Long Now

"The world is terrible, and the world is better," Stefan Sagmeister said. "Both can be true." It all depends on perspective. In his Long Now Talk, Finally, something good, Sagmeister urged us to zoom out. The faster the news cycle spins, and the more we scroll, the more we catastrophize. Meanwhile, the things that improve tend to do so slowly and quietly. In this visually stunning talk, Sagmeister takes us on a journey through his body of work, transforming long-term data on human progress into striking works of art.

Indy Johar pointed to the first photographs of the whole Earth taken from space. “This was the moment the planet became self-aware." This planetary consciousness came with new responsibility, he argued. The task before us is not simply to survive, but to reimagine civilization as a planetary project. As climate and ecological instability creates extreme whiplash effects, we will find it increasingly difficult to predict, prepare, or govern at a global scale. And as artificial intelligence reshapes labor and value, Johar urged us all to reevaluate what it means to be human. So what does that require in a time of such intense, cascading volatility? Indy’s answer is civilizational optionality: the breathing room that keeps futures open when shocks compound and our fates are systematically coupled. As humans, we can't know everything — it's a cognitive impossibility. “But there is a beautiful liberation in accepting our partial knowing,” he said. Reframing this limitation as possibility opens us up to more curiosity and “ways of being that are about tenderness, tentativeness, and care.” Johar imagines a future that leverages human–machine systems that expand our civilizational capacity for complex discourse and problem solving. Intelligence, in this view, is a conversational field: a meta-capacity for coordination, dialogue, and collective sense-making across sectors, species, and systems. Climate cascades will not be local; our planetary fates are entangled. Meeting this reality demands an approach to civilization that is capable of responding to volatility and holding uncertainty. As Johar said with a smile: “It is time to have a fucking worldview.”

Kate Crawford’s Long Now Talk traces an historical arc from Renaissance perspective to AI image models, illustrating how shifts in representational power shape empires, economies—even our shared sense of reality. During the talk, Crawford gives a tour through her detailed artwork Calculating Empires. Through examples ranging from Liebig’s critique of agriculture “robbing” soil nutrients, to Faraday’s latex insulation that devastated rubber forests, Crawford shows how technologies have long created “metabolic rifts”: systems that extract more than they regenerate. Don't miss the closing Q&A, where host Kevin Kelly asks Crawford what responsible, non-extractive AI might look like.

What if the solutions to humanity’s greatest challenges — on Earth and beyond — have already been invented by nature? In this forward-looking talk, evolutionary biologist and astrobiologist Dr. Lynn Rothschild explores how life’s patterns, materials, and mechanisms, refined over billions of years, can serve as a blueprint for building better futures on Earth and other planets. Drawing on insights from deep time, Dr. Rothschild will open the doors to “nature’s hardware store” — a vast, largely untapped reservoir of biological strategies available to scientists, engineers, and innovators. From self-healing materials and bio-inspired architecture to regenerative systems for space exploration, she reveals how biology is shaping the frontiers of technology and inspiring bold, surprisingly practical solutions to complex problems. Grounded in astrobiology and evolutionary insight, this talk invites us to rethink innovation through the lens of life itself and to explore what’s possible when we tap into nature’s storehouse of intelligence to solve the challenges of tomorrow. Lynn J. Rothschild is a research scientist at NASA Ames and Adjunct Professor at Brown University and Stanford University working in astrobiology, evolutionary biology and synthetic biology. Rothschild's work focuses on the origin and evolution of life on Earth and in space, and in pioneering the use of synthetic biology to enable space exploration. From 2011 through 2019 Rothschild served as the faculty advisor of the award-winning Stanford-Brown iGEM (international Genetically Engineered Machine Competition) team, exploring innovative technologies such as biomining, mycotecture, BioWires, making a biodegradable UAS (drone) and an astropharmacy. Rothschild is a past-president of the Society of Protozoologists, fellow of the Linnean Society of London, The California Academy of Sciences and the Explorer’s Club and lectures and speaks about her work widely.

Blaise Agüera y Arcas’s talk took us on a journey through What is Intelligence?, his groundbreaking new work connecting the evolutionary dots between life, computation, and symbiogenesis. He explores how, in our symbiotic world, things combine to make larger things all the time. We might think of humanity in terms of the individual — but we're already part of everything we're creating, which is in turn co-creating us. In the story of technology and humanity, are we distinct from the technologies that we make? Agüera y Arcas' cuts through the essentialist dogma with a functionalist view: Biological computing — computation through DNA, RNA, and proteins — is not a strange outcropping of life but its very nature. Blaise Agüera y Arcas is a VP and Fellow at Google, where he is the CTO of Technology & Society and founder of Paradigms of Intelligence (Pi). Pi is an organization working on basic research in AI and related fields, especially the foundations of neural computing, active inference, sociality, evolution, and artificial life. During his tenure at Google, Blaise has innovated on-device machine learning for Android and Pixel; invented Federated Learning, an approach to decentralized model training that avoids sharing private data; and founded the Artists + Machine Intelligence program.

What if AI is not here actually to replace us, but to remind us who we actually are? That was the question at the heart of Kim Carson’s Long Now Talk. In _Inspired by Intelligence: Purpose and Creativity in the AI Era_, Carson challenged us to avoid the easy narratives of tech-driven utopia and dystopia, charting a course through those two extremes that made the case for AI not as a way to make humans unnecessary but to emphasize our most important creative capacities. In her talk, Carson drew on her experience working in AI at organizations like IBM, where she helped lead Watson Education, which helped connect educators in underserved communities to AI technology, in the name of facing down some of the wickedest problems in society. But she also drew on her own more personal engagement with AI, discussing at length the nuances of how she uses personalized versions of generative pre-trained transformers as collaborators and enablers for creativity. For Carson, AI is a sort of tool for thought — a mirror that we can use to re-inspire ourselves towards greater creativity. Accompanied by video art made using the SORA text-to-video model by Charles Lindsay, she made the case that AI could be used not just for automating labor but also for reclaiming human agency. That means using these new technological modes as enablers for human thought and action, while recognizing their gaps, too — the questions about ourselves that only we can answer, no matter how sophisticated our technology becomes. Throughout her talk, Carson expounded upon the power of vulnerability. The ability to use AI tools to help us reconnect with ourselves, to jar us into seeing our own identities and creative capacities in new lights, is one that will fundamentally help us change our world. In Carson’s view, vulnerability and creativity are the necessary precursors to any sort of technological innovation. As she ended her remarks, Kim made one final note on how we can make a better world collaboratively and creatively: our society does not need “more optimization, it needs more imagination.”

