Long Now Foundation

Coordinates: 37°48′23″N 122°25′56″W / 37.8064591°N 122.4321258°W / 37.8064591; -122.4321258
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

The Long Now Foundation
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, is an American

Roman numerals.

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

Projects

The foundation has several ongoing projects, including a 10,000-year clock known as the Clock of the Long Now, the Rosetta Project, the Long Bet Project, the open source Timeline Tool (also known as Longviewer), the Long Server and a monthly seminar series.[2]

Clock of the Long Now

Main article: Clock of the Long Now

The purpose of the Clock of the Long Now is to construct a

Science Museum in London. The Foundation is currently building the Clock of the Long Now in Van Horn, Texas.[5]

Rosetta Project

Main article: Rosetta Project

The Rosetta Project is an effort to preserve all

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.[7]

Long Bet Project

The Long Bet Project was created by The Long Now Foundation to propose and keep track of bets on long-term events and stimulate discussion about the future. The Long Now Foundation describes The Long Bet Project as a "public arena for enjoyably competitive predictions, of interest to society, with philanthropic money at stake."[8] One example bet would be on whether people will regularly fly on pilotless aircraft by 2030.

Bets that were resolved in 2010 included predictions about

quantum computers.[9]

Seminars about long-term thinking

In November 2003, The Long Now Foundation began a series of monthly seminars about long-term thinking (SALT) with a lecture by

SETI, and the nature of time.[citation needed
]

Long Now Foundation debate format

As part of the seminar series, there are occasionally debates on areas of long term concern, such as synthetic biology[12] or "historian vs futurist on human progress".[13]

The point of Long Now debates is not win-lose. The point is public clarity and deep understanding, leading to action graced with nuance and built-in adaptivity, with long-term responsibility in mind.[12]

In operation, "There are two debaters, Alice and Bob. Alice takes the podium, makes her argument. Then Bob takes her place, but before he can present his counter-argument, he must summarize Alice's argument to her satisfaction — a demonstration of respect and good faith. Only when Alice agrees that Bob has got it right is he permitted to proceed with his own argument — and then, when he's finished, Alice must summarize it to his satisfaction."[14]

Mutual understanding is enforced by a reciprocal requirement to describe the other's argument to their satisfaction, with the goal being more understanding after the event than there was beforehand.[citation needed]

The Interval

The Interval bar in Fort Mason, San Francisco

Opened in June 2014,[15] The Interval was designed as social space in the foundation's Fort Mason facility in San Francisco. 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. The Interval includes lounge furniture, artifacts from the foundation's projects, a library, audio/video equipment, and a bar serving tea and coffee during the day, and cocktails during the night. In October 2014 The Interval was named by Thrillist as one of the best new bars in America.[16]

Manual for Civilization

The Manual for Civilization a living, crowd-curated library of 3,500 books with purpose create a record of humanity and technology for their 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]

PanLex

PanLex is a linguistic project whose stated mission is to overcome language barriers to human rights, information, and opportunities.[18] Started in 2004 at the University of Washington’s Turing Center, the project sought to build software that would enable all humans to use their native language to share information, ideas, and emotions with the rest of the world. This research produced a lexical database (TransGraph) designed to support panlingual translation, and a more powerful extension of it (PanDictionary) based on intelligent automated inference.[19] After this work demonstrated the feasibility of the concept, the PanDictionary became the PanLex Database, and PanLex has continued to enlarge, enrich, and modify it by consulting multilingual dictionary and dictionary-like sources. In 2012, PanLex became a project of The Long Now Foundation.[2]

In popular culture

January 07003 / Bell Studies for The Clock of The Long Now was released in 2003.[20] English songwriter Owen Tromans released a single entitled "Long Now", inspired by the foundation, in 2013.[21]

Board members

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

Emeritus members

See also

References

  1. ^ "About Long Now". The Long Now Foundation. Retrieved December 13, 2011.
  2. ^ a b "Projects". The Long Now Foundation. Retrieved December 13, 2011.
  3. ^ Chabon, Michael (January 2006). "The Omega Glory" (PDF). Details. Archived from the original (PDF) on November 3, 2010. Retrieved December 13, 2011.
  4. ^ Hills, Danny. "The Millennium Clock". Wired. Retrieved December 13, 2011.
  5. ^ "Prototype 1–10,000 Year Clock". The Long Now Foundation. December 31, 1999. Retrieved December 13, 2011.
  6. ^ "The Rosetta Project". The Long Now Foundation. Retrieved December 13, 2011.
  7. ^ "Macro to micro etching". The Long Now Blog. November 3, 2008. Retrieved December 13, 2011.
  8. ^ "Long Bets – The Arena for Accountable Predictions". The Long Now Foundation. Retrieved December 13, 2011.
  9. ^ Rose, Alexander (December 31, 2009). "Long Bets in 02010". The Long Now Foundation. Retrieved December 13, 2011.
  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. ^ a b Endy, Drew; Thomas, Jim. "Synthetic Biology Debate – The Long Now". longnow.org. Retrieved June 24, 2017.
  13. ^ Ferguson, Niall; Schwartz, Peter. "Historian vs. Futurist on Human Progress – The Long Now". longnow.org. Retrieved June 24, 2017.
  14. ^ Sloan, Robin (September 5, 2014). "The steel man of #GamerGate". medium.com. Retrieved June 24, 2017.
  15. ^ "New York Times Sunday Magazine". New York Times. June 12, 2014. Retrieved June 12, 2014.
  16. ^ "The Interval Named one of the 21 best new bars in the America". Thrillist. November 23, 2014. Retrieved November 23, 2014.
  17. ^ Kabil, Ahmed (April 20, 2018). "What Books Would You Choose to Restart Civilization?". Medium. Long Now Foundation. Retrieved November 9, 2023.
  18. ^ "PanLex". The Long Now Foundation. Retrieved April 8, 2019.
  19. ^ "Utilika Foundation". Utilika Foundation. Retrieved April 8, 2019.
  20. ^ "January 07003". Enoshop.co.uk. Retrieved February 20, 2014.
  21. ^ "Long Now, by Owen Tromans". Sacred Geometry. Retrieved February 3, 2020.
  22. ^ "Board – The Long Now". The Long Now Foundation. Retrieved February 2, 2020.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Long Now Foundation.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Long_Now_Foundation&oldid=1218963537"