At the Encyclopedia Foundation, we are obviously big fans of science fiction. And yes, we are nerds, in that we take it seriously to the extent that even while enjoying it, we nit pick it and try to one up each other on who can spot the glaring scientific flaws in it. Star Trek obviously provides fertile ground for this (and for those who enjoy that kind of thing, google “SF Debris” and watch his great reviews) and as to Star Wars…let’s not get us started!
One of the favorite things to show in both sci fi movies and to be described in sci fi books is also one of the more laughably inaccurate things we know of. That’s where a spaceship arrives at a new star system, and they basically look out the window and see the planet, big and bright, right in front of them. Then they can pretty much manually fly the ship straight into a parking orbit. Wow. So easy.
Kind of hard to reconcile that with how hard it was for those who actually live in that star system. For assuming that other aliens are not much smarter or dumber than we are (a reasonable assumption for reasons not relevant to this article), they would have had a hard time finding all their planets themselves.
Take our own species, since obviously that’s the one we know best. It took us quite awhile to discover all of our planets, and Pluto wasn’t discovered until the 20th century. (Yes, I know what the IAU said!) You see, planets don’t actually give off light. Sure, they reflect light, but this just means that entering our Solar System would be like entering an area 20 football fields long. In the center, a bowling ball is glowing not much brighter than the other stars. And somewhere there are nine items ranging in size from a pinhead to a chestnut. Earth would be a peppercorn.
Care to guess how long it would take you to notice the reflection off of a peppercorn in circle two kilometers in diameter? And what if it was on the wrong side of the Sun to observe the reflected light? And you are not an entity the size of a human wandering about those hundreds of football fields looking for a peppercorn. No, you are the size of an atom, and are looking about that giant sphere, 20 football fields in diameter, and oh, yeah, it’s not just two dimensions! That peppercorn could be 2 kilometers above you or below you, or anywhere in between!
Or do you use your “sensors” to find the planets? One wonders what science fiction writers imagine “sensors” to be. Apparently things that let them scan a volume of space inconceivably vast for the few rocks or wisps of gas we call “planets”. After all, the diameter of the Solar System – if we confine ourselves to Pluto being the end – is very roughly 4 billion miles in radius. Or 67 billion cubic miles in volume. And 99.85 percent of all matter in that vast volume is the Sun. And the planets are part of the remaining .0015%.
Oh, and whatever those “sensors” are, Pluto is about four light hours from the Sun. So this hypothetical spaceship “scans” and one single beam the send out takes 16 hours to get all the way to the opposite end and return with whatever information it might be able to pick up. Even if we assume their “beam” is one mile in width…well, I’m not going to do the math on that, but suffice to say, that ship had best have a sustainable environment.
What we have are telescopes and math. And the couple of centuries it took when we got serious about finding the not so obvious planets. What they apparently have in books and movies is magic. But I suppose that’s understandable. Imagine if every time the Enterprise entered a new stellar system, Captain Picard announced, “All hands, you have two weeks leave to play in the holodeck while cartography pulls double shifts looking for the planet we were sent to!” (This assumes the planet is unoccupied, or by radio waves they could simply be given instructions as to where to go, though one can imagine the “no, no, my left and down” hilarity that could entail!)
(Note to sci fi nerds: The solution is that an arriving ship would confine itself to the “life zone”, greatly reducing the area to be searched. That would still be an enormous volume. But if they observed some gas giants, and could orient on the planetary plane, this would allow them to position their ship “above” or “below” the sun, closer than 90,000,000 miles to it, so that they could look about in a roughly 300,000,000 mile circle for a planet. A series of rapid photographs of each segment would be taken, and a computer would check all the thousands of photos for any points of reflected light that were changing position. Time to do this would involve many variable factors. Have they spotted a gas giant, thus being able to determine the galactic plane? How long did it take the ship to reposition within the star system? How fast are their telescopic cameras? I am picturing anywhere from a single day to months. But not seconds, minutes or hours. And a day would seem to involve some advance knowledge, some lucky breaks, or a staggering array of telescopes.)
