The Long View...

One of the most striking aspects of some of the grandest cathedrals in Europe is that these buildings tended to take an incredibly long time to complete. Notre Dame in Paris was started in 1163 and finished 1345, St. Peter's in Rome was started in 1506 and completed in 1626 (a bit of a rush job, that one), and Barcelona's Sagrada Familia - started in 1882 and still under construction. On the subject of the long construction period of the Sagrada Familia, Antoni Gaudi (the original architect) was reported to have commented that "...my client is not in a hurry". The agreeable client, God in this case, makes this "long view" a bit more viable.

What strikes me about these undertakings is that those who devoted their working lives to these magnificent, all encompassing, projects would likely in many cases never actually see the fruition of their work. Presumably the divine connection that they were attributing to their work, may have been sufficient compensation. Many of an atheistic persuasion would say that they were deluded. Personally, though, I'm glad that they did, whatever of their reasons. Those individuals involved in these projects will have had greater legacies attributable to them than most of the projects people concern themselves with in their working lives. The trade-off is that with mortgage payments to be met, banks tend not to accept 'godliness' as an acceptable form of credit, so most of us are pushed down the route of a form of pragmatic short-termism.

Recently, I had the opportunity to take a insiders tour of the Sagrada Familia, with the current leading architect and construction engineer on the project. The passion that was on display for their work was pretty awe inspiring - to be honest i was fairly jealous about feeling as engrossed in an undertaking as these guys did. I also set to thinking as to where else in the world, and what sort of other projects exist that encompass this "long view" mentality. What becomes clear is that the notion of what the term "long-term" means in the developed world is shorter than it used to be. There are cultural consistencies - the Japanese when asked for a nominal figure in years as to what the "long-term" means always give a longer time period than people from the US, but in both cases that figure is less than it was 25 years ago. There are plenty of good reasons for this - the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-drive economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the basic requirement for personal multi-tasking. All of these are on the increase.

Nevertheless, on the search for projects that encompass the long view, my brother (who was also on the Sagrada Familia tour) highlighted a group based in the US, called the Long Now Foundation. Their website advertises that they hope to "provide a counterpoint to today's 'faster/cheaper' mindset and promote 'slower/better' thinking. We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years." Pretty heady stuff. The term "Long Now" was apparently coined by one of the founders of the foundation, Brian Eno (the former U2 producer), who upon moving from the UK to New York "found that here and now meant this room and this five minutes as opposed to the larger here and now he was used to back in England". The point of their foundation is to explore whatever may be helpful for thinking, understanding, and acting over very long periods of time.

The initial project that the Long Now Foundation decided to embark upon was the construction of a 10,000 year clock. The idea for this was borne out of an observation by a computer scientist called Danny Hillis, who helped form the Foundation.

"When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 2000. For the next thirty years they kept talking about what would happen by the year 2000, and now no one mentions a future date at all. The future has been shrinking by one year per year for my entire life. I think it is time for us to start a long-term project that gets people thinking past the mental barrier of an ever-shortening future. I would like to propose 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 millenium."

A brilliant idea. The complexity of trying to design something of this nature is where the concept becomes really interesting. Once you start to think of the logistics and planning that would be required, especially in the knowledge that you need to get things right at the outset, because making big changes even in the early years of the project (the first thousand years or so) is going to be beyond your control. 10,000 years is roughly about as long as the history of human technology. There are very, very few pieces of technology that are that old, currently still in existence - basically a few fragments of pots. Geologically, though, 10,000 years is a drop in the ocean. When this group started thinking about building something that lasts that long, the real problem they established was not with decay and corrosion, or even with finding a sustainable power source. People are the real problem. If something becomes unimportant to people, it tends to get destroyed, or substituted. There are countless cathedrals that have not survived for these reasons.

The conclusion that was drawn by the foundation was that the only way to survive over the long run is to be made of materials large and worthless, like Stonehenge and the Pyramids, or to become lost. They point to the Dead Sea Scrolls, that managed to survive for a couple of thousand years because they were lost. Now they've been located and preserved in a museum, the sense is that they won't last as long again. The Pyramids and Stonehenge have survived close to 5000 years, but over time they have been periodically pillaged and looted and its not clear as to their original purpose.

The principles that directed the design of the clock were vast and complex. As a starting point, they considered the very basic idea of how to power it in a sustainable way. Options included atomic power (poor maintainability, transparency), chemical power (poor scalability) etc. (full list at http://www.longnow.org/projects/clock/principles). Other issues that were up for consideration were - how to create a source of timing, options for how to display time, what concept of time to display and where to house the clock to ensure survival. On this last question, given the failure of human constructions to have survived the test of time, they reverted to Nature. A mountain in the Great Basin National Park, Nevada, will house the clock on the basis of its remoteness (over 200miles from any city), and is a relatively inaccessible and inhospitable location.

Whether this project will survive the 10,000 year test of time, obviously remains for the future. It would be against the balance of probabilities if it did. What I find interesting in the design concepts that are raised by undertaking a project that is so forward looking is that there are so many variables to consider. Very basically, what the future looks like thousands of years forward, and what civilisation will look like at that time.

One of the criticisms of the endeavours of our current institutions; governments, companies, charities, agencies etc. is that they are constructed in ways that don't benefit from taking this design principle into their construction, and consequently find themselves in life-threatening difficulties when we have periods of relatively high stress. Much of this happens because these institutions are reactive as opposed to proactive about the direction they want to take themselves. What I mean by this is that a public company often runs itself on the basis that it needs to report on itself to stakeholders every 3 months. A proactive institution will have considered the long view design principles, not necessarily for 10,000 years, but over a longer period such that they are less surprised about the "once in a generation" shifts that occur. There is no guarantee that they will succeed in understanding the future context ahead of time, but considering it in the way the Long Now Foundation looked at the design issues the "Clock for the Long Now" encountered would certainly create a fighting chance during stressful periods, like now.