The winter solstice marks the return of light. The days will grow longer for the next six months. This is the basis for the winter holiday season and the beginning of a new year.
So much of our modern world is designed to be nearly disposable. Modern manufacturing allows machines to do the assembly work. There is little value in most consumer products. For example, my mp3 player, which has enormous processing power and memory compared to my first computer, is worth less than a single audio book I load onto it.
The downside of this is the media we use go obsolete after ten years and degrade altogether in a few decades after that. How much of what we create will last as long as the 2600 year-old tablets containing epic of Gilgamesh or the 5000 year-old pyramids? The nature of our technology prevents it from lasting that long by accident. Only modern projects with intentional longevity are likely to last for thousands of years.
Perhaps as part a backlash against our throw-away economy, the Long Now Foundation with funding from Jeff Bezos is building a clock designed to run for 10,000 years without maintenance.
It’s hard to conceive of thousands of years. 10,000 years ago, humans were at the end of the stone age and the last glacial period was coming to an end. Our modern Gregorian calendar has its origins in the Roman calendar 2800 years ago. We cannot know what calendars and languages will be used 10,000 years from now. That’s why the clock will display astronomical data and have pictorial instructions. Power for the clock will come from day/night temperature variations. It will be located in a remote mountain to discourage people from putting it in a museum.
Any speculation about thousands of years from now is almost certain to be wrong. The purpose of the clock is to make people at least think about the distant future
I imagine people visiting the clock in what on our calendar is December of 7011. The clock seems ancient event to the oldest people alive, who are close to 1,000 years old. It was built shortly after Europeans began colonizing the world, around the time when photographic and video images began. People can experience any sensation they want using computer interfaces to the brain. Visiting an ancient mechanical device that has been ticking once every ten seconds for thousands of years reminds people of a time when life was shorter and technology was simpler.
The winter solstice and holiday season surrounding it is a good time to take a break and think of things from the perspective of the timeless motions of the earth.