Podcasts by Long Now: Seminars About Long-term Thinking

George Dyson: There's Plenty of Room at the Top: Long-term Thinking About Large-scale Computing from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.884843

George Dyson is ringing a change on the famous 1959 lecture by physicist Richard Feynman that showed the way to nanotechnology. It was called, "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom."

Daniel Janzen: Third World Conservation: It's ALL Gardening from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.882274

Jill Tarter: The Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence: Necessarily a Long-term Strategy from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.879920

Ken Dychtwald: The Consequences of Human Life Extension from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.875689

"The Consequences of Human Life Extension" will be discussed by Ken Dychtwald at the next Seminar About Long-term Thinking. Dychtwald is the author of Age Wave and Age Power: How the 21st Century ...

Stewart Brand: Cities & Time from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.872309

Esther Dyson, Freeman Dyson, George Dyson: The Difficulty of Looking Far Ahead from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.868105

"The Difficulty of Looking Far Ahead" is Freeman Dyson's subject at the next Seminar About Long-term Thinking. He will be joined for the first time on a public stage by his daughter Esther Dyson a...

Sam Harris: The View from the End of the World from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.866137

In his new book The End of Faith philosopher Sam Harris examines religious faith in terms of its consequences and aggressive irrationality. For this talk he explores how "end time" beliefs play ou...

Larry Brilliant, Katherine Fulton, Richard Rockefeller: The Deeper News About the New Philanthropy from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.857698

New money, new ideas, whole new kinds of programs, and growing global impact characterize the transformations going on in philanthropy these days. Katherine Fulton, president of the Monitor Institu...

Brian Fagan: We Are Not the First to Suffer Through Climate Change from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.853907

How vulnerable are we to climate change? What does it do to us, exactly? Human experience over the last 15,000 years shows that even slight climate shifts have been one of the major shapers of hi...

Paul Hawken: The New Great Transformation from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.851147

"I now believe there are over one million organizations working toward ecological sustainability and social justice. This is the largest social movement in all of history, no one knows its scope, a...

Rosabeth Moss Kanter: Enduring Principles for Changing Times from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.786008

Principles are fundamental and moral, and they abide. Professor Kanter from the Harvard Business School, author of renowned leadership and strategy books such as The Change Masters and When Giants...

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The Future Has Always Been Crazier Than We Thought from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.783631

Skeptical empiricist Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, has bracing things to say about the future. It is inevitable that we will be massively blindsided ...

Daniel Suarez: Daemon: Bot-mediated Reality from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.777963

The viral success story of the year is a techno-thriller called Daemon. Software developer Suarez printed the book himself after being turned down by mainstream publishers. Blog raves, Amazon rav...

Neal Stephenson: ANATHEM Book Launch Event from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.777141

At an event hosted by the Long Now Foundation, science fiction author Neal Stephenson reads from his latest novel Anathem.

Huey Johnson: Green Planning at Nation Scale from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.775473

"You cannot manage elements of the environment individually, one by one, or all your best efforts will unravel," says Johnson.  Gove...

Gavin Newsom: Cities and Time from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.769840

More than any other political entity, cities learn from each other. San Francisco's youthful mayor has traveled the world examining what works best in other cities. Now in his sixth year on the job...

Michael Pollan: Deep Agriculture from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.769024

Michael Pollan describes his program to transform American agriculture as a "sun food agenda." He is the author of two influential books---In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto; and The Omnivore...

Stewart Brand: Rethinking Green from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.764516

This talk launches Brand's new book: Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto.  His argument is that taking account of the emerging global forces of climate change, urbanization, and...

Rick Prelinger: Lost Landscapes of San Francisco 4 from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.762545

Rick Prelinger, a guerrilla archivist who collects the uncollected and makes it accessible, presents the fourth of his annual Lost Landscapes of San Francisco screenings. You'll see an eclectic mon...

Stewart Brand, Brian Eno, Alexander Rose: Long Finance: The Enduring Value Conference from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.760876

Long Finance aims to “improve society’s understanding and use of finance over the long-term”, in contrast to the short-termism that defines today’s financial and economic vi...

Beth Noveck: Transparent Government from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.758928

President Obama's first executive action was the Open Government Memorandum calling for more transparent, participatory, and collaborative government. It is likely that one of the longest lasting ...

David Eagleman: Six Easy Steps to Avert the Collapse of Civilization from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.758001

David Eagleman may be the best combination of scientist and fiction-writer alive. Sum, his collection of afterlife alternatives, made a stunning literary debut last year and now appears in 21 lang...

Nils Gilman: Deviant Globalization from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.757207

Hidden and powerful and growing worldwide at twice the rate of the legal economy, "deviant globalization" is described by Nils Gilman as "human trafficking, drug dealing, gun running, cross-border ...

Martin Rees: Life's Future in the Cosmos from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.738311

President of the Royal Society, England's Astronomer Royal, Lord Martin Rees brings a lifetime of cosmological inquiry to a crucial question: What if human success on Earth determines life's succes...

Mary Catherine Bateson: Live Longer, Think Longer from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.674478

We're not just living longer, we're thriving longer, but so far we seem to be thinking shorter. Aging societies the world over can benefit from increased longevity because human lives have added a...

Alexander Rose: Millennial Precedent from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.672914

Alexander Rose, Long Now Executive Director and project manager for the Clock of the Long Now, discussed lessons learned in multi-millennial site design.

Tim Flannery: Here on Earth from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.671263

Humans now engage the Earth at Gaian scale. How did Earth and humans get to this state? Given how we got here, how should we proceed? Tim Flannery finds that the evolutionary perspective of Alfr...

Carl Zimmer: Viral Time from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.670230

The frontier of biology these days is the genetics and ecology of bacteria, and the frontier of THAT is what's being learned about viruses. "The science of virology is still in its early, wild day...

Rick Prelinger: Lost Landscapes of San Francisco, 6 from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.665281

Rick Prelinger, a guerrilla archivist who collects the uncollected and makes it accessible, presents the 6th of his annual Lost Landscapes of San Francisco screenings. You'll see an eclectic montag...

Mark Lynas: The Nine Planetary Boundaries: Finessing the Anthropocene from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.662615

Human activities increasingly dominate 9 crucial planetary systems. Add to the familiar ones---climate, biodiversity, and chemical pollution---atmospheric aerosols, ocean acidification, excess nit...

Benjamin Barber: If Mayors Ruled the World from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.659488

Democracy began in cities and works best in cities.  Mayors are the most pragmatic and effective of all political leaders because they have to get things done.   “The paramount aims of city-dweller...

Tim O'Reilly: Birth of the Global Mind from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.656816

“The history of civilization is a story of evolution in our ability to build complex ‘multicellular minds,‘" says Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media (books, conferences, foo camps, Mak...

