The Long Now Foundation

The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996 to develop the Clock and Library projects, as well as to become the seed of a very long-term cultural institution. The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide a counterpoint to today's accelerating culture and help make long-term thinking more common. We hope to foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.

The Long Now Foundation operates several projects that we occasionally hire or seek volunteers for. These include:

Revive & Restore

Revive & Restore’s mission is to enhance biodiversity through the genetic rescue of endangered and extinct species. The fields of molecular biology and conservation biology are intersecting.  New genetic tools and new collaborative projects in genomic conservation are emerging every month. Revive & Restore is pressing ahead with a variety of genetic rescue projects with endangered and extinct species — sometimes directly, sometimes as convener, sometimes as preliminary funder, or all three.

The Rosetta Project

The Rosetta Project is The Long Now Foundation's first exploration into very long-term archiving. It serves as a means to focus attention on the problem of digital obsolescence, and ways we might address that problem through creative archival storage methods.

PanLex

PanLex aims to help you express any lexical concept (such as “democracy”, “elongate”, “à la carte”, or “Africa”) in any language. To achieve this ambitious goal, we are consulting thousands of dictionaries and other knowledge sources to build an open-source database. It already documents a billion lexical translations, from which billions more can be derived.