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The Long Now Foundation’s 10,000 Year Clock
About – Long Now
“When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 2000. For the next thirty years they kept talking about what would happen by the year 2000, and now no one mentions a future date at all. The future has been shrinking by one year per year for my entire life. I think it is time for us to start a long-term project that gets people thinking past the mental barrier of an ever-shortening future. I would like to propose a large (think Stonehenge) mechanical clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium.” (My emphasis in bold.)
These words from Daniel Hillis, co-chairman of the board of the Long Now Foundation, best express the vision of the organization regardng its development of the 10,000 Year Clock.
“The idea of the Clock is to encourage long-term thinking, which is in short supply these days”, said Stewart Brand, president of the foundation. The monumental scale clock would be built inside spectacular white limestone cliffs at 10,000 feet elevation on the west side of the Snake mountain range. Most of the range is within the Great Basin National Park, which is America’s newest national park, established in 01986.
One should note the five digit convention for denoting years, which convention is required on any 10,000 year clock.
The Long Now Foundation uses five digit dates, the extra zero is to solve the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in about 8,000 years.
I first read about the 10,000 Year Clock concept in a 1995 printed copy of Wired Magazine – I just found that original essay in Wired’s digital archives, with 90s-tech aesthetics that I prefer over the digital reprint on the Long Now website. It is fascinating that Hillis, a pioneering architect of machines that now complete trillions of operations a second, is developing a monumental mechanical machine built with mostly bronze-age materials that will methodically “tick” once a year, in real-time, over 10,000 years.
From Hillis’ orginal Wired essay:
I think of the oak beams in the ceiling of College Hall at New College, Oxford. Last century, when the beams needed replacing, carpenters used oak trees that had been planted in 1386 when the dining hall was first built. The 14th-century builder had planted the trees in anticipation of the time, hundreds of years in the future, when the beams would need replacing. Did the carpenters plant new trees to replace the beams again a few hundred years from now?
The 10,000 Year Clock is one project of many that The Long Now Foundation’s board of luminaries, including Brand, Hillis, Brian Eno and Mitchell Kapor, among others, are employing to change the current perception of condensed time into an appreciation and awareness of vast, deep and long time.
It’s too early, and perhaps impolite, to point out that 10,000 years is but a brief, imperceptible blip on the 13,700,000,000 year great cosmic clock.
(This story inspired by CNET’s article of 04.13.2009)
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