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Long Now, a 10,000 year smoke

Did you ever find yourself on Facebook, with a photo of the school where you studied, totally changed, modern or falling apart?

Sotto3 Then you realize that many who lived on the same stage are right there, on Facebook, tagging themselves in the photo taken with a Kodak 110 mm. As more people appear, you find out that other more recent photos of the same place were taken, by people before or after, who shed the same tears at 8 o'clock at night from different areas of the planet. Similar stories, anecdotes, students who came back as teachers to be everything they hated, but who 26 years later wanted to return to those days.

This is how we humans are, we throw away our son's sketchbook, just because it doesn't fit in the study cabinet. The letter from the 12-year-old bride, for which we would be willing to give everything, just to have it in our hands, to live in the moment again.

Long Now is a foundation created with the intention of creating ideas that establish in history what should not be lost in time. That time that goes so fast, that we forget, that we destroy, that we waste, but that years later we want to recover again.

Here and now, they only mean in this room, these 5 minutes. Because tomorrow, in a year, or in 10 years it will be totally different. What not to say in 10,000 years.

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Long now comes under that idea. With the altruistic intention of creating a long-term historical preservation project. 

  • Now, it's just three days: yesterday, today and tomorrow. 
  • Nowdays is the last decade, this decade and the next ... well, it does not even include the years when we were shaking our heads to the rhythm of Cinderella. 
  • Long now is a period of 20,000 years. Such that it spans from 8,000 BC to 12,000 BC.

While it is an astral smoke of extremely dreamy types, it is the way many libraries, museums and encyclopedias were formed. With the difference, that in this case we speak of a "now" that includes 10,000 years ago and the same amount forward; that is why these gentlemen have added a zero to the years (we are in the year 02011), anticipating a phenomenon similar to Y2K when the year 9,999 passes. The idea, to create something that is for history in the long term, such as Stonehenge or the Pyramid of Giza is now, which existed only about 4,000 years ago. 

With the variant, that what is done can be updated in time, and that someone in 10,000 years can see what we were doing just today, our customs, fashions, forms of government, infrastructures ... in short, they can see that there were cavemen the year 2011 in places with absurd names like Mexico, Argentina, Spain, Peru, Honduras. We thought, we acted, we fought over nonsense, we made cave paintings on an Ipad 2 tablet and we connected by obsolete matchboxes called satellites and we shouted news with grunts in a language called Twitter.

Long now considers at least 5 layers of time, from which you want to preserve history:

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  • The natural layer, which should include satellite images of the earth, the behavior of glaciers, natural phenomena, deforestation, and other aspects that may be useful for environmental aspects.
  • The cultural layer, which includes the anthropological manifestations that particularize the different regions of the planet, that which makes us unique and for which we should not discuss.
  • The layer of governance, in which the different forms of government and political and administrative evolution are recorded.
  • The infrastructure layer, with what is happening between us and nature. That which helps us to transport ourselves, live and survive, which is today and no longer tomorrow.
  • The commercial layer, with the economic aspects of the world, now increasingly globalized.
  • And finally the layer of art and fashions, where you would see the creative manifestations of humanity.

It will seem dreamy, a bit deluded. But if that had occurred to someone from the moment the camera was created, even from a single city block, it would be extremely valuable if it had been captured systematically. The Long now project is based on taking advantage of what we now have, computers and information storage media.

frontpage_rosettaproject  For this, there are various instruments trying to model how it would work. Among them the Project Rosseta that with the collaboration of linguistics specialists from around the world build an inventory of the different languages ​​and dialects of the world. Another is Long Bets, which seeks to create predictions of what could happen in the future. We understand Long Server is a project for the storage of information and Long Viewer would be a kind of Google Earth-style viewer but with layers that allow us to consult back history interactively.

OrreryWithEngineeringTeam_510pxBut the most significant project of Long now is the watch of 10,000 years. An ingenious dream that seeks that there is a clock that lasts in time, that can be preserved, maintained by a caveman, understood by future generations, that survives a global extinction and that is capable of ringing in the year 12,000.

So, if you ever want to join such an exciting cause, Long Now is a. Perhaps now it seems illusory and the guys who have signed up to this idea are considered somewhat far-fetched, out of the basic realities of humans. But they won't be in 50 years, much less 10,000.

If there are those who dream of such issues in the long run, it is likely that there are short-term dreams should not be considered deluded.

Golgi Alvarez

Writer, researcher, specialist in Land Management Models. He has participated in the conceptualization and implementation of models such as: National Property Administration System SINAP in Honduras, Management Model of Joint Municipalities in Honduras, Integrated Cadastre-Registry Management Model in Nicaragua, Territory Administration System SAT in Colombia . Editor of the Geofumadas knowledge blog since 2007 and creator of the AulaGEO Academy that includes more than 100 courses on GIS - CAD - BIM - Digital Twins topics.

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