The Clock of the Long Now

In order to investigate the theory of time further, I paid a visit to the science museum where they had a prototype of a mechanism entitled "The Clock of the Long Now".

Stewart Brand; championed sustainable living the 60s and is president of the long now foundation.

"Civilisation has revved itself into a pathologically short attention span.... And some sort of balancing corrective to short sightedness is needed - some mechanism which encourages the long view." With this statement Stewart Brand reveals the thinking behind a project to build a clock which will keep time for 10,000 years - a period the artist & musician Brian Eno called "the long now".

The prototype was designed by Danny Hills and has been built by the Long Now foundation to explore the mechanism for a clock intoned to keep time for 10,000 years. The final version of the clock would be an enormously large version of the prototype - a vast mechanism of architectural scale, big enough for visitors to walk through. It is intended that this will be installed near a National Park in eastern Nevada in a chamber hollowed out of a limestone cliff. To reduce wear the clock uses a torsional pendulum which rotates slowly and the clock ticks only once every 30 seconds. This clock is driven by falling weights that are rewound regularly. The full-size example would be powered by the energy from the footsteps of visitors or by changes in temperature. Any drift in the clocks rate will be corrected by a mechanism sensing the sun passing overhead @ noon. The stock of disks in the lower part of the clock is a train of adding wheels - a binary mechanical computer that counts the hours, the calendar & solar years, the centuries & phases of the moon & the Zodiac. This also drives the display on the face of the clock which shows the changing pattern of the night sky continuously throughout the life of the clock. Each hour the clock performs a visible calculation to update the dial display.

This clock is designed to draw attention to the virtues of firstly measuring time and more importantly being more aware of long periods of time, i.e beyond our lifespan.

In this day and age of instant pleasure and satisfaction where we regularly fail to see past the next deadline Stewart Brand believes that man has become dangerously unaware of the future and that it is our obligation to think in terms of the long now. I take his point and certainly feel that his ideas are altruistic towards future generations but I none the less regard this "long now" concept as rather pointless. Wile I'm sure the world could benefit from a little long term thinking and as much as this clock is pretty cool I feel that time and money is being wasted on something of which the benefits we'll never see. When one considers the effort put in and the money spent on it and then imagines how that could be spent on problems that affect us here and now one fails to see the virtue of such a mechanism. In many ways this contraption is unlike a clock as although it may keep time, to a future viewer it will be nothing but a collection of arbitrary figures that "apparently" have something to do with the distant past and future outside any human life expectancy. So for time to be relevant or rather for time to even exist, it has to be linked with events experienced directly.