From Your Minister
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My daughter did a science report on potassium, and we were discussing what to put in the closing paragraph. I asked, “What do you think is the most interesting thing about potassium?” She thought for a moment and said, “Well, we’re never going to run out of it!”
Having never researched potassium myself, I always thought of its existence as limited to places like bananas, or kiwifruit. Who knew? It’s in every living cell on the planet! My daughter’s confidence in this eternal abundance made me think about all the things that I fear we might, or will, run out of. Fossil fuels, rain forests, drinkable water…the list is pretty much endless, so I’ll just zero in on one that is pretty strong for me. Time. I think of time as something that not only I personally will run out of, but that the entire planet is likely to use up soon.
Such thinking brings anxiety. So I wonder, what might it feel like to have confidence that time will never end, that its presence is held in every cell in the universe? Because of my own inability to imagine this I was intrigued to learn that a group of scientists is designing a clock to last 10,000 years, powered by seasonal temperature changes. When completed, it will tick once a year and bong once a century. A cuckoo will come out every millennium.
One of the creative minds behind this clock is Stewart Brand, former publisher of the Whole Earth Review. It was Brand who campaigned to have NASA release images of the Earth from space in 1966, after which he distributed buttons of this cosmic portrait for 25 cents. He thought the image of the planet might give us a sense of the earth as “an island, surrounded by a lot of inhospitable space…this little blue, white, green and brown jewel-like icon.”
Now Brand has a website for “The Long Now Foundation”, on which he says that a 10,000 year clock could “do for thinking about time what photographs of Earth from space have done for thinking about the environment. Such icons reframe the way people think.”
Maybe it’s because the clock isn’t built yet, but I can’t even begin to imagine how that device could transform my thinking about time. Focus my attention on 89 years from now, when I might hear the clock chime? Not likely.
My sense of “a long time” right now is the two months my cell phone has to last before I can get a new one without paying a penalty, given that it’s barely holding a charge and I am constantly tethered to sockets. Can I really last that long, I wonder, with a badly charged cell phone? I generally tend to measure time by similarly fleeting and superficial yardsticks.
The truth is, while I often deride corporations and politicians for thinking only about immediate results rather than the longer term effects of their decisions, I am also regularly guilty of shortsighted thinking. My imagination barely reaches out to the possibility of the grandchildren my daughter assures me I will never have. If I have to wait more than a few seconds for an internet connection or during a pause in conversation, my mind is likely to wander.
Contrast this shallow sense of time with what is known as “deep time,” based on the scale of planetary geological history. In his book Basin and Range, John McPhee challenges us with this comparison: “Consider the Earth’s history as the old measure of the English yard, the distance from the King’s nose to the tip of his outstretched hand. One stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases human history.”
What if I could somehow rest in the reassurance that the earth’s history resides in all the living cells that also contain potassium? What if I could imagine that once every 1,000 years curious visitors would go to the 10,000 year clock’s location—Brand and his friends have bought land for this monument in Nevada—and cheer as the cuckoo came out? Forget even visualizing 10,000 years of cuckooing birds; what if I believed that the cuckoo would get to sound even once, say at the turning of the year 3,000 CE?
Scrunching up my limited mind to imagine this does inspire me to think differently. Born in the second half of the 20th century, I was once hard put to truly believe that even the year 2,000 would occur. Now I can’t remember what it felt like to write that old prime number, 19, to start a year on my checks. (Heck, with today’s technology I can barely remember writing checks at all!) And yet, I’m suddenly wishing I’d heard a cuckoo bird at Y2K.
Perhaps thinking of a 10,000 year clock and immortal potassium won’t solve the day-to-day time crunch of too many things to do in an hour. But somehow, pausing to remember that time is a resource not just abundant, but actually infinite, gives a new perspective to the crowded day.
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