[Reader-list] Future time

[Saumya Gupta]

The Clock of the Long Now

As technological breakthroughs constantly accelerate the pace of 
contemporary society, the future has become difficult to imagine or 
define beyond the next few months. Danny Hillis - inventor, scientist, 
and creator of the world's fastest computer, the Connection Machine - 
sought to recapture the idea of the future, to break past the mental 
barrier of the millennium, to focus attention on the larger continuum 
at work, and to encourage a sense of responsibility about the future. 
So, he designed the world's slowest computer: the Clock of the Long 
Now, a clock meant to last for 10,000 years. 

The last ice age receded 10,000 years ago, after which civilization 
gradually evolved. That is, the history of mankind can be understood 
to stretch backward in time 10,000 years. Thus, the project of the 
Long Now places contemporary civilization in the middle of a 
symmetrical perspective that spans 10,000 years both back in history 
and forward towards the future. 

The Clock of the Long Now uses a binary digital-mechanical system with 
a patented serial-bit-adder instead of gears, the standard mechanism 
of clocks, which can wear down with time. Void of electronics, the 
clock - made of materials such as Monel Steel, Invar steel, tungsten 
carbide and synthetic sapphire - is precise to within one day in 
20,000 years, self-corrects by 'phase-locking' to the noon sun, and 
measures the 26,000-year cycle of the procession of the equinoxes. It 
ticks once a day, bongs once a year, and the cuckoo comes out on the 
millennium. 

The Clock is only part of a project overseen by the Long Now 
Foundation, established in 01996. (Using a five-digit date is meant to 
encourage people to think in deep time and keep the foundation Y10K 
compliant.) The other major element is the 10,000 Year Library, which 
intends to address the issue of long-term collection and preservation 
of data, and to encourage others in like endeavors. The foundation's 
president is vanguard Stewart Brand, who founded, in 1968, the Whole 
Earth Catalogue and, in 1984, WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link), the 
first on-line community. He is also the author of the book The Clock 
of the Long Now, in which he describes the projects and explains the 
philosophy behind them. He maintains that society's temporal myopia is 
in need of correction to add balance and lengthen our attention span, 
to help us consider the long-term, measured in centuries. The high 
speed of change is deleterious for society at large: the focus on 
small, short-term goals creates large, long-term problems. 

The first step has been to build an eight-foot prototype for the 
clock. The goal is to have much larger versions of the clock, in an 
urban setting - for accessibility - and in the desert - for stability 
and permanence - along with the library. Recently purchased land 
adjoining Great Basin National Park in eastern Nevada will house a 
monumental scale clock inside white limestone cliffs at 10,000 feet 
elevation. 

Although the 10,000 Year Library does not actually exist yet, its 
first acquisition is already in the works. The Long Now Foundation is 
creating a modern "Rosetta Stone" to be known as the Rosetta Disk. The 
three-inch micro-etched Nickel disk will be a repository of linguistic 
information and a translation engine for 1,000 world languages. It 
promises longevity in the 2,000 to 10,000-year range. Jim Mason 
designed the Rosetta Disk, which uses nano-analog optical-storage 
technology, and it is being developed at Norsam Technologies and Los 
Alamos Laboratories with a grant from the Lazy Eight Foundation. Using 
analog coding means that platform-dependency is not a problem, nor are 
there the incompatibility pitfalls of myriad operating systems and 
applications. Only a microscope is needed to read the disk, and 
project workers are purposely keeping the encoding at a scale readable 
by a 1000X optical microscope. Thus, total disk storage capacity will 
be around 30,000 pages of text, which will begin at an eye-readable 
scale and taper down to nano-scale. In contrast to today's data 
-preserved on Web pages, magnetic media or digital files that will 
eventually be obsolete - the disk represents an effort to archive 
material essential for understanding our culture that will withstand 
the hands of time.