The Clock Of The Long Now: Time and Responsibility

“If Moore’s Law is true,” queries a media developer, “over time is time more or less valuable?” In other words, is compressed time dearer or more disposable? The price per minute is higher, but is the sustainable value? Does intense progress make everything better, or just more temporary?

How do they manage change, and how do they absorb and incorporate shocks? The answer appears to lie in the relationship between components in a system that have different change rates and different scales of size. Instead of breaking under stress like something brittle these systems yield as if they were malleable.

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

“We are the first generation that influences global climate, and the last generation to escape the consequences.”

Eternity is the opposite of a long time. In

Culture is invisible to adolescents but a matter of great concern to elders. Adolescents are obsessed by fashion, elders bored by it.

the ancient Greeks distinguished two kinds of time, “kairos (opportunity or the propitious moment) and chronos (eternal or ongoing time). While the first . . . offers hope, the second extends a warning.” Kairos is the time of cleverness, chronos the time of wisdom.

Such a clock, if sufficiently impressive and well engineered, would embody deep time for people. It would be charismatic to visit, interesting to think about, and famous enough to become iconic in the public discourse. Ideally, it would do for thinking about time what the photographs of Earth from space have done for thinking about the environment.

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