Report on a talk given by Alexander Rose, Executive Director of the Long Now Foundation
This past Tuesday, I was fortunate to be hear Alexander Rose, Executive Director of the Long Now Foundation, speak at the Virginia Air and Space Museum on the concept, design, and current progress of the 10,000-year Clock. The clock is designed to be a monument-sized project that represents today as the middle of a 20,000 year epoch of human history. The goal is to inspire us to think not just about today, but about how we act now to improve the future for the next 10,000 years and. I’ve been aware of the project since reading Stewart Brand’s The Clock of the Long Now around 02003 or so. And I’ve been a Long Now member for a couple of years (but, alas, I haven’t made it to The Interval yet to have a cocktail, listen to a live talk, or contribute to the manual for rebooting civilization.) So I was familiar with the project and the organization before the talk. Luckily there was much still to learn and Zander Rose was an exceptionally engaging speaker.
Attendance for the evening was about 125-150 at the Virginia Air and Space Museum in Hampton, Virginia. The talk was on the main floor, directly beneath an AV-8 Harrier. Most of the attendees heard about the talk through the local paper or were regulars at the Colloquium and Sigma series lectures. I think there were only two Long Now members in attendance – or at least only two who raised their hands when Zander polled the audience.
Zander opened with a description of the clock project and an update on the construction of the clock in a Texas mountain, including some fascinating photos and videos of new precision excavation technology developed specially for the project. An adjacent-possible combination of traditional excavating, marble cutting tech from Italy, and CNC principles allows for precision cutting of a spiral staircase in the sides of the enormous cylindrical limestone chamber that houses the clock. He also provided some descriptions of the metallurgy of the gearing, the challenges and serendipitous solutions for the bearings, and some of the options considered but discarded for the Local Apparent Noon calibration system. The engineering considerations that the team, led by Danny Hillis, has incorporated to achieve a 10,000-year life without any human intervention needed are quite inspiring. He also showed video of the first winding of the display mechanism (which probably deserves its own post) – the only portion of the clock that requires human power. The design considerations for every element of the Clock were very carefully considered. At every design step, in addition to longevity, the team made sure that the operation of the clock was transparent (able to be understood and reverse engineered by an astute observer), maintainable with bronze-age technology, evolvable to improve with time, and scalable from small to monument scale.
After introducing Stewart Brand’s concept of Pacing Layers, Zander dedicated a significant portion of the talk to a survey of the different ways that a society might go about preserving information at the culture layer for millennia. While I may not have captured all of them, the examples were quite thought-provoking.
Mechanical – Zander gave a brief synopsis of the construction and longevity of the Antikythera Mechanism, found in 1900-1901 in a Greek 
shipwreck dating to the 2nd Century BC. The Antikythera Mechanism is in many ways the mechanical ancestor of the 10,000 year clock, and it tracked many of the same astronomical epicycles that the 10,000 year clock will. The longevity of mechanical devices stems from the transparency of the mechanism, which can be understood from first principles, and the longevity and universality of their purpose. One needs to understand little, if any, ancient Greek to be able to derive the purpose and operation of the Antikythera Mechanism.
Oxidation – or rather, protection from oxidation, is a key design principle for anyone seeking to communicate over long time scales at the culture level. Zander quoted a chemist colleague who said that “everything is burning,” meaning that everything is oxidizing, either slowly or quickly. For an object to last millennia, it must be protected from oxidation. To demonstrate, he showed a picture of a Mongolian wooden bowl set that had been nearly perfectly preserved in a tomb chamber that was lined with a thick layer of charcoal to prevent oxidation.
Sacrifice – Architectural structures are sometimes preserved by allowing for sacrifice of a portion of the structure over time. Examples include the Giza pyramids, which have lost their outer layers to tourism, weather, and vandalism, but which nonetheless remain in their basic form. Another example is the Taj Mahal, which was once covered in jewels. In the 1857 uprising, British troops pried the jewels from the walls, but were satisfied that they had taken all of value, and left the architecture intact.
Remote – One way to preserve a site is to make it remote. This is one of the design principles for the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which seeks to preserve “distinct genetic resources of importance to food security and sustainable agriculture.”
Build Slowly – Buildings tend to be most vulnerable when they are no longer new, but aren’t yet old enough to be historically protected. Building slowly helps preserve monumental projects through this period of vulnerability. Examples include cathedrals, both old and new, that are constructed across many decades or centuries.
Build Underground – Burying something is a very good way to lose it for a long time. But only if the water that invariably seeps in can be diverted to prevent gradual decay.
Ideology – Zander calls this the scariest one, and showed the before and after pictures of the 2001 Taliban destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan. But ideology also has the potential to protect culture. We need a 10,000 year institution to protect a 10,000 year artifact. Which brought the talk to a close, and back to the purpose of the Clock – to inspire humanity to consider the long-term consequences of our current decisions, and to actively plan for success over monumental time scales.
During the Q&A, there were several interesting questions. But the most popular was “when will the clock be open?” The good news is that we are down to years instead of decades, but there isn’t a schedule that the team is building to. And for a project with a big Why, no schedule, and (relatively) no budget, Alexander was quite grateful.
Updates on the construction and opening of the Clock and on other inspiring projects will be available at longnow.org.