This Long Now Lab invites you to submit a concept for a new way of marking, experiencing, or making sense of time. This Lab is open to everyone, from precocious kindergarteners to prestigious watchmakers, from engineers to essayists to experimental artists. Reviewed by leading artists, philosophers, and technologists, the top 25 most compelling concepts will be included in a Long Now print book and digital anthology, added to the permanent collection of The Long Now Foundation library and archive. We will additionally select the top three concepts for follow-on investment and development into a working prototype.

Challenge

In 01999, Long Now cofounder Stewart Brand wrote, “Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span.” Today that feels truer than ever as social media algorithms, digital notifications, news feeds, financial transactions, and agentic workflows slice our days into ever more urgent microseconds.

In this accelerating era, we are seeking novel concepts for time — alternative tempos that might help humanity reorient our thinking, behavior, and decision-making for the long term. Imagine not just new clocks, but new time standards, measuring frameworks, or other experiments that provide a different way of relating to the past, the future, and the present pace layers of civilization.

Inspiration

Our models of time dictate how we live. Many early civilizations experienced time as cyclical, mythic, and sacred. Before reliable pendulum clocks were invented, people told time by measuring the position of the sun in the sky. Clock time moved us away from this planetary connection, abstracting time into discrete, measurable units.

For three decades, Long Now has sparked public imagination around long-term thinking through projects like our 10,000-year clocks, Jonathon Keats’ Centuries of the Bristlecone, and the adoption of The Long Now Zero (it’s 02026, not 2026). We want to hear your ideas for how to further evolve our sense of time.

Some examples of ideas that have reoriented our sense of time include:

• Long Now Council Member Katie Paterson’s The Future Library project, which commissions writing to be opened 100 years from now, beyond the author’s lifetime.
• The concept of “dog years”, bridging the gap between human and canine companion life cycles.
• The Cosmic Calendar, which compresses billions of years into one calendar year and demonstrates when humanity showed up in the evolutionary lineage.
• Blockchains, which provide “sovereign time” independent of third-party interference.
• The Doomsday Clock, which acts as a metric for existential risk.

Review Panel

Your concepts will be reviewed by a panel of interdisciplinary experts in long-term thinking, art, and technology.

Project Milestones

• June 5, 02026: Deadline to apply
• July 02026: Review and selection
• August 02026: Notification
• Spring Equinox 02027: Book of Time digital anthology and book launch

How to Apply

Please provide:

• Your Concept: A description of your concept in 500 words or less. Explain how your way of thinking about or experimenting with time reorients imagination, behavior, or decision-making.
• Supporting Media: Visual designs, sketches, or additional materials that illustrate your concept and describe how a prototype might work.
• Affiliations and Community: List any current affiliations or active social media profiles you would share this work with.
• Previous Work: List any previous work that might be relevant.