Very interested in your year notation. This is the first I’ve seen of it before. Is this to inspire readers to take a more long-term view?
The idea of planning for further out is not a bad one. I'm not sure how a giant clock inside a mountain helps with that.
The Clock of the Long Now is an artifact from thinking about that and other questions.
I'll certainly grant that many times the art or artifact that comes from that idea may become more visible than the idea itself... but for people who are inspired by the artifact and go on to disover the idea behind it, it can be, well, inspirational - and a way of doing something today that will have repercussions centuries and millennia from now.
It's obviously a place that the people who built it didn't want dug up. Just like all the ancient places that the people who built them didn't want dug up. Like the pyramids. We knew they were supposed to be dangerous and cursed and booby-trapped and whatnot. Didn't stop modern humans for a second.
I do really like the thought process, and again, I really want this to be a neat organization pushing people to think long-term. Unfortunately, when every project has the vast majority of people scratching their heads and trying to figure out what kind of drugs these folks are on, they're not really accomplishing much on that front.
> Human civilization has evolved to the point at which we have begun consciously sending messages into the far future. How should we communicate who we are, what we know, to asyet-unmet intelligent beings elsewhere in both time and space? Will they be able to decipher what we say? And what information will we leave to Earth's occupants a million years hence? How can we address an unknown destiny in which human culture itself may no longer exist?
> Combining the logical rigor of a scientist with the lyrical beauty of a novelist, Gregory Benford explores these and other fascinating questions in a provocative analysis of humanity's attempts to make its culture immortal, to cross the immense gulf that such deep-time messages must span in order to be understood. In clear, crisp language, he confronts our growing influence on events hundreds of thousands of years into the future, and explores the possible "messages" we may transmit to our distant descendants in the language of the planet itself -- from nuclear waste to global warming to the extinction of species.
From my impressions on the Long Now (and I found Deep Time a rather interesting read) the issue is not just sticking a zero on to say "think about the future" but rather that our current culture doesn't think about the future beyond the next news cycle, quarterly report, or election.
I'd contend that The Clock of the Long Now (and the intended level of technology to repair it) and the Rosetta Project are very pessimistic about the future of humanity. ( https://rosettaproject.org/about/ )
The recent HN post about the oak grove for repairing the USS Constitution reminds me of https://blog.longnow.org/02014/12/31/humans-and-trees-in-lon...
> Upon further inquiry it was discovered that when the College was founded, a grove of oaks had been planted to replace the beams in the dining hall when they became beetly, because oak beams always become beetly in the end. This plan had been passed down from one Forester to the next for over five hundred years saying “You don’t cut them oaks. Them’s for the College Hall.”
That a several hundred year old grove was planted because the builders, being familiar with wood construction, knew that in a few hundred years that it would need to be repaired and they'd need the materials to do the repair.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/oak-beams-new-college-ox...
> The answer to the question, have new oaks been planted, is probably. Somewhere on the land owned by the New College are oaks that are, or will one day, be worthy of use in the great hall, assuming that they are managed in the same way they were before. It is in this management by the Forester in which lies the point. Ultimately, while the story is perhaps apocryphal, the idea of replacing and managing resources for the future, and the lesson in long term thinking is not.
But yes, that's the intention behind the action here: https://blog.longnow.org/02013/12/31/long-now-years-five-dig...
It just seems kind of cocky to think that we can forsee what sorts of problems are going to need to be solved in the year 10k. At least as far as technology is concerned. I can see arguing for a long-term outlook on social issues. Of course we need to be looking well down the road on environmental issues. But technology? They really think that we're going to have a problem with the number of digits in the date in the year 10k? It wasn't even really a problem in 2000.
Thinking about the future is important. I have the feeling they're not literally worried about the number of digits in the date. I'm pretty sure it's just supposed to get you thinking. But nothing they're doing makes logical sense. Yes we should be thinking about the future, but trying to shoehorn it into our modern framework is misguided in my opinion. The idea itself isn't bad, but I'm not sure they actually understand how to use it constructively.
I haven't read much about this group in 10 years. If someone has more recent experience with the concepts, please let me know where I'm wrong here. I honestly want this to be a useful group, but nothing I've seen them do actually helps accomplish anything useful.
> The Long Now Foundation uses five-digit dates, the extra zero is to solve the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in about 8,000 years.