The 10,000 Year Clock | Alexander Rose | Talks at Google

Alexander Rose is Executive Director of the Long Now Foundation, an organization founded in 1996 to foster long-term thinking and responsibility in the framework of the next 10 millenia. He has been working on the 10,000 Year Clock for over 2 decades.
Currently under construction inside a mountain in western Texas, the clock will be hundreds of feet tall and open to public viewing. The project is designed to suggest generational-scale questions: if a Clock can keep going for ten millennia, shouldn’t we make sure our civilization does as well? If the Clock endures after we are long gone, why not attempt other projects that require future generations to finish? Perhaps most importantly, as virologist Jonas Salk once asked, “Are we being good ancestors?”
Moderated by Alex Sayde.

[@KevinP32270]

FREAKING EPIC!!

[@ahabkapitany]

Holy shit this project is amazing!

[@KlaxontheImpailr]

Are there any animations of the clock that show how it’s supposed to move?

[@quill444]

We're no further from the height of the Roman Empire than that society was from the zenith of the Egyptian Civilization. And how should we define human? The human race as we know it has existed for approximately 50,000 years. This makes it approximately 800 lifetimes old, assuming a lifetime to be from sixty five to seventy years. Of these 800 lifetimes, about 650 were passed by cave dwellers. Nearly all the manufactured products, luxury items, and technological conveniences we enjoy today were invented or perfected within only the last five to seven lifetimes. Less than 100 generations have walked the Earth since mankind learned how to write.

[@marylougold8333]

John Quill Taylor WOW this amazing.

[@MrRtkwe]

That number should me more around the 200-250 range because each generation isn’t the full life span of a person but the average time till they have a new generation of kids which was faster the further back in history you go and is about 25 years now depending on where you are.

[@CarFreeSegnitz]

10,000 years? Too long? Too short? Depends on the context. Before modern humans ~200,000 years ago 10,000 years was no big deal. Change was measured by biological mutation and the ebb and flow of ice ages. Creatures were entirely at the mercy of luck, forces beyond their understanding and control. 10,000 years before now humanity has inflicted massive changes on Earth. The first domesticated species, the dog, had already been our companion for ~20,000 years and undergone massive evolution through selective breeding. Agriculture put dozens of plant and animal species at the mercy of humanity's whims. Bovine, goats, sheep, chickens, wheat, barley, corn are in a Faustian pact with humanity. They gave up their individual paths in exchange for massive spreading of their genes. What could the next 10,000 years bring? Exceedingly hard to say as we're within a technological singularity. Multiple mass movements in computation, genetics, space exploration has humanity on a steep incline of development. We're in a tech singularity since any given generation will live through several iterations of society within their own lifetime. Had a person been born east of Berlin, Germany, around 1900-1910, and lived a typical 65-70 years, would have lived under a monarchy, republic, and communist dictatorship. His/her grandchild would likely been born under Nazism, lived under communism then a liberal democracy. Will AI and social media accelerate the iterations? Prior to 300 years ago economies were mostly limited to the amount of food that could be grown on the land. Then about 200 years ago the industrial revolution expanded economies through compact factories. About the same time science was born and knowledge accumulated at a breakneck pace. Now we have a sizeable scientific community armed with absurd amounts of computation and AI that will tease out truths from datasets that largely put themselves together. Rather than selectively breeding our domesticated species we're on the verge of deliberately engineering desirable traits, accelerating agriculture by hundreds of times. Space is nearly "cheap" now thanks to the advent of reusable rocketry. Monied entities are scrambling to reach the resources of space. If you thought our world was big... it's just a speck compared to the expanse of just our solar system. The difference will be as stark as living in a closet verses living in the current world, a multiplier of trillions. If you thought innovation was at a crazy pace with 10^10 people just wait and see what happens when 10^15 people each have room and resources of present-day kings.

[@skuudo]

Lenard Segnitz wow so inspiring

[@TimpBizkit]

I don't think humans have been around more than 6 to 7000 years based on population. Were we just puttering around for thousands of years before first with history in about 2000 BC? Also if Christ doesn't return sharply the human race will probably have wiped itself off the map with all the problems in the world

[@biturboism]

@@TimpBizkit This is clearly a science-based discussion and your fundamentalist views are incompatible with current scientific evidence-based consensus. If you want to add anything substantive, you have to assume a materialist naturalist universe without an interventionist god(s).

[@slipperysnot]

Good talk about the clock itself. The preamble about long term thinking could use a buff. The example at 7:00 about old growth redwoods is a little off. Those layers (governance and culture) were NOT skipped. You said it yourself, "all hell broke loose politically." Politics is literally the cultural and governance layer in action. Our adversarial legal system is the thread that runs through those layers and delivered a compromise solution. All you have to do is look at the end result, the vast bulk of the trees were preserved. Saying that this was a failure of long term thinking is something that only people obsessed with "perfected process" would say -- insisting that the ONLY acceptable outcome would be preservation of the trees. If you can't envision ANY scenario where the right answer would have been to harvest all of the trees, you're the one who isn't suited for long-term thinking.

[@BlackCeII]

There is no scenario is which the complete denuting of all of the trees in an area is "the right answer". Nor is there any scenario in which using up every drop of hydrocarbon fossil fuels can ever be the right or best answer. Absolute and total harvest can never be wise or prudent, and in every way, logic would dictate that it is in fact the opposite.

[@TimpBizkit]

Why didn't they use some sort of engine to wind it?

[@TheGreatTimSheridan]

it becomes apparent that the problem is "who gets the money" and who gets the access, and who decides what will happen to the clock. It's the political problem. this was the cause of the need for a long-term thinking clock. because politics doesn't work. I found a new way. but who could i tell?

[@NecumNaTo]

Dude needs to stop clicking his mouth. Highly distracting.