The Clock of the Long Now

I remember reading in Wired about Danny Hillis “millennium clock”. It was a single page with some text over a picture of Hillis, probably standing by the clock, I don’t remember. The text can be found here. When I read it, I interpreted it as a challenge to be able to build something to last for 10,000 years and didn’t think much about it.

Now I’m reading The Nudist on the Late Shift – a book I mindlessly picked up at a sale and honestly didn’t think I would ever read, but as I started I couldn’t stop. It’s a very interesting book about Silicon Valley during the latter part of the 90s. Its seventh chapter (of eight), titled “The Dropout” (refering to his having given up computers for a while) is devoted to Danny Hillis and his clock and this paragraph made me go google for a website for the clock:

Danny Hillis would have us execute a sort of back flip with twist on the way we have learned to think about the environment, which is to recognize that our negligible year-to-year impact on nature has added up to devastating consequences over generations. The back flip is to stop carping about the negative and to imagine what we might accomplish over generations with minor year-on-year positive efforts. The twist is to apply this type of thinking beyond nature to the rest of our lives.

So I googled and found this introduction to his idea: The Millennium Clock, which is very moving: “Ten thousand years – the life span I hope for the clock – is about as long as the history of human technology. We have fragments of pots that old. Geologically, it’s a blink of an eye. When you start thinking about building something that lasts that long, the real problem is not decay and corrosion, or even the power source. The real problem is people.” The real problem is people:

If people wouldn’t care about the clock, it would be torn down, “scrapped for parts”, he writes. And if people care too much about it, it will become a symbol and inevitably will be destroyed. “The only way to survive over the long run is to be made of materials large and worthless, like Stonehenge and the Pyramids, or to become lost” – like the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were found after a couple millennia: “Now that they’ve been located and preserved in a museum, they’re probably doomed. I give them two centuries – tops.”

The point with the clock is to make people think of the far future, the long now. According to The Nudist on the Late Shift, it was important for Hillis that the clock would be “transparent”, that you must understand how it works just by looking at it. So, just by looking at it, it must also make you think about the future. Will it not, millennia from now, make you think about the past, about the time when the clock was created and how it has managed to survive? Also according to Nudist, his fellow futurists were of the opinion that choosing bronze-age technology will inevitably make you think of the past. I’m not sure about that, since any “future technology” will be old that far into the future. But it seems very difficult to ensure that it points people to the future instead of to the past.

Anyway, I admire the motivation for building this clock, as can be read on the The Long Now Foundation website:

Such a clock, if sufficiently impressive and well engineered, would embody deep time for people. It should be charismatic to visit, interesting to think about, and famous enough to become iconic in the public discourse. Ideally, it would do for thinking about time what the photographs of Earth from space have done for thinking about the environment. Such icons reframe the way people think.

Reading about this in Nudist made me think about all sorts of things. First I thought about Long Bets, which I later found out was an off-shoot of the Long Now Foundation and part of the 10,000 year library that the foundation is building beside the clock. The Long Bets is another way to provoke people into thinking about the far future.

Then I thought about how in some schools of buddhism you meditate “on” your decaying corpse, as a way to rid yourself of your attachments regarding your own death. I thought about whether it is possible to meditate on the far future, 10,000 years from now. To do that, you would probably have to meditate on things you “know” will still be there, such as mountains and … what else? What can you safely say will last for 10,000 years? If really successful, this clock will spark this kind of thinking in people. Perhaps the clock doesn’t need to be self-explaining? Perhaps there will be an oral tradition accompanying the clock for as long as people can inhabit this planet?

The first prototype of the clock is currently at The Science Museum in London and Hillis and his team are building the second prototype, twice the size. Eventually, a clock will be placed in a desert in Nevada. There’s also a book about the clock, titled The Clock of the Long Now.