How long now

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The Long Now Foundation was established in to foster long-term thinking and responsibility in the framework of the next 10, years.

Read More Discount Code for Members Sign In. A monument scale, multi-millennial, all mechanical clock as an icon to long term thinking. Browse the interactive disk online and contribute to the archive. A public arena for enjoyably competitive predictions, of interest to society, with philanthropic money at stake.

Published monthly, the member newsletter gives in-depth and behind the scenes updates on Long Now's projects. The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide a counterpoint to today's accelerating culture and help make long-term thinking more common. We hope to foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10, years. Below is an essay by a founding board member Stewart Brand on the need for, and the mechanism by which, The Long Now Foundation is attempting to encourage long-term thinking.

Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking.

All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed-some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where 'long-term' is measured at least in centuries. Long Now proposes both a mechanism and a myth. It began with an observation and idea by computer scientist Daniel Hillis :. For the next thirty years they kept talking about what would happen by the year , and now no one mentions a future date at all.

The future has been shrinking by one year per year for my entire life. I think it is time for us to start a long-term project that gets people thinking past the mental barrier of an ever-shortening future. I would like to propose a large think Stonehenge mechanical clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium.

Such a clock, if sufficiently impressive and well-engineered, would embody deep time for people. It should be charismatic to visit, interesting to think about, and famous enough to become iconic in the public discourse.