The Long Now Foundation
It's almost 02023! (The Bus 2.26)
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The Stop
A nonprofit organisation dedicated to ‘foster[ing] long-term thinking,’ The Long Now Foundation was founded in 1996 by Stewart Brand and Danny Hillis.1 The organisation encourages ‘imagination at the timescale of civilisation’ by redefining the sense of ‘now.’ Instead of a period of three days (yesterday, today and tomorrow) or ‘nowadays’ (the last decade, this decade and the next decade), the Long Now is to be understood as a period of 20,000 years - the last 10,000 before today, and the next 10,000 years from here onward. By reimagining our place in the history of civilisation, the Long Now Foundation believes it can bring to fruition its mission statement: ‘We hope to help each other be good ancestors. We hope to preserve possibilities for the future.’2
The Long Now Foundation wants to change our perspective so that we understand ‘now’ as only a moment in the history of the earth - and that our actions have a profound influence on our descendants and the future in general. To symbolically realise this goal, the Long Now Foundation uses a five-digit dating system - for example, writing 2022 as 02022 - to convey the idea that we are only part of the way toward the next 10,000 years, and its logo is an X with an overline - the Roman numeral for 10,000. More concrete support comes through the Foundation’s support of numerous very long-term projects, including The Clock of the Long Now and The Rosetta Project.
Currently under construction inside a mountain in West Texas, The Clock of the Long Now is a monumental feat of engineering. Designed to require ‘minimal maintenance’ and powered by ‘mechanical energy harvested from sunlight,’ The Clock is made of ‘titanium, ceramics, quartz, sapphire, and 316 stainless steel.’ In order to prevent it from drifting off the correct time, The Clock synchronises with the noon sun by using a combination of a pendulum and ‘solar synchroniser’ in tandem with a ‘precomputed correction to solar time to accommodate for the orbital and rotational changes of the Earth’ over the next 10,000 years. With a chime system developed by Brian Eno which provides over 3.5 million unique bell chime sequences - a different one for every day over the next 10,000 years - The Clock has been built around five principles: (1) longevity - The Clock should display the correct time for the next 10,000 years, (2) maintainability - The Clock should be maintained with little maintenance, using ‘bronze-age technology,’ (3) transparency - The Clock’s ‘operational principles’ should be able to be seen with close inspection, (4) evolvability - The Clock should be able to be improved over time, and (5) scalability - The Clock should be able to be built from a working table top size to a monumental size using the same design.3
On a completely different note, The Rosetta Project is dedicated to preserving as many of the world’s languages as possible. With scholars predicting a loss of as much as 90% of the world’s linguistic diversity within this century - along with all of the accompanying cultural diversity - this is an attempt to ‘promote human cultural and linguistic diversity, as well as to make sure that no language vanishes without a trace.’ Inspired by the original Rosetta Stone on which a decree was inscribed in three different scripts which allowed scholars to work back from the known languages to decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Rosetta Project has two components: an Internet Archive and a very long-term archive known as The Rosetta Disk. The Internet Archive is a continually expanding collection of over 100,000 pages of documents in addition to language recordings for over 2,500 languages. The Rosetta Disk, which fits in the palm of one hand, contains over 13,000 pages of information on more than 1,500 languages. An outer ring of text in eight major world languages4 reads ‘Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 13,000 pages of language documentation.’ These pages - each about the width of five human hairs - are microscopically etched and electroformed in solid nickel, and can be read through a 650x microscope as ‘clearly as you would from print in a book.’ For each language, several types of data are provided including ‘descriptions of the speech community, maps of their location(s), and information on writing systems and literacy.’ Grammar, descriptions of sounds, the formation of words and sentence structures, a basic vocabulary list and texts.5 The hope, of course, is that in the distant future civilisations will be able to understand us better than we understand the ancient Egyptians.6
The Detour
Today’s Detour is Hurlevent (6:25). This is an amazing piece of animation described by its director as depicting ‘language [coming] to life. A breath that animates and causes a chain reaction. We see the world’s languages personified by little alphabet creatures who take flight headfirst into a raging wind. We see alphabets, languages and cultures constructing themselves and fighting for their survival.” Certainly worth the time. Enjoy.
The Recommendation
Today’s recommendation is Thomas Halliday’s Otherlands: A World in the Making. A beautifully written book, Otherlands takes the reader on an incredible journey into the earth’s distant geologic history.
From the inside jacket: This is the past as we’ve never seen before. Otherlands is an epic, exhilarating journey into deep time, showing us the Earth as it used to exist, and the worlds that were here before ours. Travelling back in time to the dawn of complex life, and across all seven continents, award-winning young palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday gives us a mesmerising up-close encounter with eras that are normally unimaginably distant.
Halliday immerses us in a series of ancient landscapes, from the mammoth steppe in Ice Age Alaska to the lush rainforests of Eocene Antarctica, with its colonies of giant penguins, to Ediacaran Australia, where the moon is far brighter than ours today. We visit the birthplace of humanity; we hear the crashing of the highest waterfall the Earth has ever known; and we watch as life emerges again after the asteroid hits, and the age of the mammal dawns. These lost worlds seem fantastical and yet every description - whether the colour of a beetle’s shell, the rhythm of pterosaurs in flight or the lingering smell of sulphur in the air - is grounded in the fossil record.
Otherlands is a staggering imaginative feat: an emotional narrative that underscores the tenacity of life - yet also the fragility of seemingly permanent ecosystems, including our own. To read it is to see the last 500 years not as an endless expose of unfathomable time, but as a series of worlds, simultaneously, fabulous and familiar.
Remember: You can buy Otherlands at Amazon, but you can also get it from your local new or used bookstore - or check it out from the library. And those options are better for everyone.
The Sounds
Today’s playlist is a collection of five tracks that have nothing to do with the Stop; they’re just great songs I felt fit this last issue before the New Year: ‘If You Could Read My Mind’ (Gordon Lightfoot, 1970), ‘Wandering Star’ (Portishead, 1994), ‘The Universal’ (Blur, 1995), ‘Sweet Little Lass’ (Dag, 1994) and ‘Sweet Baby James’ (James Taylor, 1970).
The Thought
Today’s Thought is from the founder of the Stoic school of philosophy, Zeno of Citium (ca. 335 BCE - ca. 263 BCE):7
‘No loss should be more regrettable to us than losing our time, for it is irretrievable.’
If you have a thought on this Thought - or any part of today’s issue - please leave a comment below:
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Until the next stop …
Brand created and edited the Whole Earth Catalog and created The WELL among many other things (see: Stewart Brand (edge.org) and Stewart Brand (Guardian), and Hillis - professor, inventor, engineer, former Disney Vice President and co-founder of many technology companies - is, well, pretty amazing, too. For more information about him, see: Danny Hillis (longnow).
I first discovered The Long Now Foundation several years ago when an interest in Oblique Strategies (see The Bus 2.4, 13 October 2022) led me to exploring a bit more about Brian Eno - who is on the Foundation’s Board of Directors, in addition to inventing the chimes for The Clock. I was really taken by their goal of changing our perspective regarding time - and thereby our place in it. Sources for today’s Issue include The Long Now Foundation.
Bahasa Indonesia, English, Hindi, Mandarin, Modern Standard Arabic, Spanish, Swahili and Russian.
Most of these are transcriptions of oral narratives, but also included are translations of texts such as the UN Declaration of Human Rights and the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis.
The Rosetta Project is a remarkable concept and feat of art and science. For more information, see: Rosetta Project.
For more information about Zeno, see: Zeno of Citium (Britannica).