The Long Now
May 3rd, 2007 by francis
The Long Now Foundation consider the attention span of modern civilisation to be pathetically short. Far better to take a view where the long term is measured in centuries, rather than by the publication schedule of monthly magazines and daily newspapers.
They have some projects on the go that transcend the now-now-now impulse.
Like a mechanical clock that only ticks once a year, and is designed to ne accurate in ten thousand years time. The prototype of the 10,000 year Clock is currently on display at the British Science Museum.
The Long Now Foundation also run the Rosetta Project, which brings together linguists and native speakers to develop a contemporary version of the Rosetta Stone – a meaningful survey and near permanent archive of 1,000 languages.
Some of these languages have fewer than a thousand people left who speak them. All the documents and data sets are freely available through the project’s online database, and will be archived on a micro-etched nickel disk.
The whole Long Now concept reminds me of how I feel looking round cathedrals, knowing that the craftsmen who started to build them were aware that it might not be completed until their grandchildren were grown up and with a hammer and chisel in hand.