See you in ten thousand years

In an era where we only think about the "here and now" the "Long Now Association" decided to remind us that there is no present without a future. The "long clock", whose construction will soon begin in the Nevada desert, will ring twice every millennium and remind us all that if we don't think long term, we will lose the future

Ran Levy, Odyssey

Danny Hillis is not used to failure. His friends call him a "genius", and his resume is rich in impressive successes: a successful technological entrepreneur, chief technologist of a large company in Silicon Valley, a graduate of the prestigious MIT University, and this is only a partial list. But on the thirty-first of December 1999, just one hour before the twentieth century came to an end and gave way to a promising new millennium - Danny Hillis faced the rare possibility of failure.

Three years earlier, a number of engineers, thinkers, philosophers and artists joined together to establish one of the strangest and most fascinating associations they have ever run: "The Foundation of the Long Now". The idea behind the association was the desire to promote long-term planning and thinking. The "long term", according to them, was not twenty, thirty or even a hundred years: ten thousand years, no less.

In a world where an electrical device barely survives three years of use, such thoughts require a rest of spirit and vision. The members of the "Now Long Now" association are endowed with such a spirit: they even write the year in the date in five digits (02009) with the understanding that only four digits limit their ability to plan until the year 9999 only. Danny Hills was supposed to lead one of the most important and significant operations of the association - the "long watch" project.

The ability to think about the future is a unique human trait. From the moment man managed to develop a language, and as far as we understand, he is the only creature that uses a wide and comprehensive language of symbols, the possibility of a future was created for him. Man thinks ahead, plans his actions, analyzes the possible alternatives and as a modern man he believes that he can also determine, or at least influence and change the future.

Studies and observations of animals indicate some short-term actions of planning and anticipating the future, mainly actions of storing food or planning defense measures. These actions are far from indicating recognition of the future or planning and forward thinking. Most of them are based on a basic survival instinct. Man was and remains the only creature that looks and thinks ahead.

In 1972 the spacecraft carried Pioneer 10 A letter sent by humanity To intelligent beings in space. A letter that it may be billions of years before we get to receive an answer. The dwellers of the circle tell of the man who planted a carob tree whose fruits would only be eaten by his sons 70 years later. In ancient Egypt, the giant structures of the pyramids were built, buildings whose designers knew they would not get to see them and which were also built as a signal and dialogue with the people of the future.

To think about the future requires imagination (an exclusively human trait), thought, language, and the ability to draw conclusions. Without these abilities, it is doubtful whether the human race would stand today in the position of ruler of nature. The future requires a vision. The future requires faith. The future requires the effort of renouncing the "here and now" for an unclear goal. No wonder then that the postmodern man prefers the present.

In his book "Liquid Modernity" Sigmund Bauman claims that the concept of "long term", although we still relate to it from the power of habit, is an empty shell without meaning. The "short-term" replaced the "long-term" and turned the moment into an ideal. Capitalist culture shortens the ranges, glorifies the ephemeral, replaces the durable things with transient things for immediate use. "Remembrance of the past and trust in the future," says Bauman, "were the two pillars of human culture, but contemporary man lives in the present, wants to forget the past and does not believe in the future."

The Association of the "Long Now" fights short-term thinking. It represents the human spirit in its ideal sense: a connection between the past, the present and the future. Their decision to think ten thousand years ahead is a defiance against the here and now. The first symbolic project that the members of the association planned was an unusual clock.

A once in a lifetime opportunity

Danny Hillis, the gifted engineer, conceived and designed the 'Long Now Clock'. A model of this clock was supposed to operate its first operation exactly at the end of the millennium, on December 31, 01999. It is a clock whose lifespan is ten thousand years. This number is so large that it is difficult to comprehend it. Here's a scale: the entire human culture, from the first cavemen to space shuttles that take off with a roar - has existed for about ten thousand years.

Danny Hillis wanted to create a clock that would tick five times longer than the time since Christ, twice the time since the pyramids were built. A few days before the end of the millennium, members of the Hillis engineering team finished building the first prototype of the clock: a scale model of the real thing, but nevertheless a machine that should survive and tick for ten thousand years. Every thousand years, exactly at midnight, the clock is supposed to ring only two rings.

Hillis knew that the year 02000 would be his first and last invitation to hear his handiwork play two rings. If he made a mistake in the planning, if one of the engineers missed an important detail, he will not get to hear his protégé ring in his lifetime. The challenges facing anyone trying to design such an ambitious machine are enormous. The engineer must face two unexpected and uncompromising forces: the forces of nature, and human nature.

Of these two, human nature is the most dangerous and problematic. The raw materials from which the clock will be built must be simple and cheap, so as not to tempt the thieves of the future to take it apart. It should be protected from the elements, earthquakes and similar disasters. The mechanism that activates the clock should be simple to understand and easy to maintain, so that even in the event of a third world war and cultural deterioration back to the Stone Age - there will be someone to take care of renovation and repair. It has to maintain its accuracy for thousands of years, and no less important: it has to be understandable. No one guarantees that in five thousand years the humans will use the Gregorian calendar and the standard clock display familiar to each of us. A clock from which you cannot understand the time is simply not a clock.

