It has been nearly 10,000 years since the end of the last ice age and the emergence of modern civilization. Progress during that time was often measured on a "faster/cheaper" scale. The Long Now Foundation seeks to promote "slower/better" thinking and to focus our collective creativity on the next 10,000 years.

Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase.

Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed---some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where 'long-term' is measured at least in centuries.

I would like to propose a large mechanical clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium. Its works consist of a binary digital-mechanical system. ( Danny Hillis , founder of The Long Now Project)