Steven Pinker: The Decline of Violence from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.656010

Steven Pinker changes the world twice in his new book, THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE: Why Violence Has Declined.

First, he presents exhaustive evidence that the tragic view of history i...

Anne Neuberger: Inside the NSA from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.636722

The NSA’s failures are public headlines. Its successes are secret.

These days America’s National Security Agency lives at the intersection of two paranoias—governmental fears of attack ...

Neil Gaiman: How Stories Last from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.585858

Neil's talk will explore the way stories, myths and tales survive over great lengths of time and why creating for the future means making works that will endure within the oral tradition.

...

James Fallows: Civilization's Infrastructure from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.582454

Infrastructure decisions—and failures to decide—affect everything about a society for centuries. That long shadow, James Fallows points out, is what makes the decisions so difficult, because "We m...

Stephen Pyne: Fire Slow, Fire Fast, Fire Deep from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.580153

Once humans took charge of fire, fire remade humans and commenced remaking the world. “We got small guts and big heads because we could cook food,” says Stephen Pyne, the world’s leading historian...

Walter Mischel: The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.577552

Can you pass the marshmallow test? You’re a little kid. A marshmallow is placed on the table in front of you. You’re told you can eat it any time, but if you wait a little while, you’ll be given...

Seth Lloyd: Quantum Computer Reality from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.574841

Quantum computing is widely considered to be:

The most potentially transformative technology of this century;
Nothing but hope and hype.


A reliable reporter who is famili...

David Eagleman: The Brain and The Now from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.573243

David Eagleman gives the keynote talk on "The Brain and The Now" at the Long Now Member Summit and is joined onstage after his talk by Stewart Brand and Danny Hillis for further discussion and Q&A....

Douglas Coupland: The Extreme Present from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.572443

Douglas Coupland has done so much more than name a generation (“Generation X”—post-Boomer, pre-Millennial, from his novel of that name). He is a prolific writer (22 books, including nonfiction suc...

Steven Johnson: Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.571589

“You will find the future wherever people are having the most fun,” Johnson argues. He chronicles how, throughout history, world-transforming innovation emerges from the endless quest for novelty ...

Jennifer Pahlka: Fixing Government: Bottom Up and Outside In from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.570391

Code for America was founded in 02009 by Jennifer Pahlka “to make government work better for the people and by the people in the 21st century.”

The organization started a movement to mod...

Stewart Brand, Paul Saffo: Pace Layers Thinking from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.566834

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 (01999). More than fifteen years ...

Andy Weir: The Red Planet for Real from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.565893

Before Andy Weir's self-published novel The Martian became a New York Times bestseller and a blockbuster film, it began as a series of blog posts. Those posts, and the online conversation they spar...

Michael Frachetti: Open Source Civilization and the Unexpected Origins of the Silk Road from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.558114

Travel the ancient Silk Road with an archaeologist researching a revolutionary idea.

Nomadic pastoralists, far from being irrelevant outliers, may have helped shape civilizations at contin...

George P. Shultz: Perspective from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.549884

Perspective? No one has a longer or better-informed view of world affairs and America's role than George Shultz, now 97. (Henry Kissinger is only 95.)

Secretary Shultz was a US Marine Cap...

Mary Lou Jepsen: Toward Practical Telepathy from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.531156

With her stunning breakthroughs in neural imaging, Mary Lou Jepsen is making the brain readable (and stimulatable) in real time. That will revolutionize brain study and brain medicine, but what abo...

Jeff Goodell: The Water Will Come from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.474773

The ocean is not just filling up, it’s swelling up. Half of sea-level rise comes just from the warming of the water. No matter what humans do next, we are now doomed to deal with drastically high...

Andrew McAfee: More From Less from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.468555

Andrew McAfee draws on a wide range of evidence to show that the world is already on the right track toward long-term health when it combines 1) technological progress, 2) capitalism, 3) responsive...

Eric Ries: Long-Term Stock Exchange from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.454586

Companies that operate with a long-term mindset tend to outperform their peers over time. But the pressure to achieve short-term quarterly gains often works against longer-term sustainable growth, ...

Peter Calthorpe: Urban Planet: Ecology, Community, and Growth Through the Next Century from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.435562

Throughout Peter Calthorpe's decade-spanning career in urban design, planning, and architecture, he has developed and practiced the key principles of New Urbanism: that the most successful places a...

Julia Watson: Design by Radical Indigenism from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.432762

Responding to climate change by building hard infrastructures and favoring high-tech homogenous design, we are ignoring millennia-old knowledge of how to live in symbiosis with nature. Without impl...

Nadia Eghbal: The Making and Maintenance of our Open Source Infrastructure from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.430846

Nadia Eghbal is particularly interested in infrastructure, governance, and the economics of the internet - and how the dynamics of these subjects play out in software, online communities and genera...

Jason Tester: Queering the Future: How LGBTQ Foresight Can Benefit All from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.376271

Jason Tester asks us to see the powerful potential of "queering the future" - how looking at the future through a lens of difference and openness can reveal unexpected solutions to wicked problems,...

Geoff Manaugh, Nicola Twilley: Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine from 2022-02-21T05:02:04.338058

Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley track the history and future of quarantine around the globe, chasing the story of emergency isolation through time and space—from the crumbling lazarettos of the Me...

Neal Stephenson: Termination Shock from 2022-02-17T14:03:41

Long Now Talks are in-person or via our livestream; get tickets for the in-person talk in San Francisco or RSVP for the free livestream.
Watch & share this talk on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter an...

David Rooney: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks from 2021-12-23T00:00:11

How has time been imagined, politicized, and weaponized over the centuries—and how it might bring peace?

Horologist David Rooney tells the hidden story of timekeeping and how it continues ...

Alexander Rose: Continuity: Discovering the Lessons behind the World’s Longest-lived Organizations from 2021-09-23T10:28:02

One of Long Now’s founding premises is that humanity’s most significant challenges require long-term solutions, including institutions that caretake and guide the knowledge and commitment needed to...

Nathaniel Rich, Ryan Phelan, Ben Novak: Second Nature: Green Rabbits, Passenger Pigeons, Cloned Ferrets, and the Birth of a New Ecology from 2021-08-20T00:13:24

Reporter and writer Nathaniel Rich delves deep into conversation with Revive & Restore's Ryan Phelan and Ben Novak to discuss his newest book Second Nature: Scenes from a World Remade,which attempt...

Peter Leyden: The Transformation: A Future History of the World from 02020 to 02050 from 2021-02-22T21:49:36

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 ...

James Nestor: The Future of Breathing from 2020-12-22T16:23:28

Drawing on thousands of years of medical texts and recent cutting-edge studies in pulmonology, psychology, biochemistry, and human physiology, journalist James Nestor questions the conventional wis...

