At Home with John and Debbie

The first time I heard of the Long Now Foundation, it was in relation to their suggestion of using a modified ISO 8601 standard for time so that instead of YYYY-MM-DD, you used five digits for the year, so today would be 02005-10-19.

Why? Because Danny Hillis had realised in the 80s that people were making important decisions — not just design decisions in computer applications, but political policies and so forth — based on an implicit time horizon of the year 2000 (or rather, the end of 1999). Even a time horizon of end of 9999, he felt, gives us an overinflated view of the importance of our own blip of existence, and so to remind ourselves of just how much time there is both ahead of us and behind us, think about that extra digit that one day will be required.

Another way to make people think of the long term future is the 10,000 year clock. I read about it in this Discover magazine article; it also has its own home page.

In a nutshell the project intends to build a digital, mechanical clock designed to last 10,000 years.

Slightly flowery, a paragraph towards the end of the Discover piece goes some way to explain the majesty of the concept:

Hillis’s plan for the final clock, which he reserves the right to change, has it built inside a series of rooms carved into white limestone cliffs, 10,000 feet up the Snake Range’s west side. A full day’s walk from anything resembling a road will be required to reach what looks like a natural opening in the rock. Continuing inside, the cavern will become more and more obviously human made. Closest to vast natural time cycles, the clock’s slowest parts, such as the zodiacal precession wheel that turns once every 260 centuries, will come into view first. Such parts will appear stock-still, and it will require a heroic mental exertion to imagine their movement. Each succeeding room will reveal a faster moving and more intricate part of the mechanism and/or display, until, at the end, the visitor comprehends, or is nudged a bit closer to comprehending, the whole vast, complex, slow/fast, cosmic/human, inexorable, mysterious, terrible, joyous sweep of time and feels kinship with all who live, or will live, in its embrace.

This is a phenomenal ambition — more ambitious than Crazy Horse or the pyramids — but apparently multimillionaire sponsors mean that it’s possible. Of course, who among us isn’t thinking about the public good that money could achieve in other areas, but still, I love it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 19th, 2005 at 15:44 and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.