Two weeks ago, the Jamaican Government unveiled a "Count-down Clock" indicating the time left before the year 2000 in an effort to spur private and public sector preparedness in becoming Y2K compliant.

But just over a week before that, a computer scientist in California was looking way beyond that period as he revealed plans for building a super clock, an eight-foot prototype of which is expected to debut on the dawn of the next millenium and set about keeping careful time for the ensuing 10,000 years, or until January 12,000.

The instrument has been described variously as the "The Clock of the Long Now", "The Millenium Clock", "The 10,000 Year Clock" and the "Y10K Clock." And according to the computer scientist, Daniel Hillis, various options were being considered in making the long-lasting clock, including having a pendulum which swings every 30 seconds and sturdy enough to make it destructible probably only by a nuclear bomb.

Hillis, who is vice-president and Disney Fellow at Walt Disney Company, unveiled the plans while addressing the recent JavaOne computer developers conference organised by Sun Microsystems at the Moscone Centre in San Francisco, California.

Concept

The concept for the Clock of the Long Now actually began with an observation and an idea by Hillis, who wrote in 1993:

"When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 2000. Now, 30 years later, they still talk about what will happen by the year 2000. The future has been shrinking by one year per year for my entire life. I think it is time for us to start a long-term project that gets people thinking past the mental barrier of the millennium. I would like to propose a large (think Stonehenge) mechanical clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium."

It was out of that concept that the Long Now Foundation was officially established in 1996 to develop the clock, as well as a library to provide content to go along with the long-term context provided by the clock. The Foundation felt "the library of the deep future, for the deep future" could become a repository for kinds of information deemed especially useful over long periods of time.

In addressing the computer developers, Hillis noted that it has been nearly 10,000 years since the end of the last ice age and the emergence of modern civilization, and progress made during that time was often measured on a faster and cheaper scale.

He said the Long Now Foundation, comprising experts representing several continents around the globe, was therefore seeking to promote slower and better thinking and to focus their collective creativity on the next 10,000 years. Hillis is himself a member of the Foundation.

According to Hillis, the Foundation felt that the clock, if sufficiently impressive and well engineered, would embody deep time for people. He said it should be charismatic to visit, interesting to think about, and famous enough to become iconic in the public discourse.

Hillis, who developed the "massive parallel" architecture of the current generation of supercomputers, has devised the mechanical design of the clock and is now building the prototype.

He said that in order to deliver mythic depth, consideration was being made to locate the actual clock and library in either a high desert a city.

The Foundation felt high deserts were attractive for their broad horizons and high-preservation climate, if the specific location was not too remote for easy visits from worldwide.

On the other hand, city sites offered high visibility, but were harder to protect over centuries of time. Hence their strategy "is to develop a city clock/library first - for visibility - and then a desert clock/library more deliberately - for longevity.

However, before that the Foundation wants the concept dispersed on the worldwide web, in publications and other services, to underscore it as a cultural tool. "The point is to explore whatever may be helpful for thinking, understanding, and acting responsibly over long periods of time," the Foundation said.