The Long Now Foundation, established in 1996,[1] is an American non-profit organization based in San Francisco that seeks to start and promote a long-term cultural institution.

The seminars are held in the San Francisco Bay Area and have focused on long-term policy and thinking, scenario planning, singularity and the projects of the foundation.

[citation needed] As part of the seminar series, there are occasionally debates on areas of long term concern, such as synthetic biology[14] or "historian vs futurist on human progress".

The point is public clarity and deep understanding, leading to action graced with nuance and built-in adaptivity, with long-term responsibility in mind.

[citation needed] Opened in June 2014,[17] The Interval was designed as social space in the foundation's Fort Mason facility in San Francisco.

The purpose of The Interval is to have a public space where people can come together to discuss ideas and topics related to long-term thinking, as well as provide a venue for a variety of Long Now events.

The Interval includes lounge furniture, artifacts from the foundation's projects, a library, audio/video equipment, and a bar serving tea and coffee during the day, and cocktails during the night.

[18] The Manual for Civilization is a living, crowd-curated library of 3,500 books with the purpose of creating a record of humanity and technology for the current generation's descendants.

[20] Started in 2004 at the University of Washington’s Turing Center, the project sought to build software that would enable all humans to use their native language to share information, ideas, and emotions with the rest of the world.

This research produced a lexical database (TransGraph) designed to support panlingual translation, and a more powerful extension of it (PanDictionary) based on intelligent automated inference.