Robert & Eliezer have been discussing the Clock of the Long Now.
Unless I'm miss-remembering, there was a presentation on this at
Extro3. So, now they are up to the point of building it.
I'm still thinking what I thought at Extro3 -- and the point is ???
I don't see any way of stopping the Juggernaut, and I suspect Robin
would agree. The economic forces at work and inertia they contain
are simply to great. Its like Natasha standing out in the middle of
I-80, holding the Mona Lisa, with a caption saying "here be art
that can stop the world", in the meantime, along comes Mick's truck,
he's squinting, trying to read the caption, oooopppps, too late...
(byegones, it was too good an image to resist sharing...)
If they are doing this to try and get us to wake up and go slower,
all I can do is wish them is lots of luck. I'd put the odds pretty
low for the thing lasting long enough for the first cuckoo to tweet.
That much matter has to have a better purpose in holding some high
density SI memories. As virtual clock "memory" and virtual tweets
its much cheaper.
Sooner or later people will come to treat physical reality the
same way they do data files -- if it isn't of any use now, you
might as well compress it and put it on a backup tape.
Robert
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