The Clock Of The Long Now: Time and Responsibility

The idea itself of a clock designed to run 10,000 years is incredible: on the one hand preposterous, ridiculous, pharaonic even. My first reaction was to think that the idea was a bit crazy, and I could not see the point to such a construct. The process that took me from absurd to enthusiastic follows the words of this book.
Only if we seriously work on projects for our deep future, can we come to respect and care for it, like we would our personal descendants. And I do believe many of the most complicated problems we face today seem to transform and become less severe in the perspective of millennia ahead for our species. And new tricky classes of problems gain in importance, it is my running question whether humanity will manage to show more start paying attention to the threats that most endanger its long-term survival.
The clock of the long now, matters as an idea even before its real construction. show less

An outstanding group of short essays! Interesting, thoughtful remarks from Brand and many others.

My favorites: "This world computer could easily become the Legacy System from Hell that holds civilization hostage: The system doesn't really work, it can't be fixed, no one understands it, no one is in charge of it, it can't be lived without, and it gets worse every year."

And "The debt we cannot repay our ancestors we pay our descendants."

Anathem is one of my all-time favorite books, but this still has interesting insights on levels of interaction between fashion, culture, law, infrastructure, etc

A great book that never misses its mark. It entertains, informs, and educates the reader all throughout its duration.

Recommended for thinkers, philosophers, academics, and students.

I wish that all of our thinking could extend out 10,000 years, a necessity that becomes ever more true with the constant decline of our attention spans.

The date for this selection should be listed as January, 02000, in keeping with the long view of history, science, technology, and environment that the Long Now Foundation wants to foster. This book is a proposal to build a kind of clock-monument-library designed to provide focus for a philosophy that makes mankind's view of "now" extend, instead of over a few years or a single generation, to a period of about 10,000 years. The foundation proposes to construct a clock that would be large enough so that it could accomodate fairly sizable group of visitors inside and would maintain accurate time over thousands of years. It would be a sort of super-sized Big Ben for the world. The design, construction, operation, and maintenance of the show more device, which would also be a landmark and an attraction to visitors, would require commitment from a large group of people (which is perhaps the most important part of the project). show less

Wow. A really good far-out book.

Building a clock that's going to last 10,000 years is a very ambitious (and mind-bending) project.

In particular, I liked the brief history of 'Big Ben' and the idea of making our dates 5 digits (I finished this book in 02006).