The late great Dr. Isaac Asimov actually discussed some of this in his Foundation series, when he had Golan Trevize explain some of the difficulties in finding planets to Janov Pelorat. More notably, Robert Heinlein mentioned telling time by the planets in “Time Enough for Love” when a time traveler was going to look at the position of the planets, input them into a computer that had the data on those planets, and thus know when he was. He pointed out that unless you already had all the data on the planets, it would be easier just to ask a native what year it was!
Granting then that finding planets isn’t always as easy as it’s made out to be, can one in real life tell the time by the planets?
Yes. The planets of our Solar System have given speeds and rates of rotation and rates of revolving about our Sun that are well known, well documented and susceptible to analysis. We know where each of the planets are right now. That is, when we wish to view one, we do not then spend months or years scanning the sky hoping to come across it and recognize it – we know where it is supposed to be, and we aim our telescopes there.
We are at a point in our history where we can do this now. But we have not always been. And may not always be. So it would be wise to get a series of static shots of our Solar System now, while we can. But how does that work, what good does that actually do?
The means of telling time by the planets is simple to say, harder to do. It takes into account the varying speeds of the planets revolving about the Sun. Earth takes (obviously) one year to do this. Mars, roughly twice as far, takes 1.88 of our years to make a circle (actually an ellipse) about the Sun. Jupiter, about 12 years. Pluto (I know!), about 248 years. Mercury, conversely, only about 88 days.
Western man loves clocks, and it was Lorenzo Valpaia who in the 16th century built a very clever one that was designed to show the motions and position of the major planets. Regrettably it was destroyed. But it shows it can be done. Were a new version to be built – and I think it would be great if one was – it could have a Pluto that literally took about 247 years to circle one time. And a Jupiter taking 12 years. And even “fast” Mercury taking 88 days. (His was not configured to show a literal motion, but did show where they’d be.)
However, more simply than a clockwork mechanism or an orrery, which might not last 10,000 years, would be to have still shots of the configurations of the planets at given intervals. And all the information on the planets, how to observe them, the math involved, as described in other articles.
A person coming across this in, say, the year 6,011, might have an entirely different system for naming years. To him, it may be 441 AC (After the Cleansing) as he counts from the destruction of civilization by rogue nanites that took place 441 years before his present. Or he may think of it as 5432 AH, due to an Islamic civilization having gained world wide supremacy some millennia before.
Whichever years he uses, the odds of it being ours would seem small. However, he may yet have some knowledge of our history. He may have been taught by an Imam that man set foot on the moon in the year 1390 AH, and he could then see by a chart of historical events that we called 1390 AH “1969 CE”. A one to one correlation could be made, and all our data would make sense in historical context.
But possibly he thinks in terms even worse for us – such as regarding it as the eleventh year of the reign of Emperor Daly LXII of the Chicago Imperium, Lord of the Eastern Dominions, Protector of the Western Wastes. If he is an educated man, he may know his emperors back for more than a few centuries. However, ultimately, if knowledge of Common Era dating has been lost, it would be difficult to get a one to one correlation with our historical dates. The time before Emperors may just be a murky “ancient times”, and while they could learn all about it from our books, they’d not know for sure how long had passed since then, unless there had been a fortuitously – and improbably – unbroken line of Imperial succession back to some historical date we already knew of.
This is where the static pictures of the Solar System would come in handy. Once they know what they are, they can chart the skies for what the configuration is during their time. And as the math works backwards as well as forwards, they can know what it looked like a year or five years or 1,000 years ago. Or 4,011 years ago, back to the year 02000 CE.
And given that we’d have those pictures, one of each millennia, possibly each century, they could quickly (well, okay, not so quickly, but at least surely) find out how long ago things like the moon landing were in relation to them. The hypothetical Chicagoan scholar could report to his Imperial Highness that “the moon landing of the ancients took place 2157 years before the ascension of the First Emperor. Our year, by the ancient’s dating, is 6,011. And our observations show that the planets were in the exact formation shown on this plate 11 years ago, at the time of your coronation.”
And thus time can be told again, and all humanity, past and present and future, is on the same page again. This may seem unimportant, but as any disaster could happen any time, and inevitably some disaster will happen some time, such records of the planetary configurations and what they correspond to would be (and will be) invaluable.
