In this ever-advancing modern era, where the mantra of the zeitgeist is “better, faster, cheaper,” Danny Hillis — inventor of the supercomputer that instigated our current fast-paced society — beseeches us to slow down, twiddle our thumbs and smell the roses. Hillis has been working since 1996 on a monument-sized clock to be sited on a limestone cliff in eastern Nevada, dubbed the Clock of the Long Now. This clock is nothing like your average wristwatch. The Clock of the Long Now will be large enough for visitors to walk around in and is designed to last 10,000 years — roughly the period in which humans enjoy a relatively constant climate and advancements in culture and technology. It will tick only once a year, bong once a century and cuckoo at the millennium, a pace Hillis hopes will inspire society to think in terms of decades, centuries and millennia, as opposed to the prevailing harried New York minute.
A young Danny Hillis hard at work at his connections machine console.
Titanium
Like needles in a haystack. Titanium deposits in sand, Eastern Cape, South Africa. Photo by Niel Overey.
Conceived beneath the skies of the ancient world, the Titans were the incestual god-lineage of Zeus: gigantic creatures who bore names like Oceanus, Themis, Hyperion. The metals then known to man were those purest of elements, and it was some two millenia before titanium would be discovered and used.
With an unmatched strength-to-weight ratio, low thermal conductivity and a tendency to be impervious to corrosion, titanium is indeed a metal of mythical proportions, even to the point of being mythically difficult to work with.
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