“What is life?” In her Long Now Talk, astrobiologist and theoretical physicist Sara Imari Walker explores the many dimensions of that seemingly simple question. Starting from the simplest precursors, Walker assembled a grand cathedral of meaning, tracing an arc across existence that linked the fundamentals of organic chemistry, the possibility space of lego bricks, and the materialist philosophy of Madonna. As the leader of one of the largest international theory groups in the origins of life and astrobiology, Walker has worked an interdisciplinary team of researchers to devise assembly theory: a theory of life and its origins that finds that life is the only way to create complex objects, and that the existence of complex objects is fundamentally and quantifiably rare. Assembly theory’s focus on complexity and countability allows astrobiologists like Walker to grapple with the sheer vastness of combinatorial space — the set of all things that could possibly exist. That set is vaster than the universe itself can hold, which, of course, raises a foundational question: if the universe cannot exhaust all possibilities of what can exist, what determines what actually exists, and what merely could exist? Assembly theory uses the concept of the "assembly index" to measure the complexity of objects in the universe, quantifying how many steps are required to build something — a molecule like ATP, the primary energy-carrier in cells, for example. The theory finds that items above a given assembly index of 15 cannot be produced repeatedly by any known process save for life itself — a complexity threshold governed by the size of the possibility space. Implied here is that matter itself holds information. Within the physical dimensions and history of any given object is a measure of the information required to construct it. Likewise, historical contingency matters: it determines what gets constructed within the space of all theoretically possible constructions. In Walker's words: "We are our history." Life is causal histories — lineages of propagating information. Assembly theory conceptualizes objects as entities defined by their possible formation histories, allowing a unified language for describing selection, evolution and the generation of novelty. Within assembly theory, the fundamental unit of life is not the cell, but the lineage.

As they look upon the United States of America in 02025, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson see a country wrought by a half-century of failed governance. They see states and cities theoretically committed to progressive futures instead bogged down in labyrinthine mires of process — a society stuck in low gear. Yet they also see opportunity to turn those failures on their heads, and to build a better society based around more responsive, efficient governance. This is the vision that animates _Abundance_, Klein and Thompson’s new book and the focus of their Long Now Talk, hosted by Michael Pollan and co-sponsored with Manny’s and City Arts & Lectures. Despite Long Now’s focus on long-term thinking — of counterbalancing civilization’s pathologically short attention span — there was much to appreciate in Klein and Thompson’s call for American governance to “rediscover speed as a progressive value.” In their wide-ranging discussion, the two authors made the case for a vision of liberalism that builds, both for its own sake and as a bulwark against reactionary right-wing movements that have capitalized on its current shortcomings. Klein and Thompson spent much of their conversation diagnosing the precise ways in which American governance has become bogged down. They identified a set of breakdowns in the social contract ranging from the overly-restrictive barriers to building housing and green infrastructure to the utterly inadequate governmental support given to technological development and scientific discovery. On the topic of scientific research, they spoke of the value of long-term science, noting that vital discoveries like penicillin, mRNA vaccines, and GLP-1s all benefited from the long-term investment that the private sector rarely provides. At the close of the conversation, Pollan thanked Klein and Thompson for providing “not empty hope” but a vision “with a real path in front of it.” In their talk, Klein and Thompson didn’t just outline that path — they made clear the stakes of moving down it. We do not, as they argued, have the “luxury of time.” In order to build the abundant, progressive society that they envision, we must abandon “learned helplessness” and commit to building it with all necessary urgency and focus.

Stephen Heintz and Kim Stanley Robinson say we live in an “Age of Turbulence.” Looking around our geopolitical situation, it’s easy to see what they mean. Faced with the ever-growing threat of climate change, the looming potential breakdown of the post-01945 international order, and the ambiguous prospects of rapid technological changes in fields like AI, biotechnology, and geoengineering, it is clear that we need new answers to new challenges. Stephen Heintz, a Public policy expert and president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF), and Kim Stanley Robinson, one of the most acclaimed science fiction authors writing today, work in very different fields. But each of them in his own way has sketched out a vision of what we must do to face down the intersecting crises of our time: While their methods may differ, they align on their conclusions. In their Long Now Talk, Heintz and Robinson propose what they refer to as _A Logic For The Future_ — a new path for international relations in the face of the chaos of our current age. Over the course of their conversation, Stephen and Stan drew on a wide variety of historical examples to contextualize our seemingly unprecedented geopolitical moment. In all of these case studies — from the writing of the Atlantic Charter in the darkest days of World War II to the fraught deal-making and relationship-building that allowed for the signing of the Iran Nuclear deal in 02015 — the two focused on the power of human-driven, almost utopian visions of the future as tools for building a better world. Now, in a moment of geopolitical uncertainty and internal democratic crisis, Stephen and Stan see space for the kinds of utopian imagination and creativity that were so solely missed in prior moments of flux and chaos. Long-term thinking is key to this kind utopian thinking. In Stan’s words, the “optimistic” possibilities of long-term thinking are not just useful in dreaming up a better future. They’re “reinvigorating in how we address the problems we face on a day-to-day basis.”

