The Long Now Foundation

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The Long Now Foundation is a corporation founded in 1996. American Foundation.

The foundation holds two monthly series of events. Recordings of the Long Now Seminars and Conversations at The Interval are both made available as podcasts .

aims

Inspired by the general mood in the run-up to the turn of the millennium, the founders were convinced that it would be good for the long-term survival of mankind if their field of vision really extends far into the future. The Long Now Foundation will carry this awareness in the general public. Background is u. a. the consideration that we know architectural and written evidence that is thousands of years old, but that products of our current culture will probably not survive such periods of time. For example, the members of the Foundation believe that current digital information storage methods are far from being robust enough for long periods of time and that consideration should be given to developing permanent methods and media for the preservation of human knowledge.

Members of The Long Now Foundation include Danny Hillis , the creator of the Connection Machine , Stewart Brand, and Brian Eno .

A novel by Neal Stephenson , Anathem , is influenced by the ideas of The Long Now Foundation .

Projects

Several projects are already in the works, including:

The 10,000 year clock

The project goal of the 10,000-year-clock ( The Clock of the Long Now ) is the construction of a movement that achieves a functional life of ten thousand years with as little human intervention as possible. To do this, it must be made of durable materials and easy to repair. At the same time, the watch should represent the lowest possible material value, in the hope that future civilizations will have no interest in looting and destroying the watch. Your energy source should be renewable, but it should not be able to be stolen. A prototype that is a candidate for the clock was launched on December 31, 1999 and is now in the Science Museum in London . The Foundation hopes to build the final clock near Ely , Nevada someday.

In order to avoid any difficulties at the turn of the millennium ( deca-millennium bug ), the Long Now Foundation advocates noting years with a leading zero (the year of foundation is given as 01996).

Rosetta

The Rosetta Project aims to preserve a thousand languages ​​that are believed to otherwise become extinct within the next hundred years. This includes many languages ​​with only thousands or fewer native speakers. The Foundation sees other languages ​​at risk due to the growing influence of the English language as an international means of communication in business and culture. Text samples of the languages ​​to be preserved should be written on a nickel-alloyed disk two inches in diameter. A "Version 1.0" of the disc was completed in autumn 2002.

See also

literature

  • Stewart Brand: The ticking of the long now: time and responsibility at the beginning of the new millennium. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2000, ISBN 3-518-41150-0 .
  • Vera Fischer: From the long now: a media-philosophical journey through time to the Long Now Foundation. transcript, Bielefeld 2017, ISBN 978-3-8376-3728-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. See the explanations on the Long Now project website .
  2. See the explanations on the Rosetta project website .