![]() ![]() Pages 6-8 of the Dresden Codex, an example of 11th or 12th Century Maya script that was taken to Europe during the Spanish Inquisition in the New World. On top of that, the decoders wouldn’t even know what the scripts were meant to communicate until they decoded quite a few of them first, so there wasn’t a lot of context to go on. Tragically, too, so much of the Mayan culture that had developed and maintained had died out, largely because so many Mayans themselves had perished after European conquest. It took so long largely because there were virtually no cultural referents to examine it against, given that, unlike many contemporary languages, it does not correspond directly to written speech. It was not fully deciphered by Western historians until the 1990s, after an arduous decoding project that took nearly 200 years. This, of course, presents a challenge: How do you communicate to a person living 10,000 years in the future that they need to wind this clock to keep it going? How will they know of its importance? Will there be any reason to care? Will they know how long it’s been there, or what time it’s even communicating to us? Hillis was putting a lot of faith in many, many generations to come that they’d be able to keep his clock going - assuming, of course, that humans are even around anymore by then - and that they’d know what it was telling them.Ĭonsider Maya script, the hieroglyphic written language employed by the Maya culture from around the Third Century BCE until the early 1700s. What this shows us is that wind-up, spring-driven clocks, like the Clock of the Long Now that Danny Hillis envisioned, have only been around for just over 500 years, and Hillis’s clock would need be around for about twenty times that long, and people would need to be able to read it, just as we are taught to read clocks as children. The first spring-driven clock, which could be wound, was produced in 1511 in Nuremburg, Germany, and its design remains quite common, even as innovators have added a lot of complexity. ![]() The details about how these early clocks, often called “horologes”, functioned remain somewhat sketchy, but it does appear that they contained rudimentary gears and wheels, much like what we see in wind-up clocks and watches today. Per written records from Medieval Europe, however, the first fully-mechanical clocks in human history appeared around 1300, usually in monasteries and cathedrals, as a means of timing daily prayers and other day-to-day activities. Hourglasses, sundials, water clocks, and other tools to measure time have existed in many cultures around the world for at least a few thousand years. Another of his rules, though, would allow humans to maintain the clock when necessary, so he settled on the idea that the clock would be wound, more or less by hand, by someone every now and then, with supplemental power deriving from temperature changes in the air around it. It’s that criterion about the power source that makes Hillis’s idea especially tricky, since, by virtue of a set of philosophical rules governing the clock’s operation, all of its functions must be “transparent”, meaning that solar or nuclear power (neither of which would be entirely visible to the human eye) are out of the question. A prototype of the clock, on display in London. ![]()
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