The Wall Street Journal, August 15, 02003
By David Bank
At noon one day about 5,000 years from now, in a cave carved from limestone cliffs near Nevada's Great Basin National Park, a visitor might hear the ringing of bells that sound something like a cut from Brian Eno's latest compact disc. Mr. Eno, the English musician, is on the board of the Long Now Foundation, a San Francisco-based collection of long-term thinkers that is building a clock intended to last 10,000 years, and that already has bought the 183-acre mountain where it will be housed. He got to thinking about what the clock might sound like.
"Bells are an obvious candidate. They're built to last," Mr. Eno says. He created 10 virtual bells in his synthesizer, taking some liberties with physics, and is researching methods for casting the bells he has designed. He asked computer pioneer Danny Hillis, the clock's designer, for an algorithm that would generate a different sequence each day for 10,000 years. The sequence that would play at about the midpoint is included on his CD, "January 07003" (the five-digit date convention is needed to avoid the dreaded Y10K problem).
Ringing the bells and displaying the time will require human power, though the clock itself is designed to keep time without interruption or electricity. "This will be part of the payoff for climbing up that mountain and visiting the clock," Mr. Hillis says. "If you appear in January 7003, it will show the time the last time somebody was there. That might be yesterday or it might be 2,000 years ago. Then when you wind it, it catches up to the current time and plays the music for that day."
One goal of the project is to spur thinking about human institutions that can span millennia. "You want something that requires people to be responsible for it," Mr. Eno says. "You want the thing to keep reminding people to look after it."