The Long Now Foundation

The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996* to develop the The Clock of the Long Now, an icon to help focus society’s attention on long-term thinking, and The Rosetta Project, an ongoing documentation of the world’s endangered languages, as well as to become the seed of a very long-term cultural institution.

The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide counterpoint to today's "faster/cheaper" mind set and promote "slower/better" thinking. We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.

Our Museum & Store in Fort Mason Center contains several prototypes of the monument scale, all-mechanical Clock designed to keep time for 10,000 years. Also on display is the micro- etched Rosetta Disk which displays over 13,000 pages of linguistic material on a 2.5" metal disk. The Long Now Museum & Store is free and open to the public seven days a week; see our website for the hours.

We also produce a monthly lecture series, the Seminars About Long-term Thinking, featuring speakers such as Michael Pollan, Stewart Brand, Esther Dyson, Saul Griffith and many more, each exploring their ideas through the lens of long-term thinking.

* The Long Now Foundation uses five-digit dates, the extra zero is to solve the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in about 8,000 years.