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Long Now Foundation

Coordinates: 37°48′23″N 122°25′56″W / 37.8064591°N 122.4321258°W / 37.8064591; -122.4321258
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The Long Now Foundation
FormationJanuary 4, 1996; 30 years ago (1996-01-04)
Type501(c)(3)
68-0384748
Registration no.C1956835
HeadquartersFort Mason Center, San Francisco, California, US
Coordinates37°48′23″N 122°25′56″W / 37.8064591°N 122.4321258°W / 37.8064591; -122.4321258
Key people
President Stewart Brand, Brian Eno
Websitelongnow.org Edit this at Wikidata

The Long Now Foundation, established in 1996,[1] is an American non-profit organization based in San Francisco that seeks to start and promote a long-term cultural institution. It aims to provide a counterpoint to what it views as today's "faster/cheaper" mindset and to promote "slower/better" thinking. The Long Now Foundation hopes to "creatively foster responsibility" in the framework of the next 10,000 years. In a manner somewhat similar to the Holocene calendar, the foundation uses 5-digit dates to address the Year 10,000 problem[2] (e.g., by writing the current year "02026" rather than "2026"). The organization's logo is X, a capital X with an overline, a representation of 10,000 in Roman numerals.

Projects

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The foundation has several ongoing projects, including a 10,000-year clock known as the Clock of the Long Now, a cafe/bar called The Interval, and a popular seminar series, among others.[3]

Clock of the Long Now

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Main article: Clock of the Long Now

The purpose of the Clock of the Long Now is to construct a timepiece that will operate with minimum human intervention for ten millennia.[4] It is to be constructed of durable materials, to be easy to repair, and to be made of largely valueless materials in case knowledge of the clock is lost or it is deemed to be of no value to an individual or possible future civilization; in this way it is hoped that the Clock will not be looted or destroyed. Its power source (or sources) should be renewable but similarly unlootable.[5] A prototype of a potential final clock candidate was activated on December 31, 1999, and is on display at the Science Museum in London. The Foundation is currently building the Clock of the Long Now in Van Horn, Texas.[6]

The Interval bar in Fort Mason, San Francisco

The Interval

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Opened in June 2014, The Interval is a coffee shop and bar designed as social space in the foundation's Fort Mason facility in San Francisco.[7] The purpose of The Interval is to have a public space where people can come together to discuss ideas and topics related to long-term thinking, as well as provide a venue for a variety of Long Now events.[8] The Interval includes lounge furniture, artifacts from the foundation's projects, a library of the 1000 most important books for restarting civilization in the event of collapse, audio/video equipment, robots, art pieces, and a bar serving tea and coffee during the day, and cocktails during the night.[7][8] Donors of a certain level can have a flask of locally-made whiskey or gin from St. George's Spirits hanging from the ceiling, with the gin made using juniper berries of the very long-lived bristlecone pine.[8]

In October 2014 The Interval was named by Thrillist as one of the 21 best new bars in America.[9] Coffee blog Sprudge described it as a 'steampunk wonderland'.[8]

Seminars about long-term thinking

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Brian Eno, Danny Hillis, and Stewart Brand speaking at "The Long Now, now" – an event in January 2014 at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco

In November 2003, The Long Now Foundation began a series of monthly seminars about long-term thinking (SALT) with a lecture by Brian Eno. The seminars are held in the San Francisco Bay Area and have focused on long-term policy and thinking, scenario planning, singularity and the projects of the foundation. The seminars are available for download in various formats from The Long Now Foundation.[10][non-primary source needed] They are intended to "nudge civilization toward making long-term thinking automatic and common".[11][non-primary source needed] Topics have included preserving environmental resources, the deep past and deep future of the sciences and the arts, human life extension, the likelihood of an asteroid strike in the future, SETI, and the nature of time.[citation needed]

As of 2014, SFGate and Sprudge have described the seminars (hosted by Stewart Brand) as popular.[3][8]

Rosetta Project

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Main article: Rosetta Project

The Rosetta Project is an effort to preserve all languages that have a high likelihood of extinction over the period from 2000 to 2100.[12] These include many languages whose native speakers number in the thousands or fewer. Other languages with many more speakers are considered by the project to be endangered because of the increasing importance of English as an international language of commerce and culture. Samples of such languages are to be inscribed onto a disc of nickel alloy three inches (7.62 cm) across. A Version 1.0 of the disc was completed on November 3, 2008,[13] and as of 2017 housed 1,000 languages[14] while working towards preserving 1,500.[15]

Manual for Civilization

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The Manual for Civilization is a living, crowd-curated library of over 3,500 books[16] with the purpose of creating a record of humanity and technology for the current generation's descendants. The library is curated by the Long Now community and is on display at The Interval, Long Now’s cafe-bar-salon in San Francisco.[17]

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Neal Stephenson's science fiction novel Anathem was partly inspired by the author's involvement with the Clock of the Long Now project.[18]