Roman Krznaric: Becoming a Better Ancestor from 2020-11-18T16:02:54

Human beings have an astonishing evolutionary gift: agile imaginations that can shift in an instant from thinking on a scale of seconds to a scale of years or even centuries. The need to draw on ou...

Genevieve Bell: The 4th Industrial Revolution: Responsible & Secure AI from 2020-08-28T11:27:26

"I have always felt I have an obligation to build the future I want to see.

We know that AI-powered cyber-physical systems (CPS) will scale in society. The challenge we face now is how we ...

Craig Childs: Tracking the First People into Ice Age North America from 2020-08-17T13:39:22

Craig Childs chronicles the last millennia of the Ice Age, the violent oscillations and retreat of glaciers, the clues and traces that document the first encounters of early humans, and the animals...

Lonny J Avi Brooks: When is Wakanda: Imagining Afrofutures from 2020-07-27T12:37:55

"As a forecaster and Afrofuturist who imagines alternative futures from a Black Diaspora perspective, I think about long-term signals that will shape the next 10 to 100 years." ---Dr. Lo...

Brian Fisher: Edible Insects: Where Land Conservation and Protein Meet from 2020-07-15T16:24:55

At the intersection of climate change, biodiversity loss, and food scarcity lies an unexpected and abundant resource: insects. Brian Fisher has spent three decades documenting biodiversity in Madag...

Laurance Doyle: Interspecies Communication and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence from 2020-06-22T21:50:25

Dr. Laurance Doyle is an astrophysicist and principal investigator at SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) with expertise in diverse subjects including extrasolar planets, signal process...

Rick Doblin: Transformational Psychedelics from 2020-06-11T15:40:39

Humans have consumed psychedelics for at least the last 10,000 years. The outlawing of psychedelics in most of the world in the 20th century didn’t stop that, but it did put an end to promising res...

Bina Venkataraman: Long-Term Thinking in a Distracted World from 2020-01-29T11:54:26

What does practical long-term thinking look like? Bina Venkataraman’s new book, The Optimist's Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age, brings this abstract question to life. Through a series o...

Suhanya Raffel: World Art Through The Asian Perspective from 2019-10-21T12:12:16

Coming to the fore in this century is Asian perspective on everything. A thrilling place to watch the shift is in art.

Extraordinary contemporary art from all over the world, especially ...

Monica L. Smith: Cities: The First 6,000 Years from 2019-08-23T10:14:12

“Cities were the first Internet,” says archaeologist Monica Smith, because they were the first permanent places where strangers met in large numbers for entertainment, commerce, and romance. And th...

Marcia Bjornerud: Timefulness from 2019-08-14T14:07:06

We need a poly-temporal worldview to embrace the overlapping rates of change that our world runs on, especially the huge, powerful changes that are mostly invisible to us.
Geologist Marcia Bjor...

Mariana Mazzucato: Rethinking Value from 2019-07-12T12:15:37

What happens when we confuse price with value? We end up undervaluing care. We pollute more. And the financial sector is allowed to brag about how productive it is—while often just moving around ex...

David Byrne: Good News & Sleeping Beauties from 2019-06-21T12:21:51

David Byrne has become a scholar and promoter of new good ideas that work in the world.

He finds them in health, education, culture, economics, climate, science & technology, transportat...

Ian McEwan: Machines Like Me from 2019-05-16T22:29:33

In his new novel, Machines Like Me, Ian McEwan uses science fiction and counter-factual history to speculate about the coming of artificial intelligence and its effect on human relations. The open...

Chip Conley: The Modern Elder and the Intergenerational Workplace from 2019-03-20T14:59:26

What can fifty-somethings bring of value to companies that are mostly twenty-somethings, and vice versa? A needed blending of depth with currency.

Chip Conley, a long-time hotelier (Joie...

John Brockman: Possible Minds from 2019-03-13T09:00:29

John Brockman's newly released book Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI is the springboard for this Seminar on Artificial Intelligence. Brockman will interview several of the contrib...

Martin Rees: Prospects for Humanity from 2019-01-22T12:36:36

To think usefully about humanity’s future, you have to bear everything in mind simultaneously. Nobody has managed that better than Martin Rees in his succinct summing-up book: ON THE FUTURE: Prosp...

Stewart Brand: Whole Earth Catalog 50th Anniversary Celebration from 2018-12-14T15:11:50

50 years ago, Stewart Brand launched the Whole Earth Catalog?—?one of the cornerstones of the American counterculture.

The evening program of The Whole Earth Catalog 50th Anniversary Celeb...

Niall Ferguson: Networks and Power from 2018-12-12T17:30:58

“This time is different.”

Historians: “Ha.”

“The Net is net beneficial.”

Historian Niall Ferguson: “Globalization is in crisis. Populism is on the march. Authoritarian ...

Julia Galef: Soldiers and Scouts: Why our minds weren't built for truth, and how we can change that from 2018-09-19T16:28:57

An expert on rationality, judgement, and strategy, Julia Galef notes that "our capacity for reason evolved to serve two very different purposes that are often at odds with each other. On the one h...

Juan Benet: Long Term Info-structure from 2018-08-15T16:10:18

"We live in a spectacular time,” says Juan Benet. "We're a century into our computing phase transition. The latest stages have created astonishing powers for individuals, groups, and our species as...

Chris D. Thomas: Are We Initiating The Great Anthropocene Speciation Event? from 2018-06-26T15:05:14

The bad news (not news to most): Many wild species are under severe duress.

The good news (total news to most): “Nature is thriving in an age of extinction.”

Ecologist and evoluti...

Benjamin Grant: Overview: Earth and Civilization in the Macroscope from 2018-05-30T10:24:17

Civilization is both astonishing and astonishingly various when viewed from slightly above. Not so far above as to be lost in planetary context, but just high enough to see a fascinating thing whol...

Kishore Mahbubani: Has the West Lost It? Can Asia Save It? from 2018-04-30T22:17:55

In Kishore Mahbubani’s view, global power is shifting from the West to the Rest—from Europe and North America to Asia and Africa. He argues that changes will be required both in the West and the Re...

Steven Pinker: A New Enlightenment from 2018-03-19T18:03:32

The Enlightenment worked, says Steven Pinker. By promoting reason, science, humanism, progress, and peace, the programs set in motion by the 18th-Century intellectual movement became so successful...

Charles C. Mann: The Wizard and the Prophet from 2018-01-29T15:47:38

Civilization’s health hangs on how we manage food, water, energy, and climate. Two conflicting visions dominate how we think about them. Each vision had an original creator and exemplar—the “prop...

Elena Bennett: Seeds of a Good Anthropocene from 2017-12-29T14:11:36

As humans increasingly dominate Earth’s natural systems over the coming centuries (“the Anthropocene”), how can we ensure that it becomes a “good Anthopocene”—a world in which nature and humanity p...

