By Kimberly & Michael Baldwin, April 5, 01999, ZDTV
The Long Now Foundation is busy building a clock that only ticks once a day, is only wound once a year, and chimes just every 1,000 years.
You can track the progress of this monumental endeavor at the Long Now Foundation's website. But if you want to understand why they're building it, you have to ask someone like Long Now President Stewart Brand.
Brand explains, "A lot of us are attracted to the idea of a 10,000-year clock and a 10,000-year library because everything we deal with now is sort of 10 months or 10 hours or 10 weeks. It's so short between generations of computer software, just the idea that history has accelerated so fast that we've lost track of the future. And the future is a pretty interesting place to contemplate and to prepare for.
Contemplating the future is something Stewart Brand does well. Fifteen years ago Brand founded one of the first Internet communities, The Well. The Millennium Clock was conceived by another technology visionary Danny Hillis.
The two men also want to establish an archive for long-term studies. The clock and library project has attracted other high-concept folks to the Long Now foundation-- people like Brian Eno and Esther Dyson.
Over time, if the clock does its job, it should become iconic, in the sense that it's something everyone knows about and it stands for something, as a frame of reference.
What in the World Is The Millennium Clock?
Creating a frame of reference is good, but it would be nice to have that reference frame an actual body of information, which is then taken, collected, used, and kept with centuries and millennia in mind. Now really, what would you like a 10,000-year old library to actually do?
One of the basic design principles of the clock is to reward patience. And the idea of encouraging patience beyond one's own life span is something probably worth doing.
So what have you got with this clock? Well, there is a disk by Norsam that is able to write really, really small, by using the same technology used to write on microprocessor chips. And it also allows you to write 10,000 pages of actual text onto a disk this size. So if you zoomed in on it with an optical microscope you could read it
Then there is the solar synchronizer. The lens lines up with the sun at solar noon and makes a line of light across the face. And when that line of light dives into the little gap on the clock, it heats up a piece of metal inside, which as it expands, bows out and lifts the trigger.
"One of the thoughts we had is the clock could wind itself," Long Now President Stewart Brand explained. "But if you do that than the clock doesn't need people. And I think the clock needs people to wind it, to add some element to it, participate in it. Then the clock does the thing we want to foster, which is invite responsibility."
Later in 1999, Brand expects to have a prototype of the 10,000-year clock running and it should actually be capable of going for 10 thousand years. It'll be eight feet tall, and, according to Brand, "pretty impressive."
For now, Brand and company are trying to figure out what to have it do for the year 2000 and where to do it. "The decision is pretty much that the year 2000 will come and you will hear it bong twice."
If you want to hear it bong three times you'll have to wait another thousand years. But keep in mind that the Long Now clock promises to be Y10K compliant.