![]() It was not fully deciphered by Western historians until the 1990s, after an arduous decoding project that took nearly 200 years. This, of course, presents a challenge: How do you communicate to a person living 10,000 years in the future that they need to wind this clock to keep it going? How will they know of its importance? Will there be any reason to care? Will they know how long it’s been there, or what time it’s even communicating to us? Hillis was putting a lot of faith in many, many generations to come that they’d be able to keep his clock going - assuming, of course, that humans are even around anymore by then - and that they’d know what it was telling them.Ĭonsider Maya script, the hieroglyphic written language employed by the Maya culture from around the Third Century BCE until the early 1700s. What this shows us is that wind-up, spring-driven clocks, like the Clock of the Long Now that Danny Hillis envisioned, have only been around for just over 500 years, and Hillis’s clock would need be around for about twenty times that long, and people would need to be able to read it, just as we are taught to read clocks as children. The first spring-driven clock, which could be wound, was produced in 1511 in Nuremburg, Germany, and its design remains quite common, even as innovators have added a lot of complexity. The details about how these early clocks, often called “horologes”, functioned remain somewhat sketchy, but it does appear that they contained rudimentary gears and wheels, much like what we see in wind-up clocks and watches today. Per written records from Medieval Europe, however, the first fully-mechanical clocks in human history appeared around 1300, usually in monasteries and cathedrals, as a means of timing daily prayers and other day-to-day activities. Hourglasses, sundials, water clocks, and other tools to measure time have existed in many cultures around the world for at least a few thousand years. Another of his rules, though, would allow humans to maintain the clock when necessary, so he settled on the idea that the clock would be wound, more or less by hand, by someone every now and then, with supplemental power deriving from temperature changes in the air around it. It’s that criterion about the power source that makes Hillis’s idea especially tricky, since, by virtue of a set of philosophical rules governing the clock’s operation, all of its functions must be “transparent”, meaning that solar or nuclear power (neither of which would be entirely visible to the human eye) are out of the question. Urn:oclc:816302853 Scandate 20111017162810 Scanner prototype of the clock, on display in London. OL823145W Page-progression lr Pages 218 Ppi 514 Related-external-id urn:isbn:0297642995 OL103877M Openlibrary_subject openlibrary_staff_picks Openlibrary_work Urn:lcp:clockoflongnow00bran:lcpdf:a36e8a39-2f55-4840-a25b-9d34337301e8 Extramarc University of Toronto Foldoutcount 0 Identifier clockoflongnow00bran Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t3417zs74 Isbn 046504512X Lccn 99219976 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Openlibrary OL103877M Openlibrary_edition Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 15:19:56 Boxid IA140622 Boxid_2 CH126108 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York Donorīostonpubliclibrary Edition 1st ed. ![]()
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