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Blog Archive for the ‘Long Term Thinking’ Category

Re-photography

by Alexander Rose - Twitter: @zander on July 10th, 02007

Muir Glacier as seen on August 13, 1941 (left) and August 31, 2004 (right). Photography has now been around long enough that re-photography of certain sites can show over a century of change. Recent photographs depicting glacier retreat, like the ones above, have become the canary in the mineshaft of climate change discussion. Just as…  Read More

Catastrophe a good bet?

by Stuart Candy on July 6th, 02007

photo of flooded Thames by elyob The Long Now’s Long Bets project asks us, active bettors and wider public alike, to think more deeply and carefully about the medium- to long-term future than our assumptions (and busy schedules) might otherwise allow. Nudging our culture towards assuming greater responsibility for addressing (and creating) possible futures is…  Read More

The Long You

by Stuart Candy on July 3rd, 02007

Making long-term thinking viable depends partly on rendering slow processes perceptible, compressing them onto a scale we can relate to more easily. Given that the quintessential long-now change processes (geology, deep culture etc) extend over many human lifetimes, a similar challenge is to make the passage of time more personal. Here’s an addition to our…  Read More

Westinghouse Time Capsule Book

by Kevin Kelly on June 28th, 02007

The Westinghouse Time Capsule was the object that has defined time capsules since then: a container of objects from the present buried to be resurrected at a specified date in the future. To commenorate its burial during the 1939 World’s Fair and to act as a manual for those who might dig it up in…  Read More

The (other) Long View

by Kevin Kelly on June 18th, 02007

Leave it to the BBC to take the long view. Similar to our Long View chiefly in name, The Long View is a radio program hosted by “Jonathan Freedland [who] looks for the past behind the present, and explores a moment in history which illuminates a contemporary debate.” Here’s a list of some of the…  Read More

History of religion timeline map

by Alexander Rose - Twitter: @zander on May 25th, 02007

Submitted by Dan Mosedale this animated map/timeline of the last 5000 years of religion is really fantastic. Also another take on that was submitted by Kevin Kelly.  I also just came across this great Historical Atlas page.

Urbanization timeline/map

by Alexander Rose - Twitter: @zander on May 24th, 02007

Submitted by Stewart Brand this interactive urbanization map and timeline is a nice tool for visualizing how cities have been groing over the last 60 years. I would love to see the millennial version…

Richard Feynman quote

by Alexander Rose - Twitter: @zander on May 17th, 02007

I came across this very Long Now quote recently. It is pretty amazing to see this level of optimism from someone who worked on the Manhatten Project. “We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of…  Read More

Ise is rebuilt for the 101st time…

by Alexander Rose - Twitter: @zander on May 12th, 02007

Every 20 years the Shinto temple at Ise is rebuilt. It is an exact copy of the one that has stood there for the last twenty years. They alternate the sites so that they can complete one before taking down the last. Depending on which source you trust, this has been going on, in one…  Read More

Seed Vault of Svalbard

by Alexander Rose - Twitter: @zander on May 11th, 02007

  A little while ago the design for the Svalbard International Seed Vault was released (BBC article).  They are building a long term vault for seed stock preservation.  Interestingly they seem to have chosen the site mainly under the assumption that the planet will only get warmer in the next 200 years.  My understanding of…  Read More
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