How will AI shape our understanding of our creativity and ourselves? In February, artist and technologist K Allado-McDowell delivered a fascinating Long Now Talk that explored the dimensions of Neural Media — their term for an emerging set of creative forms that use artificial neural networks inspired by the connective design of the human brain. Their Long Now Talk is a journey through the strange valleys and outcroppings of this age of neural media. That journey began in 02015, in the wake of K Allado-McDowell’s encounter with an image known as “trippysquirrel.jpg.” That picture — a squirrel flowing into dog into a slug, a hallucinogenic collection of misplaced eyes and waves of color — was generated by what was then a cutting-edge artificial intelligence system: a convolutional neural network. What AI researchers did with the creation of images like “trippysquirrel.jpeg” was to invert the traditional role of the neural network as classifier: transforming it into a tool for the generation of novel material. The captivating, uncanny potential of these AI-generated images inspired Allado-McDowell to form and lead the Artists + Machine Intelligence program at Google, and to begin their own explorations into co-creating art with artificial intelligence. Now, after a decade spent composing novels, operas, and more alongside a variety of AI models, Allado-McDowell sees the mode of creativity offered by these non-human intelligences as not just a novelty but an entirely new, sometimes bizarre paradigm of media. Allado-McDowell tells a fascinating story involving statistical distributions, anti-aging influencers at war with death itself, and vast quantities of “AI Slop,” the low-quality, faintly surreal output of cheap, rapidly proliferating image models. Yet even in this morass of slop Allado-McDowell sees reason for optimism. Referring to the title of their 02020 book Pharmako-AI, which was co-written with GPT-3, Allado-McDowell notes that the Greek word pharmakon could mean both drug and cure. What may seem poisonous or dangerous in this new paradigm of neural media could also unlock for us new and deeper ways of understanding ourselves, our planet, and all of the intelligent networks that live within it.

When you feel the future, how do you share that feeling in order to build community? Ahmed Best’s Long Now Talk was the first in the more-than-twenty-year history of Long Now Talks to be held on Valentine’s Day. It was also the first to feature a sing-a-long performance of Al Green’s 01970s soul music classic “Let’s Stay Together,” with the speaker accompanying the audience at San Francisco’s Herbst Theatre on a 7-piece drum kit. Finally, it was the first to feature a live theater performance from audience volunteers, depicting the past, present, and future through glances, gestures, and play. Yet beyond these firsts, Ahmed Best’s Long Now Talk felt deeply rooted in the spirit of Long Now Talks. Over the course of _Feel the Future_, Ahmed’s Valentine’s Evening Long Now Talk, he lead the audience on a journey through creativity and imagination, drawing on his experiences as a cast member on the award-winning percussion performance Stomp, as Jar-Jar Binks, the ground-breaking first major CGI character actor in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, and as a lecturer at the Stanford d.school and one of the leaders of the AfroRithms Futures Group. The core of Ahmed’s argument? Feeling is a form of communication in itself, beyond words — and only by taking action and sharing our feelings of the future with each other in our communities can we create the futures we want for ourselves. Using a diverse range of creative and imaginative tactics, Best incorporated play and motion in order to help us Feel The Future.

We find ourselves in a pre-paradigmatic moment in which our technology has outpaced our theories of what to do with it. The task of philosophy today is to catch up. In his Long Now Talk, Philosopher of Technology Benjamin Bratton took us on a whirlwind philosophical journey into the concept of Planetary Computation — a journey that began in classical Greece with the story of the Antikythera mechanism, the analog computer that gave his think-tank Antikythera its name. But his inquiry stretched far beyond antiquity — back to the very origins of biological life itself and forward to a present and future where we must increasingly grapple with artificial life and intelligence on a planetary scale in time and space. How might complex planetary intelligence thrive over the long now? To Bratton, that intelligence is a “emergent phenomenon of an ancient and deep biogeochemical flux” — not merely resident to the Earth but an outcropping from it. Our planet has evolved us, and we have in turn evolved a stack of technologies that can help us understand and govern that very same planet that produced us. The preconditions for long-term adaptiveness, Bratton argues, will need to be artificially realized, and we won’t be able to control what happens as a result of bringing them into existence. This, Bratton says, is the Copernican trauma of our time. In concluding his remarks, Bratton turns to James Lovelock, the pioneering environmental scientist who first proposed the Gaia Hypothesis. Referencing Lovelock’s final book, Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence (02019), Bratton notes that for both Lovelock and himself the potential coming of post-human intelligence was not cause for “grief.” Instead, the frame of the planetary makes it so that finding ourselves in a grander story where “the evolution of intelligence does not peak with one terraforming species of nomadic primates,” is, to Bratton, “the happiest news possible.”

Social philosopher Roman Krznaric and renegade economist Kate Raworth explore how we can survive and thrive by looking to the past for clues on how to build more regenerative economic frameworks. Doughnut economics describes the social and planetary boundaries needed for all people to prosper within the means of the living planet. Studying historic examples through the lens of doughnut economics, Krznaric and Raworth find the environmentally safe and socially just space in which humanity and all other living things can flourish.

Neal Stephenson, visionary speculative fiction author and long-time friend of Long Now, joined us for a conversation with journalist Charles C. Mann on the research behind his new novel _Polostan_ , the dawn of the Atomic Age, and the craft of historical storytelling. _Polostan_ is the first installment in a monumental new series called Bomb Light - an expansive historical epic of intrigue and international espionage, presaging the dawn of the Atomic Age. Set against the turbulent decades of the early twentieth century, Polostan is an inventive, richly detailed, and deeply entertaining historical epic from Stephenson, whose prior books include [_Cryptonomicon_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon) and [_The Baroque Cycle_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Baroque_Cycle)

The Bureau of Linguistical Reality is a participatory artwork facilitated by artist Alicia Escott and Heidi Quante which collaborates with the public to create new words for feelings and experiences for which no words yet exist. Recognizing the climate crisis is causing new feelings and experiences that have yet to be named, the project was created with a deep focus on these and other Anthropocenic phenomena. The Bureau views the words created in this process as also serving as points of connectivity: advancing understanding, dialogue, and conversations about the greater concepts these words seek to codify. This talk was an intimate sharing of The Bureau's findings from their decade long social art practice as well as a Word Making Field Session where Escott and Quante collaborated with participants to collectively coin a term together. Participants were encouraged to consider in advance their personal unnamed experience(s) of our changing world as well as their unique feelings for which they wish there was a word and to bring the diversity of their linguistic backgrounds to this conversation as the Bureau creates neologisms in all languages.

