Nehaveigur

Before I traveled from Cambridge to San Francisco for the first time to do research on mutant yeast, a friend said: “While you’re there, you should check out the Long Now Foundation”. This was in 2008. Once I had settled into my lab at the brand new UCSF Mission Bay campus and my room on Parnassus Avenue, I looked them up and saw that they were going to have an event at Fort Mason. I went there. I don’t remember what the talk was about, but I do remember that I arrived early, and that they offered complimentary sparkling wine and that I got to talk with a friendly doctor who was interested in my research, and I remember wise, lank Stewart Brand on stage, and how thoughtful the audience questions were,  and how I thought, “those are my people”.

I’ve now been a member of the Long Now Foundation for what seems like a long time, but which is short compared to the timescales the foundation encourages us to think in. They are dedicated to the long term, by which they mean not the next 10 years, but the next 10,000 years. They host talks like that first one I went to when George W. Bush was still president, they operate a bar at Fort Mason that I keep returning to and they have several projects, the most inspiring of which is the giant clock they’ve constructed inside a Texas mountain, designed to keep time for the next 10,000 years.

Only the worthiest objects, organizations and ideas endure. We don’t agree on the best music, or the best book, or the best ideology of the present day, but from a distance of 100 years or more, when our passions have cooled and we look back, we will see better. Time is the ultimate arbiter of merit. What’s more, considering the long term is soothing by putting the issues of the day, grating as they are, into much-needed perspective.