The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide counterpoint to today’s “faster/cheaper” mind set and promote “slower/better” thinking. We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.
The 10,000 Year Clock Project was conceived by Danny Hillis as a monument to long term thinking.
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I think of the oak beams in the ceiling of College Hall at New College, Oxford. Last century, when the beams needed replacing, carpenters used oak trees that had been planted in 1386 when the dining hall was first built. The 14th-century builder had planted the trees in anticipation of the time, hundreds of years in the future, when the beams would need replacing
The Long Now Foundation’s Rosetta Project website is now the largest collection of linguistic data on the Net.
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After five years of collection and curation, the Rosetta digital library is the largest descriptive linguistic resource on the web. We currently serve over 90,000 text pages documenting writing systems, phonology, grammar, vocabulary, typology, vernacular texts, numbering systems, maps, audio files, field notes, demographic and historical descriptions for some 2,500 languages.
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Our design goal for the Rosetta Disk is an aesthetic object that suggests a journey of the imagination across culture and history. ~ The design consists of an Earth map at the center with spokes radiating outward holding 27,000 language data pages- 27 pages for each language. ~ This tapered ring of major regional languages is intended to maximize the number of people that will be able to read something immediately upon picking up the disk, as well as implying the directions for using the disk – “get a magnifier and there is more”.
Other interesting communication.
I like this one:
The monumental scale clock would be built inside spectacular white limestone cliffs
10,000 years, huh? I don’t know if they’ve heard of erosion :-)