Long Now Foundation

The Long Now Foundation is an American non-profit dedicated to fostering long-term thinking. Their projects include the 10,000 Year Clock, Seminars About Long-term Thinking, and The Interval bar/cafe.https://www.youtube.com/c/longnow/about The president is Stewart Brand, who co-chairs the organisation with Danny Hillis.https://longnow.org/people/board/ Their YouTube channel uploads a variety of educational talks. The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996 to encourage people to think about the next 10,000 years. They use five-digit numbers for the year, using an extra zero to solve the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in about 8,000 years.
==Aims==
The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996 to develop the Clock and Library projects, as well as to become the seed of a very long-term cultural institution. The Long Now Foundation hopes to help make long-term thinking more common, and foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.https://longnow.org/about/
==Board members==
===Stewart Brand===
Stewart Brand (born: )https://twitter.com/longnow/status/1338600324471402496 is co‑chair and President of the Board of Directors. He is co-founder and president of The Long Now Foundation. He co-founded , created and edited the , and co-founded the and . His books include The Clock of the Long Now; How Buildings Learn; The Media Lab; and Whole Earth Discipline. He graduated in Biology from Stanford and served as an Infantry officer.
===Danny Hillis===
Daniel Hillis (born ) is co-founder & co-chair of The Long Now Foundation and the designer of the 10,000 year clock. He is an inventor, scientist, engineer, and author, as well as the co-founder of Applied Invention, a group who develop technology solutions with companies and entrepreneurs. He is the co-founder of , and a professor at a number of universities. Previously, he was Vice President, Research and Development at Walt Disney Imagineering, and Disney Fellow, where he developed technology and business strategies for Disney.
Hillis has published in and edited a variety of scientific journals. He has also written on technology for various publications. He is the author of two books, Connection Machine and The Pattern on the Stone. He is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery, a Fellow of the International Leadership Forum, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.https://longnow.org/people/board/danny0/
Hillis has received the for shaping and enriching society and public life in 02002, the 01991 Spirit of American Creativity Award for his inventions, the 01989 for computer science, and the 01988 Ramanujan Award for applied mathematics.https://longnow.org/people/board/danny0/full/
===Katherine Fulton===
Katherine Fulton is co-chair of the Board of Directors. She has given speeches at Long Now and at TED. She graduated from Harvard with a degree in history and literature, and co-founded The North Carolina Independent, an investigative newspaper. Fulton lives in the San Francisco Bay area with her spouse, Katharine Kunst.https://longnow.org/people/board/kfulton/
===Kevin Kelly===
Kevin Kelly (born: 01952) is Co-chair of the Board of Directors. From 01984 to 01990, he published and edited the . He co-founded the Hackers' Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL. Kelly edited, published, and wrote much of Signal, a pre-Wired compendium of digital tools. He authored New Rules for the New Economy, , and . He is also editor and publisher of several websites.
His writing has appeared in many newspapers and publications. Before taking up the consequences of technology, Kelly was a nomadic photojournalist. For most of the 01970's, he was a photographer in remote parts of Asia, publishing his photographs in national magazines. In 02001 he co-founded a scientific initiative called the . That project eventually became the Encyclopedia of Life.https://longnow.org/people/board/kk7/
===Danica Remy===
Danica Remy is Treasurer of the Board of Directors. She is president of the , which is dedicated to protecting Earth from asteroids. Danica was one of the co-founders of . She serves on the Boards of the Network for Good, Long Now Foundation, Asteroid Foundation, Greenwood School, and is president of Point Foundation, the former publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog.https://longnow.org/people/board/danicaremy/
===Alexander Rose===
Alexander Rose is the Executive Director and Secretary of the Board. He is an industrial designer and has been working with The Long Now Foundation and Danny Hillis since 01997 on the 10,000 Year Clock. Alexander speaks about the work of The Long Now Foundation at venues such as the TED conference, corporations and government agencies.
Alexander founded The Interval, and The Organizational Continuity Project, and has facilitated The Rosetta Project, Long Bets, Seminars About Long Term Thinking, Long Server and others. Alexander shares several design patents on the 10,000 Year Clock with Danny Hillis.
