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In a remote corner of the driest state in the country, Anne Heggli's team has been keeping watch over some of Earth’s oldest beings. Since 02012, Heggli’s NevCAN network has recorded conditions at the Nevada Bristlecone Preserve every eight minutes. The result is more than 120 million data points and a high-resolution portrait of how a bristlecone pine thrives. Paleoclimatologist Adam Csank showed how bristlecone microcores reveal the droughts and floods these trees survived long before us, a history that fine-tunes models of what's ahead. Artist and philosopher Jonathon Keats went further. “The most accurate clock,” he said, “is a tree.” His monumental artwork Centuries of the Bristlecone keeps bristlecone time, a clock calibrated to the trees' own growth over millennia. Together, Heggli, Keats and Csank made the case for long science: patient, continuous observation that will help us answer future urgent questions. “Data at this resolution,” Csank said, “is like a Rosetta Stone” for understanding nature’s resilience. At fourteen years young, the bristlecone record is just beginning, Heggli said, but it already holds the key to questions like these: How will bristlecones adapt? What happens when the droughts and floods they've weathered for millennia arrive faster and more frequently? “We can't answer the questions if we're not watching,” said Csank. “We are the stewards of this data,” Heggli concluded. “This is why we need long science.”

Today, we’re going back in the Long Now archives for a talk from artist and experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats, originally recorded on Apr 7, 02015. You’ll hear his original pitch for the monumental art project Centuries of the Bristlecone, launched at the Nevada Museum of Art earlier this year. Join Long Now Talks on Sep 29, 02026 for Art & Science at the Nevada Bristlecone Preserve, which will feature an update from Keats along with hydrometeorologist and Long Now Research Fellow Anne Heggli and paleoclimatologist and dendrochronologist Adam Csank sharing their work on our Mt. Washington property in Eastern Nevada. More information and tickets here: https://longnow.org/talks/02026-heggli-keats-csank/

In his Talk, poet-philosopher Bayo Akomolafe presented a riveting critique of linear time, and gave a persuasive invitation to step sideways, to slow down, to notice the cracks in our temporal systems. Through Yoruba cosmology, slave ship histories, and decolonization strategies, he invited us to look at the space between the tick and the tock, to sit in the uncomfortable and incomplete. Only here, in what Akomolafe calls “parapolitics of the untimely,” can we ask, “What does untimeliness make possible?”

**This evening is made possible with generous support from the John Templeton Foundation.** How do the binary electronic signals of neurons give rise to subjective experience? Mathematician and machine learning researcher Nina Miolane joined science historian Claire Isabel Webb to explore this question from an unexpected direction: geometry. Plotting the collective firing rate of neurons in 3D space, Miolane's Geometric Intelligence Lab at UC Santa Barbara found the result created a torus. When they trained an artificial neural network on the same task, it converged on the same shape. Miolane posits that biological and artificial intelligence may be reaching for a universal computational design. In this fascinating conversation, Webb and Miolane discussed how geometry is the most ancient branch of physics; it is the language we use to describe the curvature of spacetime and the General Relativity of the universe. Might it also map the universe inside us?

What if we redefined “profit” as maximizing human flourishing? Eric Ries has seen the corrosive effects of shareholder primacy at every company he’s worked with. Mission-driven companies, however, are the outliers: demonstrating stronger profits, better talent, and deeper loyalty. So why don't we build differently? In the long arc of economic history, our current definitions of profit and value are relatively new, held in place by normative consensus. But we can flip the script. By using what Ries calls “mission transmission,” we can build companies around a coherent set of values, where profit becomes the natural extension of those values, rather than the only goal. “Start with the thing you have the most agency over," he said. "You can decide the purpose of your work.” We built this system, Ries urged, so we can rebuild it better.

