The Long Now—and The Clock of the Long Now—is about planning for the long-term and
thinking in the long-term in a world in
which people appear to be thinking in
the shorter and shorter term. Not even
necessarily at this point about things
that will take them to the end of their
lifetime—which at least at one point you
would have thought people go, "Well, you know, I'll be dead before that's a
problem." Looking around now at the mess that we're making
of things on this planet, you want to go
to people, "You know, actually you won't be."
You will still be around. We could run
out of water, you'll be here having to
figure out what to do with no water, what
to do when the oceans are screwed up,
what to do when Twitter finally becomes
sentient.
Tom Sebok concluded you couldn't
actually create a story that would last
10,000 years. You could only create a
story that would last for three
generations: for ourselves, for our
children, and for their children. But what
we can do, I think, is try and create
stories that are interesting enough, and
important enough, that our grandchildren
might want to tell those stories to
their grandchildren. Because that's the
purpose of stories. It's what they're for.
They make life worth living. And sometimes, they keep us alive.
