Long Now purchased the Nevada land in 1999 with donations from founders of Lotus Software, Sun Microsystems and. Other key Long Now figures include the parallel computing inventor Danny Hillis, the ambient electronic musician Brian Eno, the founding editor of Wired Kevin Kelly, the corporate futurist Peter Schwartz and philanthropist-journalist-investor Esther Dyson, the daughter of mathematical physicist Freeman Dyson. The Long Now Foundation was established in San Francisco at the peak of that boom with a mission to “foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.” Its first president was Stewart Brand - the former editor of the Whole Earth Catalog and an early pioneer of 1960s counterculture and Silicon Valley cyberculture. Our gathering was enabled by a remarkably brief slice of space-time: the sudden generation of wealth during Silicon Valley’s personal computer and internet boom in the 1990s. Eating Korean barbecue and gluten-free mochi served to us by a “backcountry caterer” (“trip of self-reliance” appeared to be more of an ambition) we’d come to Nevada to contemplate humanity’s place within radically deep, planetary time horizons. All were staff of, donors to or active members in the Long Now community.
The clock of the long now license#
I’d embedded myself in the Long Now Foundation’s annual “trip of self-reliance,” hoping to gain an anthropological understanding of the staunch optimism of the organization’s leaders - their trust that humans will still exist 10 millennia from now - and what that can offer at a moment of political disillusionment, ecological degradation and intergenerational mistrust.Īt the campfire, I met a champion BattleBots roboticist, a screamo musician turned autodidact, a sailor with a Coast Guard license to captain 100-ton ships, a University of Nevada ecohydrologist, a former scenario planning consultant, two friendly dogs, a wealthy investor, an academic “experiential futurist,” a former Wired journalist and multiple programmers fond of reminiscing about Burning Man. But it was the San Francisco Bay Area that never felt closer.
I had driven over 500 miles east and north from Los Angeles, along what a 1986 issue of Life magazine called “the loneliest road in America,” Nevada’s Highway 50. “Pondering this vast desert landscape,” I wrote in my notebook, “can grind up one’s short-term predicaments into the shifting sands of deep time.” Nearby were ancient clonal aspen groves, a melting Pleistocene alpine glacier, 3,000-year-old Indigenous cave paintings, Cambrian trilobite fossils and the “forgotten Winchester” - a rifle manufactured in 1882 and discovered leaning against a tree in 2014, where it had been mysteriously abandoned perhaps a century before. I tried to take in the region’s temporal immensity. Washington’s limestone cliffs to a deep orange.
Old bullet holes in a rusty, abandoned truck. Sheep skull fragments and rusty cans left behind by bygone ranchers. Sagebrush, Rocky Mountain juniper trees, Jerusalem crickets, sage grouse. WHITE PINE COUNTY, Nevada - A dusty field in the high desert of eastern Nevada’s Snake Range.
His book “Deep Time Reckoning” (MIT Press) is an ethnographic study of how Finland’s nuclear waste repository “safety case” experts grapple with distant future ecosystems and the limits of imagination. Vincent Ialenti is a Berggruen Institute fellow at the University of Southern California.
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