10,000 years from now, when you ask, "What time is it?" what kind of answer will you get?
Well, if the members of a 10-year-old foundation dedicated to long-term thinking have their way, you — or rather your great-great-great- (±300 greats) -grandchildren — will be able to climb a mountain in what is now known as Nevada USA and synchronize their chronometers with the Clock of the Long Now. In fact, if they show up 9,992.3 years from now — i.e., by 11.59 PM on 31 December 11,999 of the Common Era, (using the Gregorian calendar) — they will be present for the three dramatic actions that the clock will perform in its superslow life: it will tick once a year, bong once for every century, and the cuckoo (or its equivalent) will pop out for each millennium (12 times, by then).
Who would think of building such a thing? And why? Considering how much the world has changed since 10,000 years ago — that was when the last Ice Age ended, and our hunter-gatherer skin-clad ancestors hadn't even discovered agriculture, let alone built a civilization — it seems utterly impossible to even begin to imagine what life will be like 10,000 years from now, if humans even survive that long. So why bother?
Stewart Brand creator of the Whole Earth Catalog and patriarch of the Long Now Foundation says that of course this enterprise isn't about 10,000 years from now, this is about NOW.
"Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span," he writes. "The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase."
"Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed," he goes on, "— some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where 'long-term' is measured at least in centuries. Long Now proposes both a mechanism and a myth."
The mechanism: the 10,000-Year Clock. The myth: the Long Now.
What does he mean, the Long Now?
The name was coined by one of the founding members of the Long Now Foundation, composer and music producer Brian Eno "When Brian first moved to New York City he found that in New York here and now meant this room and this five minutes, as opposed to the larger here and longer now that he was used to in England," according to the Foundation's website.
"We have since adopted the term as the title of our foundation as we are trying to stretch out what people consider as now."
The designer of the 10,000-Year Clock is Brand's and Eno's friend Danny Hillis, who created the Connection Machine, one of the earliest massively parallel computers that are now used for AI research. "I think of the oak beams in the ceiling of College Hall at New College, Oxford," Hillis wrote in a 1995 essay for Wired magazine's "Scenarios" issue. "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."
This idea of doing things now to provide for the needs of the future inspired Hillis to begin work on a clock that would last 10,000 years. The first prototype of the Millennium Clock, as it's also known, was completed in time for the Y2K rollover, when the clock bonged twice, slowly, at the stroke of midnight on 1 January 02000 CE in London. (The Long Now designates years with five digits, presumably to ward off the deca-millennium bug. Now that's dedication to long-term thinking!)
The Clock's eight-foot tall proof of concept is now on display at the Science Museum in London. Hillis began immediately to work on the design for the monument-scale second prototype — the Real Thing — which will be housed at the top of Mt. Washington in eastern Nevada, in the midst of a forest of bristlecone pines, generally considered to be the world's oldest living things (one tree in the Snake Range was determined to have livedfor almost 5,000 years — so far).
Bill Bly Bill Bly has notched up 33 years of experience as an author, editor, hypertext designer and publisher, artistic director, musician, teacher (online and on-site), program director, department administrator and more. He lives in New York City and Bethlehem, PA.
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