The ocean is not empty. It is a vast storage facility of memory agents. Ocean bodies use the chemical signatures of seawater for memory and intelligence in ways we can barely imagine. In her Talk, Melody Jue said our struggle to understand ocean memory comes from our terrestrial bias. This bias shapes what we try to protect and the technologies we develop. We must, she said, “deterritorialize the sensorium.” For example, the vertical depths of the Pacific carry thermal signatures of ancient ice ages. Arctic glaciers are laced with matrices of microbes retaining genes from before the Great Oxidation Event. Whale songs are also memory agents, passed down through generations, preserving the cultural histories of the planet's largest creatures. Corals hold memory, too. Those exposed earlier to changing ocean pH are more resilient to acidification. Meanwhile, human cultural memory is in danger of disappearing alongside these ecosystems. Jue pointed to Indigenous and traditional environmental knowledge at risk, like the Ama divers’ fishing tradition, as abalone populations drop. To better translate the ocean sensorium, Jue worked with interdisciplinary artists, musicians, divers, and researchers to develop soundscapes that help us “smell” with our ears, remapping chemosensation through synesthesia. Don’t miss the moment in the Talk where she plays two original music pieces that use the density and flow of sound to mimic chemical gradients of seawater. “The ocean teaches us humility,” Jue concluded. “It makes us confront our preconceptions about the planet and sensation.”

"The world is terrible, and the world is better," Stefan Sagmeister said. "Both can be true." It all depends on perspective. In his Long Now Talk, Finally, something good, Sagmeister urged us to zoom out. The faster the news cycle spins, and the more we scroll, the more we catastrophize. Meanwhile, the things that improve tend to do so slowly and quietly. In this visually stunning talk, Sagmeister takes us on a journey through his body of work, transforming long-term data on human progress into striking works of art.

Indy Johar pointed to the first photographs of the whole Earth taken from space. “This was the moment the planet became self-aware." This planetary consciousness came with new responsibility, he argued. The task before us is not simply to survive, but to reimagine civilization as a planetary project. As climate and ecological instability creates extreme whiplash effects, we will find it increasingly difficult to predict, prepare, or govern at a global scale. And as artificial intelligence reshapes labor and value, Johar urged us all to reevaluate what it means to be human. So what does that require in a time of such intense, cascading volatility? Indy’s answer is civilizational optionality: the breathing room that keeps futures open when shocks compound and our fates are systematically coupled. As humans, we can't know everything — it's a cognitive impossibility. “But there is a beautiful liberation in accepting our partial knowing,” he said. Reframing this limitation as possibility opens us up to more curiosity and “ways of being that are about tenderness, tentativeness, and care.” Johar imagines a future that leverages human–machine systems that expand our civilizational capacity for complex discourse and problem solving. Intelligence, in this view, is a conversational field: a meta-capacity for coordination, dialogue, and collective sense-making across sectors, species, and systems. Climate cascades will not be local; our planetary fates are entangled. Meeting this reality demands an approach to civilization that is capable of responding to volatility and holding uncertainty. As Johar said with a smile: “It is time to have a f*****g worldview.”

Kate Crawford’s Long Now Talk traces an historical arc from Renaissance perspective to AI image models, illustrating how shifts in representational power shape empires, economies—even our shared sense of reality. During the talk, Crawford gives a tour through her detailed artwork Calculating Empires. Through examples ranging from Liebig’s critique of agriculture “robbing” soil nutrients, to Faraday’s latex insulation that devastated rubber forests, Crawford shows how technologies have long created “metabolic rifts”: systems that extract more than they regenerate.  Don't miss the closing Q&A, where host Kevin Kelly asks Crawford what responsible, non-extractive AI might look like.

What if the solutions to humanity’s greatest challenges — on Earth and beyond — have already been invented by nature? In this forward-looking talk, evolutionary biologist and astrobiologist Dr. Lynn Rothschild explores how life’s patterns, materials, and mechanisms, refined over billions of years, can serve as a blueprint for building better futures on Earth and other planets. Drawing on insights from deep time, Dr. Rothschild will open the doors to “nature’s hardware store” — a vast, largely untapped reservoir of biological strategies available to scientists, engineers, and innovators. From self-healing materials and bio-inspired architecture to regenerative systems for space exploration, she reveals how biology is shaping the frontiers of technology and inspiring bold, surprisingly practical solutions to complex problems. Grounded in astrobiology and evolutionary insight, this talk invites us to rethink innovation through the lens of life itself and to explore what’s possible when we tap into nature’s storehouse of intelligence to solve the challenges of tomorrow. Lynn J. Rothschild is a research scientist at NASA Ames and Adjunct Professor at Brown University and Stanford University working in astrobiology, evolutionary biology and synthetic biology. Rothschild's work focuses on the origin and evolution of life on Earth and in space, and in pioneering the use of synthetic biology to enable space exploration. From 2011 through 2019 Rothschild served as the faculty advisor of the award-winning Stanford-Brown iGEM (international Genetically Engineered Machine Competition) team, exploring innovative technologies such as biomining, mycotecture, BioWires, making a biodegradable UAS (drone) and an astropharmacy. Rothschild is a past-president of the Society of Protozoologists, fellow of the Linnean Society of London, The California Academy of Sciences and the Explorer’s Club and lectures and speaks about her work widely.

