The Long Now Foundation was founded by some rather famous people thinking that our time increasingly is concerned with short-term things anymore: politicians on election or polling cycles, industry in quarterly numbers, human beings in maximum their own lifetime.
One project is the clock of the Long Now - a project to build a huge (mechanical) clock ticking for 10000 years. Plans are made, already land in Nevada has been bought for the project - I really would like to see this realized and visit this site. I think it is a very worthwhile project, maybe touching and changing visitors like the pictures of earth from space once did.
They also have a series of seminars/talks, which is available on the web as http://www.longnow.org/seminars.