So much so that at the Encyclopedia Foundation, we are going to see about adding such to our collection.
Friday, July 1, 2011
What time is it?
The Encyclopedia Foundation has as its goal the preservation of knowledge for 10,000 years. All well and good, but when will that be up? One could imagine that it would be 10,000 years from the date of our incorporation, or 12,008. Or 12,007 from our earlier incorporation. Or perhaps even 11,941, reflecting the year the late Dr. Isaac Asimov first published “Foundation” detailing our plans.
Dr. Asimov even anticipated the difficulty in labeling years in his book “Second Foundation” when he showed that the date of the start of the Stettinian War (in which the Mule’s successor on Kalgan attempted to take over the Foundation Federation) was given as 11,692 of the Galactic Era, but also 419 After Seldon, 348 Year of the Foundation or even 56 FC (Year of the First Citizenship of the Mule).
Likewise on our planet, at this time, we have a variety of year systems, and a variety of ways of starting the clock. However, and mercifully, a general acceptance of what used to be AD (Anno Domini or Year of our Lord) has been accepted, though is called CE or Common Era. And in that, the year as I write is 02011.
All well and good, but human systems of time measuring can – and usually do – vary greatly. Can we really assume that we’ll all still be using Common Era in the year (to us) of 12,011? At the Encyclopedia Foundation, we think that this would be a poor bet to make.
You see, in the past 10,000 years, it has not been common to list years out. For many thousands of years, there was no need for a tally, things were simply in your own personal past, in “my father’s time”, in the “time of my father’s father” or “in ancient times”. Later, in Biblical times and all the way through Roman times, it was common to name years after the rulers. Such as in the “fifth year of the reign of Solomon” or “the second year of the rule of Tiberius”. Or even events. “The third year after the Battle of X”.
Egyptians and many other cultures did this, too. So much so that it was a major task of historians to synchronize all those various years into our Common Era dating system. Which itself led to problems. Such as when it was realized that when Dionysius Exiguus invented the Anno Domini system, he matched it with the Roman system of “Anno Urbis Conditae”, or Year of the Founding of the City of Rome. However, he regrettably matched it wrong, so that is why even today the birth of Christ is listed as 4BC. Dr. Asimov had an excellent article on this in his essay “Of Time and Space and Other Things”, in which he described all this in detail.
But none of that actually gets us closer to the real question – what time is it?
Well, one can get almost endlessly metaphysical – and that’s always fun! – but one could say, in general, that time for our purposes is measured by astronomical bodies. The “time” it takes the Earth to rotate once (or from a human perspective, for the Sun to rise in the east, set in the west, and rise again) is a “day”. A “year” is how long it takes the Earth to revolve once about the Sun (or from a person’s perspective, for the seasons to come back around to the beginning, in ancient times, the Winter Solstice, when the Sun started getting higher in the sky again). Even a “month” was derived from the length of time the Moon goes through its phases, which while actually 29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes and 2 plus seconds, is arbitrarily defined as four seven day “weeks” or various amounts of days varying from 28 to 31 (also known as “calendar months”).
Were we not to have astronomical bodies to measure the rates of, we’d not have “time” as we know it. Instead we’d simply have that “several winters ago” and “in my grandsire’s day” stuff that is way to imprecise for our modern purposes.
But that’s only how we measure rates of time. What shows, in a neutral, objective, non-arbitrary way, exactly what time it is now? For we can see that no matter how well we count the number of times the Earth has rotated or revolved since Rome was founded or Jesus was born, that errors do creep in. Mostly for us being admirably exact in knowing how long the periods of time are, but very inexact in the historical events we are speaking of.
When was Jesus born? And it’s not just the Christians, when was Mohammed born? We don’t have exact dates for either. Nor is it only a religious problem, there is dispute not only over George Washington’s birthday, but even Isaac Asimov was unsure as to his date of birth!
The Encyclopedia Foundation offers several things, that should be used together, to derive an “objective time” that can be agreed on, and not change, and be likely to be understood in the coming millennia.