Alternative visions for social change rooted in the frameworks of capitalism and colonialism only reproduce contemporary structures of power. How can indigenous perspectives and knowledge inform the structural transformation necessary to improve the health of the natural world and of human communities? Dr. Cordero discussed how indigenous epistemologies challenge the ideas and practices related to capitalism and colonialism and how the enhancement of indigeneity and sovereignty are critical to the maintenance of indigenous epistemologies. Throughout his talk, Dr. Cordero drew from academic and communal discourses on decolonization, settler colonialism, and epistemicide, revealing the nuances of indigenous worldviews with deeply researched case studies. Dr. Cordero also shared how indigenous perspectives and knowledge inspire work of the [Association of Ramaytush Ohlone](https://www.ramaytush.org/), where he serves as Executive Director.

Economic policy can seem abstract and distant, but it manifests the physical world, affecting us all. Our economic stories shape our systems, and they in turn shape us. What myths continue to constrain us, and how might new stories emerge to scaffold the future? This talk explores concepts we often take as gospel: profits, competition, economic value, efficiency, and others — and asks how we might reshape them to better serve planetary flourishing — today, and well into the future. Drawing on insights from economics and the social sciences more broadly, writer and researcher Denise Hearn makes the case that the challenge for 21st century policy-making is figuring out how much we can "hold economic reasoning back." In her Talk, she asks: in what areas can we bring in new paradigms and systems of understanding that don't produce the same problems that our societies are trying to escape?

_What really interests me is how long-lived plants allow humans to think about—and emotionally relate to—long units of time. They provide a bridge between human time and geological time. - Jared Farmer_ In his Long Now Talk, Geohumanist and historian Jared Farmer shared his multi-faceted approach to understanding our human relationship with trees over millennia. From ancient stories, as objects of reverence, named individuals and clonal organisms, sources of wealth in ancient and modern times, the lungs of the planet and the wood wide web - trees are deeply interwoven with our histories, cultures and growing scientific understanding of our complex global ecosystem. Through his work, Farmer reflects on our long-term relationships with long-lived trees, and considers the future of oldness on a rapidly changing planet.

As authoritarianism continues to rise around the world, the stories we tell ourselves about our collective history become a battleground for competing visions of the future. Drawing extensively from Russian history in the 20th century, Rumsey offers a framework to discuss our current social and political tensions and how our increasing polarization could shape our future. Abby Smith Rumsey was joined by archivist and filmmaker Rick Prelinger for the Q&A. This Long Now Talk is presented in partnership with the [Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences](https://casbs.stanford.edu/about?ref=longnow.org) (CASBS) at Stanford University. CASBS brings together deep thinkers from diverse disciplines and communities to advance understanding of the full range of human beliefs, behaviors, interactions, and institutions. A leading incubator of human-centered knowledge, CASBS facilitates collaborations across academia, policy, industry, civil society, and government to collectively design a better future.

Over the last two years, the US government has started thinking about the future of the world in a very different way. Across speeches and policy papers, a vision of world politics has emerged which breaks sharply both with the old logic of the Cold War and the newer politics of globalization. The globalization bet has turned sour, but it has created a far more closely connected world than ever existed before. Problems such as climate change, economic inequality, food security, supply chain vulnerabilities, democratic weakness and mass migration emerge from the interdependent choices of people and governments in a global system without any global rulers. In a complex interdependent world, is the only way forward to accept these complexities, and try to work with them? That is the challenge that the US now faces – moving from the simple imagined futures of the past to a more entangled and realistic vision of our planet's future. This Long Now Talk is presented in partnership with the [Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences](https://casbs.stanford.edu/about/about-us?ref=longnow.org) (CASBS) at Stanford University. CASBS brings together deep thinkers from diverse disciplines and communities to advance understanding of the full range of human beliefs, behaviors, interactions, and institutions. A leading incubator of human-centered knowledge, CASBS facilitates collaborations across academia, policy, industry, civil society, and government to collectively design a better future.

Coco Krumme traces the fascinating history of optimization from its roots in America's founding principles, to its dominance as the driving principle of our modern world. Optimized models underlie everything and are deeply embedded in the technologies and assumptions that have come to comprise not only our material reality, but what we make of it. How did a mathematical concept take on such outsized cultural shape? Krumme's work in scientific computation made her aware of optimization's overreach, where she observed that streamlined systems are less resilient and more at risk of failure. They limit our options and narrow our perspectives. Optimal Illusions exposes the sizable bargains we have made in the name of optimization and asks us to consider what comes next.

Our bodies, our houses, our land, our space: we humans don’t always like to share. Author Bette Adriaanse engaged in deep discussion with fellow author Chelsea T. Hicks. as well as virtual guests Brian Eno, Margaret Levi, and Aqui Thami, about property, sharing, and how to make a lasting positive change in the way we share the world with each other. Alternating between thinkers and doers whose approaches are helping to foster long term equality, this talk explored the choices that can be made to share time and resources with others in radical ways. **Virtual guests:** **Brian Eno** is a musician, artist, writer, and co-founder of Earth Percent and The Long Now Foundation. **Margaret Levi** is an American political scientist and author, noted for her work in comparative political economy, labor politics, and democratic theory. **Aqui Thami** is an Indigenous artist, activist, academic, and member of the Himalayan Janajati Thang-mi community.

