Selected Articles from the
August 2001
Odyssey
Editor: Terry Hancock
- The LaGrange Points and You, Terry Hancock
- The Surf Report, Diane Rhodes
The Surf Report
Dian Rhodes
The Long View
Have you heard of the Millenium Clock? No, not the one that counted down to the wrong year of the ``New Millenium''. I mean the one that is being built inside a mountain in Utah and will run for 10 thousand years.
What does this have to do with Space, you ask? It actually has a lot to do with space, in terms of sustainable technology, and the quest to expand the human viewpoint to comprehend projects in terms of a hundred or a thousand lifetimes, not just one (let alone just one administration!).
Imagine, if you will: It's 2031, and we're launching our first probe to Alpha Centauri. It will not get there for 400 years, and it will take 4 years and change for the signal to return. When it does, will we still be able to understand the answer? Maybe. Will the scientific language of notation, measurements and things measured undergo change in 400+ years? The answer is yes. Scientific theory is not static, after all. If a probe should be sent back, will we remember how to operate its memory systems, and will it still physically work? For that matter, will we still remember what we were seeking to discover when we sent it on its way? We will if we plan ahead.
In science's quest for knowledge, we have always assumed that such things are permanent. Hey, no problem, right? Think again. What we believed about the Universe just 100 years ago is basically wrong. The latest revision of Hubble's view of the Universe just got turned on its ear, in the last two or three years. As more is discovered in the coming years the new view will be, in its turn, wrong. Will the theory the hypothetical probe is sent to test even be relevant a millenium after its launch?
That's where the Clock comes in (remember the Clock?). It is an idea, an attempt to build something that will be durable, adaptable, and maybe most importantly, a method to stretch the human consciousness around a time frame of hundreds of lifetimes. We might just be lucky enough to discover a way around Einstein's little theorem and/or discover immortality, but are we willing to bet the antenna farm on it? We can look through all the telescopes in the world, but all we can do is make (very learned) guesses. Being what we are, that will ultimately not be enough. I don't want our Universe to end just outside the Kuiper Belt, or at the edge of the Solar Magnetopause.
And that just might be what happens, if we find the rest of the Universe impenetrable. Our focus could shift inwards and as a species we'd disappear down our own navels. Not a pretty picture. By taking the Long View, we would weather the disappointment of being long dead when the results return and confident in the knowledge that we did the right thing, not in terms of our own ephemeral lives, but in terms of the longevity of humanity's.
If you would like to learn more about the Millenium Clock project, the Long Now Foundation and its directors Stewart Brand (of Whole Earth Catalog fame) and Daniel Hillis, go to: http://www.wired.com/wired/scenarios/clock.html
File translated from TEX by TTH, version
2.25.
On 18 Jan 2002, 12:53.
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