The Clock Of The Long Now: Time and Responsibility

Danny Hillis explains what motivated him to build a linear Clock

Mechanical clocks were first invented for monasteries in the late thirteenth century and only later ordered the life of towns. The miniature clock strapped to your wrist is the direct descendent of European monastic practice. It was the monks who taught us to keep time.

FIGURE 7.1 The order of civilization. The fast layers innovate; the slow layers stabilize. The whole combines learning with continuity.

Brian Eno proposed “the long now” as what we are aiming to promote. Peter Schwartz suggested 10,000 years as the appropriate time envelope for the project: 10,000 years ago was the end of the Ice Age and beginning of agriculture and civilization; we should develop an equal perspective into the future.

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

The payback period for such things as transportation and communication systems is too long for standard investment, so you get government-guaranteed instruments such as bonds or government-guaranteed monopolies.

People already refer to the near future in months instead of years, and to the distant future in years instead of decades or centuries. What

When we disturb nature at its own scale—as with our “extinction engine” and greenhouse gases of recent times—we risk triggering apocalyptic forces. Like it or not, we now have to comprehend and engage the still Longer Now of nature.

Of all cultural practices, religion is the greatest sustainer and most durable of institutions.