TIMEKEEPING: Keeping time with the rhythm of the millennia
Can you think beyond next week? Jerome Burne discovers a clock is to be built with a view to extending our vision by 10,000 years

When the oak beams of the hall at New College in Oxford had to be replaced last century, wood from oak trees planted in 1386, when the hall was built, was used. The 14th century carpenters knew that their work would one day need replacing and made provision for it.

It is an attitude that would be unthinkable today - planning five years ahead is long term, 600 years is off the dial.

But maybe it shouldn't be. The beams were an inspiration for Danny Hillis, a former computer guru, now an "imagineer" with the Disney Corporation, and his Clock of the Long Now.

The aim of the project is to transform our idea of time - to shift our view from next week or next year, and immediate profit and short-term goals, to the almost unimaginable vista of 10,000 years.

The intention is to create a symbol in the same league as the atomic mushroom cloud that was associated with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, or the view of the Earth from space that was an inspiration for the environmental movement.

It will also be an actual clock, at least 60ft tall, built somewhere in the desert in the south-western US. A first sight of it, according to Stewart Brand in a book published next week*, could be while peering into a cave at the back of which is a giant pendulum swinging, one pass every 10 seconds.

Climbing steps outside the mechanism, you would come to the next fastest process - the tick once a day. You climb up through slower and slower mechanisms until you arrive at the last one, which records the procession of the equinoxes with a 25,784-year cycle. Finally, you emerge into a huge dark room several stories high that, at midday, is pierced with a shaft of light as the sun pours through a strategically placed slit in the wall and on to the clock face to adjust automatically the time to the local noon.

The clock is designed, however, to be able to run for several years without this daily correction even if there is prolonged cloud cover, a nuclear winter or some natural disaster.

Thinking like that is known as "long now". The aim, according to Brand - known to old hippies as the author of the Whole Earth Catalogue - is to inspire thoughts in the visitor such as: "I'm part of something and it is long and lively. There is an alternative to my present urgency."

Designing for such an unimaginable time-span presents unique challenges. One of the guiding principles is that it should be reparable using Bronze Age tools - who knows what disasters civilisation might suffer. This led to some complicated mathematics and required the invention of a mechanical computer that can handle computations. Charles Babbage, who designed a mechanical calculator last century, would recognise it.

Another principle is that it should require human involvement so that, although there are ways for it to be self-powered, it will need winding once a year.

Before Hillis became involved with the clock, he was working at the other end of the time-scale. A computer prodigy, his early ambition was to speed them up. He was one of the designers of the current generation of supercomputers. Concentrating on machines that worked in nanoseconds led him to consider the other end of the scale, the rhythm of centuries and millennia. As aresult, he has gone from the fastest computer in the world to the slowest.

"The clock really started as an antidote to the millennium," says Hillis. "It seemed that all my life the future has been getting nearer. When I was a child the magic number was 2000, and it still is. It's as if we can't see over the wall of those zeros.

"And, at the same time, everything has been speeding up - cars and aircraft, the time you are likely to stay in a job. Governments are turning increasingly to business for their working model and business is in-famously interested only in the short-term, the profit available from this investment, that merger. Just maybe the clock could change that."

Hillis is one of a group of artists and engineers, including musician Brian Eno, who have come together to form the Long Now Foundation.

An 8ft, prototype is already under construction. Unlike its giant offspring, it is being made of exotic modern materials - tungsten carbide, metallic glass and synthetic sapphire - but its workings are pure Renaissance, Galileo meets William Gibson. It has a binary mechanism accurate to one day in 20,000 years.

Such a perspective prompts thoughts such as how long is "now", anyway? For most people it is about a week, on the stock exchange it is a day, in fashion a season, and in most businesses it is next quarter.

Ten thousand years as "now", suggests Brand, is not that long. It is only 400 generations. The trick, he says, is learning to treat the last 10,000 years as if it were last week and the next 10,000 as if it were next week.

But once you start thinking in those terms, you are forced to become more responsible and altruistic. As Brand points out, in 100 years there is expected to be 12.6bn people on the planet, three times as many as are alive now.

So the unborn outnumber the living at a time when depletion of resources, global warming and toxic residues give the living a greater impact on the unborn than ever before.

"The great value of the future is its inclusiveness," writes Brand. "We don't know what is coming but we do know that we are in it together. To produce the benefits of greater co-operation all you need to do is lengthen the shadow of the future."

As a first step on this long journey, he advocates writing the date as 01999 - that way we can at least avoid the Y10K problem.

© Copyright The Financial Times Limited 1999. "FT" and "Financial Times" are trademarks of The Financial Times.

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