He writes about building artefacts and institutions that last, co-curates the Long Now Seminars, as well as The Conversations at The Interval and some talks at The Battery SF. Alexander is also an advisor to the METI project. Alexander lives in Marin County, California, and enjoys mountain biking, mountaineering and other outdoor activities.https://longnow.org/people/board/zander/
==Projects==
===Clock of the Long Now===
The is an all mechanical clock designed to keep time for 10,000 years. In 01998, asked some friends to make sketches of what they imagined a 10,000-year clock should look like.https://twitter.com/longnow/status/1382700138276196355 Hillis and a crew developed engineering designs for the Long Now 10,000-year Clock. They plan to build the Clock inside Mount Washington, Nevada, at the end of a long vertical tunnel entrance. It was designed with the principles of longevity, maintainability, transparency, evolvability, and scalability. In 01999, Long Now purchased 180 acres on Mount Washington, covered by ancient bristlecones, for the 10,000 Year Clock.https://twitter.com/longnow/status/1362227103668781056 https://medium.com/the-long-now-foundation/the-long-now-foundation-and-a-great-basin-mountain-observatory-for-long-science-6f5e6816a9d3
The clock powers itself, harnessing the day-to-night temperature shift and the piezoelectricity of ground quartz, and synchronizes itself. On the summer solstice (June 21st), the sun shines straight down the shaft and warms a part of the clock up, so it can adjust itself to that moment and stay on time. It displays the position of the sun and the moon and the stars, which move around as the clock goes. The clock accounts for the slowing of the earth and the melting of the icecaps.https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/digital-x/260423/10-000-years/
https://twitter.com/longnow/status/1364977466884898820/photo/1
The clock includes a Solar Synchroniser,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQobn1REbkc a Chime Generator that has been programmed to not repeat a chime for 10,000 years,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXgY6Cr347U and a Speed Governor, which gears and moderates energy coming out of the power system, and only spins up when the chimes are ringing.https://longnow.org/clock/
==Seminars About Long Term Thinking==
The Long Now Foundation hosts Seminars About Long Term Thinking (SALT). Long Now's first ever seminar was given by co-founder Brian Eno in 2003. It was titled "The Long Now."https://twitter.com/longnow/status/1334538256898265088 All of the past seminars, which often end with Q&As, were made available on YouTube in the summer of 02020.https://twitter.com/longnow/status/1334173396196859905 Seminars have been given by people including Neil Gaiman and Sean Carroll. The seminars, summarized by Stewart Brand, are available in a book,https://longnow.org/store/salt-summaries-paperback-edition/ written with Kevin Kelly, Alexander Rose and Paul Saffo, and a foreword by Brian Eno.https://longnow.org/seminars/ The seminars (The Long Now Seminars, and Conversations at The Interval) are also available as podcasts. https://longnow.org/seminars/podcast/
===The Interval===
The Interval is a bar, café, museum, and venue in the Fort Mason Center.https://twitter.com/longnow/status/1377272347636461575 They host talks,https://twitter.com/Interval/status/1296628088252424193 and have a floor-to-ceiling library of books that might be needed to rebuild civilization, mechanical prototypes for the 10,000 year clock, art that continually evolves in real time, and a time-inspired menu of artisan drinks.https://theinterval.org/about/
===Long Bets===
The Long Bets website is an arena for competitive, accountable predictions "of societal or scientific importance,” and a forum for focused discussion and debate about prediction. Participants have to use their real names, so they take personal responsibility for their ideas and opinions, and stand up for what they think. Like the predictions, a vote is “a permanent record of a judgement made at moment in time”. Anyone is welcome to cruise around the website anonymously. The project began in 02003, and it donates money to charitable causes.https://longbets.org/about/ Betting where bettors keep the money winnings is defined as gambling and is illegal throughout the United States. Though some may do it informally, a formal service like Long Bets cannot. Having the winnings become philanthropic gifts solves the legal problem and also introduces a charitable element to the process.https://longbets.org/faq/
===The Rosetta Project===
The Rosetta Project is a global collaboration of linguists and native speakers working to build a publicly accessible digital library of human languages.https://rosettaproject.org/?disk=back They created The Rosetta Disk, a three inch diameter nickel disk with nearly 14,000 pages of information microscopically etched onto its surface. Since each page is an image, rather than a binary code, it can be read by the human eye using 500 power optical magnification. The disk rests in a sphere made of stainless steel and glass which allows the disk exposure to the atmosphere, but protects it from casual impact and abrasion. There is a wearable version,https://rosettaproject.org/disk/wearable/ and a disc on board the European Space Agency’s .https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_h7RkkisRgI
The Long Now Foundation began by creating a key, a kind of "decoder ring" for any information humanity might leave behind, written in any language. The Rosetta Disk collection has as its core a set of "parallel" information - the same texts, the same set of vocabulary, and the same kinds of description, for over 1,000 human languages. The idea was inspired by the .
The Rosetta Project collection has over 100,000 pages of documents, and language recordings, for over 2,500 languages. The collection is housed as a special collection in the , and they continue to expand the collection.
The Rosetta Project has a principle of open access - all of the contents in the digital archive are publicly available, and all of the structured information they collect and maintain about languages and their speakers is freely available for download and reuse. The Rosetta Project also serves to draw attention to the loss of the world’s languages.https://rosettaproject.org/about/
===PanLex===
PanLex is a database enabling anyone in the world, regardless of their language, to communicate and exercise their rights. PanLex is a panlingual database (built to contain every language), and lexical (focused on words, not sentences). The mission of PanLex is to overcome language barriers to human rights, information, and opportunities. The team target under-served language communities, international humanitarian organizations, and global businesses to explore what practical problems PanLex can address. They work closely with the Rosetta Project. PanLex became a sponsored nonprofit project of the Long Now Foundation in 2012.https://medium.com/the-long-now-foundation/this-non-profit-startup-is-overcoming-language-barriers-to-human-rights-a895598672d2
==Quotes==
*“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.” - Brian Eno, a member of the Board of Directors.https://longnow.org/people/board/prospect4/
==Trivia==
*There is a play, titled The Long Now, inspired by The Long Now Foundation.https://blog.longnow.org/02021/05/02/play-inspired-by-long-now-premieres-this-month/
==References==
Category:Educational YouTubers
Category:American YouTubers
Category:Users who joined in 2006