Renee Wegrzyn: Engineering Gene Safety from 2017-11-20T14:55:42

Genome editing technologies provide the unprecedented ability to modify genetic material in a manner that is targeted, rapid, adaptable, and broadly accessible. Advances in genome editing form the ...

David Grinspoon: Earth in Human Hands from 2017-09-19T19:10:25

For thinking about the future of life on Earth in planetary terms, no one can match the perspective of an astrobiologist.

David Grinspoon notes two major shifts in Earth’s biological regim...

Nicky Case: Seeing Whole Systems from 2017-08-17T14:32:43

Nicky Case’s presentations are as ingenious, compelling, and graphically rich as the visualizing tools and games Nicky creates for understanding complex dynamic systems.

Case writes: “We n...

Carolyn Porco: Searching for Life in the Solar System from 2017-08-10T16:43:48

Where will unambiguous signs of life most likely be found outside Earth? While telescopes squint at impossibly distant (but numerous) exoplanets, increasing numbers of increasingly brilliant robot...

James Gleick: Time Travel from 2017-06-26T15:32:20

The problem of the unknowable future is matched by the problem of the unchangeable past. Both are solved by the dream of time travel. The peculiarities and paradoxes of time travel are explored i...

Geoffrey B. West: The Universal Laws of Growth and Pace from 2017-05-23T19:30

The scope of Geoffrey West’s talk is covered by the full title of his new book: Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies...

Frank Ostaseski: What the Dying Teach the Living from 2017-04-10T19:30

It’s a lot more than “Seize the day.” We learn from the dying to push away nothing; to lose the habit of postponing things; to show up entirely; to find rest amid whatever; to go ahead and be surp...

Bjorn Lomborg: From Feel-Good to High-Yield Good: How to Improve Philanthropy and Aid from 2017-03-13T19:30

Bjorn Lomborg does cost/benefit analysis on global good. There are surprises when you examine what are the highest-yield targets in the domains of health, poverty, education, reduced violence, gend...

Jonathan Rose: The Well Tempered City from 2016-09-20T19:30

Cities and urban regions can make coherent sense, can metabolize efficiently, can use their very complexity to solve problems, and can become so resilient they “bounce forward” when stressed.
...

Kevin Kelly: The Next 30 Digital Years from 2016-07-14T19:30

Since the mid-01980s Kevin Kelly has been creating, and reporting on, the digital future. His focus is the long-term trends and social consequences of technology. Kelly’s new book, THE INEVITABLE: ...

Brian Christian: Algorithms to Live By from 2016-06-20T19:30

It is possible to be extremely astute about how we manage difficult decisions. With just a few mental tools we get the benefit of better outcomes along with release from agonizing about the proces...

Priyamvada Natarajan: Solving Dark Matter and Dark Energy from 2016-04-11T19:30

No one thinks longer, or bigger, than astrophysicists.

“This is the golden age of cosmology,” says Priya Natarajan, one of the world’s leading astrophysicists, because data keeps pouring i...

Jane Langdale: Radical Ag: C4 Rice and Beyond from 2016-03-14T19:30

Three billion people—nearly half of us--depend on rice for survival. What if you could adjust rice genetically so 1) it has a 50% greater yield, 2) using half the water, 3) needing far less fertil...

Eric Cline: 1177 B.C.: When Civilization Collapsed from 2016-01-11T19:30

Consider this, optimists. All the societies in the world can collapse simultaneously. It has happened before.

In the 12th century BCE the great Bronze Age civilizations of the Mediterran...

Philip Tetlock: Superforecasting from 2015-11-23T19:30

The pundits we all listen to are no better at predictions than a “dart-throwing chimp,” and they are routinely surpassed by normal news-attentive citizens. So Philip Tetlock reported in his 02005 ...

Saul Griffith: Infrastructure and Climate Change from 2015-09-21T19:30

So far we are trying to deal with climate change at the wrong time scale. A really deep problem cannot be solved by shallow innovations, no matter how clever. The scale of climate change requires...

Sara Seager: Other Earths. Other Life. from 2015-08-10T19:30

We are one tool away from learning which distant planets already have life on them and which might be
welcoming to life.

MIT Planetary Scientist Sara Seager is working on the tool. S...

Ramez Naam: Enhancing Humans, Advancing Humanity from 2015-07-22T19:30

Techno thriller meets realistic optimism. Ramez Naam, a former Microsoft executive with 19 patents to his name, wrote a riveting just-completed science fiction trilogy (Nexus, Crux, and Apex) that...

Beth Shapiro: How to Clone a Mammoth from 2015-05-11T19:30

Beth Shapiro is far from a giddy enthusiast about de-extinction. She knows more than nearly anyone about the subject because she is a highly regarded biologist in the middle of the two leading eff...

Michael Shermer: The Long Arc of Moral Progress from 2015-04-14T19:30

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."
<...

Paul Saffo: The Creator Economy from 2015-03-31T19:30

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 prol...

David Keith: Patient Geoengineering from 2015-02-17T19:30

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 w...

Jesse Ausubel: Nature is Rebounding: Land- and Ocean-sparing through Concentrating Human Activities from 2015-01-13T19:30

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, fa...

Kevin Kelly: Technium Unbound from 2014-11-12T19:30

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 phone...

Larry Harvey: Why The Man Keeps Burning from 2014-10-20T19:30

“Scaling up will kill Burning Man.” “That new rule will kill Burning Man.” “The Bureau of Land Management will kill Burning Man.” “Selling tickets that way will kill Burning Man.” “Board infigh...

Drew Endy: The iGEM Revolution from 2014-09-16T19:30

iGEM stands for the “International Genetically Engineered Machines” competition.

Thousands of student bioengineers from all over the world construct new life forms and race them every year...

Adrian Hon: A History of the Future in 100 Objects from 2014-07-16T19:30

Thinking about the future is so hard and so important that any trick to get some traction is a boon. Adrian Hon’s trick is to particularize. What thing would manifest a whole future trend the way...

Stefan Kroepelin: Civilization’s Mysterious Desert Cradle: Rediscovering the Deep Sahara from 2014-06-10T19:30

Egypt’s pharaonic civilization rose on the Nile, but it was rooted in the deep Saharan desert and pushed by climate change, says Stefan Kröpelin.

Described in Nature magazine as “one of th...

Sylvia Earle, Tierney Thys: Oceanic from 2014-05-20T19:30

Land animals on an ocean planet, we have a lot to learn about how the world works. The microbes of the sea are Earth’s dominant life form. Ocean currents and temperatures drive climate and weathe...

Tony Hsieh: Helping Revitalize a City from 2014-04-22T19:30

Can a successful company and a run-down downtown vitalize each other?

Tony Hsieh, CEO of the phenomenally successful Zappos, is betting exactly that in Las Vegas. He moved his company hea...

