flickering pictures

For the last little while, vacation time, jet lag and three weeks worth of e-mail/voice mail have joined their sinister forces to create a great sucking whirlpool of unproductiveness and exhaustion — one that pulled my desire to post down to the deepest darkest abysses of the undersea. As of today, I’ve returned home, toweled off and will be picking up more or less where I left off. I’ve still got a few nifty Korean experiences to subject you to, but here’s something neat in the meantime.

Moved by the shortsightedness of human thought and endeavour, Brian Eno and some friends got together 12 years ago to create the Long Now Foundation, which aims to change the idea of “now” from a blinking instant in time to a span of 10,000 years — still an infinitesimal blip in Earth’s history. To promote this shift in thought, they’re building a clock designed to keep accurate time for ten millenia, and they’ve already got this extremely cool prototype to show for their efforts.

The next step is go full-scale — build a monument-sized clock (blueprints below) and plant it for a hundred centuries on a plot of land in the Nevada desert that they’ve already purchased. The clock is being designed with five principles in mind:

Longevity
With occasional maintenance, the clock should reasonably be expected to display the correct time for the next 10,000 years.

Maintainability
The clock should be maintainable with bronze-age technology.

Transparency
It should be possible to determine operational principles of the clock by close inspection.

Evolvability
It should be possible to improve the clock with time.

Scalability
It should be possible to build working models of the clock from table-top to monumental size using the same design.

It can’t be easy to build something that will survive for a period equivalent to the entire span of human agricultural history. The pyramids at Giza have only been around half that long, and they’re pretty worn down already. But then again, the ancient Egyptians didn’t have the benefit of 21st-century technology. Nor did they have Brian Eno.

(Incidentally, Brian Eno’s real name is “Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno.”)

From the Long Now Foundation website:

The idea to build a monument scale, multi-millennial, all mechanical clock as an icon to long term thinking came from computer scientist Danny Hillis and was published in the form of an email to friends. Later it was followed up with an essay published in the 01995 Wired magazine scenarios isssue (shown below). Danny reasoned that by actually building a remote monument, the discussions around long term thinking would be far more focused, and it would lend itself to good storytelling and myth. Two key requirements of anything lasting a long time.

In 01996 a group of these friends led by Stewart Brand incorporated a non profit around the idea of long term thinking and responsibility. This group became the founding board of The Long Now Foundation. One of the members, Peter Schwartz, suggested that 10,000 years be the time frame, as it was about how long humans have had a stable climate and technological progression.

The zero in front of “1995″ and “1996″ is intended to highlight the enormous span of time that lies in front of us — assuming, of course, that we don’t wreck our planet or blow ourselves to smithereens first. And though it sounds silly, thinking of this year as 02008 really does get you thinking about the 98,000 or so years that haven’t happened yet — and all the ones after that. Maybe it’s because I’ve just finished reading Bill Bryson’s excellent A Short History of Nearly Everything, but it’s seems to me that any understanding of human existence as a brief fleeting blip on the universe’s radar can only bring badly needed perspective to our actions.

Here are the blueprints for the full-scale clock:

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