Clock/Library: Articles, The Millennium Clock

The Millennium Clock

by, Daniel Hillis
Some people say that they feel the future is slipping away from them. To me, the future is a big tractor-trailer slamming on its brakes in front of me just as I pull into its slip stream. I am about to crash into it.

When I was a kid three decades ago, the future was a long way off -- at the turn of the millennium. Dates like 1984 and 2001 were comfortably remote. But the funny thing is that in all these years, the future that people think about has not moved past the millennium. It's as if the future has been shrinking one year per year for my entire life. The year 2005 is still too far away to plan for and the year 2030 is too far away to even think about. Why bother making plans when everything you know is going to change?

Part of the problem is just the way we name our years. Those three zeros in the millennium form a convenient barrier, a reassuring boundary in which we can hold on to the present, and isolate ourselves from whatever comes next. Still, there is more to this shortening of the future than just dates. It feels like something big is really about to happen: all those graphs showing the yearly growth of population, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, net addresses and megabytes per dollar. They all soar up to an asymptote just beyond the turn of the century: The Singularity. The end of everything we know, and the beginning of something we may never understand.

All of this make me think of the oak beams in the ceiling of College Hall at New College, Oxford. Last century, when the beams needed replacing, the carpenters made the new beams from the oak trees that were planted in 1386, when the chapel was first built. The fourteenth-century builder had planted the trees in anticipation of the time, hundreds of years in the future, when the beams would need t replacing. I wonder if anyone building today plants new trees, to replace the beams a few hundred years from now? .....

I want to build a clock that ticks once a year. The century hand advances once every hundred years and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium. I want the cuckoo to come out every millennium for the next ten thousand years. If I hurry I should finish the clock in time to see the cuckoo come out for the first time.

When I tell my friends about the millennium clock they either get it or they don't. Nothing in between. Most of them assume I'm not serious or if I am, that I must be having some kind of mid-life crisis. "That's nice, Danny, but why can't you just write a computer program to do the same thing?" or "Maybe you should start another company instead". My friends who get it all have ideas, but each focuses on a different aspect of the clock. My engineer friends mostly worry about the power source: solar, water, nuclear, geothermal, diffusion, or tides? Stewart Brand starts thinking about the organization that takes care of the clock. My entrepreneurial friends muse about how to make it financially self-sustaining. It's a kind of Rorschacht test, of time. Peter Gabriel thinks maybe the clock should be alive, like a garden, counting the seasons with short-lived flowers , counting the years with sequoias and bristle cone pines. Brian Eno gives it a name: The Clock of the Long Now.

Ten thousand years is about as long as the history of human technology. We have fragments of pots that are that old. Geologically, it is just a blink of an eye. When you really start thinking about building something that lasts that long, the real problem is not decay and corrosion, or even the power source. The real problem is people. If something becomes unimportant to people it gets salvaged for parts; if it becomes important then it becomes a symbol and eventually it must be destroyed. The only way to survive over the long run is either to be made of something large and worthless, like Stonehenge and the Pyramids, or to become lost. The Dead Sea scrolls managed to survive by remaining unfound for a few millennia. Now that they are located and preserved in a museum they are probably doomed. I would give them two centuries, tops.

This leads to a line thinking that says the clock should be copied and hidden. The idea of hiding the clock to preserve it has a natural corollary, but it takes Teller, a professional magician, to suggest it without shame: "The important thing is to make a very convincing documentary about building the clock and hiding it. Don't actually build one. That would spoil the myth if it was ever found." I know that in a way Teller is right. The only clocks that have ever really survived over the long run, like the Su Sung's Heavenly Clockworks, or the giant hourglass of Uqbar, have survived in books, drawings and stories. The longest lived thing in the universe pure information. Bits last. .....

Just before Jonas Salk died, I was lucky enough to sit next to him at dinner. I didn't know him well, but in past conversations he had always encouraged my more mystical lines of thought. I was sure he would like the millennium clock. I was disappointed by his response: "Think about what problem are you really trying to solve. What question are you really trying to ask?" I had never really thought of the clock as a question. For me it was more of an answer, although I wasn't sure to what. I talked more, about the shrinking future, about the oak trees. "Oh I see", Salk said, "you want to preserve something of yourself, just as I am preserving something of my self by having this conversation with you." I remembered this a few weeks later, when he died. "Be sure you think carefully about exactly what you want to preserve," he said.

O.K. Jonas, and People of the Future, here is a part of me that I want to preserve, and maybe the clock is my way of preserving it: I cannot imagine the future, but I care about it. I sense I am a part of a story that starts long before I can remember and continues long beyond the time when anyone will remember me. I sense that I am alive at the time of an important change, and I feel a responsibility to make sure that the change comes out well. I plant my acorns knowing full well that I will never live to harvest the oaks. I have hope for the future.

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Index of articles by Danny Hillis.