Wednesday, April 18, 2012

I don't have a bucket list. I'm still young and healthy, I haven't had any particular mortality scares, and I don't plan very long-term in general. (Also, the term "bucket list" seems like an annoying cliché, but call it what you will, I don't have one.)

That being said, if I did have one, I can think of two things would be on it. First, visiting New Orleans. I've never been and it sounds like a fun place. And second, which I just learned about today and is what inspired this post, is winding the Clock of the Long Now, a clock designed to work for ten thousand years.

It hasn't actually been built yet, according to Wikipedia, but it looks like it will be sooner or later. And it's a pretty damn cool idea. As skeptical as I usually am about grand, sweeping claims of any kind (the idea that, say, nanotechnology will lead to the Singularity or transhumanism is only slightly more likely than the idea popular 50 years ago that nuclear power would, which is to say, not very), the idea of building a complicated machine to last and continue working for ten thousand years is very impressive.

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