A couple of years ago, the Long Now Foundation started hosting seminars (lectures) on long-range thinking and planning, and making recordings of them available online. Unfortunately, they don’t have a lot of bandwidth so the downloads are painfully slow. In the interests of exposing more people to these brilliant talks, I’ve put together a torrent of all the MP3s so far and am seeding it using Blog Torrent, which makes things fantastically easy for those new* to bittorrent download. Here’s the torrent (204MB) for those who have a bittorrent client installed and an Easy Download for those who don’t. Enjoy! Please keep your torrents open for a while after you’ve downloaded to spread the love. There’s more info on the speakers on the Long Now site.

Included speakers:

• Spencer Beebe, “Very Long-term Very Large-scale Biomimicry”
• Stewart Brand, “Cities & Time”
• James Dewar, “Long-term Policy Analysis”
• Rusty Schweickart, “The Asteroid Threat Over the Next 100,000 Years”
• Daniel Janzen, “It’s ALL Gardening”
• David Rumsey, “Mapping Time”
• Bruce Sterling, “The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole”
• Jill Tarter, “Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence – A Necessarily Long-Term Strategy”
• Phillip Longman, “The Depopulation Problem”
• Danny Hillis, “Progress on the 10,000-year Clock”
• Paul Hawken, “The Long Green”
• Michael West, “The Prospects of Human Life Extension”
• Peter Schwartz, “The Art of the Really Long View”
• and my personal favorite, Brian Eno on “The Long Now”, which kicked off the lecture series in November, 2003.

Not (yet) included:

• George Dyson, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Top: Long-term Thinking About Large-scale Computing”
• Ken Dychtwald, “The Consequences of Human Life Extension”
• Will Jarvis, “Time Capsule Behavior”

* see also this great little how to start using BitTorrent article on commonbits.org.