Mariana Mazzucato: The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Private vs. Public Sector Myths from 2014-03-24T19:30

Where do the boldest innovations, with the deepest consequences for society, come from?

Many business leaders, entrepreneurs, and libertarians claim that the private sector leads the way ...

Brian Eno, Danny Hillis: The Long Now, now from 2014-01-21T19:30

Brian Eno delivered the first SALT talk exactly ten years ago. He gave The Long Now Foundation its name, contributed in no end of artistic and financial ways, and designed the chimes for the 10,00...

Richard Kurin: American History in 101 Objects from 2013-11-18T19:30

Relics grip us. They anchor stories that matter by giving a visceral sense that they really happened. Look, here is the actual chain used on an American slave. What ended its use? Abraham Linco...

Adam Steltzner: Beyond Mars, Earth from 2013-10-15T19:30

“Dare mighty things” concludes the most dramatic space video in years, "Seven Minutes of Terror." Narrated by Adam Steltzner, it spelled out how the “sky crane” his team designed at JPL would have...

Peter Schwartz: The Starships ARE Coming from 2013-09-17T19:30

There is an appalling distance between here and the countless planets we’re discovering around stars other than our Sun. At first glance we can never span those light years. At second glance howe...

Daniel Kahneman: Thinking Fast and Slow from 2013-08-13T19:30

Daniel Kahneman is the world’s most influential psychologist because he has, based on empirical research, figured out how we can notice when we are not thinking rationally. That knowledge gives us...

Craig Childs: Apocalyptic Planet: Field Guide to the Everending Earth from 2013-07-29T19:30

Our planet gets up to no end of apocalyptic-like tricks over time---periods when it is nearly all ice, all melting ice, all desert, all sea water, all molten lava, and civilizations come and go, so...

Ed Lu: Anthropocene Astronomy: Thwarting Dangerous Asteroids Begins with Finding Them from 2013-06-18T19:30

Are humans smarter than dinosaurs? We haven’t proved it yet.

In the long now, the greatest threat to life on Earth, or (more frequently) to civilization, or (still more frequently) to cit...

Stewart Brand: Reviving Extinct Species from 2013-05-21T19:30

Death is still forever, but extinction may not be---at least for creatures that humans drove extinct in the last 10,000 years. Woolly mammoths might once again nurture their young in northern snow...

Nicholas Negroponte: Beyond Digital from 2013-04-17T19:30

It’s far easier to predict the future when you are helping make and distribute it. Nicholas Negroponte exemplifies this with his notable accomplishments, including co-founding the MIT Media Lab, be...

George Dyson: No Time Is There--- The Digital Universe and Why Things Appear To Be Speeding Up from 2013-03-19T19:30

When thinking about the future, it is easy to forget to look behind you. Enter George Dyson, “a historian among futurists”, who does deep research into the history of computing to understand the tr...

Chris Anderson: The Makers Revolution from 2013-02-19T19:30

Chris Anderson’s book THE LONG TAIL chronicled how the Web revolutionized and democratized distribution. His new book MAKERS shows how the same thing is happening to manufacturing, with even wider...

Terry Hunt, Carl Lipo: The Statues Walked -- What Really Happened on Easter Island from 2013-01-17T19:30

Was it ecocide? The collapse of the mini-civilization on Easter Island (Rapa Nui) has long been considered one of the great Green morality tales. Once the people there cut down the last tree, sto...

Peter Warshall: Enchanted by the Sun: The CoEvolution of Light, Life, and Color on Earth from 2012-11-28T19:30

For 3.8 billion years, life has lived in a bath of solar radiance. The Sun’s illumination outlines which objects are appealing, bland, or repellant. Its powers of desiccation, blistering, bleaching...

Lazar Kunstmann, Jon Lackman: Preservation without Permission: the Paris Urban eXperiment from 2012-11-13T19:30

There is at least as much underneath Paris as there is above it. The secretive members of the Paris Urban eXperiment, known internally as "The UX", have spent the last 30 years surreptitiously pro...

Elaine Pagels: The Truth About the Book of Revelations from 2012-08-20T19:30

Revelations about the Book of Revelation

Probably the most consequential vision of the future ever written is the Bible’s Book of Revelation. If God didn’t write it (through the sainted i...

Cory Doctorow: The Coming Century of War Against Your Computer from 2012-07-31T19:30

The war against computer freedom will just keep escalating, Doctorow contends. The copyright wars, net neutrality, and SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) were early samples of what is to come. Victori...

Susan Freinkel: Eternal Plastic: A Toxic Love Story from 2012-05-22T19:30

Plastic now pervades civilization---how many of the things you see from where you are right now are plastic? It is an ingenious material whose miraculous qualities we take too much for granted, bu...

Charles C. Mann: Living in the Homogenocene: The First 500 Years from 2012-04-23T19:30

Ever since Columbus, it’s an alien invasive world. Everybody’s germs, insects, vegetables, staple foods, rats, domestic animals, and even wildlife went everywhere, changing everything. That convu...

Edward O. Wilson: The Social Conquest of Earth from 2012-04-20T19:30

Seminar and Conversation with Edward O. Wilson and Stewart Brand, with an introduction by Rob Semper, Executive Associate Director of the Exploratorium.
Presented by The Long Now Foundation and...

Jim Richardson: Heirlooms: Saving Humanity's 10,000-year Legacy of Food from 2012-02-22T19:30

Agricultural biodiversity is as much in need of defending as the world's wildlife. Countless varieties of plants and animals were bred by the world's peoples for talents specific to every soil, cl...

Lawrence Lessig: How Money Corrupts Congress and a Plan to Stop It from 2012-01-17T19:30

A dazzlingly incisive presenter, Lawrence Lessig specializes in identifying deep systemic problems in public process (such as copyright malfunction and Congressional dysfunction) and then showing h...

Brewster Kahle: Universal Access to All Knowledge from 2011-11-30T19:30

As founder and librarian of the storied Internet Archive (deemed impossible by all when he started it in 1996), Brewster Kahle has practical experience behind his universalist vision of access to e...

Laura Cunningham: Ten Millennia of California Ecology from 2011-10-17T19:30

Ecologically, the past is always present if you know where and how to look. Paleontologist-biologist-artist Laura Cunningham spent 20 years exploring California's archives and relic lands to recon...

Timothy Ferriss: Accelerated Learning in Accelerated Times from 2011-09-14T19:30

As the times accelerate and we face ever more kaleidoscopic careers, a crucial meta-skill is the ability to learn new skills extremely rapidly, extremely well. That practice has no better exemplar...

Geoffrey B. West: Why Cities Keep on Growing, Corporations Always Die, and Life Gets Faster from 2011-07-25T19:30

As organisms, cities, and companies scale up, they all gain in efficiency, but then they vary. The bigger an organism, the slower. Yet the bigger a city is, the faster it runs. And cities are st...

