The Clock Of The Long Now: Time and Responsibility

Nobody can save the world, but any of us can help set in motion a self-saving world—if we are willing to engage the processes of centuries, because that is where the real power is.

The ability to live both in the present and in a handful of imagined but uncertain futures is the basic skill of foresight, planning, and responsibility. It is worth encouraging.

The sociologist Elise Boulding diagnosed the problem of our times as “temporal exhaustion”: “If one is mentally out of breath all the time from dealing with the present, there is no energy left for imaging the future.” In a 1978 paper Boulding proposed a simple solution: expand our idea of the present to two hundred years—a hundred years forward, a

Eno and I dutifully viewed the famous pennies used to adjust the clock, a stack of which is visible on the boss of the pendulum a few feet below the suspension point. Each one-ounce penny speeds the clock by 0.4-second in 24 hours (by raising the pendulum’s center of gravity a trace and thus shortening its period a microtrace). The pendulum, made o

(The world’s best in science fiction is the Eaton Collection of some four hundred thousand volumes at the University of California Riverside Library.)

Judaism says, “The Messiah is going to come, and that’s the end of history”; Christianity says, “The Messiah is going to come back, and that’s the end of history”; Islam says, “The Messiah came; history is irrelevant.”

You need the space of continuity to have the confidence not to be afraid of revolutions. You can always improve things as long as you’re prepared to wait.

At any time the several “probable” things that might occur in the future are vastly outnumbered by the countless near-impossible eventualities, which are so many and individually so unlikely that it is not worth the effort of futurists or futurismists to examine and prepare for even a fraction of them. Yet one of those innumerable near-impossibilit

Now that we have progress so rapid that it can be observed from year to year, no one calls it progress. People call it change, and rather than yearn for it, they brace themselves against its force.

“The default condition of paper is persistence, if not interrupted; the default condition of electronic signals is interruption, if not periodically renewed.”