It was with no small excitement that I read, in a recent issue of Wired, an article
about Neal Stephenson’s new novel Anathem, which is in stores today. And though the details about the novel were tantalizing enough, my imagination soon caught fire from something else—and I felt perhaps something like the dizzying opening of the mind that Neal Stephenson himself might have felt when he first heard about about the Clock of the Long Now.
The Clock of the Long Now is just that—a clock. But it inspired Neal to write Anathem. This is, in a strange way, exactly what this clock—which will take sixty years and tens of millions of dollars to construct—was designed to do.
More after the jump…
The Clock of the Long Now is a vast computerized device designed to track the passage of the next 10,000 years. It will tick once a year. A cuckoo will emerge once in a millenium. Above is the plan for the orrery, which will track the movement of the planets.
It's not just that creating a device that will work over such a huge span of time would be a feat of engineering. It is that it will require the devotion and protection--not to mention the continued existence of--humankind to keep going. And that even conceiving of the project, and embarking on the colossal endeavor of constructing it, demands true faith in the future.
And it was when I read about this Clock that I felt it. First, a total failure of the imagination, a massive power outage. My mind wasn't large enough to hold it: 10,000 years from now. It was then that I realized I'd stopped assuming there would be a future, any future, at such a great distance from us. And then I stopped and asked myself why.
And this, as Michael Chabon wrote in his beautiful and moving essay in The Clock, is what is the Clock of the Long Now is all about:
Ten thousand years from now. Can you imagine that day? Okay, but do you? Do you believe "the Future" is going to happen? If the Clock works the way it's supposed to--if it lasts--do you believe there will be a human being around to witness, let alone mourn its passing, to appreciate its accomplishment, its faithfulness, its immense antiquity? What about five thousand years from now, or even five hundred? Can you extend the horizon of your expectations for our world, for our complex of civilizations and cultures, beyond the lifetime of your own children, or even two or three generations? Can you even imagine the survival of our world past the present presidential administration?
It is this narrowing of the imagination, this civilization-wide loss of hope, this blackout of dreams, that the Clock, and the foundation that constructed it (whose founders include Stewart Brand and Brian Eno), the Long Now Foundation was established to combat. The clock makes us all, for a moment, think in a larger, brighter, and better way about the world: in a way, to dream every day like a great science fiction author, about where we are all going.
Links:
The Long Now Foundation
Michael Chabon on the Long Now (PDF)
I'm on my way right now to buy this book. :) I hope to have it done by the time I see Neal next week!