The Long Now

[Mahdi]

So cool.

https://www.discover.com/issues/nov-05/cover/

Most humans are preoccupied with the here and now. Albert Einstein, echoing the sentiments of other deep thinkers of the modern era, argued that one of the biggest challenges facing humanity is to "widen our circle of compassion" across both space and time. Everything from ethnic discrimination to wars, such reasoning goes, would become impossible if our compassionate circles were wide enough.

The final version, which will be at least 60 feet tall, frankly strikes more than a few people as pointless. "Many people are completely uninterested. They think it's nonsense, a waste of time," Hillis says. And he concedes that "in the world of ideas, it's an odd one."

Still, project insiders have found that the idea, like the clock itself, ticks away patiently, incrementally engaging skeptical minds. "People will make some flippant comment, then come back months later with an idea about how to make it work," says Alexander Rose, a codesigner and executive director of the Long Now Foundation, which finances the clock.

Hillis, at first motivated by a vague desire to promote long-term thinking, has been transformed by his idea: "Now I think about people who will live 10,000 years from now as real people." His eyes take on a distant focus as he says this, as if he sees them massed on the horizon. "I had never thought that way before."

[Dante]

Beautiful in so many ways.

[Mahdi]

They've also got sveral other projects going on, including "The Rosetta Project", which is a compilation of every human language ever spoken or written.

A NASA probe launched in 2004 carried the (at that time) latest version of it.

http://www.longnow.org/

I wish they had a download, a screen saver or something showing the prototype clock and telling the time....

[TMA_1]

Interesting. The Rosetta project sounds like one of those cold war era sci fi ideas. Well, the Clock does as well. Something from The Time Machine almost.

[Egeides]

Well this is one nice aspect of Frank Herbert's ideas really, as it thinks about grasping a more universal time/space-frame. A system with less efficiency will be able to consider a wider space/time frame and then be more efficient in the present.

But what will this clock actually bring is something else, if it survives more than 100 years... *thinks to Hubble's reparations*

It seems alot easier to let a block of bricks like the Pyramids survive so long.

Wisdom flows unhindered in time and space, regenerating the particulars towards one coherent whole. Well Mankind as a whole is a long way from this, and I'm not too sure that to bring somthing so far fetched without the middle-ground is going very far. It's like trying to solve Archimedes' problems when the army just entered the city: protect yourself, THEN solve the problem.

So maybe they know which direction to conquer (intellectually) but if they have a force of 100 men to conquer the next 1000km with no topographic map, it'd be wasted money.