By Ed Hunt, Jan. 15th 01999, The Tidepool
In Washington state, the new vehicle tabs for the year 2000 carry the cryptic
statement "The Future is Now."
Of course the future is not "now" and by definition, never will be.
Yet, this statement is indicative of the sort of thinking that has left us with a shortsighted society. Twenty to thirty years ago, the year 2000 was used to convey a far off time of either utopic or distopic possibilities. We hoped for a better future. We feared the consequences that might be to come.
As the fateful year grew closer, we failed to reset the goal post. Now "the future" is quickly approaching, and too many of us seem unable to perceive an existence much beyond that date.
In all the Millennial musings, have you heard anyone talk about what life might be like when the next 1,000 years has passed? Even a discussion about what life will be like at the passing of the next century would be helpful.
Such discussions of the future help us set our goals and make our fateful decisions.
Our concept and dreams of the future are the translucent girders upon which we construct our tomorrows. Our dreams, predictions and hopes for the future are the tools by which we measure our daily decisions.
As Alan Abrams recently wrote: "The real (Y2K) problem is the inability of the human central processing unit, otherwise known as a brain, to effectively process dates that end in two (or, especially, three) zeros."
For millions of people the future is the year 2000. It ends there.
That scares me, and I am not alone.
"When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 2000. Now, thirty years later, they still talk about what will happen by the year 2000. The future has been shrinking by one year per year for my entire life," Computer Scientist Danny Hillis wrote in 1993. "I think it is time for us to start a long-term project that gets people thinking past the mental barrier of the Millennium. I would like to propose a large (think Stonehenge) mechanical clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium."
Such a Millennium Clock--as well as the Long Now Foundation, a non-profit organization based in San Francisco--may be our best hope of resurrecting the future.
It's vital for our survival that we learn to think on a scale where species become more important than sex scandals and the biodiversity of an ecosystem weighs heavier than quarterly profits.
The Big Idea is to create something that will force people into thinking long term. Not just ten to twenty years, but ten to twenty centuries.
The exercise starts with a great clock designed to run for 10,000 years. Just designing such a clock forces its creators to think on a different scale. The whole of human civilization has emerged in the last 10,000 years. What could emerge in the years to come?
Once it's built, it becomes a icon of long term thinking, a constant tangible reminder that we have a responsibility that lasts beyond our lifetimes.
More importantly, its creators are designing it in a way that requires ongoing human interaction. So the result will be a human relationship with the future.
The Long Now Foundation also plans a library "of the deep future--for the deep future" where documentation of policy-decisions with long term consequences can be stored. It also hopes to form the seed of a cultural institution that focuses on very long term projects.
"Ideally, it would do for thinking about time what the photographs of Earth from space have done for thinking about the environment," says the foundation's Stewart Brand. "Such icons reframe the way people think."
Try to imagine any environmental crisis we face held up against the yard stick of one hundred centuries. Will an eco-efficient version of the industrial revolution still prevail? Will we still be assaulting our watershed with subdivisions? Will we continue strip mine our oceans and poison our water?
If we thought, even for a moment about the future, would we seriously be endangering our ability to live on this planet by disrupting our climate, destroying our atmosphere and the diversity of life?
Hope, planning and learning are all dependent on the concept of a future. If "the future is now" we lose our ability to hope, our motivation to learn, as well to plan based on what we've learned.
If all goes well the clock and library will spark a rediscovery of one of the greatest human inventions of all time--the ability to perceive of a world beyond the length of our years.
We cannot afford to lose the future, too much depends on it.