By Margie Wylie, May 13th 01999, NEWHOUSE NEWS SERVICE, MSNBC
SAN FRANCISCO, May 13 — Don’t wait for the future. The future is now. That’s the message of a group of technology luminaries who’ve set out to build a 10,000-year clock. Tired of the shortsightedness of Year 2000 fever, the group hopes the three-story-tall, non-electronic, nuclear blast-resistant, 100-century clock will inspire humans to take a longer perspective about life on planet Earth. Not 30 years, not a hundred — think thousands of years.
“IT’S AN OPTIMISTIC ICON, a place that will remind us that we are
in a civilization that hopefully takes the future more seriously than the next
quarter,” says Stewart Brand, president of the Long Now Foundation, which
is building the Millennium Clock.
PRESTIGIOUS BACKERS
Brand — who created the Whole Earth Catalog and founded the seminal online
service, the WELL — is joined in this venture by a who’s who of digerati.
Danny Hillis founded Thinking Machines and is now a Walt Disney fellow. He pioneered
some of the world’s fastest computers and originated the idea of “a
clock that ticks once a year. The century hand advances once every 100 years,
and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium.”
Also onboard are respected technology forecaster Paul Saffo, a director of
the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, Calif.; technology guru and investor
Esther Dyson; and avant-garde British musician Brian Eno, who is working on
the clock’s chimes.
It’s no coincidence that some of the very people responsible for speeding
our lives are the ones behind the clock project. Brand insists their dedication
to the work, however, isn’t a renunciation of the Information Age.
‘FULL RANGE OF PACES’
“I don’t think it’s penance as much as balance,” says Brand.
“A healthy civilization respects and honors the full range of paces that
people want to live at and doesn’t insist anyone speed up or slow down.”
This week the foundation finished its first working prototype. A fusion of renaissance
design, space-age engineering and Bronze Age technology, the 8-foot tall timepiece
has been described as the world’s slowest computer.
Building a machine to last 10,000 years presents considerable engineering challenges.
It has to survive not only everyday wear and tear but natural and man-made disasters.
Its meaning, function and repair must be clear to anyone, even those from foreign
cultures or with only rudimentary technology. And it needs a continuous, reliable
power supply.
Hillis’ ingenious “bit-adder” digital design avoids the pitfalls
of traditional analog clocks, which become inaccurate as their cogs wear down.
Powered by two weights slowly sliding down a DNA-like double helix, the clock
is driven by a torsional pendulum, a whirling trio of metal balls like those
found in glass-domed anniversary clocks.
20 WHEELS
The pendulum, in turn, moves a series of 20 wheels that, as they rotate, flip
switches, to represent either one or zero and finally turn a cog only to adjust
the clock face when a particular calculation is complete. A lens on top of the
clock will use the noonday sun to correct any slight discrepancies between the
clock and the sun.
The digital mechanical design also allows the clock to adjust for leap days,
leap years, leap centuries, even for the 26,000-year cycle of the procession
of the equinoxes.
The clock’s face displays the Gregorian calendar, the sun’s position,
moon phase (with the current star field in the middle) and the procession of
equinoxes below.
“Basically, if aliens landed, they could reset the clock, even if it hadn’t
been wound for 5,000 years,” says Alexander Rose, Long Now’s executive
director.
PLACED IN DESERT
The full-scale clock, which could be from 50 feet to 80 feet tall, will be located
in a desert, far enough away from civilization to avoid becoming a target, yet
close enough to be visited and tended. Rose envisions hollowing out a mountain
to protect the clock from disaster.
“We’ll probably sand-cast the (metal) clock parts on site,”
that is, inside the excavated mountain, said Rose. Artisans will fit the pieces
together using hammers and chisels, nothing more complex than is available to
the average Bronze Age civilization.
Carefully engineered as it is, the full-scale clock will need rewinding. Brand
says it would have been easy enough to make the clock run off the expansion
and contraction of daily heat changes, but if the clock ticks away untended,
it loses its relevance.
The clock’s creators are no doubt enjoying themselves, but there’s
more than whimsy at work here. Though the clock is its most visible manifestation,
the clock project also includes a library with sober aims. “The library
is the content behind the theater of the clock,” Rose says.
“Everything digital is lost every 10 years,” Brand says. “That’s
a very stupid way to run a civilization. If we let the Information Age erase
itself every decade, then we’re in real trouble.” Most computer media
— hard disks, CD-ROMs, magnetic tape — can degrade in as little as
five years. Those that don’t rot, simply become obsolete and unreadable.
“We’re looking at taking on and managing information over periods
of centuries, even millennia,” says Brand.
DATA LIBRARY
The library will store data on a technology called HD-Rosetta. Created by Norsam
Technologies, HD-Rosetta preserves texts by etching them in microscopic detail
on the face of a long-lasting disc using a focused ion beam. To help people
understand what they’re looking at, the images would start out being large
enough to see with the naked eye and get progressively smaller. “It’s
basically just better microfiche,” Rose said.
Like a modern-day Library of Alexandria, the disks could hold cultural artifacts,
music, even lexicons to help a 30th century archaelogist understand the oddballs
who buried all this stuff.
Another thing the library might store is the kind of longitudinal data that
simply can’t be collected today. “If we had the last 10,000 years
of sea water analyses in our hands, we’d be in a very a different place
than we are now,” Rose says.
This New Year, the clock — its prototype, anyway — will strike its
first thousand-year chime. And, already, it’s a little misunderstood. The
British have offered the clock a New Year’s venue in the multi-million
dollar Millennium Dome. The Egyptians want to perch it atop a flat-topped pyramid.
New York’s Times Square has even been suggested.
“It’s tempting, from a fund-raising perspective, but it’s also
a little antithetical to what we’re doing.” Rose said. More likely
the clock’s inaugural chime — which won’t be heard again for
another thousand years afterward — will take place in a low-key ceremony
somewhere beyond the reach of the Year 2000 hoopla. The foundation has yet to
decide.
© 1999 Newhouse News Service