Jan. 2, 2000

CLOCK OF THE LONG NOW

If it seems you've been waiting all your life for it to be 2000, you'll be wanting something else to wait for, and a group of long-term thinkers has just the project for you.

They call it ''The Clock of the Long Now,'' a clock conceived, and they hope eventually built, as a monumental structure that would keep time for 10,000 years, reaching as far into the future as humanity's past reaches back since the development of agriculture.

''It ticks once a year, bongs once a century and the cuckoo comes out every millennium,'' says Daniel Hillis, who came up with the idea in 1993 and is now building a prototype.

Whimsical? That was my first reaction to the book, ''The Clock of the Long Now," by Stewart Brand, whom many will remember from the '60s as the guru of The Whole Earth Catalog. But the need to start the year 02000 with a forward-looking column prompted me to take a second look, and there's more here than mere whimsy.

''How do we make long-term thinking automatic and common,'' Brand asks, ''instead of difficult and rare?''

One way, Brand and his colleagues think, is to offer a perspective on time that is mind-expanding in the same way that the first view of earth from space was.

''The astronomer Fred Hoyle was right in 01947 when he forecast, 'Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from outside, is available . . . a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose,' '' Brand says.

The phrase ''the long now'' comes from musician Brian Eno, who observed when he lived in New York City in the 1970s that the people around him were relentlessly local in their concerns, both in time and space.

''More and more,'' Eno wrote in his notebook in 1979, ''I find I want to be living in a Big Here and a Long Now.''

''Here'' should be at least as big as the earth, and ''Now'' as long as we can encompass, because the human lives to come vastly outnumber those that exist now.

The long perspective is needed, they think, because ''civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span'' (Hillis).

I'm not entirely convinced that is right as a description of how people visualize their own lives. We are still adjusting, personally and socially, to the doubling of the average human lifespan in the 20th century. My father, born in 1906, didn't begin to think about saving for retirement until after World War II, when he was in his 40s. My husband and I weren't even eligible to enroll in his employer's retirement plan until he was 35. My son started putting money into a 401(k) plan at work when he was 22, — not so much as he thought he ought to, but that's the point. Assumptions about what one ought to do are more, not less, future-oriented than they were.

Companies look as far ahead as they can in a time of accelerating technological change. A Dec. 15 report from the Industrial Research Institute noted that American spending on research and development had grown from $97 billion to $166 billion in the last five years (not including $70 billion from the federal government). Basic research is a small but growing share of it.

The group is correct, though, to identify this as a time of ''drastic and irretrievable information loss.'' That may seem odd, when it seems that every stray e-mail comment can be dredged up from the indiscreet past, as in the Microsoft antitrust trial, but that's true only so long as the technology doesn't change.

Hillis recalls that when the artificial intelligence lab at MIT shut down its pioneer minicomputer, there was no place to store its files except mag tapes that are now unreadable. The first vision and language programs are lost, as well as the early correspondence of the founders of artificial intelligence. Yet historians can read Galileo's scientific correspondence from the 1590s, and Galileo's daughter's letters to him have just been published.

So the Long Now people (on the Web at longnow.org) propose a library to go with their clock. They also suggest some interesting services it might perform, such as periodically warning the government of the region formerly known as New Mexico that there is a large quantity of radioactive material buried nearby. In case everyone has forgotten, information on its exact location is available, and the next notice will be sent in 300 years.

How could we build something, besides a nuclear waste dump, that would last 10,000 years? It's worth thinking about.

(775 words)