First, a list of very important historical dates, from all around the world, in the major languages, all on one durable metal plate. It would show what year it was in Common Era for things like the founding of the city of Rome, the birth of Christ (as normally given), the year Mohammed and his followers went to Medina, the year of Johan Gutenberg’s printing press, the first man landing on the moon and such like that. It could be a large list, so that one of the cultural/historical events would be sure to be known to the person looking at it, and such a person may already have a “year” in their own system for it. Battles, discoveries, inventions, great leaders, all the usual things should be included.
Second, it would be given not just in the Common Era year, but in the Jewish year (2011 is 5771), the Hindi year (5112), the Muslim year (1432) and such. We cannot currently know what culture will be dominant in 5,000 years. Or even 500 years. Or, though it may seem hard to believe, even 50 years from now. The world has changed faster and more dramatically in less time than half a century before.
Third, and most important, it would then include a static image of the Solar System at various intervals, for our purposes, once per millennia. Thus an image of the planets as they were aligned if one was looking from “above” for the year 1,000, 2,000, 3,000…to 10,000 Common Era. Also for the year 0, 1,000 BCE (Before Common Era) and back to 10,000 BCE. That would be a good 20,000 year spread.
Included in these static pictures would be all the information necessary for calculating such things. This would be important, so they’d know “when” they were seeing this. Space and desire permitting, we could have static shots of the 100 year intervals, too. But the real trick is to show them the data and give them the instructions on lens crafting, telescope making, star gazing and the math (Newton, Kepler, Einstein) to let them do this themselves.
For it is the last that shows definitively exactly what time it is. They would know what time it was for them. And they could then know exactly when all those historical events listed took place. And they – our descendents – would know when the 10,000 year period was up.
The Encyclopedia Foundation proposes having such a metal plate or plates with such information on it. But we’d like the Long Now Foundation to have such at the sites of their 10,000 year clocks. For reasons mentioned in another article, this would be handy in case the clock needed to be reset due to accidental or purposeful damage.
It would also be handy because if this were not there, then even if nothing was ever broke on the clock, you would only have a clock, and it wouldn’t actually be measuring anything. Picture, if you will, a timer. It shows 4 millennia, 274 years, 4 months, and 8 days have passed. Passed since what? Since the Mayans ruled? Since we landed on the moon? Since the Mars colony was seized by Quato and his gang of mutinous dissidents?
A 10,000 year clock needs context. The idea of it, for encouraging a long term thinking, is accomplished by its very existence. But the addition of the metal plates described above is necessary to it having utility in the coming millennia. And again, to fix it if need be.
Dr. Asimov even anticipated the difficulty in labeling years in his book “Second Foundation” when he showed that the date of the start of the Stettinian War (in which the Mule’s successor on Kalgan attempted to take over the Foundation Federation) was given as 11,692 of the Galactic Era, but also 419 After Seldon, 348 Year of the Foundation or even 56 FC (Year of the First Citizenship of the Mule).
Likewise on our planet, at this time, we have a variety of year systems, and a variety of ways of starting the clock. However, and mercifully, a general acceptance of what used to be AD (Anno Domini or Year of our Lord) has been accepted, though is called CE or Common Era. And in that, the year as I write is 02011.
All well and good, but human systems of time measuring can – and usually do – vary greatly. Can we really assume that we’ll all still be using Common Era in the year (to us) of 12,011? At the Encyclopedia Foundation, we think that this would be a poor bet to make.
You see, in the past 10,000 years, it has not been common to list years out. For many thousands of years, there was no need for a tally, things were simply in your own personal past, in “my father’s time”, in the “time of my father’s father” or “in ancient times”. Later, in Biblical times and all the way through Roman times, it was common to name years after the rulers. Such as in the “fifth year of the reign of Solomon” or “the second year of the rule of Tiberius”. Or even events. “The third year after the Battle of X”.
