Am I the only one who finds The Long Now obnoxious? Mostly rich people who spend their money and time thinking about 10000 years from now as some kind of grandiose, pretentious, self-important hobby.
>Spending millions burying a clock isn't helping anyone
You will be happy to hear that, according to policy, the millions they spent buying the clock were taken away from them as punishment for using resources and causing so many people to labor. Presently, I believe the fine for causing other people to do $1M worth of unnecessary work is a little over $1M (due to taxes).
Given the rate of climate change and how little we're doing, trying to make 10000 year institutions seems foolish. We can't even manage the institutions we have now.
Because of short term thinking. Nobody cares about what will happen beyond the next election cycle, the next quarter, the next iPhone release. A bit more long-term thinking would not hurt anybody.
No one is objecting to 20-100 year thinking and even then planning is hard if you look back 100 years and see what has changed. I would be very happy if these people were putting their time and money into solving problems on this scale like the Gates foundation etc. This is just a sci-fi hobby.
My point stands. Uber has been a public company for all of 5 hours now, and their stock is a few dollars less per share than it opened, and everybody is freaking out and wondering what it all means.
It's not about planning out 10,000 years, or even 100; it's something more abstract than that. What will your legacy be? Your family's legacy? Your country's? Humanity's? I don't have any personal connection to somebody who will be alive 1000 years from now, or even 200, but I still don't want to leave them a dead, depleted planet.
Is the clock a bit frivolous? Sure. But it's not about the clock. The clock is merely a symbol, that we have considered our place in history, that we recognize we are part of something larger, and we want to be good stewards of our future.
Fair enough, if you think mere symbolism is more important than putting the money ($42M) towards tangable things like childhood education which has an actual 70 year impact. Having so much time and money to spend on symbolism is pretty obnoxious when there are actual long term issues we can actually solve for real people.
To give them credit he says in the article that the issue is that the SV hippies are all getting older and new people will take it over and criticise and change it.
So he's not without some thought of the actual changes that will occur in the next 50 years. But they aren't thinking more about people not liking their project after they are gone
Spending millions burying a clock isn't helping anyone: http://longnow.org/clock/