**Story & Performance Credits:** **Dodging the Apocalypse** story by Mark Alpert | Actor: Stuart Briggs | Video: Ruda Virginio | Score: Tristan de Liège **Victory Condition** story by Eliot Peper | Actor: Marilyn Pittman | Video: Back Pocket Media and Ruda Virgini | Found footage by: Chris Lange, Oscar Osbo, Robert Pullum, Sean Kirmani, Matt Trainor, Billy Bjork, Loren Hamilton, Panorama International Productions, Living with Fire_ The USGS Southern California Wildfire Risk Project | Score: Tristan de Liège **Glacial Elevation Operations** story by Kim Stanley Robinson | Actor: Conrad Cecil | Video: Alborz Kamalizad | Score: Tristan de Liège

How can we turn the tide on species loss and help biodiversity and bioabundance flourish for millennia to come? Ryan Phelan is Executive Director of [Revive & Restore](https://reviverestore.org); the leading wildlife conservation organization promoting the incorporation of biotechnologies into standard conservation practice. Phelan shared the new Genetic Rescue Toolkit for conservation – a suite of biotechnology tools and conservation applications that offer hope and a path to recovery for threatened species. In this talk, Phelan presented examples of the toolkit in action, including corals that better withstand rising ocean temperatures, trees that withstand a fungal blight, and the genetic rescue of the black-footed ferret, once thought to be extinct. Revive & Restore brings biotechnologies to conservation in responsible ways; from engaging local communities where ecological restorations are underway, to connecting stakeholders in disciplines like biotech, bioethics, conservation organizations and government agencies. Together, they are forging new paths to bioabundance in our changing world. Ryan Phelan was joined by forecaster and Long Now Board Member [Paul Saffo](https://longnow.org/people/paul-saffo/) for the Q&A; to discuss long-term outcomes and the Intended Consequences framing used by Revive & Restore.

One of our guiding principles at Long Now is that in order to get to a future that we want to live in, we must first be able to imagine it. For many, it is much easier to imagine a dystopia than a thriving civilization. Our cultural visions of the future are increasingly occupied by tales of impending doom and despair. These stories have a role to play — in showing how current trends could lead to dire consequences in the future, or how certain totalizing technological or ideological worldviews have risks that are at times unaccounted for — but they can’t be the only narratives our culture has for what the future looks like. Becky Chambers and Annalee Newitz are two of the leading lights in contemporary speculative fiction. In their writing, which ranges from novels and short stories to history and journalism, they imagine quietly radical propositions: worlds that we might actually want to live in. Over the course of an adventurous, far-ranging conversation at The Interval in April 02023, the two of them walked through how they build their visions for a cozier, more interconnected society — and made the case that those visions could not only serve as an escape from the troubles of the modern world but as pathways to a better future. At times, Newitz referred to their novels as “Topian” — neither utopian nor dystopian. To Newitz, the appeal of writing in the Topian mode is that it reflects the state of our own society: not as hopeless as some would despair, but also not as perfect as some would exalt. Chambers follows along similar lines — though perhaps a tinge more utopian. Her work has been at times called “Hopepunk.” In contrast to grimmer, darker modes of speculative fiction, her worlds ditch gloom without returning to the sometimes-tired paths of more conventional heroic narratives. She noted, with a certain glee, that her narratives lacked traditional protagonists and all-encompassing villains. Instead, she tells stories of normal people like the ones she knows in real life: except, of course, for the fact that some of them live in a “fantastic, galactic future.” May we all be so lucky, someday.

Jenny Odell describes _Saving Time_, her second book and the inspiration for her first Long Now Talk, as a “panoramic assault on nihilism.” The particular nihilism that Odell confronts is rooted in what she calls “Clock Time.” While the rigid, regular progression of clock time may feel like a universal truth to those of us raised under its regime, Odell argues that it is merely one among many ways of keeping time found across societies and ecosystems. Told loosely as a road trip around the San Francisco Bay Area — from the bustling port of Oakland to the beachside cliffs of Pacifica — Odell’s tale of temporal dissonance and harmony weaved together a story of time and modernity. Her core thesis: our lives have become rigid and contorted by the demands of profit-maximizing industrial clock time, but they do not have to stay that way. In order to make that case, she told a narrative that stretches across epochs and topics, stringing together stories from European imperialism, scenes from Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, and contemporary anecdotes from online communities of working mothers and disabled activists. The principle uniting all of these threads is a dogged pursuit of the capricious nature of time, with each new facet or mode of timekeeping challenging the monolith of industrial clock time. In both her talk and in her book, Odell refrained from offering prescriptive solutions, whether on the scale of individual change or revolutionary upheaval. Her approach is neither that of a self-help book nor a manifesto, but something weirder and more ambiguous. As she concluded her remarks to Long Now, Odell invoked the language of cultivation — both metaphorically, in terms of nurturing an intergenerational web of friends and allies, and literally, as she discussed how the temporal rhythms of growing beans and observing garden life can teach us about the latent chronodiversity of the world around us.

Psychedelics and other mind-altering substances have been used for thousands of years across the world in religious, spiritual, celebratory, and healing contexts. Despite a half century of a "War on Drugs" in the United States, there has been a recent resurgence in public interest in ending drug prohibition and re-evaluating the roles these substances can play in modern society. What can our several-thousand year history with these substances teach us about how they can be used in a modern society? What legal & cultural frameworks can be used to increase access to these substances, and what are the potential downsides of these frameworks? Ismail Ali works daily developing and implementing the legal and policy strategies that will define the next several decades of psychedelic access, and joined Long Now for a Talk that explored the deep history of psychedelics and what role they can play in our future.