Egyptians and many other cultures did this, too. So much so that it was a major task of historians to synchronize all those various years into our Common Era dating system. Which itself led to problems. Such as when it was realized that when Dionysius Exiguus invented the Anno Domini system, he matched it with the Roman system of “Anno Urbis Conditae”, or Year of the Founding of the City of Rome. However, he regrettably matched it wrong, so that is why even today the birth of Christ is listed as 4BC. Dr. Asimov had an excellent article on this in his essay “Of Time and Space and Other Things”, in which he described all this in detail.
But none of that actually gets us closer to the real question – what time is it?
Well, one can get almost endlessly metaphysical – and that’s always fun! – but one could say, in general, that time for our purposes is measured by astronomical bodies. The “time” it takes the Earth to rotate once (or from a human perspective, for the Sun to rise in the east, set in the west, and rise again) is a “day”. A “year” is how long it takes the Earth to revolve once about the Sun (or from a person’s perspective, for the seasons to come back around to the beginning, in ancient times, the Winter Solstice, when the Sun started getting higher in the sky again). Even a “month” was derived from the length of time the Moon goes through its phases, which while actually 29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes and 2 plus seconds, is arbitrarily defined as four seven day “weeks” or various amounts of days varying from 28 to 31 (also known as “calendar months”).
Were we not to have astronomical bodies to measure the rates of, we’d not have “time” as we know it. Instead we’d simply have that “several winters ago” and “in my grandsire’s day” stuff that is way to imprecise for our modern purposes.
But that’s only how we measure rates of time. What shows, in a neutral, objective, non-arbitrary way, exactly what time it is now? For we can see that no matter how well we count the number of times the Earth has rotated or revolved since Rome was founded or Jesus was born, that errors do creep in. Mostly for us being admirably exact in knowing how long the periods of time are, but very inexact in the historical events we are speaking of.
When was Jesus born? And it’s not just the Christians, when was Mohammed born? We don’t have exact dates for either. Nor is it only a religious problem, there is dispute not only over George Washington’s birthday, but even Isaac Asimov was unsure as to his date of birth!
The Encyclopedia Foundation offers several things, that should be used together, to derive an “objective time” that can be agreed on, and not change, and be likely to be understood in the coming millennia.
First, a list of very important historical dates, from all around the world, in the major languages, all on one durable metal plate. It would show what year it was in Common Era for things like the founding of the city of Rome, the birth of Christ (as normally given), the year Mohammed and his followers went to Medina, the year of Johan Gutenberg’s printing press, the first man landing on the moon and such like that. It could be a large list, so that one of the cultural/historical events would be sure to be known to the person looking at it, and such a person may already have a “year” in their own system for it. Battles, discoveries, inventions, great leaders, all the usual things should be included.
Second, it would be given not just in the Common Era year, but in the Jewish year (2011 is 5771), the Hindi year (5112), the Muslim year (1432) and such. We cannot currently know what culture will be dominant in 5,000 years. Or even 500 years. Or, though it may seem hard to believe, even 50 years from now. The world has changed faster and more dramatically in less time than half a century before.
Third, and most important, it would then include a static image of the Solar System at various intervals, for our purposes, once per millennia. Thus an image of the planets as they were aligned if one was looking from “above” for the year 1,000, 2,000, 3,000…to 10,000 Common Era. Also for the year 0, 1,000 BCE (Before Common Era) and back to 10,000 BCE. That would be a good 20,000 year spread.
Included in these static pictures would be all the information necessary for calculating such things. This would be important, so they’d know “when” they were seeing this. Space and desire permitting, we could have static shots of the 100 year intervals, too. But the real trick is to show them the data and give them the instructions on lens crafting, telescope making, star gazing and the math (Newton, Kepler, Einstein) to let them do this themselves.
For it is the last that shows definitively exactly what time it is. They would know what time it was for them. And they could then know exactly when all those historical events listed took place. And they – our descendents – would know when the 10,000 year period was up.
The Encyclopedia Foundation proposes having such a metal plate or plates with such information on it. But we’d like the Long Now Foundation to have such at the sites of their 10,000 year clocks. For reasons mentioned in another article, this would be handy in case the clock needed to be reset due to accidental or purposeful damage.
