Long Now Foundation

Challenges that feel impossible to tackle within a single human lifetime become conceivable when you have a longer timescale to work with. Today is a day to take the long view. Join our community of long-term thinking, 02026 is going to be a good one. na2.hubs.ly/H02frJ50

Wow, thank you Long Now community, all events for the remainder of 02026 are sold out!  If you couldn’t get in, a reminder: Newsletter subscribers get ticket announcements first. Sign up here: na2.hubs.ly/H08SdCf0 Plus, members get two complimentary tickets to all Talks at the Cowell Theater. Next year’s Talk lineup is extraordinary, so now is a great time to join: na2.hubs.ly/H08SdCg0

Ahead of Entangled Intelligences, revisit Nina Miolane's extraordinary conversation with Entangled speaker Claire Isabel Webb on the search for unifying principles of intelligence in both brains and machines. Read it on Long Now Ideas here: na2.hubs.ly/H08T46k0

[Tomorrow] Get ready! Entangled Intelligences hits the stage Tues 11/10. This is not a traditional Long Now Talk. Expect multimodal presentations, live music, immersive visuals — and many more surprises.  This event is sold out, but you can tune in from anywhere in the world via the livestream: na2.hubs.ly/H08SdtP0 Presented in partnership with the @templeton_fdn

Long-time Long Now collaborator @JonathonKeats explores time beyond the human scale in “Chronotope,” a new group exhibition opening next week at Moderism. His piece, Arboreal Tempo, reconfigures a standard metronome to measure time at the vastly slower, deliberate pace of a tree. If you are in the Bay Area, attend the opening reception to see it in person: Thursday, Nov 12 | 6:00–8:00 PM @ Modernism | 724 Ellis St, San Francisco modernisminc.com/exhibitions…

How do we make the unfathomable scales of planetary and cosmic history tangible? Artist and Long Now Council member Katie Paterson has spent her career translating the vast dimensions of deep time into visceral experiences. Her first solo exhibition in China, Across Deep Time, is now open at UCCA Dune in Aranya, and it is a triumph. The exhibition convenes 21 of her works showcasing everything from Earth’s deep past to beauty in the outer reaches of the cosmos. Here are a few of our favorites from the show, on view until April 02027. Silva (2024) — a branch formed from the ashes of 10,000 tree species, condensing the enormity of the world's forests into a single, fragile object Totality (2016) — 10,000 images of total solar eclipses, daguerreotypes to modern telescopic photography, each image made into a reflective facet on a giant mirror ball Vapour (2026) — an atmospheric sculpture composed of 1,000 water sources from across the planet (ice cores, aquifers, monsoon rains) released as a shifting fog for visitors to breathe and inhabit Congratulations Katie! More on the exhibition here: na2.hubs.ly/H08MhJN0

An important discussion is happening around the death of the leap second: International metrologists voted to halt worldwide usage of the leap second convention and adopt a continuous atomic time scale instead. This will mean civil time will drift away from astronomical solar time by up to an hour over the centuries ahead. The discussion brings long-term thinking, civilizational planning, and planetary-scale cooperation all to the forefront, which we love. Farewell to the little leap second, and welcome to the future leap hour. It’s all a poetic reminder that human technology is still tethered to the messy, irregular, wobbly planet we all inhabit.