The Long Now Foundation
It has been nearly 10,000 years since the end of the last ice age and
the emergence of modern civilization. Progress during that time was
often measured on a "faster/cheaper" scale. The Long Now Foundation
seeks to promote "slower/better" thinking and to focus our collective
creativity on the next 10,000 years.
Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention
span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the
short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election
perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal
multi-tasking. All are on the increase.
Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is
needed---some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the
taking of long-term responsibility, where 'long-term' is measured at
least in centuries.
I would like to propose a large mechanical clock, powered by seasonal
temperature changes. It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the
cuckoo comes out every millennium. Its works consist of a binary
digital-mechanical system. (
Danny Hillis
, founder of The Long Now Project)