Peter Kareiva: Conservation in the Real World from 2011-06-27T19:30

As chief scientist of one of the most highly respected conservation organizations, The Nature Conservancy, Peter Kareiva is surprisingly radical. "Look," he says, "we're in nature. The deal is ho...

Ian Morris: Why the West Rules - For Now from 2011-04-13T19:30

A Malaysian lawyer told a British journalist: "I am wearing your clothes, I speak your language, I watch your films, and today is whatever date it is because you say so."

Do chaps or maps ...

Matt Ridley: Deep Optimism from 2011-03-22T19:30

Via trade and other cultural activities, "ideas have sex," and that drives human history in the direction of inconstant but accumulative improvement over time. The criers of havoc keep being prove...

Philip K. Howard: Fixing Broken Government from 2011-01-18T19:30

Philip K. Howard is a conservative who inspires standing ovations from liberal audiences (short example here.) He says that governance in America---from the capitol to the classroom---has achieved...

Rick Prelinger: Lost Landscapes of San Francisco, 5 from 2010-12-16T19:30

Rick Prelinger, a guerrilla archivist who collects the uncollected and makes it accessible, presents the fifth of his annual Lost Landscapes of San Francisco screenings. You'll see an eclectic mon...

Rachel Sussman: The World's Oldest Living Organisms from 2010-11-15T19:30

While we may aspire to live a century, Rachel Sussman documents creatures who don’t bat an eye at a millennium or two. Her photography has captured 4,500 year old bristlecone pines, 12,000 y...

Lera Boroditsky: How Language Shapes Thought from 2010-10-26T19:30

Do the languages we speak shape the way we think? For example, how do we think about time? The word "time" is the most frequent noun in the English language. Time is ubiquitous yet ephemeral. It...

Stewart Brand, Jane McGonigal: Long Conversation 19 of 19 from 2010-10-16T20:44

Long Conversation, an epic relay of one-to-one conversations among some of the Bay Area's most interesting minds, took place over 6 hours in San Francisco on Saturday October 16, 02010. Interpret...

Jane McGonigal, Tiffany Shlain: Long Conversation 18 of 19 from 2010-10-16T20:25

Long Conversation, an epic relay of one-to-one conversations among some of the Bay Area's most interesting minds, took place over 6 hours in San Francisco on Saturday October 16, 02010. Interpret...

Paul Hawken, Tiffany Shlain: Long Conversation 17 of 19 from 2010-10-16T20:06

Long Conversation, an epic relay of one-to-one conversations among some of the Bay Area's most interesting minds, took place over 6 hours in San Francisco on Saturday October 16, 02010. Interpret...

Katherine Fulton, Paul Hawken: Long Conversation 16 of 19 from 2010-10-16T19:47

Long Conversation, an epic relay of one-to-one conversations among some of the Bay Area's most interesting minds, took place over 6 hours in San Francisco on Saturday October 16, 02010. Interpret...

Stuart Candy, Katherine Fulton: Long Conversation 15 of 19 from 2010-10-16T19:28

Long Conversation, an epic relay of one-to-one conversations among some of the Bay Area's most interesting minds, took place over 6 hours in San Francisco on Saturday October 16, 02010. Interpret...

Stuart Candy, Danese Cooper: Long Conversation 14 of 19 from 2010-10-16T19:09

Long Conversation, an epic relay of one-to-one conversations among some of the Bay Area's most interesting minds, took place over 6 hours in San Francisco on Saturday October 16, 02010. Interpret...

Danese Cooper, Peter Schwartz: Long Conversation 13 of 19 from 2010-10-16T18:50

Long Conversation, an epic relay of one-to-one conversations among some of the Bay Area's most interesting minds, took place over 6 hours in San Francisco on Saturday October 16, 02010. Interpret...

Peter Schwartz, Pete Worden: Long Conversation 12 of 19 from 2010-10-16T18:31

Long Conversation, an epic relay of one-to-one conversations among some of the Bay Area's most interesting minds, took place over 6 hours in San Francisco on Saturday October 16, 02010. Interpret...

Ken Foster, Pete Worden: Long Conversation 11 of 19 from 2010-10-16T18:12

Long Conversation, an epic relay of one-to-one conversations among some of the Bay Area's most interesting minds, took place over 6 hours in San Francisco on Saturday October 16, 02010. Interpret...

Melissa Alexander, Ken Foster: Long Conversation 10 of 19 from 2010-10-16T17:53

Long Conversation, an epic relay of one-to-one conversations among some of the Bay Area's most interesting minds, took place over 6 hours in San Francisco on Saturday October 16, 02010. Interpret...

Melissa Alexander, Ken Wilson: Long Conversation 9 of 19 from 2010-10-16T17:34

Long Conversation, an epic relay of one-to-one conversations among some of the Bay Area's most interesting minds, took place over 6 hours in San Francisco on Saturday October 16, 02010. Interpret...

John Perry Barlow, Ken Wilson: Long Conversation 8 of 19 from 2010-10-16T17:15

Long Conversation, an epic relay of one-to-one conversations among some of the Bay Area's most interesting minds, took place over 6 hours in San Francisco on Saturday October 16, 02010. Interpret...

John Perry Barlow, Violet Blue: Long Conversation 7 of 19 from 2010-10-16T16:57

Long Conversation, an epic relay of one-to-one conversations among some of the Bay Area's most interesting minds, took place over 6 hours in San Francisco on Saturday October 16, 02010. Interpret...

Violet Blue, Robin Sloan: Long Conversation 6 of 19 from 2010-10-16T16:38

Long Conversation, an epic relay of one-to-one conversations among some of the Bay Area's most interesting minds, took place over 6 hours in San Francisco on Saturday October 16, 02010. Interpret...

Robin Sloan, Jill Tarter: Long Conversation 5 of 19 from 2010-10-16T16:19

Long Conversation, an epic relay of one-to-one conversations among some of the Bay Area's most interesting minds, took place over 6 hours in San Francisco on Saturday October 16, 02010. Interpret...

Emily Levine, Jill Tarter: Long Conversation 4 of 19 from 2010-10-16T16:00

Long Conversation, an epic relay of one-to-one conversations among some of the Bay Area's most interesting minds, took place over 6 hours in San Francisco on Saturday October 16, 02010. Interpret...

Saul Griffith, Emily Levine: Long Conversation 3 of 19 from 2010-10-16T15:41

Long Conversation, an epic relay of one-to-one conversations among some of the Bay Area's most interesting minds, took place over 6 hours in San Francisco on Saturday October 16, 02010. Interpret...

Jem Finer, Saul Griffith: Long Conversation 2 of 19 from 2010-10-16T15:22

Long Conversation, an epic relay of one-to-one conversations among some of the Bay Area's most interesting minds, took place over 6 hours in San Francisco on Saturday October 16, 02010. Interpret...

