“Are you sure you are really interested in the preservation of the human race, once you and all the people you know are no longer living?” asked Swiss writer and architect Max Frisch in his Diary 1966–1971. The founders of the Long Now Foundation would answer with a resounding “Yes”.
The foundation, whose board members include computer scientist Danny Hillis, writer Stewart Brand and musician Brian Eno, follows the ambitious aim – in times of short legislative periods, quarterly reports, changing fashions and the technological rush hour – of stimulating passion for long term thinking and expanding horizons to the next millennia, because they believe thinking far beyond our limited lifespan is essential for the survival of humankind. Our collected knowledge must be secured for future generations and the earth and its resources require careful maintenance. Of course, climate change does not take place in one or two years – something like that takes centuries. Nature teaches us patience. We people, on the other hand, are impatient.
The Clock Of The Long Now
The foundation was started in 01996. The extra zero is not a typo, but rather a sign that the clocks tick differently here. Their timing takes millennia into consideration. It was this attitude that led the foundation to develop a monumental clock: The Clock of the Long Now. It is designed to tick just once a year, chime once each century and work for a full 10,000 years without major repair work. That would make it twice as old as the Pyramids are now! The clock, which is still being built deep under the Texan mountains, is a true monument for the future, because the clockwork also sets our thought processes moving: will there actually be people to experience the moment it stops ticking? If so, what will their life be like?
In order for future generations to learn from the successes and failures of humanity, the Long Now Foundation strives to preserve this knowledge for tens of thousands of years. It was for this reason that the Internet Archive was created. It is a digital world library, whose algorithms scan the World Wide Web and store everything there is to be found. It now as of February 2025 contains 70 petabytes (equal to 70,000,000 gigabytes) of texts, images, videos and websites.
Long Now Foundation's The Rosetta Project
But the medium used to store the knowledge is also ephemeral. Even now, a floppy disk won’t fit into a Mac. Programs and formats from the early days of computers no longer work. CDs are already useless, just like USB sticks and hard drives. While people in times gone by scratched texts into stone that survived centuries, current world knowledge crumbles before our very eyes, despite the flood of information. This is because today’s products and digital storage media are not robust enough. Alarming: without realizing it, we are steering our way towards an epoch of forgetfulness. With this in mind, the foundation has developed a storage medium called Rosetta: a nickel plate that can last several thousand years, on which 13,000 text pages that can be read with a microscope are engraved. The first versions already exist: 1,500 languages and information on their syntax and pronunciation are engraved on them, because the Long Now Foundation assumes that 50 to 90 % of the languages will disappear in the course of the next century.
The foundation is willing to bet on it. For real. They have started a betting platform, the Long Bets Project, where each individual considers what the future will look like, in order to make bets on it. For example: “Want to bet that ... planes will fly without pilots in 2030?” Some of the guesses have already passed their use by date. For instance, it was predicted that the last source of oil would run dry in 2010. Fortunately, that bet was lost. The predictions are designed to help people think a bit further ahead along the path of humanity and open our eyes to the future, so that we can act intelligently and sustainably. That is what the Long Now Foundation wants for the future.
