Elders of Time: Art & Science with the Bristlecones
Jonathon Keats, Anne Heggli, and Adam Csank explore the world's oldest trees as a lens on deep time, climate science, and the limits of how we measure the present.
Why we picked this
Three researchers converge on the bristlecone pine — part film premiere, part climate data session, part philosophical provocation — to ask what 5,000-year-old trees reveal about the arbitrariness of Universal Standard Time.
The evening begins with the world premiere of Elders of Time, a documentary set at Long Now’s Nevada Bristlecone Preserve, where the oldest living trees on Earth have been quietly tracking climate and time for five millennia. The film documents Jonathon Keats’ installation Centuries of the Bristlecone, a work that takes the trees themselves as the standard against which human timekeeping is measured — and found wanting.
Three speakers approach the bristlecones from distinct disciplines. Keats, an artist and experimental philosopher with affiliations at UC Berkeley and the SETI Institute, introduces the concept of “bristlecone time” — a temporal framework that exposes the arbitrariness baked into our clocks and calendars. Climate scientist Anne Heggli brings real data: long-term monitoring from Mount Washington that links current snowpack and hydrology to patterns the trees have been recording since before recorded history. Paleoclimatologist Adam Csank closes the loop with dendrochronology and isotope geochemistry, translating tree rings into a high-resolution record of ecosystem response across the American West.
Together, the three perspectives form something rarer than a lecture series: a genuine convergence between art, empirical science, and philosophy of time. Long Now’s Interval is an unusually fitting venue — a bar and salon built around a 10,000-year clock — and events there tend to attract audiences who want to sit with uncomfortable temporal scales rather than have them resolved too quickly.