Each of the problems already had a solution found by engineers in ancient times. The Egyptian pyramids and the English Stonehenge circle have survived unscathed for thousands of years, almost without practical damage by man. The key to this survival lies in the raw material from which they were built: cheap, simple and worthless stone. The stone does not attract robbers and it was chosen to be the material from which the clock of the long now will be built.

The advantages of the location can also be learned from the pyramids: a dry and arid area, isolated and inaccessible. The Long Now organization bought a piece of land on top of a high mountain in the Nevada desert - a desolate and remote area, on which the planned clock would be built. The second option, to hide the clock (in the same way as the Dead Sea scrolls were buried and preserved), was rejected outright: the clock must be visible to fulfill its function. The need for simplicity and easy maintenance dictated the technology behind the watch: not sophisticated electronics, but a metal mechanism that is clear and easy to understand. Hills decided to build a computer - but a mechanical one.

A sundial and a grandfather clock

The design is genius in its simple elegance. The heart of the watch is a round metal disc, inside which a mechanical arm rotates like a hand on a watch face. On the surface of the disc, in its inner area, are embedded a series of pins which are actually a binary number: if there is a pin, the number is '1', and if there is not - '0'. The rotating hand "reads" the number (the exact way in which it does so is not important for the purpose of the explanation), then "writes" it on a series of movable pins located on the circumference of the disc: it drops pins or picks them up to accurately reproduce the number it read from the center of the disc. The movable pins on the perimeter are like a memory cell in an electronic computer, the contents of which can be changed.

In each full revolution, the hand writes the fixed number to the memory cell in the circumference and adds it to the previous contents of the cell: if the original number is, for example, 3, then in the first revolution the memory cell will contain 3, in the second 6, in the third 9 and so on. At some point, the memory cell is full to capacity: in practical terms, all the pins on the disk's perimeter have gone up. Or then, the clock display moves forward one step - and the memory cell is emptied and ready for another round. The great advantage of such a design is its simplicity and uncompromising digital precision: if any pin breaks, the problem is visible and easy to replace.

To maintain accuracy over the years, the watch uses two mechanisms that complement each other. Christian Huygens, a talented mathematician who lived in the seventeenth century, investigated in depth a discovery that Galileo Galilei had made before him. When a pendulum - a wire with one end fixed in place and a weight swinging at the other end - moves around an axis, it always completes a complete cycle of rotation in a fixed period of time. This periodicity is essential to maintain the accuracy of a watch.

Huygens was able to take advantage of the regular cycle of the pendulum to design the first pendulum clock around it, which we usually call a 'grandfather clock'. The pendulum will also be in the center of the long now clock: it is accurate, but not reliable enough - friction and displacement may cause it to deviate from the fixed cycle time. Sundials, on the other hand, are not accurate (it is difficult to read the time from them with great precision) but they are reliable: the sun rises and sets every day, without change.

The reliability of the sun is the natural complement to the accuracy of the pendulum. Every afternoon the sun will pass over the clock, and a special lens will focus its rays on a tiny metal strip. The metal strip will expand as a result of the heat, and this expansion will provide a signal to the pendulum (again, through a mechanism whose exact details are not important for our purpose) by which it can synchronize and reset itself each time. This mechanism will be reliable enough, according to the plans, to operate even if for several years the sun cannot shine through the clouds - following an asteroid hitting the Earth, for example.

As a replacement for a standard clock display, a display showing the position of the planets around the sun was chosen: small balls representing the planets will go round and round in circles so that their relative position will accurately reflect their position at that moment in the night sky. It is likely that however advanced or backward the future civilization may be, tracking the celestial bodies will play the same important role it has played throughout human history.

The experiment of the Millennium Night was finally successful. Some thought that the two chimes of the clock were an anti-climax to the tremendous effort. For Danny Hillis, however, they were a voice from the future. Probably wouldn't have replaced the muffled ringing heard with any other sound.

But the clock that chimed on December 31, 01999, was only a prototype and the distant now clock is now in the final stages of planning. The team building it is working out the last few issues before work begins in the Nevada desert. The financing is provided by an anonymous millionaire, and all the signs indicate that our children and grandchildren are expected to admire this ambitious piece of technology with their own eyes. But also the grandchildren of our grandchildren, and their children in the next thousand generations? Much depends on our ability to leave them a stable, safe world with a climate in which they can survive.

We should hurry and improve what needs improvement: the clock is ticking. In the Knesset of Israel, for reasons of savings, the "Commissioner of Future Generations" was abolished, which was supposed to connect our actions in the present with their results and effects on future generations. In their way, the people of the "long now" are trying to convey to the members of the Israeli Knesset and to the whole world a different human ethos - an ethos of the future, of continuity and of a unifying vision. If we don't know how to think ahead we will all disappear.

Ran Levy is an electrical engineer and popular science writer. His first book, "Perpetum Mobila: On Physics, Charlatans and Eternal Machines" was published in 2007 in the "Maariv Library". The full article was published in the latest issue of the magazine "Odyssey"

More on the subject on the science website

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