Stewart Brand, Jem Finer: Long Conversation 1 of 19 from 2010-10-16T15:03

Long Conversation, an epic relay of one-to-one conversations among some of the Bay Area's most interesting minds, took place over 6 hours in San Francisco on Saturday October 16, 02010. Interpret...

Jesse Schell: Visions of the Gamepocalypse from 2010-07-27T19:30

Games perpetually revolutionize computer use toward denser interaction with the human mind. To do that, they perpetually revolutionize themselves. Understanding the next frontiers of the genre is...

Frank Gavin: Five Ways to Use History Well from 2010-07-12T19:30

Policy makers typically ignore or misuse history. They are attracted by simplistic theories and analogies and take little account of huge events outside their policy-making domain.
Scholarly h...

Ed Moses: Clean Fusion Power This Decade from 2010-06-16T19:30

Finally achieving fusion energy may be closer than everyone thinks. For decades the dream has been to employ the reaction that powers stars to generate high-volume electricity without the drawbacks...

Alan Weisman: World Without Us, World With Us from 2010-02-24T19:30

Journalist Weisman traveled the world to investigate what happens when humans stop occupying an area. How long do our artifacts last? How does nature recover? What does that say about the human ...

Wade Davis: The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World from 2010-01-13T19:30

Anthropologist Wade Davis is one of the world's great story tellers, with personal adventures to match. An Explorer-in-Residence at National Geographic, he specializes in hanging out with traditio...

Sander van der Leeuw: The Archaeology of Innovation from 2009-11-18T19:30

Are we the first civilization to try and innovate our way out of climate change? How have past societies engineered sustainable solutions to a shifting world?
Sander van der Leeuw, Director of ...

Arthur Ganson: Machines and the Breath of Time from 2009-09-14T19:30

Arthur Ganson uses humble materials to create kinetic sculptures of humor, drama, and emotion.  His work has been shown around the world, and has been an ongoing inspiration for the 10,000 Yea...

Wayne Clough: Smithsonian Forever from 2009-08-17T19:30

Wayne Clough is the 12th Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.  In July 1998 he took the reins of the world's largest museum and research complex and has since initiated long-range plannin...

Raoul Adamchak, Pamela Ronald: Organically Grown and Genetically Engineered: The Food of the Future from 2009-07-28T19:30

She's the head of a plant genetics lab at UC Davis; he teaches organic farming there. They're married (with kids), and they coauthored Tomorrow's Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future o...

Paul Romer: A Theory of History, with an Application from 2009-05-18T19:30

Paul Romer is best known as the lead developer of New Growth Theory, which shows how societies can speed up the discovery and implementation of new technologies; essentially, ideas about how object...

Daniel Everett: Endangered languages, lost knowledge and the future from 2009-03-20T19:30

The Pirahã, a remote Amazonian tribe with little outside contact, have attracted the attention of mainstream media, scientists, zen buddhists, professors of religion, mathematicians, philoso...

Dmitry Orlov: Social Collapse Best Practices from 2009-02-13T19:30

A close student and observer of the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe twenty years ago, engineer Dmitry Orlov finds a similar sequence of events taking shape in America. His savagely ...

Saul Griffith: Climate Change Recalculated from 2009-01-16T19:30

"It is not accurate to say we can still stop climate change," says Saul Griffith, the Bay Area inventor who received a MacArthur "genius" award in 2007.  "We are now working to stop worse clim...

Rick Prelinger: Lost Landscapes of San Francisco from 2008-12-19T19:30

Rick Prelinger is a guerrilla archivist who collects the uncollected and makes it accessible. Prelinger will be presenting his third annual "Lost Landscapes of San Francisco" event, an eclectic mon...

Drew Endy, Jim Thomas: Synthetic Biology Debate from 2008-11-17T19:30

Bioengineer Drew Endy is the leading enabler of open-source biotechnology. Technology historian Jim Thomas is the leading critic of biotech, based with ETC Group in Ottawa.
"Synthetic Biology i...

Peter Diamandis: Long-term X-Prizes from 2008-09-12T19:30

Prizes are proving themselves as powerful tools to accelerate goal-specific innovation. Diamandis, the founder and chairman of the X Prize Foundation, has built on the success of the $10 million An...

Edward Burtynsky: The 10,000-year Gallery from 2008-07-23T19:30

Burtynsky's massively informative photographs change minds and influence policy. They are also exquisite art. Their historical value will grow with time. Other art has similar reach. There shou...

Paul Ehrlich: The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment from 2008-06-27T19:30

Everything living evolves, but humans evolve culturally as well as biologically, and that puts us in a peculiar relation to the rest of life, with a peculiar responsibility. If we can understand h...

Iqbal Quadir: Technology Empowers the Poorest from 2008-05-21T19:30

Quadir is the now-legendary founder of GrameenPhone, which transformed his home country of Bangladesh in the 1990s and led the way for the cellphone revolution throughout the developing world. Cur...

Niall Ferguson, Peter Schwartz: Historian vs. Futurist on Human Progress from 2008-04-28T19:30

Distinguished historian Ferguson and renowned futurist Schwartz disagree profoundly on the nature of human progress. Both use scenarios (called "counterfactual history" by Ferguson) to analyze how...

Craig Venter: Joining 3.5 Billion Years of Microbial Invention from 2008-02-25T19:30

With his current series of breakthroughs in synthetic biology Craig Venter and his team are not so much creating life as joining life. Reverse-engineering evolution's long-refined tricks and subtle...

Paul Saffo: Embracing Uncertainty: the secret to effective forecasting from 2008-01-11T19:30

"Some would argue that forecasting is a dangerous exercise in futility, but they are mistaken. In fact, effective forecasting is not merely possible, but remarkably easy; all it takes is simple s...

Joline Blais, Jon Ippolito: At the Edge of Art from 2007-12-14T19:30

Art is humanity's long-term unconscious memory.  Artists work by creative misuse, and thanks to the Internet there have never been so many tools for so many artists (and multitudes who don't k...

Juan Enriquez: Mapping the Frontier of Knowledge from 2007-10-12T19:30

Enriquez has a world-class collection of historic maps made at the very point of discovery. He will deploy them for the first time in one of his dazzling presentations, to examine how we image and...

Rip Anderson, Gwyneth Cravens: Power to Save the World from 2007-09-14T19:30

The best introduction to the current realities and benefits of nuclear power is Gwyneth Cravens' forthcoming book Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy. A science journalist and ...

Alex Wright: Glut: Mastering Information Though the Ages from 2007-08-17T19:30

Francis Fukuyama: 'The End of History' Revisited from 2007-06-28T19:30

Frank Fukuyama's 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man had profound and lasting impact with its declaration that science and technology, the growing global economy, and liberal democracy ar...

