Forbes, Graeme A

English

Kent Academic Repository

Kent Academic RepositoryFull text document (pdf)Copyright & reuseContent in the Kent Academic Repository is made available for research purposes. Unless otherwise stated allcontent is protected by copyright and in the absence of an open licence (eg Creative Commons), permissions for further reuse of content should be sought from the publisher, author or other copyright holder. Versions of researchThe version in the Kent Academic Repository may differ from the final published version. Users are advised to check http://kar.kent.ac.uk for the status of the paper. Users should always cite the published version of record.EnquiriesFor any further enquiries regarding the licence status of this document, please contact: researchsupport@kent.ac.ukIf you believe this document infringes copyright then please contact the KAR admin team with the take-down information provided at http://kar.kent.ac.uk/contact.htmlCitation for published versionForbes, Graeme A  (2018) Why a 10,000-year clock is being built under a mountain – and why10,000 years is too long.   The Conversation .    ISSN 2201-5639.DOILink to record in KARhttps://kar.kent.ac.uk/83287/Document VersionAuthor's Accepted Manuscript‘10,000 year clock’ article for The Conversation. Graeme A Forbes Construction is underway on a ‘10,000 year clock’. In case this news has flashed past you, it’s a clock that will have a year hand, a century hand, and a cuckoo that comes out every 1000 years. Danny Hillis wrote about the idea in 1995, and, thanks to a US$42 million investment from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the clock is getting built. The aim of building a clock designed to work for 10 millennia, Bezos says, is to encourage long term thinking. The striking thing about a 10,000 year clock is that it’s measuring a very long time, rather than a very short time. London has been home to a ‘caesium fountain’ atomic clock since 1955, setting new standards for precision timekeeping. In 2013 ‘optical lattice clocks’ were 100 times more accurate than caesium fountains, and experiments continue to improve on this. The 10,000 year clock is potentially the world’s most inaccurate clock. It resets itself at noon every day, so, if all goes well it can be at most twelve hours out. But, as Lewis Carroll pointed out, a stopped clock is right twice a day. If this clock stops it will be right once every 1000 years. Is such monumental imprecision a bad thing? How useful clocks are depends on what they are used for. Clocks get more precise because activity has needed to be co-ordinated more precisely. Think of John Harrison’s 1761 Marine Chronometer, which allowed sailors to calculate their location at sea more accurately. The need to catch trains led, in 1847 Greenwich Mean Time to be adopted across Great Britain. The wristwatch allowed soldiers in the First World War to coordinate their advance with artillery barrages. GPS uses the time kept by caesium fountains to allow your Sat Nav to help you navigate your way across the country and have the voice of Brian Blessed congratulate you on successfully reaching your destination. The ghostly voice of Jeff Bezos may well congratulate an intrigued audience on witnessing the 10th cuckoo appear out of his clock, but there doesn’t seem to be a practical purpose served by a 500ft tall mechanical clock dug into the Sierra Diablo mountain range. It is roughly as useful stopped as it is ticking. This misses the point, however. Clocks aren’t just for the co-ordination of activity, they are often symbolic. Clocks are often used as retirement presents, jewellery, and public art. John Taylor’s Chronophage is an artwork in Cambridge that’s been reminding the public of their time being ravenously eaten since 2008. The 10,000 year clock is primarily a symbol, rather than a timepiece. Its aim is to get us to think about things beyond what’s currently dominating the news agenda. The 10,000 year clock is a symbol of the Long Now foundation, and both aim to foster long-term thinking and responsibility. This is a laudable goal. It is good to ensure that companies don’t prioritise quarterly profits over the sustainability of their businesses. It’s good when governments don’t prioritise re-election over public health issues or the environment. It’s good to ensure that one’s pension provides security in one’s retirement, even if it is many decades away.  I’m sceptical, however, that ‘long-term’ thinking is what we really want. As the late John Maynard Keynes pointed out in 1923, “In the long run we are all dead”. Extending our thinking from weeks or months to decades or centuries would be a good thing, but once we start thinking in millennia, we stretch ourselves too far. Corpus Christi, home of the Chronophage, does a perfectly decent job of reminding its students to think about decades and centuries, rather than weeks and months, having been there since 1352. But this is all ‘medium-term’; Corpus isn’t old enough to have witnessed its first cuckoo from a 10,000 year clock. Neither is the British monarchy, let alone Great Britain itself.  Percy Shelley’s poem Ozymandias describes a traveller coming across the broken remains of a statue of Ozymandias (aka Rameses III: 1186-1155BC), inscribed with the words ‘LOOK ON MY WORKS, YE MIGHTY, AND DESPAIR!’. Philosopher Christopher Bennett asks “No doubt at the time we strive and strive to do things that we can feel proud of; but in the scheme of things, how important can anything we do really be, when even the achievements of Ozymandias, “king of kings”, will one day be reduced to dust?” This is my worry with ‘long-term thinking’; it risks removing us from the contexts (our life plan, our society, our civilisation) in which things matter to us. Indeed, it removes us from contexts in which talk of ‘mattering’ makes sense. Another philosopher, Thomas Nagel cautioned against losing touch with the human scales on which our actions, plans, and lives make sense: “to see myself objectively as a small, contingent, and exceedingly temporary organic bubble in the universal soup produces an attitude approaching indifference.” If we think on a 10,000 year scale, what do railways, or pension schemes, or countries matter? The result is paralysis, rather than responsibility. Much better to stick to the medium-term. 

Why a 10,000-year clock is being built under a mountain – and why 10,000 years is too long

https://kar.kent.ac.uk/83287/3/10000%20year%20clock.pdf

Why a 10,000-year clock is being built under a mountain – and why 10,000 years is too long

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Kent Academic Repository