Psychedelics and other mind-altering substances have been used for thousands of years across the world in religious, spiritual, celebratory, and healing contexts. Despite a half century of a "War on Drugs" in the United States, there has been a recent resurgence in public interest in ending drug prohibition and re-evaluating the roles these substances can play in modern society.

What can our several-thousand year history with these substances teach us about how they can be used in a modern society? What legal & cultural frameworks can be used to increase access to these substances, and what are the potential downsides of these frameworks? Ismail Ali works daily developing and implementing the legal and policy strategies that will define the next several decades of psychedelic access, and joined Long Now for a Talk that explored the deep history of psychedelics and what role they can play in our future.

How would someone fare if they were dropped into a randomly chosen period in history? Would they have any relevant knowledge to share, or ability to invent crucial technologies given the period's constraints? Ryan North uses these hypothetical questions to explore the technological and implicit knowledge underpinning modern civilization, offering a practical guide of how one could rebuild civilization from the ground up.

Tracing an arc from the earliest humans to our digitized, synthesized present and future, Adam Rogers shows the expansive human quest for the understanding, creation and use of color. We meet our ancestors mashing charcoal in caves, Silk Road merchants competing for the best ceramics, and textile artists cracking the centuries-old mystery of how colors mix, before shooting to the modern era for high-stakes corporate espionage and the digital revolution that’s rewriting the rules of color forever.

This journey has required millennia of remarkable innovation and a fascinating exchange of ideas between science and craft that’s allowed for the most luminous manifestations of our built and adorned world.

Adam Rogers is the author of [_Full Spectrum: How the Science of Color Made Us Modern_](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781328518903) and [_Proof: The Science of Booze_](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780547897967/). He is a deputy editor at Wired, and was a Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT and a writer covering science and technology for Newsweek.

The map of humanity isn’t settled -- not now, not ever.

In the 60,000 years since people began spreading across the continents, a recurring feature of human civilization has been mobility—the ever-constant search for resources, stability and opportunity. Driven by global events from conflicts, famine, repression and changing climates - to opportunities for trade, social advancement and freedom of thought - humans have relocated around the globe for millennia.

But what happens when billions of people are on the move? As climate change tips toward full-blown crisis, economies collapse, governments destabilize, and technology disrupts, we’re entering a new age of mass migrations. Futurist Parag Khanna discusses the deep trends that are shaping the most likely scenarios for our future and asks what map of human geography will emerge.

Eric Debrah Otchere's research revolves around the power of music in the context of work; covering an ambitious range from ethnographic research on Ghanaian indigenous fishing culture to personalized musical preferences via modern technology.

Throughout history, the power of music to enhance productivity and focus at work has been explored, leveraged and exploited - by individuals and societies. Combining empirical data from his extensive fieldwork with a critical review of literature and theories from different areas of study, Otchere connects previously siloed research into a comprehensive body of knowledge on the intricate relationship between music and work.

**This Long Now Talk is presented in partnership with the[Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences](https://casbs.stanford.edu/about/about-us)** (CASBS) at Stanford University. CASBS brings together deep thinkers from diverse disciplines and communities to advance understanding of the full range of human beliefs, behaviors, interactions, and institutions. A leading incubator of human-centered knowledge, CASBS facilitates collaborations across academia, policy, industry, civil society, and government to collectively design a better future.

What is the role and purpose of Anthropology today? Wade Davis looks back at the pioneering work of Franz Boas in the early 20th century that upended long-held Western assumptions on race & gender, along with definitions of "social progress". Boas and his students used comparative ethnography to advance “cultural relativism”-- the idea that every culture is as “correct” as every other culture. Boas showed that our differences can be completely explained by social conditioning, not inherent genetic makeup, upending a deep history of scientific racism.

This fundamental change in understanding laid the intellectual foundations for the political movements for racial, gender, and cultural equality in the 20th century. But over the last few decades, the field of Anthropology has turned inward, and seems increasingly unable to address global challenges like linguistic loss, cultural erasure, environmental destruction, and economic injustice. Davis offers ideas on how the field could change direction and reclaim global activism as part of its core once again.

Urbanist, researcher and writer Johanna Hoffman gave a Long Now Talk about speculative futures — a powerful set of tools that can reorient urban development help us dream and build more resilient, equitable cities. Navigating modern change depends on imagining futures we’ve never seen. Urban planning and design should be well positioned to spearhead that work, but calculated rationale often results in urban spaces crafted to mitigate threats rather than navigate the unexpected, leaving cities increasingly vulnerable to the uncertainties of 21st century change.

Long used in art, film, fiction, architecture, and industrial design, the methodology of speculative futures offers powerful ways to counter this trend by moving us beyond what currently exists into the realms of what could be. Far from an indulgent creative exercise, speculative futures is a means of creating the resilient cities we urgently need.

Robot ethicist Kate Darling offers a nuanced and smart take on our relationships to robots and the increasing presence they will have in our lives. From a social, legal, and ethical perspective, she shows that our current ways of thinking don’t leave room for the robot technology that is soon to become part of our everyday routines. Robots are likely to supplement, rather than replace, our own skills and relationships.

Darling also considers our history of incorporating animals into our work, transportation, military, and even families, and shows how we already have a solid basis for how to contend with, and navigate our future with robots.

Dr. Kate Darling works at the intersection of law, ethics and robotics; as a researcher at MIT Media Lab, author and intellectual property policy advisor. Her work with Dr. Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, and other institutions explores the difficult questions that lawmakers, engineers, and the wider public will need to address as human-robot relationships evolve in the coming decades.

Darling's work is widely published and covered in the media; and her new book is [_The New Breed: What Our History With Animals Reveals About Our Future With Robots_](https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781250296108/).

Forest Ecologist Suzanne Simard reveals that trees are part of a complex, interdependent circle of life; that forests are social, cooperative creatures connected through underground mycorrhizal networks by which trees communicate their vitality and vulnerabilities, and share and exchange resources and support.

Simard's extraordinary research and tenacious efforts to raise awareness on the interconnectedness of forest systems, both above and below ground, has revolutionized our understanding of forest ecology. This increasing knowledge is driving a call for more sustainable practices in forestry and land management, ones that develop strategies based on the forest as a whole entity, not on trees as isolated individuals.

In _The Clock of the Long Now_, Long Now founder Stewart Brand wrote, in response to Zen poet Gary Snyder, the following musing on the nature of time:

>THIS PRESENT

MOMENT

USED TO BE

THE UNIMAGINABLE

FUTURE

Interdisciplinary artist Alicia Eggert’s work uses neon, steel, and time to expand the scope and possibilities of the carefully chosen quotes she uses in her work. In This Present Moment, Brand’s quote flickers between its original form to Eggert’s subtly edited version:

>THIS

MOMENT

USED TO BE

THE

FUTURE

In this Long Now Talk, Alicia Eggert and Long Now's Executive Director Alexander Rose discussed time, art and long-term thinking.