As a result of Brian Eno's work on the clock project, an album entitled January 07003 / Bell Studies for The Clock of The Long Now was released in 2003.[19] English songwriter Owen Tromans released a single entitled "Long Now", inspired by the foundation, in 2013.[20]

Ian McEwan acknowledges the foundation for helping with much deep thinking about what we owe the future in his 2025 novel 'What We Can Know'.[21] The novel centers around a lost poem (perhaps a masterpiece) and an academic's search for it roughly 150 years hence, when climate change has drowned much of the landscape referenced by the poem.[21]

Board members

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The Board of Directors of The Long Now Foundation as of February 2023:[22]

Emeritus members

See also

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References

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  1. ^ Rooney, David (July 31, 2013). "The Clock Of The Long Now". Science Museum Blog. Retrieved July 13, 2024.
  2. ^ "About Long Now". The Long Now Foundation. Retrieved December 13, 2011.
  3. ^ a b Kauffman, Jonathan (June 27, 2014). "Long Now Foundation opens the Interval cafe, bar in Fort Mason". SFGATE. Archived from the original on November 28, 2022. Retrieved November 10, 2025.
  4. ^ Chabon, Michael (January 2006). "The Omega Glory" (PDF). Details. Archived from the original (PDF) on November 3, 2010. Retrieved December 13, 2011.
  5. ^ Hills, Danny (December 6, 1995). "The Millennium Clock". Wired. Archived from the original on March 3, 2018. Retrieved December 13, 2011.
  6. ^ "Prototype 1–10,000 Year Clock". The Long Now Foundation. December 31, 1999. Retrieved December 13, 2011.
  7. ^ a b Freeman, Nate (June 12, 2014). "Now Booking:A Techno-Utopian Bar in San Francisco for Those Who Like to Think While They Drink". New York Times Sunday Magazine. Retrieved June 12, 2014.
  8. ^ a b c d e Haven, Leif (August 29, 2014). "At The Interval In San Francisco: Fresh Coffee, Aged Spirits, And Contemplation of The Future". Sprudge. Retrieved November 10, 2025.
  9. ^ Alexander, Kevin; Childers, Liz (November 22, 2014). "The 21 best new bars in America". Thrillist. Retrieved November 23, 2014.
  10. ^ "Seminars About Long-term Thinking Podcasts". The Long Now Foundation. Retrieved December 13, 2011.
  11. ^ "Seminars About Long-term Thinking". The Long Now Foundation. Retrieved December 13, 2011.
  12. ^ "The Rosetta Project". The Long Now Foundation. Retrieved December 13, 2011.
  13. ^ "Macro to micro etching". The Long Now Blog. November 3, 2008. Retrieved December 13, 2011.
  14. ^ Blakemore, Erin. "This Necklace Contains All of the World's Languages". Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved November 10, 2025.
  15. ^ Livni, Ephrat (January 17, 2017). "Wear a nanoscale archive of all the world's languages on a necklace". Quartz. Retrieved November 10, 2025.
  16. ^ King, Anthony (October 26, 2017). "Disaster preparedness: Risk, rout and ruination" (PDF). Nature. 550 (7677): 456. doi:10.1038/550456a. Archived from the original on January 15, 2026.
  17. ^ Kabil, Ahmed (April 20, 2018). "What Books Would You Choose to Restart Civilization?". Medium. Long Now Foundation. Retrieved November 9, 2023.
  18. ^ Fisher, Douglas (January 1, 2012). "Languages, Litanies, and the Limit: The Discourse of Mathematics in Neal Stephenson's Anathem" (PDF). Extrapolation. 53 (3): 343. doi:10.3828/extr.2012.18. Archived from the original on January 15, 2026. In his commentaries on Anathem, Stephenson is quite insistent that the Præsidium reflects his interest in the 10,000-year clock project of the Long Now Foundation
  19. ^ "January 07003". Enoshop.co.uk. Retrieved February 20, 2014.
  20. ^ "Long Now, by Owen Tromans". Sacred Geometry. Retrieved February 3, 2020.
  21. ^ a b McEwan, Ian (November 28, 2025). "Ian McEwan on Imagining the World After Disaster". The New Yorker Radio Hour (Interview). Interviewed by Remnick, David. Archived from the original on January 15, 2026. David Remnick: What would that notebook look like for this novel? What were the concerns that were running through it? Ian McEwan: This novel is an example. I read a wonderful long poem […] it swept me away. I didn't think I was ever going to be writing about such a poem. Also, I was interested in discussions taking place in philosophy about what are our moral duties to the future. I was also following a rather wonderful outfit, the Long Now Foundation, started up by Stewart Brand […] It was about sending basic information to the future in case civilization collapsed. How many of these things could you do yourself? How to make soap, how to make a three-crop rotation, germ theory of disease, how to make glass? Further on from that, and suddenly these two things began to merge: the poem and then the issue about the future. Different things float together.
  22. ^ "Board – The Long Now". The Long Now Foundation. Retrieved February 2, 2020.
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