Steven Pinker writes: “Shermer has engaged the full mantle of moral progress and considered how far we have come and how much farther that arc can be bent toward truth, justice, and freedom.” “Through copious data and compelling examples Shermer shows how the arc of the moral universe, seen from a historical vantage point, bends […]

A conceptual artist and experimental philosopher, Jonathon Keats’ work has included personalizing the metric system, copyrighting his own mind, applying general relativity to time management, and attempting to genetically engineer God. Recently he opened the shutter on his first millennium-long photograph. Co-sponsored by The ZERO1 Art & Technology Network. “Envisioning Deep Time” was given on

According to futurist (and Long Now board member) Paul Saffo, the “new economy” anticipated in the late 01990s is arriving late and in utterly unexpected ways. Social media, maker culture, the proliferation of sensors, and even the 02008 market crash are merely local phenomena in a much larger shift. What unfolds in the next few

The versatile author and historian Richard Rhodes (a Pulitzer-prize winner for his book “The Making of the Atomic Bomb”) leads us through innovations both medical and military from the Spanish Civil War, the subject of his new book “Hell and Good Company”. “Hell and Good Company, the Spanish Civil War” was given on March 10,

A filmmaker, historian, and self-proclaimed rogue archivist, Jason Scott discusses his personal history of preserving the digital commons which began with rescuing his favorite BBS-era “text files: http://textfiles.com/” and continued with saving gigabytes of the first user-created homepages (i.e. GeoCities.com) which were about to be trashed by their corporate owner. Today his mission, in his

The main arguments against geo-engineering (direct climate intervention) to stop global warming are: 1) It would be a massive, irreversible, risky bet; 2) everyone has to agree to it, which they won’t; 3) the unexpected side effects might be horrific; 4) once committed to, it could never be stopped. What if none of those need

The co-founder of Because We Can, the architecture/design firm that designed The Interval at Long Now, discusses the future of building: automation, communication, and whether “robots” will change everything. An informed and realistic overview of how architects and builders use automation today and how they may use it tomorrow. “Talking with Robots about Architecture” was

Stewart Brand and Paul Saffo will discuss the Pace Layers framework for how a healthy society functions, which Stewart introduced in his book The Clock of Long Now: http://www.amazon.com/Clock-Long-Now-Responsibility-Computer/dp/0465007805/lono0a20 (01999). More than fifteen years after its debut, this concept continues to be influential and inspiring. The Pace Layers idea is illustrated by a simple diagram

In the field of environmental progress the conflict between anecdote and statistics is so flagrant that most public understanding on the subject is upside down. We worry about the wrong things, fail to worry about the right things, and fail to acknowledge and expand the things that are going well. For decades at Rockefeller University

What comes after the Internet? What is bigger than the web? What will produce more wealth than all the startups to date? The answer is a planetary super-organism comprised of 4 billion mobile phones, 80 quintillion transistor chips, a million miles of fiber optic cables, and 6 billion human minds all wired together. The whole