Thoughts of Time and Space

Imagine yourself as an observer in a universe but not part of the universe. This universe contains no created objects or even energy that you can sense. No mater which way you turn or move through this universe, you sense no change. In this universe you would have no perception of space. Any place you were would seem like any other place and you would have no reference between places. You would have no perception of time either, because nothing is changing. It’s always the same.

Now imagine objects and energy beginning to emerge from the nothingness. As they became perceptible to you, you would begin to develop the perception of space. This place is different that that place over there. The rate of emergence would then lead to the development of the perception of time. Now is different than before. And, perhaps later will be different than now. Without change there is no perception of time.

Imagine now that you are early man on the created earth. Your perception of time is driven by natural events. Daylight and dark repeat in endless procession. The position and appearance of the moon changes more slowly. Seasons cycle even more slowly. Things come to life and die. Your perception of change is slow and so is your perception of time. Mystery surrounds events that do not follow your perception of time.

Now fast forward to the present time. Imagine now that your mind has developed so that ideas get created in your mind. Some of these ideas get transferred to other minds. And, other minds transfer their ideas to yours. Some of the ideas come into being as objects. The rate of change has increased both inside and outside of your mind, and your perception of time has as well. Add tools to that image and imagine that all the minds of the earth are interconnected almost simultaneously. You and every other person are at the center of the rapidly changing world in time and space. Unexpected events abound and you live in a world of mystery.

The Long Now

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. Long Now proposes both a mechanism and a myth. It began with an observation and idea by computer scientist Daniel Hillis:

"When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 2000. For the next thirty years they kept talking about what would happen by the year 2000, and now no one mentions a future date at all. The future has been shrinking by one year per year for my entire life. I think it is time for us to start a long-term project that gets people thinking past the mental barrier of an ever-shortening future. I would like to propose a large (think Stonehenge) mechanical clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium."

Such a clock, if sufficiently impressive and well engineered, would embody deep time for people. It should 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. Such icons reframe the way people think.

Hillis, who developed the 'massive parallel' architecture of the current generation of supercomputers, devised the mechanical design of the Clock and is now building the second prototype (the first prototype is on display in London at the Science Museum). The Clock's works consist of a binary digital-mechanical system which is so accurate and revolutionary that we have patented several of its elements. (With 32 bits of accuracy it has precision equal to one day in 20,000 years, and it self-corrects by 'phase-locking' to the noon Sun.) For the way the eventual Clock is experienced (its size, structure, etc.), we expect to keep proliferating design ideas for a while. In 01999 Long Now purchased part of a mountain in eastern Nevada whose high white limestone cliffs may make an ideal site for the ultimate 10,000-year Clock. In the meantime Danny Hillis and Alexander Rose continue to experiment with ever-larger prototype Clocks.

Long Now added a "Library" dimension with the realization of the need for content to go along with the long-term context provided by the Clock - a library of the deep future, for the deep future. In a sense every library is part of the 10,000-year Library, so Long Now is developing tools (such as the Rosetta Disk, The Long Viewer the Long Server) that may provide inspiration and utility to the whole community of librarians and archivists. The Long Bets project - whose purpose is improving the quality of long-term thinking by making predictions accountable - is also Library-related.

The point is to explore whatever may be helpful for thinking, understanding, and acting responsibly over long periods of time.

-Stewart Brand

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