happened when we stopped employing kids to work in mines, or when we began to accept that women had voices too. But the act of even trying is valuable: it puts time and the future on the agenda and encourages thinking about them. This is our peculiar form of selfishness, a studied disregard of the future. Special updates on the 10,000 Year Clock project are posted on the members only Clock Blog. Challenger expedition surveyed the world’s deep-sea life and brought it back for cataloging by now-legendary illustrator Ernst Haeckel (. So quickly, according to the fire historian Stephen Pyne, we forget the threat is even real. Everyone seemed to be passing through. The Big Here and Long Now Published on Sunday, January 15, 01995 • 25 years, 9 months ago Written by Brian Eno for The Long Now Foundation It was 1978. I noticed that this very local attitude to space in New York paralleled a similarly limited attitude to time. A rich acquaintance had invited me to a housewarming party, and, as my cabdriver wound his way down increasingly potholed and dingy streets, I began wondering whether he'd got the address right. Increasingly working with time, culture-makers see themselves as people who start things, not finish them. We. Artworks in general are increasingly regarded as seeds - seeds for processes that need a viewer's (or a whole culture's) active mind in which to develop. Since this act of imagination concerns our relationship to time, a Millennium is a good moment to articulate it. Top of Page, Nadia Eghbal - The Making and Maintenance of our Open Source Infrastructure, Roman Krznaric - Becoming a Better Ancestor, Long Now Members - Long Now Member Ignite Talks 02020, Julia Watson - Design by Radical Indigenism, Genevieve Bell - The 4th Industrial Revolution: Responsible & Secure AI, Craig Childs - Tracking the First People into Ice Age North America, Peter Calthorpe - Urban Planet: Ecology, Community, and Growth Through the Next Century, Explorers Discover Pinnacle of Coral Taller Than Empire State Building in Great Barrier Reef, How “Forest Floors” in Finland’s Daycares Changed Children’s Immune Systems, How Long-term Thinking Can Help Earth Now, A Long Now Drive-in Double Feature at Fort Mason, Five New Discoveries Offer an Opportunity to Contemplate the Difference Between the Dead and Merely Dormant. 50 years ago, the Apollo 11 moon landing was televised live to some 600 million viewers back on planet Earth. . Our astonishing success as a technical civilisation has led us to complacency, to expect that things will probably just keep getting better. 01996 It was 1978. The Global Imagination Space, in one sense, created the environmental revolution of the 1960s. "I think you may have made a mistake", I ventured. But when the H.M.S. Politicians feel forced to perform for the next election or opinion poll. I just didn't understand. We don't yet, however, live in The Long Now. . The Big Here In July 02013 author Craig Childs spoke to Long Now about his travels around the world. The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996* to foster long-term thinking and responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years. When Martin Luther King said "I have a dream", he was inviting others to dream it with him. The Long Now is the recognition that the precise moment you're in grows out of the past and is a seed for the future. This imaginative process can be seeded and nurtured by artists and designers, for, since the beginning of the 20th century, artists have been moving away from an idea of art as something finished, perfect, definitive and unchanging towards a view of artworks as processes or the seeds for processes - things that exist and change in time, things that are never finished. Well that's outside!" It produced icons to our careless and misdirected power - the mushroom cloud, Auschwitz, and to our capacity for compassion - Live Aid, the Red Cross. . Many musical compositions don't have one form, but change unrepeatingly over time - many of my own pieces and Jem Finer's Artangel installation "LongPlayer" are like this. . One of the world’s great intrepid travelers and story-tellers, Childs finds the places on Earth that are most geologically or climatically dangerous and hangs out, observing closely, then documents them from a personal as well as scientific. 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. We felt no compulsion to regard slaves as fellow-humans and thus placed them outside the circle of our empathy. We rehearse new feelings and sensitivities. We might be living in the last gilded bubble of a great civilisation about to collapse into a new Dark Age, which, given our hugely amplified and widespread destructive powers, could be very dark indeed. The ‘Big Here and the Long Now’: Agendas for history and sustainability Libby Robin1 Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University/ Centre for Historical Research, National Museum of Australia 1. "Now" is never just a moment. We become our new selves first in simulacrum, through style and fashion and art, our deliberate immersions in virtual worlds. It's ironic that, at a time when humankind is at a peak of its technical powers, able to create huge global changes that will echo down the centuries, most of our social systems seem geared to increasingly short nows. 01996 she laughed. We need to make a similar act of imagination now. Its demise will begin five billion years from now, when it starts running out of fuel. Why would anyone spend so much money building a place like that in a neighbourhood like this? By this process it starts to come true. . Can we become inspired by the prospect of contributing to the future? It just stopped feeling right. “We think. . You rarely got the feeling that anyone had the time to think two years ahead, let alone ten or a hundred. Through them we sense what it would be like to be another kind of person with other kinds of values. As artists and culture-makers begin making time, change and continuity their subject-matter, they will legitimise and make emotionally attractive a new and important conversation. Our empathy doesn't extend far forward in time. Two winos were crumpled on the steps, oblivious. If we want to contribute to some sort of tenable future, we have to reach a frame of mind where it comes to seem unacceptable - gauche, uncivilised - to act in disregard of our descendants. It will slowly bloat into a red giant, becoming over two hundred times larger than it is. The planisphere was an ambitious map of the world across sixty individual sheets that, were it to be stitched together as Monte’s instructions dictated, would be the largest world map made in. I was all ready to laugh. "It's the best place I've ever lived", she replied.