Ping Fu The Long Now Foundation is a think tank, but we are also a group of people who are not satisfied with just having ideas. We wanted to actually create physical experiences. That’s why we built the Clock of the Long Now. If the pyramid is the symbol of the past, then the clock is the symbol of the future. We created it not only to inspire people to think about responsibility for the long term, but also to create an experience. It’s designed in a way that’s very much like a sanctuary. We picked a mountain — it’s literally underground within an 11,000-foot mountain. We dug a hole 500 feet deep for this clock, which is 30 feet in diameter and sits 250 feet above sea level. It’s a huge clock so that it can’t be looted. But the experience of visiting this clock starts with hiking up to the mountain.You go into this tunnel and then there’s this gigantic clock that’s been designed to chime a different sequence every day for 10,000 years. We have recorded 1,500 human lan guages and etched them onto the disk and put it together with
Ping Fu is a tech pioneer who helped create the software behind Mozilla and Internet Explorer. She founded Geomagic, an inf luential 3D imaging company, and sits on the board of directors of The Long Now Foundation, a San Francisco-based non-profit that aims at “creatively fostering responsibility” in the framework of the next 10,000 years
the clock. Imagine in the future when someone finds it! When you get there, there’s a large sanctuary space where people will be able to sit and discuss their experience, to assimilate it immediately. The space has four corners. We are building one corner now. In 100 years, someone will build the second corner. The third will be built in 1,000 years, and then the fourth in 10,000 years. So I’m trying to imagine how this space would look in the duration of 10,000 years! If you think about travel, you can focus on the destination or you can think about how you get there. The Clock and The Long Now Foundation are kind of about setting the time, not about the destination, right? You’re not setting a specific goal, but you can start to ask the question. If you have 10,000 years to solve a problem, what problem would you pick?
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