How would someone fare if they were dropped into a randomly chosen period in history? Would they have any relevant knowledge to share, or ability to invent crucial technologies given the period's constraints? Ryan North uses these hypothetical questions to explore the technological and implicit knowledge underpinning modern civilization, offering a practical guide of how one could rebuild civilization from the ground up.

Tracing an arc from the earliest humans to our digitized, synthesized present and future, Adam Rogers shows the expansive human quest for the understanding, creation and use of color. We meet our ancestors mashing charcoal in caves, Silk Road merchants competing for the best ceramics, and textile artists cracking the centuries-old mystery of how colors mix, before shooting to the modern era for high-stakes corporate espionage and the digital revolution that’s rewriting the rules of color forever. This journey has required millennia of remarkable innovation and a fascinating exchange of ideas between science and craft that’s allowed for the most luminous manifestations of our built and adorned world. Adam Rogers is the author of [_Full Spectrum: How the Science of Color Made Us Modern_](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781328518903) and [_Proof: The Science of Booze_](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780547897967/). He is a deputy editor at Wired, and was a Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT and a writer covering science and technology for Newsweek.

The map of humanity isn’t settled -- not now, not ever. In the 60,000 years since people began spreading across the continents, a recurring feature of human civilization has been mobility—the ever-constant search for resources, stability and opportunity. Driven by global events from conflicts, famine, repression and changing climates - to opportunities for trade, social advancement and freedom of thought - humans have relocated around the globe for millennia. But what happens when billions of people are on the move? As climate change tips toward full-blown crisis, economies collapse, governments destabilize, and technology disrupts, we’re entering a new age of mass migrations. Futurist Parag Khanna discusses the deep trends that are shaping the most likely scenarios for our future and asks what map of human geography will emerge.

Eric Debrah Otchere's research revolves around the power of music in the context of work; covering an ambitious range from ethnographic research on Ghanaian indigenous fishing culture to personalized musical preferences via modern technology. Throughout history, the power of music to enhance productivity and focus at work has been explored, leveraged and exploited - by individuals and societies. Combining empirical data from his extensive fieldwork with a critical review of literature and theories from different areas of study, Otchere connects previously siloed research into a comprehensive body of knowledge on the intricate relationship between music and work. **This Long Now Talk is presented in partnership with the[Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences](https://casbs.stanford.edu/about/about-us)** (CASBS) at Stanford University. CASBS brings together deep thinkers from diverse disciplines and communities to advance understanding of the full range of human beliefs, behaviors, interactions, and institutions. A leading incubator of human-centered knowledge, CASBS facilitates collaborations across academia, policy, industry, civil society, and government to collectively design a better future.

What is the role and purpose of Anthropology today? Wade Davis looks back at the pioneering work of Franz Boas in the early 20th century that upended long-held Western assumptions on race & gender, along with definitions of "social progress". Boas and his students used comparative ethnography to advance “cultural relativism”-- the idea that every culture is as “correct” as every other culture. Boas showed that our differences can be completely explained by social conditioning, not inherent genetic makeup, upending a deep history of scientific racism. This fundamental change in understanding laid the intellectual foundations for the political movements for racial, gender, and cultural equality in the 20th century. But over the last few decades, the field of Anthropology has turned inward, and seems increasingly unable to address global challenges like linguistic loss, cultural erasure, environmental destruction, and economic injustice. Davis offers ideas on how the field could change direction and reclaim global activism as part of its core once again.

Urbanist, researcher and writer Johanna Hoffman gave a Long Now Talk about speculative futures — a powerful set of tools that can reorient urban development help us dream and build more resilient, equitable cities. Navigating modern change depends on imagining futures we’ve never seen. Urban planning and design should be well positioned to spearhead that work, but calculated rationale often results in urban spaces crafted to mitigate threats rather than navigate the unexpected, leaving cities increasingly vulnerable to the uncertainties of 21st century change. Long used in art, film, fiction, architecture, and industrial design, the methodology of speculative futures offers powerful ways to counter this trend by moving us beyond what currently exists into the realms of what could be. Far from an indulgent creative exercise, speculative futures is a means of creating the resilient cities we urgently need.

Robot ethicist Kate Darling offers a nuanced and smart take on our relationships to robots and the increasing presence they will have in our lives. From a social, legal, and ethical perspective, she shows that our current ways of thinking don’t leave room for the robot technology that is soon to become part of our everyday routines. Robots are likely to supplement, rather than replace, our own skills and relationships. Darling also considers our history of incorporating animals into our work, transportation, military, and even families, and shows how we already have a solid basis for how to contend with, and navigate our future with robots. Dr. Kate Darling works at the intersection of law, ethics and robotics; as a researcher at MIT Media Lab, author and intellectual property policy advisor. Her work with Dr. Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, and other institutions explores the difficult questions that lawmakers, engineers, and the wider public will need to address as human-robot relationships evolve in the coming decades. Darling's work is widely published and covered in the media; and her new book is [_The New Breed: What Our History With Animals Reveals About Our Future With Robots_](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781250296108/).

Forest Ecologist Suzanne Simard reveals that trees are part of a complex, interdependent circle of life; that forests are social, cooperative creatures connected through underground mycorrhizal networks by which trees communicate their vitality and vulnerabilities, and share and exchange resources and support. Simard's extraordinary research and tenacious efforts to raise awareness on the interconnectedness of forest systems, both above and below ground, has revolutionized our understanding of forest ecology. This increasing knowledge is driving a call for more sustainable practices in forestry and land management, ones that develop strategies based on the forest as a whole entity, not on trees as isolated individuals.

In _The Clock of the Long Now_, Long Now founder Stewart Brand wrote, in response to Zen poet Gary Snyder, the following musing on the nature of time: >THIS PRESENT MOMENT USED TO BE THE UNIMAGINABLE FUTURE Interdisciplinary artist Alicia Eggert’s work uses neon, steel, and time to expand the scope and possibilities of the carefully chosen quotes she uses in her work. In This Present Moment, Brand’s quote flickers between its original form to Eggert’s subtly edited version: >THIS MOMENT USED TO BE THE FUTURE In this Long Now Talk, Alicia Eggert and Long Now's Executive Director Alexander Rose discussed time, art and long-term thinking.

