Time contains every paradox. It heals all wounds, but it wounds all heels. It shrinks, it stretches, it flies, it drags. It varies relativistically according to the speed of the observer. It is measured in years, but even years have to be subdivided into tropical years, or anomalistic years, or Great Years. Aeons are counted in the wheeling of the heavens – but it’s the Earth that moves. The planet goes round the sun at 30km/s, and the sun goes round the galaxy at 200km/s, and the galaxy, too, is moving: falling towards Andromeda at one speed, and racing with other galaxies towards some mysterious destination in the heavens at 600km/s.
Time is not infinitely divisible: the smallest unit cosmologists work with is called Planck time. It involves a decimal point followed by 43 zeroes before the first numeral. There are more of these Planck units in the Very Early Universe – the first thousandth of a second of creation – than there are seconds in the 15-billion year history of time thereafter. So for cosmic physicists, time stretches dizzyingly inside that first thousandth of a second.
Time is not infinite: Saint Augustine worked out 1 500 years ago that it came from nothing, simultaneously with space, out of nowhere. If time had a beginning, why not an end? Time may not the same for all creatures. A mouse lives three years; an elephant could survive for 60. But a mouse’s heart beats 700 times a minute, and an elephant’s 30 times a minute: they are both around for a billion heartbeats. So do both lifetimes feel like a lifetime?
Technology now sets an unimaginable pace: computer calculations are measured in billionths of seconds and computer power doubles every 18 months. Since 1959, the number of components on a chip has increased 137-billionfold, and new computers are obsolete in three years. “Now that we have progress so rapid that it can be observed from year to year,” says Stewart Brand in The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility, “no one calls it progress. People call it change, and rather than yearn for it, they brace themselves against its force.”
Brand, for decades an eco warrior and counter-culture campaigner, wants to stop the whirligig of time, or at least make people get off for a while. He wants people to understand the difference between the seize- the-day aspect of time, the Greek kairos, and the always-there backcloth of chronos.
Brand wants to build a whole-history timepiece, a clock that will remind people of their responsibility to the future: it should tick once a year, bong once a century, and a cuckoo might pop out of it once every millennium. It would last for 10 000 years, and be central to a library devoted to the 10 000 years of human wisdom and experience accumulated so far. He calls it the “Clock of the Long Now”.
The clock was proposed, and is being built, by Daniel Hillis, a Californian computer designer. The name was dreamed up by Brian Eno, the genius behind Roxy music.
Brand has always been in the business of making people think. And he had a crucial experience which made him think: his parachute failed while he was skydiving. He says he learned three visceral lessons. First, technology is statistically unreliable: sooner or later, a parachute would fail. Second, a backup is a good idea. Third, free fall was more fall than free: if his second parachute hadn’t worked, then he would have had just eight seconds left.
That was enough culture of immediacy: he wanted an outside frame of reference, and a backup. The clock would remind him that humans were the sum of their past, which they dare not forget, lest they be condemned to repeat it in the future. The library would be the backup, a guide to risk assessment for future generations.
He is a founder member of the Long Now Foundation in San Francisco, which is building the clock, and wrestling with developing a form of information storage that will last.
A prototype of the clock is beginning to take shape, and the foundation is contemplating a permanent home for it. It won’t yet say where, in case that pushes the price too high. But, says Eno, the clock is in Hillis’s laboratory at Disney headquarters and the potential home is in the western United States, somewhere dry, in limestone hills hollowed out by abandoned mines.
In theory, Hillis’s new clock will have an accuracy equal to one day in 20 000 years. The prototype is 2,5m tall, built in alloy, tungsten carbide, metallic glass and synthetic sapphire.
It’s also debated, because time is a problem, and so is keeping it. In the medieval world, time used to be kept in days and years, with the hours an arbitrary series of points, marking matins and compline and vespers.
Punctuality arrived later (monks divided the hour into four “puncts”) and minutes and seconds only began to matter with the arrival of precision navigation and train travel.
But the kings of the supercomputer face the same calendar problems that Pope Gregory had to deal with: the days, and therefore the hours, do not fit neatly into the year. Old almanac-keepers settled this by inserting leap days. But now the second has been decoupled from the year – the modern second is so many vibrations of an isotope of caesium – and even the year won’t keep still. The moon’s drag on the Earth is drawing out day-length: leap seconds need to be inserted.
