General

My Yearly Post About Time

A couple years ago I wrote about different calendar and time systems. Interestingly, I have had my wristwatch in UTC since I wrote that post. Changing to use UTC was not as hard as I imagined. I still use it.

Last week I heard about another interesting time concept, the 10,000 year clock. Their implementation is a bit crazy and useless, I thought, but the bigger thought behind it is actually interesting.

10,000-Year Clock

I listened to a report on NPR about a guy (Danny Hillis) who is building a huge clock that is designed to run for 10,000 years. The whole story got crazier (not in a good sense) when he said that it doesn’t actually show time because the the people in the future might not “use exactly the same timekeeping systems that we do.” While that might be true, I was baffled about the clock and its purpose. I almost drove to the ditch when I heard that Jeff Bezos (Amazon founder) is funding it, and they have spent millions.

I had to look into this.

The Good Idea Behind it

I realized that the article was about the wrong thing. The important thing is not the clock, but the idea of a “Long now.” The clock is just a representation of the Long Now foundation’s purpose. A dumb one as such, if you ask me. But the foundation is interesting. “The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996 to creatively foster long-term thinking and responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years,” according to their website. That is something I can support. I entertained the idea of becoming a “stainless steel” member (lowest dues) but I just cannot think of even a penny of my money going to building a clock, although they have other interesting projects too such as the Rosetta Project. (I will definitely look into that.) But the idea that we should think and act with the future in mind is absolutely essential. And that is missing in today’s society, and politics, specifically.

From the NPR interview of Danny Hillis:

“But the project began simply when Danny Hillis heard a story about New College, one of the oldest colleges at the University of Oxford, founded I n the 1300s.

“HILLIS: Sometime this century, they were renovating the common room and they needed some 40-foot oak beams to replace the originals. And of course, by then you couldn’t just go down to the lumber yard and buy a 40 foot oak beam. But they knew that Oxford had some forests that it owned and so they asked the forester if there were any oak trees that they could harvest. and the forester said, oh, yes. We have the ones that were planted to replace the beams in New College.

“STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

“Wow.

“HILLIS: Yeah. When I heard that story, I thought, wow, that’s a completely different way of thinking than we have today. We would never imagine doing something like that when we built a building today.

“HILLIS: I realized we were kind of missing something by not thinking that way.”

This is the real story! The clock certainly draws attention, and I hope it also makes people look into the real idea behind it.

What can we do to foster this kind of thinking?

P.S. They have a podcast

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