![]() When I asked him whether any events in the past six years had changed his mind, he replied, “I am now much more inclined to say that even in the short term, the future is decided by optimists.” The pinned tweet on Kelly’s Twitter account proclaims, “ Over the long term, the future is decided by optimists.” He wrote that tweet on April 25, 2014. But left unsaid is the troubling matter of which people will ask this question, and who will be doing the prompting. If you have a Clock ticking for 10,000 years what kinds of generational-scale questions and projects will it suggest? Why would anyone build a Clock inside a mountain with the hope that it will ring for 10,000 years? Part of the answer: just so people will ask this question, and having asked it, prompt themselves to conjure with notions of generations and millennia. Here’s how Hillis described the purpose of this project: “The century hand advances once every 100 years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium … If I hurry, I should finish the clock in time to see the cuckoo come out for the first time.” “I want to build a clock that ticks once a year,” Hillis wrote in a 1995 WIRED essay. It is a memento of sorts, a physical reminder of the brash, sunny-side futurism that defined the early internet boom. Jeff Bezos calls it the 10,000-Year Clock, and, since he’s spent an estimated $42 million to build it inside a mountain that he owns, that name is a real contender. Some call it the Millennium Clock, others call it the Clock of the Long Now. Even worse: It is a reminder that social chaos is never evenly distributed. The clock is a testament to willful blindness, as today’s tech barons whistle past the grim realities of the oncoming catastrophe that is man-made climate destabilization. I think it is a monument to something else: a profound failure of the imagination. ![]() It is intended as a monument to long-term thinking, meant to inspire its visitors to be mindful of their place in the long arc of history. The clock will tick once a year, marking time over the next 10,000 years. ![]() The question on Rose’s mind is about generational thinking - are we being good ancestors? If humans keep executing more projects that look towards the future with hope and optimism, it’s hard to argue.There is a clock being constructed in a mountain in Texas. In fact, Eno also came up with the Long Now Foundation’s name, in efforts to expand the public’s understanding of what “now” means and how it affects the future.) Designed by Brian Eno (yes, that Brian Eno of Devo and “ The Microsoft Sound”), the chime generator will play a different sequence on 10 chimes each day of the 10,000 years. At solar noon each day, the chimes start. But his clock-related goals aren’t all so lofty (or few and far between). On the Long Now Foundation’s website, Hillis says that he wants to build a clock that ticks once a year with a cuckoo that comes out every 1,000 years. (Only this lens is made out of a massive piece of quartz.) The 10,000 Year Clock works with the kinds of tools that Galileo would have understood: gears, levers, and a lens to synchronize the clock to the sun for accuracy. ![]() When Hillis first came up with the idea in 1986, everyone else in his life was speeding up, but Hillis realized he “needed to think on a different time scale.” Specifically - a scale of 10,000 years.
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