It would also be handy because if this were not there, then even if nothing was ever broke on the clock, you would only have a clock, and it wouldn’t actually be measuring anything. Picture, if you will, a timer. It shows 4 millennia, 274 years, 4 months, and 8 days have passed. Passed since what? Since the Mayans ruled? Since we landed on the moon? Since the Mars colony was seized by Quato and his gang of mutinous dissidents?
A 10,000 year clock needs context. The idea of it, for encouraging a long term thinking, is accomplished by its very existence. But the addition of the metal plates described above is necessary to it having utility in the coming millennia. And again, to fix it if need be.
10,000 year clock - a concern
The Encyclopedia Foundation by its nature must attempt to take into account any possible catastrophe that might impede the mission of preserving knowledge for 10,000 years. We are different than the Long Now Foundation in a variety of ways, but perhaps one way is in philosophical outlook.
The Long Now Foundation is one of philosophical optimism, grounded in the theory that there is nothing particularly special about our time, therefore, instead of assuming we are at the end of time (the way Western Culture loves to imagine in the form of our various apocalyptic beliefs) they assume we are in the middle of two myrias. That is to say, they note that we have (roughly) 10,000 years of history behind us, and thus plan for 10,000 years ahead of us.
In an article in Details (January/February 2006) it was pointed out that most of us fatalistically expect the world to end. But the Long Now is trying, by means of its 10,000 year clock, to get us thinking about the long view of things, to realize that yes, there will be people here, so we need to start thinking about the future again. It points out the phenomena where we all got so used to thinking of the year 2000 as “the future” that it was kind of disappointing when it came and went!
At the Encyclopedia Foundation, we agree with this. And we do believe that humans will be around in 10,000 years. However, we aren’t quite so optimistic in general, because by the nature of our mission, we can’t afford to be.
You see, while the clock of the Long Now is admirably suited for getting people to think about the future, it is not so admirably suited for preparing people of the future to recover from disasters. That’s where we come in. Our point of preserving knowledge for 10,000 years is not simply so that advanced archaeologists of that time can have something fun to examine. It’s more along the lines of “In Case of Emergency Read This!”. We are – like in the “Foundation Trilogy” of the late Dr. Isaac Asimov, planning in advance for a collapse.
Which as far as we’re concerned, all history shows that there is always a collapse!
This tends to give us a certain philosophical “pessimism”, in that we must then orient to the negative “what ifs” and plan and guard against those.
I mention this due to reading about the 10,000 year clock being built in Texas. It is described as able to be self-powered, but to be accessible to people, so that they can help wind it up, literally. A journey of a day, and someone can look about the clock, examine it, wind it, read it, and come away inspired.
Of course, I am sorry to have to say this, but that is not all a person – or persons – can do in 10,000 years. There is a reason for there being a fence around Stonehenge.
Yes, I refer to vandalism. And while having the sphinx’s nose lopped off, or having “Go Mancs!” spray painted on a stone of Stonehenge may not actually interfere with the majesty of the Sphinx or the calculative abilities of Stonehenge, it does deface them.
And a clock is ever so much more sensitive to vandalism than a stone sphinx. Or a circle of stones. Or really, let’s be honest, it’s more sensitive than anything.
The solution that we have here at the Encyclopedia Foundation is to have a caretaker on site. To prevent that kind of thing. We also plan on redundancy, so that if one body of knowledge is destroyed, another still exists. We can – and do – hope that the Long Now Foundation is doing that. Oh, we know that they aren’t having a caretaker on the site – though we believe they should – but we do know that they are going to build more than one.
Of course, we don’t think the simple building of more than one really cuts it, given that 10,000 years is a long time for vandals to operate. And leaves out the possibility of a concerted effort, such as always happens with these types of things, every century or three. At the Encyclopedia Foundation, amongst the many apocalyptic scenarios we imagine, one involving a radical anti-time measuring movement is hardly very far fetched. Time measuring is, after all, responsible for no small portion of the woes of the common man, and such “common men” are always the shock troops of any revolution or anarchy that comes.
Is there a solution for the Long Now Foundation? Well, we understand how they can’t really have a caretaker there – though as far as we’re concerned, that might be more possible than they are thinking. But failing that, there are some things they could do. Three things, actually.
