Why Long Now

Long Now has done this before, in the opposite direction.

Revive & Restore was incubated here and released: a project about the deep past of life on Earth, about lineages time had closed. Alien Worlds is the same institutional shape pointed the other way — the deep future, and the elsewhere, of life.

The hard cases

Lab 001.3, Interspecies Protocols, launches early 02027. Every case available to it is terrestrial: counterparties who share our biochemistry, our selection history, our planet. Alien Worlds manufactures the hard cases. If interspecies protocols are to be protocols and not etiquette, they must be tested against something genuinely not us.

The addressee

The Rosetta Disk solved the substrate of a ten-thousand-year message and left the addressee unexamined. It assumes a reader who can decode us. SETI is that problem rotated from time into space, and it has spent sixty years learning how badly the assumption holds.

An index for deep time

Pace layers is a diagram. Deep time is a feeling the Clock induces, and induces beautifully. Assembly theory makes depth in time an intrinsic, measurable property of physical objects. The interior structure of the ribosome has changed less than most rocks on this planet in four billion years. The lineage of sharks is older than Saturn's rings.

Earth has had enough time to build a memory that includes life, and life includes technologies. That is Long Now's thesis — that a civilization is a memory-bearing object — restated as physics, with an index.