Clock of the Long Now

The Clock of the Long Now (prototype pictured) is a project 'to build a monument scale, multi-millennial, all mechanical clock as an icon to long term thinking'. The project is meant to get people thinking about the future...the deep future. We all have such shallow perspectives about the future these days. Most of us can barely think ahead to next week let alone next year or beyond the span of our own life. The clock is a monument to humanity...one that may very well outlast our civilisation.

The Long Now Foundation has other projects under way - such as a library, gallery and orrery. The fact that there are people out there planning and making a reality the means by which human knowledge can be retained across eons is staggering to me. The Foundation has bought land in Nevada where the Clock of the Long Now will eventually be placed. I intend to visit it at some point in my life.

What has revived my interest in this project is the news that Neal Stephenson's new science fiction novel, Anathem, is inspired by the Clock. I would be buying the book regardless but now I can't wait to get my hands on it (although I'm dreading yet another 1000 page door-stopper). There's not much in the following synopsis to indicate the connection between the Clock and the novel but it sounds interesting regardless.

Fraa Erasmas is a young avout living in the Concent of Saunt Edhar, a sanctuary for mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers, protected from the corrupting influences of the outside "saecular" world by ancient stone, honored traditions, and complex rituals. Over the centuries, cities and governments have risen and fallen beyond the concent's walls. Three times during history's darkest epochs violence born of superstition and ignorance has invaded and devastated the cloistered mathic community. Yet the avout have always managed to adapt in the wake of catastrophe, becoming out of necessity even more austere and less dependent on technology and material things. And Erasmas has no fear of the outside—the Extramuros—for the last of the terrible times was long, long ago.