1. Have more than one clock. Ideally at least one per continent. And work to get the unit price down so that such clocks can be made smaller, more affordable, at least to the extent that you could have one in every library of every city over 100,000 people. The odds of every statue or picture of George Washington being destroyed are very, very slight. So make as many of these clocks. Sound fantastic? Well, they are planning on a ten thousand year period, and it would be surprising if they could not do this within the first 200 years. Frankly, we think they could do it in the first 100, based on certain variables of capital accumulation and public interest.
2. Have spare parts and tools for fixing the clocks on site. In a vault secure enough to deter the casual vandal. But with instructions for how to open it on the outside. Instructions? Sure. Just that it would be the type of instructions that only a serious scholar could provide. Basically, the combo – and we got this idea from Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle in “The Mote in God’s Eye” – would be the positions of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn as of any year they cared to designate. Don’t laugh, you are thinking you know the order of the planets, I assure you that unless you are a staggeringly unusual savant, you sure don’t know what the positions were for the year 02000 or 01996 or any other year you care to think of.
Why this combo? Because besides discouraging vandals, it would do no good to have the tools to repair the clock without a way to figure out what time to reset it to. And the ability to chart the positions of the planets would tell such a person the very important piece of information needed – what time it is when they come across the clock. (More on this in a future article.)
Which leads to…
3. Have on site the written instructions for finding the positions of the planets. This could be engraved on the wall itself, on the clock itself, or on metal plates. Or all three. It would have instructions as to the math of calculating orbits, how to make lenses for telescopes, Newton’s and Einstein’s laws on how to figure it out, Kepler’s Laws of Planetary motion and such. Besides engravings, you could also have records – old fashioned records and an old fashioned gramophone – to tell them about all this. The verbal instructions need not be detailed, it would be enough if they were told the writings had meaning, that they were in English (and Spanish, Mandarin and Hindi) and they would – if they were scholars, not vandals – be able to take it from there.
You could also, if you really wished to be thorough, have glass slides and a mechanical slide projector and lamp to literally show them what you meant.
This would allow them to re-discover astronomy (if they had lost it), calculate the current time, calculate the combination to the vault, access the tools and supplies and reset the clock. And close the vault door again.
All that said, and we are serious in suggesting it, they’d also do well to have some kind of group of people living on site. Such takes enormous planning and initial funding, but is what will inevitably be the only thing that truly works to avoid vandalism for the longest of terms.
The Long Now Foundation is one of philosophical optimism, grounded in the theory that there is nothing particularly special about our time, therefore, instead of assuming we are at the end of time (the way Western Culture loves to imagine in the form of our various apocalyptic beliefs) they assume we are in the middle of two myrias. That is to say, they note that we have (roughly) 10,000 years of history behind us, and thus plan for 10,000 years ahead of us.
In an article in Details (January/February 2006) it was pointed out that most of us fatalistically expect the world to end. But the Long Now is trying, by means of its 10,000 year clock, to get us thinking about the long view of things, to realize that yes, there will be people here, so we need to start thinking about the future again. It points out the phenomena where we all got so used to thinking of the year 2000 as “the future” that it was kind of disappointing when it came and went!
At the Encyclopedia Foundation, we agree with this. And we do believe that humans will be around in 10,000 years. However, we aren’t quite so optimistic in general, because by the nature of our mission, we can’t afford to be.
You see, while the clock of the Long Now is admirably suited for getting people to think about the future, it is not so admirably suited for preparing people of the future to recover from disasters. That’s where we come in. Our point of preserving knowledge for 10,000 years is not simply so that advanced archaeologists of that time can have something fun to examine. It’s more along the lines of “In Case of Emergency Read This!”. We are – like in the “Foundation Trilogy” of the late Dr. Isaac Asimov, planning in advance for a collapse.
Which as far as we’re concerned, all history shows that there is always a collapse!
This tends to give us a certain philosophical “pessimism”, in that we must then orient to the negative “what ifs” and plan and guard against those.
I mention this due to reading about the 10,000 year clock being built in Texas. It is described as able to be self-powered, but to be accessible to people, so that they can help wind it up, literally. A journey of a day, and someone can look about the clock, examine it, wind it, read it, and come away inspired.
