CMA Presents "The 10,000-Year Clock and Other Short-Term Thinking Exercises"

In a world dominated by the next fiscal quarter and constant Twitter updates, The Long Now Foundation creates projects that focus us on ways of thinking, understanding, and acting responsibly over long periods of time. One of their projects, The Clock of the Long Now, will be a monument-sized, all-mechanical device that will be housed in a recently purchased limestone mountain. The clock will tick once a year, the hand will advance every hundred years, and the cuckoo will come out every millennium for the next 10,000 years.

The process of implementing such a project brings out all sorts of questions: What will the clock be made of? How will it stay accurate? Where should it be located? How will it be maintained? What should the chimes sound like? What will life be like in 10,000 years? Join us as Alexander Rose discusses The Long Now Foundation's amazing clock project that will pull us out of our short-term mentality and challenge our understanding of the long term.

Founded in 1996 by luminaries such as Danny Hillis, Stewart Brand, Brian Eno, and Peter Schwartz, The Long Now Foundation has other exciting projects: the Rosetta Disk (archiving all languages), the All Species project (documenting all species), and the Long Bets project (improving the quality of long-term thinking by making predictions accountable).

Alexander Rose was hired as the first employee of The Long Now Foundation and is now its Executive Director. He was an artist in residence at Silicon Graphics, Inc., and graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in industrial design, where he was the lead designer for a record-setting human-power-vehicle team. In addition, his combat robots have won over six world championship titles.

These events are free. All members of the Campus and JPL communities and retirees are welcome. Caltech personnel and guests can access von Kármán Auditorium via the external gate. For additional information about these events, please send email to [email protected], or call Dan Goods, at 818-393-6219.