Over the last two decades, I have been working at The Long Now Foundation to build a monument-scale “10,000 Year Clock” as an icon to long-term thinking, with computer scientist Danny Hillis and a team of engineers. The idea is to create a provocation large enough in both scale and time that, when confronted by it, we have to engage our long-term future.
Building a 10,000-year machine required diving into both history and the present to see how artefacts have lasted. While we can slow the workings of the clock itself down so that it only ticks as many times in 10,000 years as a watch does in a person’s lifetime, what about the materials and location? Over the last 20 years I have studied how other structures and systems have lasted over time, and visited as many of them as I can. Some sites have been conserved by simply being lost or buried, some have survived in plain sight by their sheer mass, others have had much more subtle strategies.
Few human-made objects or organisations last more than a handful of centuries, much less millennia. Stories, myths, religions, a handful of institutions, as well as some structures and artefacts have lasted this long. Most of these were not built with the intention of extreme longevity, but are accidents of history. More recent efforts such as nuclear waste sites, genealogic repositories and seed vaults, are being designed explicitly to last for thousands—or even hundreds of thousands—of years. There are a series of lessons we can learn from the past and present, ranging from material science and engineering, to the ideological. I will cover some of these as well as discuss how they have influenced our work on the 10,000 Year Clock.
Many of the best preserved artefacts probably spent most of their time underground. The subterranean environment protects them from sunlight and generally keeps a very stable temperature. The rise and fall of temperature accelerates oxidation and aging. In fact, when manufacturers do rapid aging tests for materials, it is done largely through cycling temperatures up and down. There is, however, one serious drawback to trying to preserve things underground—water. I have visited nuclear waste sites in the US and Europe, the Global Seed Vault, and the Mormon Genealogical Archive—and in every case they are fighting a losing battle to keep water out. Over centuries and millennia, water will always find a way in. The only successful mitigations of water I have seen are when it is redirected rather than blocked. The ancient rice paddies of Asia are a testament to the effectiveness of carefully directing water over thousands of years.
Building the 10,000 Year Clock underground is important not only for preservation, but for timekeeping as well. Temperature change causes metals to expand and contract, requiring clever and imperfect schemes to keep devices like pendulums at the same length, and therefore keep regular time. The less temperature change a mechanical clock experiences, the more accurate it will be. However, after witnessing the struggles with water at nearly every underground site I have visited, we had to think very carefully about how we tackle it. Our underground site is built at the top of a mountain in order to minimize the area of drainage that can collect water, but we still assume that water will get in. To address this eventuality, we angled every underground surface away from the clock and made sure that water would not be trapped anywhere and could escape at the bottom of the site. If we can’t stop the water, we can choose where to direct it.
The final and greatest danger to building anything that lasts is human beings themselves. In recent years we have witnessed some of the world’s oldest sites destroyed because their values or ideology were seen as in conflict. One of the more heart-breaking of these was the Taliban’s destruction of the massive Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan. It is hard to imagine a more innocuous religious symbol than a Buddha, but it was threatening enough to the Taliban to spend weeks blasting these amazing artefacts out of the cliffs.
How do we make something of value and cultural significance that will not at some point be stolen or destroyed? This is the true question when we ask how to build something like the 10,000 Year Clock. It is not the engineering of the materials and its workings, but the civilisation around it, which we hope to shape as one that cares for both the present and the future. We hope that by building such things, they challenge us not just technically, but ethically as well. We hope that they challenge us to become better ancestors.
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