JULY 2008

Developing Dialogues About Deep Time

Fort Mason Center’s newest resident nonprofit organization is the Long Now Foundation — an enterprise consumed with the desire to help society assume more responsibility for the future. The Long Now museum and store in Building A offer fascinating glimpses into what the future might be like and how we could preserve aspects of our culture to endure for 10,000 years or longer.

Machinery Mentality
The Long Now space houses a museum, bookstore and gift shop, and amazing prototypes of artifacts that might convey our culture to individuals in the far distant future, also called deep time. To help people contemplate the nature of time, Long Now visionaries have designed beautifully machined models fashioned from gleaming metals such as brass, a nickel-copper alloy, and stainless steel.

The extremely durable devices represent the full-size mechanical behemoths the Long Now hopes to build someday in a secure, remote location where they will rise above the ravages of time. Brilliant computer scientist and Long Now board co-chair Danny Hillis designed the 10,000 Year Clock prototypes. Only two exist in the world and one of them resides at Fort Mason Center (FMC).

“The clock will run without an external power source,” said Alexander Rose, Long Now’s Executive Director. “The largest dial on the full-size clock will be a stone disc 20 feet in diameter.”

Other beautiful mechanisms on display include an eight-foot tall Planetary Orrery that uses a mechanical calculation engine to accurately track the positions of the six inner planets of our solar system. Each celestial body is a polished orb made from a stone of a similar color. Earth is blue lapis while the sun is yellow calcite.

Starting in 1996, the 10,000 Year Clock of the Long Now concept inspired Whole Earth Review founder Stewart Brand, avant-garde musician and artist Brian Eno, and like-minded friends to form a foundation devoted to long term thought. Rose joined the Long Now in 1997 at its former headquarters in the Presidio of San Francisco. Rose said the Long Now waited six years to obtain a coveted space in FMC.

“The ecology of nonprofits is not quite the same at the Presidio,” Rose said. “We developed a public viewing component to be at Fort Mason Center.”

Scintillating Seminars
Another way Long Now engages the public in discussions about time is through its acclaimed Seminars About Long Term Thinking program. Held in FMC’s Cowell Theater and other locations, the seminars showcase leading thinkers from many fields, including art, science, politics, and futurism.

At a recent seminar in late June, Stanford population biologist Paul Ehrlich raised issues about how human cultural evolution affects our environment. On July 23, large-scale photographer Edward Burtynsky discusses “The 10,000-Year Gallery.” Long Now archives the seminars on its web site as audio podcasts, blog summaries, and often in slideshow or video formats. Site visitors can also post comments in seminar discussion forums.

“We’ve had almost 400,000 audio and video downloads,” said Rose. “We’ve had well-known speakers, such as Craig Venter, who told us how genetic engineering is going to change our lives.”
Long Now also sponsors other public events, such as the Mechanicrawl along San Francisco’s northern waterfront, which is the subject of another article this month.

Deep Time Projects
Another vital element is Long Now’s Rosetta Project, which is part of the 10,000 Year Library for the 10,000 Year Clock. Supported by the National Science Foundation and Stanford University Libraries, the Rosetta Project seeks to document 7,000 human languages and store them in a permanent format accessible to future generations. The project has archived more than 100,000 pages of material for more than 2,500 languages, many close to extinction.

“A lot of languages are disappearing – we may lose 80 to 90 percent of our linguistic diversity,” said Laura Welcher, Rosetta Project Director.

As with the other Long Now artifacts on view in the museum, the Rosetta Project tools are elegantly designed and lovely to behold. For longevity purposes, Long Now decided to use durable analog technology to store data on small metallic discs. The discs are encased in stainless steel spheres and resist damage from water, high temperatures, and radiation.

Microetched onto the discs are 15,000 pages of documents for each language. The discs are also marked with graphics of words spiraling downward in size, indicating that something very small is on the disk.

“All you need to see the documents on the disk is magnification technology,” Welcher said.

However, the Rosetta Project also offers its knowledge to the digital generation in the present time. Welcher said that many educators and others interested in rare languages access the Rosetta Projects digital library archives.

“We have people using the archives who want to bring languages back. We are helping them preserve endangered languages,” said Welcher. “We have become a voice for minority languages online.”

— Claudia Willen

Read more impressions of the Long Now in “Long Now Lands In Its New Space Here At Fort Mason Center” at www.fortmason.org/features/2006/07/feature01.shtml.

Images:
Long Now Executive Director Alexander Rose (top)
Veronica Grahm, Museum & Store Assistant Manager, Danielle Engelman, Community Development Director, Photo: Bradford Gregory (second from top)