The Long Now - it sounds new age, but it's the creative, cutting edge of the science of time. This enormous clock will sit in a mountain in Nevada. It's self-correcting mechanisms will be locked to the sun, so it will never be inaccurate.

The first prototype has already been built, and is on display at the Science Museum in London. They're building the second. The final clock, says computer scientist Daniel Hillis, would be "a large (think Stonehenge) mechanical clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium." ¹

Along with the Clock, the Long Now group is developing The Rosetta Project (a publicly accessible archive of all human languages), The Longviewer (an open source timeline tool), and Long Bets (a public discussion about humanity's long-term goals).

The purpose of The Long Now is to help us humans think more carefully about what may lie ahead for our great-great-great grandchildren. They want to re-define the word "now" to include the next 10,000 years, rather than just the next two minutes.

As they describe on their website, "Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. ... Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed - some mechanism or my which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility. ... Long Now proposes both a mechanism and a myth." ²