HH Magazine de la Haute Horlogerie - 1rst October 2010Katja Schaer
Have you ever wondered how humans will live in 10,000 years' time? What they'll say about us? What name tomorrow's citizens will give the era we still call "contemporary"? And if you could leave them a message, tell them about one tiny part of your century, what would that be?
Danny Hillis has his answer: time measurement. This American inventor and computer scientist is working on a one-hundred-century timepiece; a vast mechanical clock that will go on giving the time for the next ten thousand years.
This extraordinary project, known as the 10,000 Year Clock, originated from a simple observation: that we have lost the ability to project ourselves into the future. In an essay on long-term thinking, published in the years before the change of millennium, Danny Hillis wrote: "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."... Read more
