Saturday July 03, 2004 The Millenium Clock
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At a library book sale a couple of months ago, I bought a box of about 30 Communication Arts magazines for about 5c each. I was reading the March/April 1999 one last night. It was celebrating 40 years of the magazine. One of the articles, Forty Years Out: A Conversation with Paul Saffo talked about designing for the long haul. It mentioned that Paul Saffo, along with Stewart Brand and Danny Hillis, (a pioneer in the Computer Industry) were trying to design a clock that would tick once a year and last for 10,000 years. |
Wow, what a fantastic idea I thought. Then I went to google around trying to find out what had happened with this project since then. Had they successfully started the clock going as the seconds had ticked over into the new millenium.
The more I looked, the more I realized what a daunting task they'd set themselves. How can you create something that will last 10,000 years? 10,000 years ago was the time of the last Ice Age on this planet.
More of the impetus for building the clock is described at length by Stewart in his book, Clock of the Long Now which has had good reviews.
A special web site, The Long Now Foundation has been created for disseminating information on this clock.
Quoting from their location web page:
"As the first step toward building a 10,000-year clock, The Long Now Foundation has purchased desert mountain land adjoining Great Basin National Park in eastern Nevada. The purchase of the property from National Treasure Mines Inc. was made possible by donations from three high-tech pioneers---the Mitchel Kapor Foundation (Kapor founded Lotus), the Jay Walker family (Walker founded Priceline.com), and Bill Joy (one of the founders of Sun Microsystems)."
The latest article I've found on this, on the Wired web site is from just 3 days ago by Hillis himself. The tone of the article was disturbing to me. I felt that Hillis was now trying to think of ways to "build" the clock in spirit without actually physically creating it.
If the project is too hard currently, with the level of technology available today, why not just admit it and wait until we have invented the tools that would enable it to be built?
( Jul 03 2004, 06:30:24 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink
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