Big Here, Long Now

The Long Now foundation (Jeff Bezos and others) undertakes projects that are beyond the lifespan of a peoples or culture. The idea is that in some future time someone could receive knowledge from today the way we received from the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians.

A few of their projects include a clock that will run for 10,000 years, ways to warn future humans of nuclear waste disposal sites, and a library of books required to restart civilization after an apocalypse (which is housed in The Interval cafe in Fort Mason, San Francisco)

In Santa Cruz I found a book by Stewart Brand (The Whole Earth Catalog guy) where he talks about the development of the Long Now foundation, and in one section he explains where the name comes from.

The musician Brian Eno wrote: “more and more I find I want to be living in a Big Here and a Long Now… a justification for the type of music I was starting to make at the time -

a music which was sort of suspended in an eternal present tense.” (which became the genre of Ambient music)