The Long Now Foundation - Museum and Store
“Caught up as we are these years in the whirligig of time, with our attention-deficit disorder and our technological obsession with the ever tinier and ever faster, how do we keep up with its pace and at the same time perceive outside it? Supposing that occasionally taking the long contemplative view is indeed a good thing, where do you stand to get one?” Stewart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now
Photograph by Curtis Myers
One place where your search will be rewarded is The Long Now Foundation’s Museum and Store, located in Landmark Building A at San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center. The Long Now’s headquarters has been here since 2006. It is open—free–to the public seven days a week, and though the museum’s space is small, it is filled with engaging artifacts that recall the so-called Cabinets of Wonder popular in Renaissance Europe.
The exhibits show two of the foundation’s projects: a clock which, in its final form, will record 10,000 years of earth-time and the 10,000 Year Library, featuring the Rosetta Project, which has created a disk with 15,000 pages of text covering 2,500 languages.
The clock is a work in progress that began in 01996–to affirm the 10,000 year time span the foundation uses five digits for the years instead of four. The first prototype of the clock has been on exhibit in London’s Science Museum since June 02000.
Photograph by Ralph Horne
The clock’s first tick occurred on 12/31, 01999. Because of local and national concerns surrounding the coming of the millennium, foundation members could not find a space to rent for the celebration and had to host a small gathering of about 20 friends and family members in their offices. The clock ticked twice, once for each millennium.
The museum shares the ground floor of the Fort Mason space with a reception desk and store, which sells books, souvenirs, and DVDs of lectures given by well known thinkers in the fields of environmental science, physics, art, technology, social science. etc. The speakers are futurists for the most part, who support the foundation’s goal of promoting responsible long term thinking.
The rest of the space houses the exhibits. No matter what the weather is outside, the interior seems bright, as befits the future. This brightness is not just a result of white walls and lighting; it is also produced by the light from the reflective materials of which the objects exhibited are made. Not just high grade stainless steel, but also monel, an expensive alloy made mostly of nickel and copper. You cannot create things to last l0,000 years on the cheap.
Most visitors do not see familiar things when they look around the museum, but labels and the explanations of the staff are very helpful. The store sells a very attractive, seventy-three-page book, Long Now, works in progress, by Alexander Rose, Executive Director of the foundation, that tells the story in words and pictures. (see review accompanying this text.)
Pictured above is the columnar binary bit adder mechanism installed in a cut stone boulder and topped with a planetary display called an orrery which, when activated, shows the phases and motion of the six planets of our solar system that are visible to the naked eye. The planets are made of a variety of natural stones such as yellow calcite for the sun and Venus, red jasper for Mars, Chilean lapis for the earth, and banded sandstone for Jupiter. This orrery is roughly 1/4 the size of the one that will top the final version of the clock.
The large photograph on the wall below is the clock prototype now on exhibit in the London Museum of Science.
A platform in the museum’s main space displays a mechanism called the solar synchronizer, which resolves the difference between absolute time and solar time. As the label explains, without the synchronizer this difference between the two ways of measuring time would result in the clock’s time drifting from year to year because of eccentricities in the orbit of the earth around the sun and the tilt of the earth’s axis. At noon, local time, a beam of light strikes the large lens, which heats a length of memory wire that contracts when it reaches a certain temperature. The contraction pulls a lever that strikes a bowl gong, producing a certain tone. In the future the lever will be attached to the clock, the orrery, and the chime generator.
Shown above is a ten-foot long model of the chime generator. Danny Hillis, the clock’s designer, created this machine to ensure that visits to the clock would be sonically memorable. The turning of the array of Geneva wheels causes a series of ten Tibetan brass bowl gongs to sound in the more than 3,650,000 combinations required to ring out a different sequence of tones each day for 10,000 years. Brian Eno, a foundation board member, worked out the sounds of the gongs. Eno released a CD titled, January 07003, that explores the possibilities of the chime generator. However, he did not use these bowl gongs to create the music.
Above is a two-foot tall version of the first prototype for the clock carved in plywood. Hillis wanted a form that would honor mechanical computers and time pieces of the past. Geneva wheels like those in the layers of this prototype were standard components of clocks. The Geneva wheel is a mechanism that translates the continuous rotation into the intermittent rotary motion that occurs in the ticking of a clock.
Photograph courtesy of The Long Now Foundation
In addition to the display of apparatuses related to the clock project, the museum also has an exhibit of the Rosetta Project. This micro-etched nickel disk has room for over 2,500 languages recorded in its 15,000 pages of text. Why would this disk be a desirable artefact?
It turns out that our digital age is rife with discontinuities–black holes–so that although our information storage capacity is vaste, historians are likely to label our time the digital dark age because the system’s constant technical innovation has been accompanied by the constant loss of instructions for use. Among the losses will be thousands of languages, perhaps 90% of humanity’s spoken languages.
The Rosetta Project addresses this issue by collecting, naming, and sorting linguistic materials. Results of this effort are displayed on a wall and accompanied by a sound dome, which allows viewers standing in front of the wall of written texts to hear examples of the languages in the collection. The web site www.rosettaproject.org, permits people to view the pages of the Rosetta Archive and correct, comment on, or submit materials.
Other components of the clock that represent steps in the process of its development are displayed with explanatory labels. Visitors should not hesitate to ask members of the staff for more explanations if their questions are not addressed in the labels. The exhibits in this museum wll take many of us into new territory; we need guidance to find our way.
Unless otherwise noted, photographs are by Sally B. Woodbridge