Jonathan Haidt sees that we have entered a social-psychological phase change that was initiated in 02009 when social media platforms introduced several fateful innovations that changed the course of our society and disintegrated our consensus on reality. In this conversation with Long Now co-founders Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly, Haidt explored questions of technological optimism, morality vs ethics, teen mental health, possible platform tweaks that could reduce the damage and just how long this next cycle of history could last. Prompted by Haidt's piece on [Why The Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/), this discussion offers a behind the scenes look at the thinking going into Haidt's next book, _The Anxious Generation_.

Governance moves slow. The work of the politician and the public servant ought to inherently be one of long-term thinking — of taking in concerns both urgent and longstanding and crafting solutions to them that will live on beyond any official’s term of office. As Mayor of Stockton, California, Special Advisor for Economic Mobility to California Governor Gavin Newsom, and founder of End Poverty in California, Michael Tubbs has taken on some of the deepest problems in the public sphere. In his Long Now Talk, he focused on one of the most long-standing of all issues in human society: poverty. To Tubbs, who grew up in poverty in Stockton and witnessed its consequences first-hand, poverty is not just an ill for its immediate negative effects but how it shapes one’s perceptions. When you’re living under the deprivation of poverty, it’s harder to think about the long-term future. You are faced with an array of short-term demands on your resources: not just your financial resources, but also your mental ones. It is an “incredible privilege,” Tubbs noted, “to have the space, to have the time, to have the mental capacity to think about the future.” Tubbs’ solution — both in his talk and in his time as mayor and advocate — is to start by providing the direct, near-term aid to those pressing problems in the form of cash: a Universal Basic Income. Tubbs pointed to the positive results from UBI trial runs both in Stockton and cities across the country, showing how lifting people out of extreme scarcity allowed them to start thinking about the future. In his remarks, Tubbs was realistic about the depth of the challenge of fighting poverty. No one policy proposal can fully solve a problem that, he said, was built into the “setup” of this country. Yet his tone throughout was one of deep optimism, invoking what he called the “prophetic” power of long-term thinking and calling on all of us to take an active role in planning for the future. Once we are all committed to creating a brighter tomorrow, the slow work of governance can succeed.

Philosopher Edward Slingerland’s latest research is a deep dive into the alcohol-soaked origins of civilization — and the evolutionary roots of humanity’s appetite for intoxication. “Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization” elegantly cuts through the tangle of urban legends that surround our notions of intoxication to provide a rigorous, scientifically-grounded explanation for our love of alcohol. Drawing on evidence from archaeology, history, cognitive neuroscience, psychopharmacology, social psychology, literature, and genetics, Slingerland shows that our taste for chemical intoxicants is not an evolutionary mistake, as we are so often told. In fact, intoxication helps solve a number of distinctively human challenges: enhancing creativity, alleviating stress, building trust, and pulling off the miracle of getting fiercely tribal primates to cooperate with strangers.

More than one hundred million pieces of human-made space debris currently orbit our planet, most moving at more than 10,000 mph. Every year their number increases, creating a progressively more dangerous environment for working spacecraft. In order to operate in space, we track most of this debris through a patchwork of private efforts and government defense networks. Creon Levit spent over three decades at NASA, and is now the Director of R&D; at Planet, a company that is imaging the earth everyday with one of the largest swarms of micro-satellites in the world. In his Long Now Talk, Levit discusses the history of space debris, the way the debris is currently tracked, and how we might work to reduce it before we see a cascading effect of ballistic interactions that could render low orbit all but unusable.

Personal goals need a long-term strategy too. Dorie Clark offers concrete practices to sharpen strategic thinking and incorporate a long-term perspective within a personal time scale. By reorienting ourselves to focus on the big picture, and using the power of small but persistent changes over time, Clark shows how long-term thinking can be applied to reshape our own futures. **Dorie Clark** is a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review, and consults and speaks for clients such as Google, Yale University, and the World Bank. Clark teaches executive education for Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and Columbia Business School, and offers continuing professional education through her newsletter, courses, writing and appearances. Clark is author of [_The Long Game_](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781647820572), [_Entrepreneurial You_](https://dorieclark.com/entrepreneurialyou/), [_Reinventing You_](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781422144138), and [_Stand Out_](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781591847403); all books which delve deep into her business acumen around helping individuals and companies realize their best ideas, take control of their futures and make an impact on the world.

Long Now continued our dialogue with the acclaimed writer Kim Stanley Robinson around [COP26](https://unfccc.int/conference/glasgow-climate-change-conference-october-november-2021) and his award-winning book [_The Ministry for the Future_](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780316300131). Clean energy advocate & author [Ramez Naam](https://rameznaam.com/) joined Robinson on stage after the talk for a further discussion. Tackling topics from carbon quantitative easing, to political action, to planetary-level engineering, Robinson describes our current situation as "all-hands-on-deck" where every possible mitigation strategy should be tried. You can find our [other talks with Kim Stanley Robinson](https://www.youtube.com/c/longnow/search?query=Robinson) on our YouTube channel.

In his Long Now Talk, John Markoff was joined in conversation with Long Now's Co-founder Stewart Brand and Executive Director Alexander Rose around Markoff's new biography of Brand. Journalist John Markoff writes about technology, society and the key figures who shaped Silicon Valley and the personal computer revolution. Along the way, his stories and reporting intersected with Stewart Brand's paths numerous times and in surprising ways. And now Markoff has distilled Brand's formative rise from the Merry Pranksters and the Whole Earth Catalog, to the marriage of environmental consciousness and hacker capitalism into his newest book, [_Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand_](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780735223943).

