Tuesday, March 06, 2018

Because he’s Jeff Bezos, that’s why

Jeff Bezos is worth more than $100 billion, making him the not just the wealthiest person in the world, but the wealthiest person in history. Rich as Croesus! Richer, even!

The best thing about having this kind of money is that you can drop bucks on any item you want to buy, on any project you care to drop bucks on. Even if we’re talking about $42 million bucks, which to Jeff Bezos probably takes about as much thought as the rest of us devote to yes-or-no on a new raincoat.

Anyway, one of the little somethings (little nothings?) that caught Bezos’ interest is an outfit called the Long Now Foundation, and one of their pet initiatives, the Clock of the Long Now.

The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide a counterpoint to today's accelerating culture and help make long-term thinking more common. We hope to foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.

Those italics are mine. I mean, 10,000 years out. They ain’t kidding about long-term thinking.

I am not in the least averse to long-term thinking, especially when it comes to my own personal longevity. And I’m big and generous-spirited enough to want the entire shebang to hang together so that the people I love who will outlast me (and their children, and their children’s children) won’t end up in some death fight to cadge the last raft in waterworld so that they can escape from holograms of Barron Trump III ruling humankind. Even if I blessedly won’t be around to experience whatever that 100 year in the future long-term holds.

Anyway, we know that the Long Now Foundation really thinks things through. They even refer to their year of founding as 01996 rather than the more pedestrian 1996. While I laud their commitment to think in more digits – after all, 10,000 years out, the world (if it’s still on the Common Era calendar cycle) is definitely a five-digit one – 01996 sure looks like a zip code to me. As I suspect it does to the folks of Senftenberg, Germany, whose zip code 01996 is.

Anyway, the Long Now Foundation has a number of quirky, interesting and downright wonderful things going.

The Rosetta Project is “building an archive of ALL documented human languages.” Well, go raibh maith agat to you. (That’s thank you in Irish for you non-Rosettans.)

Their Revive and Restore initiative is aimed at saving species on the verge of extinction. (Who knew that the horseshoe crab was one of them? Surely no one who stumbles across the horseshoe crab carcasses in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. Now it may sound like seeing so many dead horseshoe crabs is an argument that, yes, they are on the verge of extinction. Other than that those dead bodies seem to replenish themselves, year after year, suggesting that there are a lot of horseshoe crabs, at least in Wellfleet, Massachusetts.)

Perhaps even more wondrously, Revive and Restore is planning on working on de-extinction. Send in the pterodactyls.

One of the key Long Now projects is the Clock Of The Long Now,

…which is designed to run for at least 10 millennia, without any need for human intervention. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos took an interest in the project six years ago, and has funded it to the tune of $42 million. (Source: Bloomberg)

The Clock is big – hundreds of feet tall – and is being built (it’s almost there, I take it) inside a mountain in Texas. And it’s designed to keep on ticking, tick by tick, for 10,000 years.

Every once in a while the bells of this buried Clock play a melody. Each time the chimes ring, it’s a melody the Clock has never played before. The Clock’s chimes have been programmed to not repeat themselves for 10,000 years. Most times the Clock rings when a visitor has wound it, but the Clock hoards energy from a different source and occasionally it will ring itself when no one is around to hear it. It’s anyone’s guess how many beautiful songs will never be heard over the Clock’s 10 millennial lifespan…

This Clock is the first of many millennial Clocks the designers hope will be built around the world and throughout time. There is a second site for another Clock already purchased at the top of a mountain in eastern Nevada, a site surrounded by a very large grove of 5,000-year-old bristlecone pines. Appropriately, bristlecone pines are among the longest-lived organisms on the planet. The designers of the Clock in Texas expect its chimes will keep ringing twice as long as the oldest 5 millennia-old bristlecone pine. 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. (Source:Kevin Kelly, writing on The Long Now)

I’m surprised that Ray Kurzweil, who I believe wants to live forever, isn’t all over this one. Maybe he’s too caught up in The Singularity.

Anyway, the designers have really thought this through.

The clock's materials are deliberately inexpensive, to discourage looting, and its location (on land Bezos owns) is quite remote; the nearest airport is two hours away and getting to the clock chamber requires hiking up 2,000 feet from the desert floor. It's also designed so that most of its components can be repaired using nothing more than Bronze Age technology and tools.

I guess that’s in case we revert back to some sort of waterworld-y Bronze Age.

$42 million does seem like a lot of money to invest in something that no one (except perhaps Ray Kurzweil) will be around to see, even 100 years out, let alone 10,000 years. Especially when you think about all the here and now things – like preserving the horseshoe crabs or bringing back the pterodactyl – that this money could go towards.

On the other hand, if you’ve got $100+ billion, what’s $42 billion to spend on something that’s a weird little brainiac puzzle?

As for why, well, because he’s Jeff Bezos. That’s why.

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