The Long Now

Lately while working on various projects I have been listening to the downloadable lectures from the Long Now Foundation.

The Long Now Foundation’s mission is to get humanity to think bigger: to have a “here” that’s bigger than the four walls of your apartment and a “now” that’s longer than this evening or this week or this year.

The lectures are superb background material for flying on airplanes or tinkering at home. The Long Now foundation is best known for the 10,000 year clock, but personally I like the lectures that make you think on a timescale of hundreds of thousands of years.

Don’t miss former astronaut Rusty Schweickart’s lecture, The Asteroid Threat Over The Next 100,000 Years. Did you know that a 10km asteroid striking the earth — like the one that extincted the dinosaurs — would not only cause a tremendous seismic event for thousands of miles in every direction but would also shoot thousands of massive obelisk-like rocks into the air which would within two hours rain down over every part of the planet, burning white hot on reentry and raising the air temperature to 1500 degrees Celsius?

The top three meters of all the oceans would boil off.

Yeah. Good stuff.