Steven Johnson: The Long Zoom from 2007-05-11T19:30

Nobody discovers or imparts an insight with the dexterity of Steven Johnson, author of Emergence, Everything Bad Is Good For You, and The Ghost Map. In this talk he examines how humanity is transf...

Frans Lanting: Life's Journey Through Time from 2007-04-27T19:30

Acclaimed nature photographer Lanting has created the most graphic timeline ever, at its best as a live performance. This is the "long now" in glowing imagery.

Vernor Vinge: What If the Singularity Does NOT Happen? from 2007-02-15T19:30

Technology acceleration is like what happens approaching the singularity in the center of a black hole--- everything is transformed utterly and unpredictably. That metaphor was invented by science...

Philip Tetlock: Why Foxes Are Better Forecasters Than Hedgehogs from 2007-01-26T19:30

Why are so many experts so wrong, yet people keep listening to them? Who really is worth listening to about the future? The author of Expert Political Judgement builds on Isaah Berlin's character...

Philip Rosedale: 'Second Life:' What Do We Learn If We Digitize EVERYTHING? from 2006-11-30T19:30

Philip Rosedale is the founder of a burgeoning Web phenomenon, the massive multi-player substitute reality called "Second Life." When the scheduled speaker for this month, Francis Fukuyama, was s...

John Baez: Zooming Out in Time from 2006-10-13T19:30

This graphic extravaganza from mathematical physicist John Baez shows not only humanity's nested time dimensions but how we expand our time perspective to understand and solve crises. Baez's famed ...

Orville Schell: China Thinks Long-term, But Can It Relearn to Act Long-term? from 2006-09-22T19:30

Orville Schell is author of nine books about China and dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley. The question facing China now is whether in practice it can live up to its sense of ...

John Rendon: Long-term Policy to Make the War on Terror Short from 2006-07-14T19:30

John Rendon, head of The Rendon Group, is a senior communications consultant to the White House and Department of Defense. His subject in this talk is how to replace tactical, reactive response to...

Brian Eno, Will Wright: Playing with Time from 2006-06-26T19:30

Will Wright, creator of the video games "Sim City," "The Sims," and the forthcoming "Spore," will speak on playing with time.

Chris Anderson, Will Hearst: The Long Time Tail from 2006-05-12T19:30

A new economic principle is the "the long tail," discovered and named by the editor of Wired magazine, Chris Anderson. The former dominance of best-sellers has been augmented by the new dominance ...

Jimmy Wales: Vision: Wikipedia and the Future of Free Culture from 2006-04-14T19:30

Vision is one of the most powerful forms of long-term thinking. Jimmy Wales, founder and president of the all-embracing online encyclopedia Wikipedia, examines how vision drives and defines that pr...

Kevin Kelly: The Next 100 Years of Science: Long-term Trends in the Scientific Method. from 2006-03-10T19:30

Stephen Lansing: Perfect Order: A Thousand Years in Bali from 2006-02-13T19:30

Anthropologist/ecologist Stephen Lansing tells a gorgeous tale of how spiritual practices in Bali have finessed over 1,000 years the most nuanced and productive agricultural system in the world. C...

Ralph Cavanagh, Peter Schwartz: Nuclear Power, Climate Change and the Next 10,000 Years from 2006-01-13T19:30

In a very pointed discussion, two energy experts bring opposite perspectives to the question of whether global climate change justifies reviving nuclear power. Ralph Cavanagh is co-director of the...

Clay Shirky: Making Digital Durable: What Time Does to Categories from 2005-11-14T19:30

Clay Shirky is the most riveting of speakers at tech conferences, with his deep insight into social software and the culture and economics of networks. His talk for the next Seminar About Long-ter...

Ray Kurzweil: Kurzweil's Law from 2005-09-23T19:30

The next Seminar About Long-term Thinking features Ray Kurzweil, speaking on "Kurzweil's Law"--- the exponential trend of accelerating returns governing life and technology.

Robert Fuller: Patient Revolution: Human Rights Past and Future from 2005-08-12T19:30

From time to time a portion of humanity declares a new human right. Behavior thought normal for thousands of years is suddenly challenged.  What does it take for the new right to prevail? ...

Jared Diamond: How Societies Fail-And Sometimes Succeed from 2005-07-15T19:30

Robert Neuwirth: The 21st Century Medieval City from 2005-06-10T19:30

Spencer Beebe: Very Long-term Very Large-scale Biomimicry from 2005-03-11T19:30

Spencer Beebe, founder of Ecotrust, is giving the next Seminar About Long-term Thinking lecture, titled "Very Long-term Very Large-scale Biomimicry"---how to prosper with bio-regional economics ove...

Roger Kennedy: The Political History of North America from 25,000 BC to 12,000 AD from 2005-02-25T19:30

James Carse: Religious War In Light of the Infinite Game from 2005-01-14T19:30

"Religious War in Light of the Infinite Game" is the subject of the next Seminar About Long-term Thinking lecture, given by James P. Carse. Carse is the author of the celebrated tiny book, Finite ...

Michael West: The Prospects of Human Life Extension from 2004-11-12T19:30

"The Prospects of Human Life Extension" is the subject of the next Seminar About Long-term Thinking, Friday, Nov. 12, 7 pm, at the Fort Mason Conference Center in San Francisco. The speaker is Mic...

Paul Hawken: The Long Green from 2004-10-15T19:30

Paul Hawken, ur-environmentalist, is the next speaker in the series of Seminars About Long-term Thinking, Friday, October 15, 7 pm, at the Fort Mason Conference Center in San Francisco. His subjec...

Danny Hillis: Progress on the 10,000-year Clock from 2004-09-10T19:30

Danny Hillis is the next speaker in the Seminars About Long-term Thinking series, Friday, September 10, 7pm, at the Fort Mason Conference Center in San Francisco. His topic is "Progress on the 10,...

Phillip Longman: The Depopulation Problem from 2004-08-13T19:30

Bruce Sterling: The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole from 2004-06-11T19:30

David Rumsey: Mapping Time from 2004-05-14T19:30

Rusty Schweickart: The Asteroid Threat Over the Next 100,000 Years from 2004-03-12T19:30

The epitome of long-term thinking is to take seriously the protection of the Earth from massive asteroid impacts, which in the past have extincted as much as 90% of life on Earth.
On Friday, Ma...

James Dewar: Long-term Policy Analysis from 2004-02-13T19:30

Peter Schwartz: The Art Of The Really Long View from 2003-12-12T19:30

Peter Schwartz, considered by many to be the world's leading futurist, will be trying out new ideas in public in a talk titled, "The Art of the Really Long View." He'll be talking about ways to ...

Brian Eno: The Long Now from 2003-11-14T19:30

This is not a concert. Brian Eno will be speaking about "The Long Now." His talk will be the first of a monthly series of Seminars About Long-term Thinking, sponsored by The Long Now Foundation. H...