The Earthshot Prize

The Long Now Foundation is a nonprofit organization founded in 1996 by Stewart Brand, Brian Eno, and colleagues with the mission of fostering long-term thinking and responsibility. Its projects include the 10,000 Year Clock being built inside a mountain in West Texas, the Rosetta Project archiving human languages for future generations, and a regular seminar series featuring some of the most significant long-horizon thinkers of our time. Long Now operates on the premise that civilization's most dangerous pathologies stem from the shortening of institutional and individual time horizons.

Long Now uses five-digit years — writing 02025 rather than 2025 — as a daily practice of temporal humility, a reminder that the present moment is embedded in a much longer story. Its membership community spans scientists, technologists, artists, entrepreneurs, and policymakers united by a commitment to thinking and acting on timescales beyond the quarterly and the electoral.

The Long Now Foundation's contribution to the transition is conceptual and cultural. It provides the intellectual infrastructure for thinking seriously about responsibility across centuries — the kind of thinking that family stewardship requires but that almost no institutional framework supports. For families managing assets, land, and values across generations, Long Now's framing of the present as a brief moment in a much longer story is not a philosophical position but a practical governance orientation.