Blaise Agüera y Arcas’s talk took us on a journey through What is Intelligence?, his groundbreaking new work connecting the evolutionary dots between life, computation, and symbiogenesis. He explores how, in our symbiotic world, things combine to make larger things all the time. We might think of humanity in terms of the individual — but we're already part of everything we're creating, which is in turn co-creating us. In the story of technology and humanity, are we distinct from the technologies that we make? Agüera y Arcas' cuts through the essentialist dogma with a functionalist view: Biological computing — computation through DNA, RNA, and proteins — is not a strange outcropping of life but its very nature. Blaise Agüera y Arcas is a VP and Fellow at Google, where he is the CTO of Technology & Society and founder of Paradigms of Intelligence (Pi). Pi is an organization working on basic research in AI and related fields, especially the foundations of neural computing, active inference, sociality, evolution, and artificial life. During his tenure at Google, Blaise has innovated on-device machine learning for Android and Pixel; invented Federated Learning, an approach to decentralized model training that avoids sharing private data; and founded the Artists + Machine Intelligence program.

**Kim Carson's new book [_Inspired by Intelligence: From Burnout to Becoming_](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DJGYQHN6?ref=cm_sw_r_ffobk_cp_ud_dp_GRXNCCGS6G4C982ADDQD&ref_=cm_sw_r_ffobk_cp_ud_dp_GRXNCCGS6G4C982ADDQD&social_share=cm_sw_r_ffobk_cp_ud_dp_GRXNCCGS6G4C982ADDQD&bestFormat=true) is available May 1, 02026.** What if AI is not here actually to replace us, but to remind us who we actually are? That was the question at the heart of Kim Carson’s Long Now Talk. In _Inspired by Intelligence: Purpose and Creativity in the AI Era_, Carson challenged us to avoid the easy narratives of tech-driven utopia and dystopia, charting a course through those two extremes that made the case for AI not as a way to make humans unnecessary but to emphasize our most important creative capacities. In her talk, Carson drew on her experience working in AI at organizations like IBM, where she helped lead Watson Education, which helped connect educators in underserved communities to AI technology, in the name of facing down some of the wickedest problems in society. But she also drew on her own more personal engagement with AI, discussing at length the nuances of how she uses personalized versions of generative pre-trained transformers as collaborators and enablers for creativity. For Carson, AI is a sort of tool for thought — a mirror that we can use to re-inspire ourselves towards greater creativity. Accompanied by video art made using the SORA text-to-video model by Charles Lindsay, she made the case that AI could be used not just for automating labor but also for reclaiming human agency. That means using these new technological modes as enablers for human thought and action, while recognizing their gaps, too — the questions about ourselves that only we can answer, no matter how sophisticated our technology becomes. Throughout her talk, Carson expounded upon the power of vulnerability. The ability to use AI tools to help us reconnect with ourselves, to jar us into seeing our own identities and creative capacities in new lights, is one that will fundamentally help us change our world. In Carson’s view, vulnerability and creativity are the necessary precursors to any sort of technological innovation. As she ended her remarks, Kim made one final note on how we can make a better world collaboratively and creatively: our society does not need “more optimization, it needs more imagination.”