As a society, how do we address the "wicked hard problem" of vaccine acceptance? How can public health institutions reach those who are hesitant when even robust fact-based campaigns don't seem to work? Infectious diseases are one of the long-standing challenges for humanity; historical plagues and flare ups of disease have transformed societies, redrawn boundaries across the globe and instigated mass migrations. Successive civilizations have grappled with attempts to control contagion and tried to protect their populations. With the advent of vaccines in the late 1700's it seemed humanity had finally found the way out of this potentially existential threat. But despite humans' deeply embedded fear of infectious disease, issues of vaccine acceptance arose from the start. Through decades of public health campaigns in multiple countries, a persistent thread can be seen of reluctance to adopt vaccines, despite extensive educational campaigns or even coercive tactics to get populations fully vaccinated. Prerna Singh asks how do we go beyond the usual behavior modeling to find out what actually works for these critical public health campaigns? Can we uncover the keys to human motivation to get people to act for their own protection and for the greater good? **This Long Now Talk was presented in partnership with the[Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences](https://casbs.stanford.edu/about/about-us)** (CASBS) at Stanford University. CASBS brings together deep thinkers from diverse disciplines and communities to advance understanding of the full range of human beliefs, behaviors, interactions, and institutions. A leading incubator of human-centered knowledge, CASBS facilitates collaborations across academia, policy, industry, civil society, and government to collectively design a better future.

What is time? What is humankind’s role in the universe? What is the meaning of life? For much of human history, these questions have been the province of religion and philosophy. What answers can science provide? In this talk, Sean Carroll shared what physicists know, and don’t yet know, about the nature of time. He argued that while the universe might not have purpose, we can create meaning and purpose through how we approach reality, and how we live our lives. Sean Carroll is a Research Professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology, and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. His research has focused on fundamental physics and cosmology, especially issues of dark matter, dark energy, spacetime symmetries, and the origin of the universe. Recently, Carroll has worked on the foundations of quantum mechanics, the emergence of spacetime, and the evolution of entropy and complexity. Carroll is the author of [_Something Deeply Hidden_](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781524743031), [_The Big Picture_](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780525954828), [_The Particle at the End of the Universe_](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780142180303) amongst other books and hosts the [_Mindscape_](https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/) podcast.

From the Metaverse in Snow Crash to digital currency in Cryptonomicon, Stephenson's thrilling stories offer uncanny insights into our future. [Neal Stephenson](http://www.nealstephenson.com/)'s fifth Long Now Talk featured a reading from his book [_Termination Shock_](https://www.booksmith.com/book/9780063028050) (pub. 11/16/21) and a discussion with Long Now's Executive Director and 10,000 Year Clock builder, [Alexander Rose](https://longnow.org/people/board/zander/). Neal Stephenson’s sweeping, prescient _Termination Shock_ transports readers to a near-future world, and brings together a fascinating, unexpected group of characters from different cultures and continents, whose stories collide and transform. Ranging from the Texas heartland to the Dutch royal palace in the Hague, to the snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas, the novel grapples with the real-life repercussions of planetary system changes. Epic in scope while heartbreakingly human in perspective, _Termination Shock_ sounds a clarion alarm, considers dire risks, and ponders potential adaptations coming to our near future.

**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 Mediterranean, built to contain the Black Death, to an experimental Ebola unit in London, and from the hallways of the CDC to closed-door simulations where pharmaceutical execs and epidemiologists prepare for the outbreak of a novel coronavirus. But the story of quarantine ranges far beyond the history of medical isolation. In their book, [_Until Proven Safe_](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780374126582), the authors tour a nuclear-waste isolation facility beneath the New Mexican desert, see plants stricken with a disease that threatens the world’s wheat supply, and meet NASA’s Planetary Protection Officer, tasked with saving Earth from extraterrestrial infections. They also introduce us to the corporate tech giants hoping to revolutionize quarantine through surveillance and algorithmic prediction. We live in a disorienting historical moment that can feel both unprecedented and inevitable; Manaugh and Twilley helped us make sense of our new reality through a thought-provoking exploration of the meaning of freedom, governance, and mutual responsibility.

As with all Long Now Talks, David Rooney’s talk on Thursday, September 9, 02021 began with a few tones from Brian Eno’s January 07003: Bell Studies for The Clock of the Long Now, based on the original algorithm for the Clock’s ever-changing chimes designed by Danny Hillis. These rings of the Clock’s bell were an especially good fit for Rooney’s talk, though: Over the course of an hour, his “History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks” engaged directly with the inexorably ticking logic of clocks just as Eno and Hillis’ work did so musically. Drawing on the wealth of stories on clocks contained within his recently published book, About Time, Rooney cleanly sketched a global history of imperial control, popular resistance, and the spread of information, illustrated vividly using clocks both ancient and modern. Rooney — a horologist and historian of technology by trade as the curator at the Science Museum, London — focused his story on three clocks within the United Kingdom and the British Raj in India between 01890 and 01920 CE. Yet his wide-ranging talk flowed naturally out of those more constrained examples, wading back through time to the reign of Timurid astronomer-king Ulūgh Beg in 01424 CE and the rule of Roman dictator and sundial-builder Manius Valerius Maximus in 00494 BCE and forward to the contemporary moment, where we are at once surrounded by clocks large and small and less aware of their presence in the form of technology like GPS satellites, which rely on atomic clocks to accurately track their positions. While his talk at times focused on the violent reactions against the imposition of clocks on oppressed populations in British India and the Roman Empire, Rooney’s overall message was one of hope: “while clocks might oppress us, clocks can and will save us as well.” The horologist, who first engaged with Long Now as the lead caretaker of Long Now's Prototype 1 10,000-year-clock, pointed to The Clock as a key example of how clocks serve as “proxies for humans,” their ticking mechanisms giving them a certain heartbeat-like quality that speaks to their deeply embodied humanity.