Futurist Peter Schwartz distills the lessons learned from his work in scenario planning for organizations. — The following transcript of Peter Schwartz’s Long Now talk on scenario planning has been edited for length and clarity.

An interview with Vincent Ialenti, author of Deep Time Reckoning — With half-lives ranging from 30 to 24,000, or even 16 million years, the radioactive elements in nuclear waste defy our typical operating time frames. The questions around nuclear waste storage — how to keep it safe from those who might wish to weaponize it, where to store it, by what…

Insights from 14 of the world’s foremost long-term thinkers — On April 14th, 02020, The Long Now Foundation convened a Long Conversation¹ featuring members of our board and invited speakers. Over almost five hours of spirited discussion, participants reflected on the current moment, how it fits into our deeper future, and how we can address threats to civilization that are…

Tickets to the Moon. Teleporting inanimate objects. A woman on the roster of an NFL, NBA, NHL, or MLS team. These are the Long Bets and Predictions made about the year 02020. — The year 02020, like 02000 before it and 02050 after it, has long captivated the popular imagination as a kind of shorthand for “the future.” Some predictions about life in 02020 are remarkably prescient: In 02004, the National Intelligence Council predicted that an “America first” movement would rise in the…

“Digital storage is easy; digital preservation is hard.” -Stewart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now (01999) In March of 02019, MySpace, the one-time de facto social media network before the rise of Facebook, announced that it had lost 12 years’ worth of users’ songs, photos, and videos during a…

We can no longer see ourselves as separate from the natural world or our technology, but as a part of them, integrated, codependent, and entangled. — By Danny Hillis We humans are changing. We have become so intertwined with what we have created that we are no longer separate from it. We have outgrown the distinction between the natural and the artificial. We are what we make. We are our thoughts, whether they are created by…

50 years ago, the Apollo 11 moon landing was televised live to some 600 million viewers back on planet Earth. One of them was future Long Now co-founder Brian Eno, then 21. He found himself underwhelmed by what he saw.

A History of Land Art in the American West, Part III — As installation begins at the Texas site for Long Now’s monumental 10,000 Year Clock, it’s worth taking a step back to examine the Clock’s larger artistic context and its place in the history of Land Art in the American West. Long Now’s staff and many of the individuals working on…

There are reasons to be hopeful after the fire. — In the hours after news broke that the Cathedral of Notre Dame suffered extensive fire damage, many found hope in a story that circulated on social media about a centuries-old protocol the fire department in Paris followed when battling the fire. The story originated with Twitter user Michael Slavitch, who…