Of course, I am sorry to have to say this, but that is not all a person – or persons – can do in 10,000 years. There is a reason for there being a fence around Stonehenge.
Yes, I refer to vandalism. And while having the sphinx’s nose lopped off, or having “Go Mancs!” spray painted on a stone of Stonehenge may not actually interfere with the majesty of the Sphinx or the calculative abilities of Stonehenge, it does deface them.
And a clock is ever so much more sensitive to vandalism than a stone sphinx. Or a circle of stones. Or really, let’s be honest, it’s more sensitive than anything.
The solution that we have here at the Encyclopedia Foundation is to have a caretaker on site. To prevent that kind of thing. We also plan on redundancy, so that if one body of knowledge is destroyed, another still exists. We can – and do – hope that the Long Now Foundation is doing that. Oh, we know that they aren’t having a caretaker on the site – though we believe they should – but we do know that they are going to build more than one.
Of course, we don’t think the simple building of more than one really cuts it, given that 10,000 years is a long time for vandals to operate. And leaves out the possibility of a concerted effort, such as always happens with these types of things, every century or three. At the Encyclopedia Foundation, amongst the many apocalyptic scenarios we imagine, one involving a radical anti-time measuring movement is hardly very far fetched. Time measuring is, after all, responsible for no small portion of the woes of the common man, and such “common men” are always the shock troops of any revolution or anarchy that comes.
Is there a solution for the Long Now Foundation? Well, we understand how they can’t really have a caretaker there – though as far as we’re concerned, that might be more possible than they are thinking. But failing that, there are some things they could do. Three things, actually.
1. Have more than one clock. Ideally at least one per continent. And work to get the unit price down so that such clocks can be made smaller, more affordable, at least to the extent that you could have one in every library of every city over 100,000 people. The odds of every statue or picture of George Washington being destroyed are very, very slight. So make as many of these clocks. Sound fantastic? Well, they are planning on a ten thousand year period, and it would be surprising if they could not do this within the first 200 years. Frankly, we think they could do it in the first 100, based on certain variables of capital accumulation and public interest.
2. Have spare parts and tools for fixing the clocks on site. In a vault secure enough to deter the casual vandal. But with instructions for how to open it on the outside. Instructions? Sure. Just that it would be the type of instructions that only a serious scholar could provide. Basically, the combo – and we got this idea from Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle in “The Mote in God’s Eye” – would be the positions of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn as of any year they cared to designate. Don’t laugh, you are thinking you know the order of the planets, I assure you that unless you are a staggeringly unusual savant, you sure don’t know what the positions were for the year 02000 or 01996 or any other year you care to think of.
Why this combo? Because besides discouraging vandals, it would do no good to have the tools to repair the clock without a way to figure out what time to reset it to. And the ability to chart the positions of the planets would tell such a person the very important piece of information needed – what time it is when they come across the clock. (More on this in a future article.)
Which leads to…
3. Have on site the written instructions for finding the positions of the planets. This could be engraved on the wall itself, on the clock itself, or on metal plates. Or all three. It would have instructions as to the math of calculating orbits, how to make lenses for telescopes, Newton’s and Einstein’s laws on how to figure it out, Kepler’s Laws of Planetary motion and such. Besides engravings, you could also have records – old fashioned records and an old fashioned gramophone – to tell them about all this. The verbal instructions need not be detailed, it would be enough if they were told the writings had meaning, that they were in English (and Spanish, Mandarin and Hindi) and they would – if they were scholars, not vandals – be able to take it from there.
You could also, if you really wished to be thorough, have glass slides and a mechanical slide projector and lamp to literally show them what you meant.
This would allow them to re-discover astronomy (if they had lost it), calculate the current time, calculate the combination to the vault, access the tools and supplies and reset the clock. And close the vault door again.
All that said, and we are serious in suggesting it, they’d also do well to have some kind of group of people living on site. Such takes enormous planning and initial funding, but is what will inevitably be the only thing that truly works to avoid vandalism for the longest of terms.
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