I would like to propose a large (think Stonehenge) mechanical clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium.The Long Now Foundation's goal is to change how we think about time:
Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed-some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where 'long-term' is measured at least in centuries.
It was a fascinating lecture, and made me think deeply.
I just got a note tonight that The Long Now Foundation is sponsoring a series of free seminars on the topic of "Long Term Thinking". The next one is Friday, February 13 and the speaker is James Dewar of RAND, and the topic is "Long Term Policy Analysis", to answer the question "how to improve our ability to think about the longer-range future--from 35 to as far as 200 years ahead."
The free seminar will be held at the Fort Mason Conference Center in San Francisco at 8pm (7pm coffe bar). Thankfully, this isn't a Future Salon Friday, so I hope to attend.
There is also information on future seminars which include Rusty Schweickart on "The Asteroid Threat Over the Next 100,000 Years", Daniel Jazen on "It's ALL Gardening" and David Rumsey on "Mapping Time".