Most of these were not built with the intention of extreme longevity, but are accidents of history. Stories, myths, religions, a handful of institutions, as well as some structures and artefacts have lasted this long. Some sites have been conserved by simply being lost or buried, some have survived in plain sight by their sheer mass, others have had much more subtle strategies.įew human-made objects or organisations last more than a handful of centuries, much less millennia. While we can slow the workings of the clock itself down so that it only ticks as many times in 10,000 years as a watch does in a person’s lifetime, what about the materials and location? Over the last 20 years I have studied how other structures and systems have lasted over time, and visited as many of them as I can.
But if you reset the scale to 500 years, even the impossible can start to seem tractable. One could imagine that if given only five years to solve an issue like climate change, it is very difficult to even know where to begin because the time scale is unreasonable. The idea is to create a provocation large enough in both scale and time that, when confronted by it, we have to engage our long-term future. Over the last two decades, I have been working at The Long Now Foundation to build a monument-scale “10,000 Year Clock” as an icon to long-term thinking, with computer scientist Danny Hillis and a team of engineers.
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