The clock face shows the year written in five digits after all, the Clock has to be able to show dates past the year 10,000. A window cut into the mountain peak lets in sunlight, which heats a sealed air chamber the resulting pressure difference drives a piston which adjusts the Clock and provides energy. Part of the energy comes from using temperature differences. How can the Clock of the Long Now continue to operate for hundreds of years? The Clock’s engineers have decided to use human visitors as a source of power as well as other natural energy sources.
THE CLOCK OF THE LONG NOW HOW TO
One of the most important considerations, however, is how to provide the clock with a constant source of energy. Its manner of operation must be clear and capable of being improved, and it should be possible to construct clocks of various sizes based on the same basic design. The clock should be made of long-lasting materials such as stainless steel and titanium it should able to be maintained using Bronze Age technology if needed. Danny Hillis and his team developed a set of fundamental principles to ensure its accuracy and durability. Much thought must go into the construction of a machine that will remain functional longer than any object that has yet been made by humans. ” (Alexander Rose, Clock Project Manager, Introduction to the Long Now Foundation, 2010) Instead, it should encourage people today to reflect upon their world and expand their temporal horizons: “By building something like a 10,000 year clock, you start to get a different perspective on how you might change those options. But this is not really the reason that the Long Now Foundation has undertaken this complex project. It should last for the extent of the “long now,” that is, at least 10,000 years. The clock is both an ambitious engineering project and a symbol. A special algorithm calculates the melody-a different one each time.
Visitors that climb the strenuous path to the Clock provide its chiming mechanism with energy, which results in a melody playing at noon. Installed in a vertical shaft drilled into a mountain in Texas, the giant mechanical clock will tick only every ten seconds. We need something to encourage us to think over the long term and remind us of the far-reaching temporal effects of our actions: the idea of the Clock of the Long Now was born. The US computer engineer Danny Hillis and the author and environmental activist Stewart Brand wanted to do something to counteract this habit of short-term thinking. New technologies frequently become obsolete within a single year, fashion trends last no more than a single season, companies think in terms of quarters, and politicians only until the next election season. Over the course of the twentieth century in particular, the intervals in which we experience time have become increasingly shorter.
“Live in the here and now” is a common expression in our time. Stewart Brand, US author and initiator of the Clock of the Long Now For most of us now is about a week, sometimes a year.…Just as the Earth photographs gave us a sense of the big here, we need things that give people a sense of the long now. Now is the period in which people feel they live and act and have responsibility.
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