Futures

The Long Now_

In 01996 a small group of scientists, engineers, designers, and philosophers such as Danny Hillis and Alexander Rose founded the non profit Long Now Foundation.
The Name comes from an essay by Brian Eno where he describes the difficulty to solve long time problems such as global warming because human realities are based on a short now thinking that doesn't go ahead of generations or even only decades.
The Long Now Foundation tries to deal with the kind of problem that no other agency or institution has time and money to deal with as those problems go ahead of the time range they can make profit out of.


The 10 000 Year Clock is one of their projects.This clock is meant do work over next 10 000 years and it measures years instead of seconds and centuries instead of hours.
Their long time goal with this clock is to create a symbol of long time thinking, that can be visited by the coming generations like the Egyptian pyramids or the Eiffel Tower in Paris. The first prototype of the 10 000 Year Clock can be seen in the Science Museum in London. The foundation has just purchased land in Nevada where the 8 foot high final Clock, that ticks every year, bells every century and where thecuckoo comes out every millennium, will be placed.

The Rosetta Project is an other project and it's inspired by the 'rosetta stone' an Ancient Egypt artifact which helbed modern understanding in hieroglyphic writing.

One main issue for the Rosetta project is the rapid loss of languages in the world. The Projects aim is to collect as many languages and documentation on them as possible and store them in as many formats possible. They have already reached 2500 languages and their documentation and worked on side projects such as language labels for Google Earth, and in cooperation with the E.S.A. (European Space Agency), the launch of a the Rosetta disc into space to reach comet 67P/Churyumov- Gerasimenko in the year 2014. Alexander Rose underlines in an interview by Plan*B, the importance of Rosetta because of the fact that we are living in a 'Digital Dark Age', where the formant of files are constantly evolving and past formats aren't readable with new devices. He describes this with the quote: ‘If Leonardo Da Vinci were alive today, his notebooks would not be preserved for the future’.

Referance: Eternaly Yours, Time in Design, Ed van Hinte