“What is life?” In her Long Now Talk, astrobiologist and theoretical physicist Sara Imari Walker explores the many dimensions of that seemingly simple question. Starting from the simplest precursors, Walker assembled a grand cathedral of meaning, tracing an arc across existence that linked the fundamentals of organic chemistry, the possibility space of lego bricks, and the materialist philosophy of Madonna. As the leader of one of the largest international theory groups in the origins of life and astrobiology, Walker has worked an interdisciplinary team of researchers to devise assembly theory: a theory of life and its origins that finds that life is the only way to create complex objects, and that the existence of complex objects is fundamentally and quantifiably rare. Assembly theory’s focus on complexity and countability allows astrobiologists like Walker to grapple with the sheer vastness of combinatorial space — the set of all things that could possibly exist. That set is vaster than the universe itself can hold, which, of course, raises a foundational question: if the universe cannot exhaust all possibilities of what can exist, what determines what actually exists, and what merely could exist? Assembly theory uses the concept of the "assembly index" to measure the complexity of objects in the universe, quantifying how many steps are required to build something — a molecule like ATP, the primary energy-carrier in cells, for example. The theory finds that items above a given assembly index of 15 cannot be produced repeatedly by any known process save for life itself — a complexity threshold governed by the size of the possibility space. Implied here is that matter itself holds information. Within the physical dimensions and history of any given object is a measure of the information required to construct it. Likewise, historical contingency matters: it determines what gets constructed within the space of all theoretically possible constructions. In Walker's words: "We are our history." Life is causal histories — lineages of propagating information. Assembly theory conceptualizes objects as entities defined by their possible formation histories, allowing a unified language for describing selection, evolution and the generation of novelty. Within assembly theory, the fundamental unit of life is not the cell, but the lineage.

As they look upon the United States of America in 02025, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson see a country wrought by a half-century of failed governance. They see states and cities theoretically committed to progressive futures instead bogged down in labyrinthine mires of process — a society stuck in low gear. Yet they also see opportunity to turn those failures on their heads, and to build a better society based around more responsive, efficient governance. This is the vision that animates _Abundance_, Klein and Thompson’s new book and the focus of their Long Now Talk, hosted by Michael Pollan and co-sponsored with Manny’s and City Arts & Lectures. Despite Long Now’s focus on long-term thinking — of counterbalancing civilization’s pathologically short attention span — there was much to appreciate in Klein and Thompson’s call for American governance to “rediscover speed as a progressive value.” In their wide-ranging discussion, the two authors made the case for a vision of liberalism that builds, both for its own sake and as a bulwark against reactionary right-wing movements that have capitalized on its current shortcomings. Klein and Thompson spent much of their conversation diagnosing the precise ways in which American governance has become bogged down. They identified a set of breakdowns in the social contract ranging from the overly-restrictive barriers to building housing and green infrastructure to the utterly inadequate governmental support given to technological development and scientific discovery. On the topic of scientific research, they spoke of the value of long-term science, noting that vital discoveries like penicillin, mRNA vaccines, and GLP-1s all benefited from the long-term investment that the private sector rarely provides. At the close of the conversation, Pollan thanked Klein and Thompson for providing “not empty hope” but a vision “with a real path in front of it.” In their talk, Klein and Thompson didn’t just outline that path — they made clear the stakes of moving down it. We do not, as they argued, have the “luxury of time.” In order to build the abundant, progressive society that they envision, we must abandon “learned helplessness” and commit to building it with all necessary urgency and focus.

Stephen Heintz and Kim Stanley Robinson say we live in an “Age of Turbulence.” Looking around our geopolitical situation, it’s easy to see what they mean. Faced with the ever-growing threat of climate change, the looming potential breakdown of the post-01945 international order, and the ambiguous prospects of rapid technological changes in fields like AI, biotechnology, and geoengineering, it is clear that we need new answers to new challenges. Stephen Heintz, a Public policy expert and president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF), and Kim Stanley Robinson, one of the most acclaimed science fiction authors writing today, work in very different fields. But each of them in his own way has sketched out a vision of what we must do to face down the intersecting crises of our time: While their methods may differ, they align on their conclusions. In their Long Now Talk, Heintz and Robinson propose what they refer to as _A Logic For The Future_ — a new path for international relations in the face of the chaos of our current age. Over the course of their conversation, Stephen and Stan drew on a wide variety of historical examples to contextualize our seemingly unprecedented geopolitical moment. In all of these case studies — from the writing of the Atlantic Charter in the darkest days of World War II to the fraught deal-making and relationship-building that allowed for the signing of the Iran Nuclear deal in 02015 — the two focused on the power of human-driven, almost utopian visions of the future as tools for building a better world. Now, in a moment of geopolitical uncertainty and internal democratic crisis, Stephen and Stan see space for the kinds of utopian imagination and creativity that were so solely missed in prior moments of flux and chaos. Long-term thinking is key to this kind utopian thinking. In Stan’s words, the “optimistic” possibilities of long-term thinking are not just useful in dreaming up a better future. They’re “reinvigorating in how we address the problems we face on a day-to-day basis.”