By: The Posts Author | Posted on: 17 Nov 21
In the mid-2000s, the virtual world of the game Second Life was seen by many as a nascent metaverse, a term for virtual worlds coined by Neal Stephenson. Courtesy of Jin Zan CC-BY-SA-3.0 Sometime in the late 01980s or early 01990s, five-time Long Now Speaker Neal Stephenson needed a word to describe a world within the world of his novel Snow Crash. The physical world of Snow Crash is a dystopia, dominated by corporations and organized crime syndicates without much difference in conduct. The novel’s main characters are squeezed to the fringes of the “real world,” forced to live in
In the mid-2000s, the virtual world of the game Second Life was seen by many as a nascent metaverse, a term for virtual worlds coined by Neal Stephenson. Courtesy of Jin Zan CC-BY-SA-3.0 Sometime in the late 01980s or early 01990s, five-time Long Now Speaker Neal Stephenson needed a word to describe a world within the world of his novel
By: The Posts Author | Posted on: 28 Oct 21
A sign from the No Planet B global climate strike in September 02019. Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash The following essay was written by Lucienne Bacon and Lucas Kopinski, senior year students at Avenues: The World School. Bacon and Kopinski spent the previous school year engaging with Long Now ideas, such as the pace layers model, while they pursued an independent project reflecting on the importance and fallibility of metrics when it comes to balancing long-term environmental and societal health. The essay crystallizes their learnings and proposes a long-term index that combines social, environmental, present, and future considerations. Authors’
A sign from the No Planet B global climate strike in September 02019. Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash The following essay was written by Lucienne Bacon and Lucas Kopinski, senior year students at Avenues: The World School. Bacon and Kopinski spent the previous school year engaging with Long Now ideas, such as the pace layers model, while they pursued
By: The Posts Author | Posted on: 28 Oct 21
A sign from the No Planet B global climate strike in September 02019. Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash The following essay was written by Lucienne Bacon and Lucas Kopinski, senior year students at Avenues: The World School. Bacon and Kopinski spent the previous school year engaging with Long Now ideas, such as the pace layers model, while they pursued an independent project reflecting on the importance and fallibility of metrics when it comes to balancing long-term environmental and societal health. The essay crystallizes their learnings and proposes a long-term index that combines social, environmental, present, and future considerations. Authors’
A sign from the No Planet B global climate strike in September 02019. Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash The following essay was written by Lucienne Bacon and Lucas Kopinski, senior year students at Avenues: The World School. Bacon and Kopinski spent the previous school year engaging with Long Now ideas, such as the pace layers model, while they pursued
By: The Posts Author | Posted on: 22 Oct 21
The first book of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series was also published as The 1,000-Year Plan — an indication of the series’ focus on long-term thinking. Cover design by Ed Valigursky Courtesy of Alittleblackegg/Flickr Perusers of The Manual For Civilization, The Long Now Foundation’s library designed to sustain or rebuild civilization, are often surprised to find the category of Rigorous Science Fiction included alongside sections devoted to the Mechanics of Civilization, Long-term Thinking, and a Cultural Canon encompassing the most significant human literature. But these ventures into the imaginary tell us useful stories about potential futures. Science fiction has long had
The first book of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series was also published as The 1,000-Year Plan — an indication of the series’ focus on long-term thinking. Cover design by Ed Valigursky Courtesy of Alittleblackegg/Flickr Perusers of The Manual For Civilization, The Long Now Foundation’s library designed to sustain or rebuild civilization, are often surprised to find the category of Rigorous Science
By: The Posts Author | Posted on: 22 Oct 21
The first book of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series was also published as The 1,000-Year Plan — an indication of the series’ focus on long-term thinking. Cover design by Ed Valigursky Courtesy of Alittleblackegg/Flickr Perusers of The Manual For Civilization, The Long Now Foundation’s library designed to sustain or rebuild civilization, are often surprised to find the category of Rigorous Science Fiction included alongside sections devoted to the Mechanics of Civilization, Long-term Thinking, and a Cultural Canon encompassing the most significant human literature. But these ventures into the imaginary tell us useful stories about potential futures. Science fiction has long had
