ABSTRACT

Where does time go from here? It depends how long a view you want to take. The longest view of all is being taken by the Long Now Foundation, a group of enthusiasts who believe that our preoccupation with the here and now is causing us to lose sight of the scale of time. They want to widen our perspectives by constructing a monumental clock that will last for 10 000 years. Danny Hillis, the US computer scientist who is the inspiration behind the project, imagines a clock that “ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out once every millennium”.