A 10,000-year clock, a future library: Check out grand creative projects set in the future
There’s a verse in the Atharva Veda that goes: “Kalo ha sarvasyesvaro yaḥ pitasit prajapateḥ / tenesitaṃ tena jataṃ tad u tasmin pratisṭhitam” or “Time is truly the god of all; he was the father of the Creator; by time is the world sent forth, produced and established.”
All things flow from Time.
In physics, it is the fourth dimension, unique in its asymmetry.
All things flow within Time. That may explain the human obsession with it.
It is measurable, yet uncontrollable. Not wild. But inexorable. And symbolic.
It was this symbolic power that Augustus, founder of the Roman Empire, sought to harness when he brought back a 30-metre obelisk of Egyptian red granite from Heliopolis, after defeating Cleopatra’s army in the 1st century BCE, and used it as a giant gnomon (the part of the sundial that casts the shadow).
The obelisk cast its shadow across a pavement of marble and bronze. It was a symbol of the Pax Romana, the golden age.
Nearly 2,000 years later, in 1851, unnamed workmen embedded a bronze strip in the grounds of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, under the direction of royal astronomer George Biddell Airy, to mark that the prime meridian passed through London, the seat of the greatest empire the world had known.
By 1884 there was universal agreement: Clocks around the world would tell what time it was based on what time it was here.
Time is not just about power, though. It is about durability as well. We can’t build something that will outlast time, but we can certainly try. It is not surprising that humans, through modern history, have birthed projects that shoot forward into the future. Many of these are built around time itself.
Stonehenge, made and remade over thousands of years, marks the solstices: the peak of summer, the waning of winter. The great solar temples of Ancient Egypt, with their obelisks serving as gnomons (centuries before Augustus), marked the hours and seasons. Other monuments to time still stand: the Gothic beauty of Prague’s Orloj (astronomical clock; completed in 1410), Maharaja Jai Singh’s Jantar Mantar in Jaipur, built at scale for greater accuracy, in the 1730s.
By the 20th century, time had been divided, standardised, synchronised across continents, but our understanding of it was shifting. Einstein’s theory of relativity upended the meaning of time itself. It was no longer fixed, universal, or even knowable. By 1940, time dilation (time passing at different rates for different observers) was observed. When the space age began, time dilation started to be measured, and matter.
As we break it down into ever-finer slices, we continue to build grand monuments to time.
There is the Clock of the Long Now, a mechanical device under construction, has been designed to keep time for 10,000 years. It doesn’t concern itself with femtoseconds or attoseconds, but with what is called deep time, far beyond the scale of individual human experience.
Work on the 500-ft-tall device, being built in Texas with funding from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, began in 1989.
The man behind the idea, computer scientist Danny Hillis, now 69, had said: “I want to build a clock that ticks once a year. The century hand advances once every one hundred years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium. I want the cuckoo to come out every millennium for the next 10,000 years. If I hurry, I should finish the clock in time to see the cuckoo come out for the first time.”
An early model clock ticked for the first time in 2000 (though no cuckoo was in place yet). The final model is now under construction.
A similar effort to encapsulate the scale of the future is underway in Wemding, Germany. To celebrate the town’s 1,200th anniversary in 1993, artist Manfred Laber conceived of the Time Pyramid, a structural countdown implemented in concrete blocks.
Every ten years, a single block is added to the structure. In 2023, the fourth block was lowered into place, a tiny increment in a monument that will not be completed until the year 3183. It is a work of “architectural metabolism”, designed to give a fleeting human population a physical sense of what a 12-century span actually feels like.
Then, there is the monument to time as music in the form of a performance of composer John Cage’s As Slow As Possible, on an organ in a German church. A new note is played every two years. The complete performance of the eight-page score is scheduled to end in 2640.
Parallel to this stretching of sound is the Future Library in Norway, a project that treats time as an act of ecological and literary faith. Each year, for a century, a different writer (participants include Margaret Atwood and Ocean Vuong) contributes a manuscript to be held in a sun-filled room in Oslo’s Deichman Library. These words will remain unread until 2114, when they will finally be printed on paper made from a forest of 1,000 spruce trees planted specifically for this purpose at the project’s inception in 2014.
But time is slippery. The brass line at Greenwich no longer marks the meridian, which lies 102 metres away (based on more recent and more accurate readings defined by the Earth’s centre of mass). The Time Pyramid will need one more block than planned, because of a classic counting conundrum called the fencepost problem. The Future Library waits for a forest that may not survive its own century. We build to remember, but time exists to forget.
As for the Clock of the Long Now, maybe Shelley said it best in Ozymandias (1818): “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.”
(K Narayanan writes on films, videogames, books and occasionally technology)
