- By Laura McClure
- Jan 2, 2026 (nobhillgazette.com)
Deep inside a mountain in the high desert of West Texas, a timepiece hundreds of feet tall is designed to last for the next 10 millennia. This 10,000-year clock is possibly the best-known project of The Long Now Foundation, a San Francisco nonprofit that champions long-term thinking. “Long Now operates within the context of the next 10,000 years and the last 10,000 years,” says Long Now Executive Director Rebecca Lendl. “We believe this kind of thinking is particularly critical for times like these, when we’re living in an increasing sense of disorder — a kind of shift in our underlying systems and structures. We’re in a time of great acceleration, and really taking a moment to make sense of the current moment within the context of the ancient past and the distant future helps us imagine new possibilities based on what humans have been capable of over time.”
Founded in 1996 by futurist Stewart Brand, musician Brian Eno and inventor Danny Hillis, Long Now brings this heady concept to life via projects including Long Now Talks (a lecture series), Rosetta (an archive of 1,500+ languages), Long Now Ideas (a living library and digital publication) and The Interval: an award-winning bar, cafe and community space next to Greens Restaurant in Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture that features art, craft cocktails, artisan coffee and tea, a floor-to-ceiling library and provocative exhibits on long-term thinking. “I think of [Long Now] as an expansive, decades-long book club where people can come together around the big ideas of our times,” says Lendl.
Talks happen live once a month at the nearby Cowell Theater, with after-parties at The Interval, where people tend to stay late into the night discussing related ideas. “Our talks and events are truly interdisciplinary, so on any given night we’ll be covering philosophy and the social sciences or the development of frontier technologies and AI, economics, art, poetry, deep time, nature and ecology — or the spaces in between,” says Lendl. Long Bets, another project, uses public wagers to create a slow record of predictions about the future.
Interested in supporting the foundation? There are several ways to do so. Donations, of course, are welcome. But the best way to get involved is to sign up for an annual membership, attend talks, spend time at The Interval and generally wrestle with the ideas presented by the foundation. There’s no better time than now. longnow.org
