When a culture builds something big and intends it to last, it tells us a lot about what story that culture is living out of.
Ancient Egypt built pyramids to ensure the resurrection of their Pharaonic internees. Medieval Europe built cathedrals to draw the eye of the beholder upwards to the transcendent. Imperial China built the Great Wall as a long fortress to protect its peaceful cities from northern invaders.
In western Texas, a clock is being built inside a mountain, designed to chime for 10 000 years.
This clock has been conceived and designed by a group of people who hope it will become a symbol of human progress. On their website, they write,
Ten thousand years is about the age of civilization, so a 10K-year Clock would measure out a future of civilization equal to its past. That assumes we are in the middle of whatever journey we are on – an implicit statement of optimism.
The clock is being built so as to require little or no maintenance over the millennia. It is designed to endure corrosion, earthquakes and the collapse of human civilisation. Its builders and backers (including the founder of Amazon.com and other wealthy entrepreneurs) are committed to a vision of human progress in the long term.
Danny Hillis, the key man behind the clock, wrote,
I cannot imagine the future, but I care about it. I know I am a part of a story that starts long before I can remember and continues long beyond when anyone will remember me. …I have hope for the future.
The scope of vision is breathtaking, but so is the scope of the statement that is being made about what human life is about.
A clock, perhaps one of the most powerful tokens of modern human achievement, is a symbol of a technological society. The clock is intended to point us to progress as the great end of human society. By placing their clock into a 20 000 year story of human civilisation, the builders involved are hoping to invite current and future generations into this story, to maintain, protect and develop the clock, and by extension, to maintain, protect and develop scientific civilisation. The clock tries to give individual lives a degree of immortality inside a greater story – one where humanity is the highest end.
Just as the medieval cathedral-builders designed their gothic spires to call people to the worship of God in heaven as the highest end of man, the ten thousand year clock calls people to the development of a technologically adept human world. This is a religious hope – an assumption and assertion designed to narrate the world for people.
When our descendants look back on our time, they most likely won’t see the gadgets of our daily lives, but they may think of us as a culture that believed so strongly in the story of progress that we hollowed out a mountain and filled it with a ticking monument to our own potential.