The aim of the clock is to make people think “long”. Its keepers will have to think long just to keep it working. But that, too, is part of the aim. The idea is to have something ticking in the public gaze by January 2001.
Brand points out that word processor files and computerised financial records from 10 years ago are now inaccessible: either the operating system has vanished or the computer has perished or the floppy disk has deteriorated. The computer, meant to be the great creator, has become the great eraser. Clay, stone, papyrus and parchment have survived, but haphazardly: most ancient Greek literature perished in the deliberate destruction of the great library at Alexandria.
The invention of printing turned the book into a kind of multiple independently targeted warhead: burn as many books as you like, one will always get through. The Nazis burned Albert Einstein and Andr Gide, Marcel Proust and mile Zola, but someone kept the flame alight. Other cultures were almost obliterated by history’s bigots. The Mayans had a better calendar system than Europe: Franciscan friars destroyed most of it. All the destruction was wrong, says Brand. The accumulated past is life’s best resource for innovation. Reinventing beats inventing every time.
But libraries only house, they don’t really keep. People are the keepers. The works of the past that have stayed the distance were those that people used, every day: the great religious works. So there may have to be robot librarians “exercising” knowledge. There may need to be an indelible, fireproof form of storage. And the computer’s binary code may not be the ultimate form of information storage: you could go back to a real language, and etch the words. They could be etched very small. The biblical book of Genesis has been etched for the foundation on a scale that would fit 1 000 pages on a 5cm metal disc. This is big enough to be read with an optical microscope.
There is a story about Eno in Brand’s book: in 1979, in New York, Eno became depressed by the way that a generation of here-and-now New Yorkers thought only in terms of “this loft” and “this week”. He wrote in his diary: “More and more, I want to be living in a Big Here and a Long Now.”
Eno says that is still his motive. “You behave quite differently if you think you are acting in terms of one year or two years, as opposed to 10 years or 100 years, so I’m trying to get into my mind that sense of the scale of time – and then get it into everyone else’s. The point of this project … is to make people think that our species will possibly be around for another 10 000 years, and we ought to be behaving as if that were the case.”
Humans started changing the environment with the invention of agriculture about 10 000 years ago. They accelerated this change with the Industrial Revolution 200 years ago. Yet the changes are still slow enough to seem imperceptible. Brand and his colleagues see the clock/library project as the guardian of slow research and measurement. Somebody has to take on the long-term projects. Nuclear power operators are proposing not to dismantle nuclear power stations as they become inoperable, but to “park” them for 125 years while they cool.
We now have to think 125 years ahead. Try thinking 125 years back, and look at the gap. Try looking ahead 125 years, and imagine the gap to come.
There are even longer-term projects: Britain’s National Radiological Protection Board, when contemplating where to store nuclear waste, had to imagine radiation hazards to hunter-gatherers wandering over what had been Sellafield, 100 000 years from now, after the next Ice Age.
Who will take responsibility for remembering where these things were buried, and what language will be recognisable 100 000 years from now? Brand imagines the Long Now Library issuing a warning every 300 years to the rulers “of the region formerly known as New Mexico” about radioactive waste buried in salt in “what used to be the Carlsbad caverns”.
He imagines the librarians planting messages in bottles for the future: burying global warming statistics in glaciers, or seeding minefields with data about who planted the mines.
But the world has lost most of its languages, and many of its books, and most of its memory. Does it matter now what the world will keep in the future?
“The ultimate reason for initiating something ambitious,” says Brand, “is not to fulfil certain notions, but to find out what surprises might emerge.” He quotes the writer Ken Kesey, who calls the idea “boiling rocks. If you don’t boil rocks and drink the water, how do you know it won’t make you drunk?”
The Long Now Foundation is a charity, and its existence depends on it being taken seriously for a very long time, but Eno is not daunted. “The most important part is the conversation,” he says. “You say to someone, `If you were going to save things for 10 000 years, what would you save?’ When you start thinking about that question, you are already starting to do what we hope this project will achieve. You are thinking: what are we doing now that is valuable, that is worth holding on to, that is worth communicating? And, by implication, you are also saying: what are we doing that isn’t worth communicating to the future?”