Long Now Foundation
The The Long Now Foundation is a company incorporated in 1996 American Foundation.
Objectives
Inspired by the general mood on the eve of the millennium, the founders had come to believe that it would be good for the long-term survival of humanity when her vision goes really far into the future. The The Long Now Foundation will carry this awareness in the general public. Background is, inter alia, the consideration that we know structural and written documents that are thousands of years old, that products of our culture today, those periods but probably not survive. So the members of the Foundation my example, that the current digital information storage method for long periods of time are not robust enough by far and it should be considered that to develop lasting method and media for preservation of human knowledge.
The members of The Long Now Foundation include Danny Hillis, inventor of the Connection Machine, Stewart Brand and Brian Eno.
A novel by Neal Stephenson, Anathem is influenced by the ideas of The Long Now Foundation.
Projects
Several projects are already in the works, including:
The 10,000 -year clock
The project goal of 10,000 -year clock ( The Clock of the Long Now ) is the construction of a transitional work that achieved with little human intervention as possible a functional life of ten thousand years. There must be constructed of durable materials and easy to repair. At the same time the clock represent a very low value material, in the hope that future civilizations will have no interest to plunder the clock and destroy. Your source of energy should be renewable, but can not be stolen. A prototype, which is a candidate for the clock in question was set in motion on 31 December 1999 and is now in the Science Museum in London. The Foundation hopes to near Ely, Nevada, to build the final clock once.
To prevent potential problems in year ten thousand change ( deca -millennium bug), the Long Now Foundation advocates to record annual results with a leading zero ( thus the foundation year is given as 01996 ).
Rosetta
The Rosetta Project has the aim to preserve one thousand languages , one of which is to assume that they would otherwise be extinct in the next hundred years. This includes many languages with only thousands or even less native speakers. Other languages does the Foundation threatened by the growing influence of English as an international means in economy and culture. Text of the need to retain languages to be written to a nickel alloy disc with two -inch diameter. A " Version 1.0" of the disc was completed in the fall of 2002.