The first book of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series was also published as The 1,000-Year Plan — an indication of the series’ focus on long-term thinking. Cover design by Ed Valigursky Courtesy of Alittleblackegg/Flickr Perusers of The Manual For Civilization, The Long Now Foundation’s library designed to sustain or rebuild civilization, are often surprised to find the category of Rigorous Science
By: The Posts Author | Posted on: 30 Sep 21
Long Now’s Website, as reimagined by the Internet Archive’s Wayforward Machine For the past 25 years, the Internet Archive has embraced a bold vision of “Universal Access to All Knowledge.” Founded in 01996, its collection is in a class of its own: 28 million texts and books, 14 million audio recordings (including almost every Grateful Dead live show), over half a million software programs, and more. The Archive’s crown jewel, though, is its archive of the web itself: over 600 billion web pages saved, amounting to more than 70 petabytes (which is 70 * 10^15 bytes, for those unfamiliar with
Long Now’s Website, as reimagined by the Internet Archive’s Wayforward Machine For the past 25 years, the Internet Archive has embraced a bold vision of “Universal Access to All Knowledge.” Founded in 01996, its collection is in a class of its own: 28 million texts and books, 14 million audio recordings (including almost every Grateful Dead live show), over half
By: The Posts Author | Posted on: 30 Sep 21
Long Now’s Website, as reimagined by the Internet Archive’s Wayforward Machine For the past 25 years, the Internet Archive has embraced a bold vision of “Universal Access to All Knowledge.” Founded in 01996, its collection is in a class of its own: 28 million texts and books, 14 million audio recordings (including almost every Grateful Dead live show), over half a million software programs, and more. The Archive’s crown jewel, though, is its archive of the web itself: over 600 billion web pages saved, amounting to more than 70 petabytes (which is 70 * 10^15 bytes, for those unfamiliar with
Long Now’s Website, as reimagined by the Internet Archive’s Wayforward Machine For the past 25 years, the Internet Archive has embraced a bold vision of “Universal Access to All Knowledge.” Founded in 01996, its collection is in a class of its own: 28 million texts and books, 14 million audio recordings (including almost every Grateful Dead live show), over half
By: The Posts Author | Posted on: 23 Feb 21
The Long Now Foundation · Peter Leyden – The Transformation: A Future History of the World from 02020 to 02050 A compelling case can be made that we are in the early stages of another tech and economic boom in the next 30 years that will help solve our era’s biggest challenges like climate change, and lead to a societal transformation that will be understood as civilizational change by the year 02100. Peter Leyden has built the case for this extremely positive yet plausible scenario of the period from 02020 to 02050 as a sequel to the Wired cover story
The Long Now Foundation · Peter Leyden – The Transformation: A Future History of the World from 02020 to 02050 A compelling case can be made that we are in the early stages of another tech and economic boom in the next 30 years that will help solve our era’s biggest challenges like climate change, and lead to a societal
By: The Posts Author | Posted on: 23 Feb 21
The Long Now Foundation · Peter Leyden – The Transformation: A Future History of the World from 02020 to 02050 A compelling case can be made that we are in the early stages of another tech and economic boom in the next 30 years that will help solve our era’s biggest challenges like climate change, and lead to a societal transformation that will be understood as civilizational change by the year 02100. Peter Leyden has built the case for this extremely positive yet plausible scenario of the period from 02020 to 02050 as a sequel to the Wired cover story
The Long Now Foundation · Peter Leyden – The Transformation: A Future History of the World from 02020 to 02050 A compelling case can be made that we are in the early stages of another tech and economic boom in the next 30 years that will help solve our era’s biggest challenges like climate change, and lead to a societal
By: The Posts Author | Posted on: 15 Feb 21
Evan “Skytree” Snyder in his studio. Source: Facebook. Evan “Skytree” Snyder straddles two worlds: by day, he is a robotics engineer. By night, he produces electronic music that drops listeners into lush atmospheres evocative of both the ancient world and distant future. We had a chance to speak with Snyder about his 02020 album Infraplanetary and his recent experiments with piezoelectric musical synthesis. Both projects ratchet up themes of deep time, inviting listeners to meditate on singing rocks and post-historic correspondences. Our discussion has been edited for clarity and length. Let’s talk about the lyrics to “Atomic Priest” off Infraplanetary. An excerpt: “This is for the humans
Evan “Skytree” Snyder in his studio. Source: Facebook. Evan “Skytree” Snyder straddles two worlds: by day, he is a robotics engineer. By night, he produces electronic music that drops listeners into lush atmospheres evocative of both the ancient world and distant future. We had a chance to speak with Snyder about his 02020 album Infraplanetary and his recent experiments with piezoelectric musical synthesis. Both
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