Time is the longest distance between two places. -Tennessee Williams
“What’s your 5 year plan?”
It’s a question that businesses are supposed to ask themselves, that personal financial advisers will ask you, and that you may have been asked on job interviews or annual employee reviews. While businesses may have a specific plan, only the most forward-thinking of us will tend to lay out a plan for our own lives in anything other than the vaguest terms. And let’s face it, being too rigid, too lacking in flexibility can take a lot of the joy out of living. We don’t want to plan our into way a loss of spontaneity or missed opportunities because we didn’t adapt or re-evaluate along the way. Besides, we don’t know everything in advance, so it’s kinda hard to be specific about what an exact plan should be (other than advance in your career, get out of debt, plan for your kids’ college and your retirement, etc). Some of us are much better planners than others, but we all learn along the way, and we face the unexpected. Like John Lennon said, life is what happens when you were making other plans.
Nationally, we plan as vaguely as we do personally. We have had some exceptional moments of foresight- the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and our three-branches, checks-and-balances system of government, and my personal favorite, the “seven generations” rule of some Native American cultures which stated that in all deliberations, the tribe leaders had to consider the impact of their decisions on the next seven generations. But in modern civilization, and especially in a society as free as ours, there’s no overarching guideline, no principle we are trying to follow other than to be prosperous and free as businesses, families, people.
One unintended consequence of our freedom and prosperity is the incredibly short, distraction and sound-bite and news clip-driven attention span. I don’t know a single person who doesn’t feel the impact of this personally. Wired magazine, in an article detailing the research that supports the advantages of working from home, mentions that the typical office worker is interrupted from whatever they are working on once every 3 minutes. To put that in perspective, light takes 8 minutes to travel from the Sun to the Earth. It hasn’t made it halfway here since the last time your phone rang or your boss hovered. I know I do way too much texting while driving, or reading & listening to music while also eating lunch. We are giving ourselves ADD if we don’t already have it.
I’m not suggesting that we curb this freedom and prosperity, or all agree on a Big Plan. History has shown how badly trying to engineer a society for a specific purpose or grand design can go. But as a nation, we could make decisions that leave the place in good enough shape for our descendants to build their lives and culture in, whatever those may turn out to look like. So without having our lives run and planned for us, what could we do that would get us, as a culture, to slow down just a little and give some consideration to the longer term? To think about how to plan for the next 10, or 20, or even 100 years? To think about the next seven generations? How about if we asked this question-
“What’s your 10,000 year plan?”
That’s exactly what The Long Now Foundation is doing. Not laying out a specific plan, but doing things to encourage long-term thinking and responsibility. They are doing this in multiple ways, but the most amazing is the Clock of The Long Now.
The Clock of The Long Now is probably the most far-reaching, inspiring project I’ve ever heard of. It’s a clock designed to run for 10,000 years, accurate to within one day per 20,000 years. It will tick only twice per day. So how on Earth do you build a mechanical, moving (although slowly) object like this when the millenia-old artifacts we do have are crumbly around the edges (the pyramids, the Sphinx, Stonehenge) and not exactly functional?
For starters, you make it big. Monument-sized. Electronics are right out. You make a mechanical clock, something that can be maintained by bronze-era technology. But you don’t make it the way mechanical clocks have been for centuries. Gears, as they wear down, get smaller and so spin faster, and then the clock is no longer keeping accurate time. So you can’t use them in any time-calculating part of the clock. Ideally you want a mechanism that 200 generations from now will have to be maintained but not replaced. You should also be able to figure out how it works just by watching it for a few days, in case through cultural or political upheaval, knowledge is lost.
The designer is Danny Hillis, who in the 1980s revolutionized the principles modern supercomputers are based on. For the clock, he came up with a device called a serial-bit adder. It’s essentially a mechanical calculator that can represent a series of 1s and 0s. The clock is a hybrid of the kind of clocks we’re used to- digital, yet mechanical. The clock’s stack of these adders can represent a 32-bit number, which gives the clock the 1-day-in-20,000-years precision. The beauty of the design is that while a gear’s speed will vary as it wears down, the serial-bit adders either work or don’t. 1 or 0, no values in between. The adder’s function depends on pins moving through a slide, so unless the pin breaks or grinds off completely, it works. In a mechanism that moves this slowly and is this big, that’s not likely even over thousands of years. Currently, the foundation is constructing larger and larger prototypes as they work up to the big 60-ft. tall one, which will be located in a remote, geologically stable part of Nevada. It can be wound by humans, but it’s designed to self-wind using solar power activating a set of weights. To stay accurate, it “syncs” at noon every day that the weather allows enough light in. A simple mechanical device is connected to a strip of metal that expands as the sun hits it, then contracts again as it cools, triggering a recalibration.
No doubt this might sound as nutty as it does amazing. Why a big clock, and why 10,000 years? Suppose you and I decide to run a marathon. I might suggest a 10k, and you, being more prudent and not all that into pain, suggest a 5k. But if I suggest a 20k run, your I’m-not-ready-to-die suggestion might be a 10k, and a recommendation that we do some serious training first. We raise the standard by pushing the envelope. So to get us seriously thinking about long-term consequences and responsibility over the next 100 or 200 years, we need a few geniuses out there on the edge, challenging us to think about the next 10,000 so that thinking about the next 100 becomes commonplace. A clock marked not in hours, but in centuries and millenia, puts the contemplation of the future right there in front of you.
I’m hoping that when I’m 80 I’ll have visited the Clock of The Long Now at least once (which will be a thing of sublime mechanical beauty if the prototypes are any indication). Maybe I’ll have wondered what people 20 generations in the future will think when they visit it, what their lives and culture will be like, and if it will be successfully maintained and preserved as a reminder that we can have a sustainable future if we make the effort.
(image from The Long Now Foundation)
