#and also solving war climate change world hunger etc

[faaun]

if i had infinite money id travel to the other hemisphere in december/june so i could experience 2 summer solstices

[ultrasolquery]

How do we make the world better?

We could make the world better by wasting less things, there's a lot of waste and garbage build-up that is damaging the Earths' atmosphere and taking up space. Landfills are over-flowing and trash is being dumped into the ocean. I think instead of scientists and people worrying about trying to advance technology, they should take the time to figure out how to use that technology to better the earth and help with it's environmental issues.

You can make the world a better place by supporting your local businesses so they won't go out of business.

We can make the world better by spending our consumer dollars wisely and by talking about politics productively.

We can make the world better by cleaning our environment and helping others who are in need. By giving them food and providing them with some other recourses that they also may need.

The first thing we need is leadership, that's something we lack of. What I mean by that is we need a representative, someone to guide and share our interest as well as the same point of view. And secondly equality, not to treat people based on their appearance and/ or the color of their skin, their ethnicity and more; We are all human after all, we have the same right. 

One way I think would make the world better is that we start off with the smaller problems like fixing the school systems. The reason why I think is that because school isn't about learning anymore, its more of just trying to pass and not get in trouble with your parents and just doesn't encourage kids to properly learn. One way thing we can start doing is properly educating us kids in school, like teaching us how file taxes, how to create resumes, how to pay bills, and etc. 

We can make the world better by getting rid of social classes and lessen the value of money. It's unfair to live in a world where you don't particularly get to choose how well off you are and it also seems unfair that just because you make less and/or have less you can not enjoy the same luxuries as other people.

Volunteer your time at school children are the future of this world Recognize the humanity of other people`11=``11 and respect their dignity. 

I believe that we can make the world better by making people more aware of the problems going on in the world, such as wars, hunger, poverty and climate change. With more people aware of these problems we could do something to solve them. 

We can make the world a better place by trying not to put hazardous things like oil and plastic in the sea. We can also recycle more.

In order to make the world a better place, we have to inform the people about the importance of following the rules designed to protect the planet: recycling, driving according to the law, respecting other people's rights and territories. We have to awaken people to the dangers we are facing just by neglecting the orders laid out for us, and help them realize how much life would be easier if they actually respected these regulations.

I agree it all starts with with help protecting the earth and not destroying it and following the laws is essential to protecting people lives and privacy. 

 We can make the world a better place by not being negative about everything. STOP destroying the earth for profit, trash in the ocean, cutting trees, factories, pollution , and a lot more. Everywhere we go there is technology and we are depending on it too much for everything we do. Schools should not pressure students with stacks of homework, fast-food companies should change how they make there food, and people should not start riots for democracy and republican's. If we keep being addictive to technology and social media our future generation is going to go down hill. 

 To make the world better you can do good gestures for others by volunteering at shelters and planting trees for the good of the environment.

 I Think we can make the world a better place by genuinely being kind to others and spreading positivity. The world is already so cruel and it gets worse throughout the day so why not ?Our forests are being cut down at an alarming rate. Conserve the trees by conserving paper. Send an e-mail instead of a letter, type directions into your cell phone instead of writing them down, and bring your own fabric shopping bags to the store.

 The ways that we could make the world better is by limiting a lot of many harmful things that affect all our environments. For example limiting plastic and using more reusable bottles and straws and the result of this is less plastic and other garbage in the oceans. Being optimistic person can also affect a lot of people. Commenting on peoples appearance or a simple "have a nice day" set them off and probably gives them a bit more serotonin and energy because they're happy.

Many bad things are happening in the world right now, such as, wildfires, different types of pollution, and climate change. But let's talk about the effects of social media on everybody. Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat and Twitter, are all platforms that we spend a lot of time on. Nowadays, wherever you go, people are always on their phones, and it is sad. When I was a kid, I used to play in the park with my friends and come back home in desperate need of a shower, but with the biggest smile on my face. New generations are being born, and they're not experiencing these things. Kids are spending their time watching YouTube and learning things that should not even know about at this age. Even when they decide to hang out, they're together but they're not actually communicating with each other. Each and every one of them is one their phone, scrolling through social media, and then they go back home just to do the same thing again. I understand, it's fun and sometimes we need to pass the time, but wasting four to five hours of our days just to scroll through Instagram or any other platform, is depressing.

[qtakesams]

When Life Goes On, Go with It

Two years ago this month, I moved to Edgewater, Maryland, to complete a summer internship with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. SERC, as we call it, is a branch of the Smithsonian Institution that specializes in climate, coastal, terrestrial, and various other types of sciences. Their campus is an hour east of Washington, D.C. They own hundreds of acres of land, on which they house their laboratories and fields.

It was just after my sophomore year of college ended. As with many underclassmen years, mine was turbulent. I endured a drastic shift in my social circle which had, even if temporarily, left me feeling stranded on a campus I was still learning about. I’d had a rough spring semester, finding a lack of motivation to complete any assignment.

Most undergrads face that year: the one where nothing feels right, and each path feels like a dead-end. I had applied for a SERC internship on a bit of a whim. Entering college, I’d seen myself as a fiction writer and editor, planning to end up in a corporate publishing house. Sophomore had shown me I desired other things, and I applied for SERC’s science writing internship completely unsure if I’d actually like the work. What if I didn’t? What if it felt worse than the previous semester? What would I do if I couldn’t bounce back?

All of this, I decided, would be worth the risk. When I got an email from the internship’s advisor in March, offering me the position, I accepted it. The rest, as some might say, is history.

SERC is a hard place to find until you’ve visited a few times. The brown sign is easily skipped by the eyes. Coming from the west, you approach SERC on the left side of the road. Immediately, you forget that you’re technically in the suburbs, less than thirty miles from the epicenter of political heat in America. After a few turns, you arrive at the gate. When SERC is publicly open, you drive on through. When you’re an intern coming back from the bar at night, you have to swipe your ID card. You drive a few more turns, watching closely for deer, before that final right turn that drops you into the parking lot of the intern dorms and the labs.

I fell in love with SERC within days of my arrival. There were the intimidating factors of the place: fellow interns at Ivy Leagues and respected colleges, scientific labs into which the government itself funded millions, no meal plan, and the stick shift vehicle I would drive all summer. I was terrified when my mom drove away. I explored the floor of my building, admiring the kitchen, perusing the book selection. By eleven, I was in bed. I was tried from traveling, but more so, I didn’t know what to do. I’d briefly interacted with the other intern already on my floor, but I didn’t know him well enough to go say hi. There were four interns moved in below my floor, but I hadn’t seen any of them yet. I suddenly seemed wildly out of my element, though I had felt comfortable at SERC the moment I drove through the gate.

Of course, I grew happier at SERC. The happiest I’d been in years. Within weeks, I made strong friends, adjusted to my job, and began to close my GPS when driving to the store.

My work felt good. The articles I wrote and the media I created reached thousands of people, many of which gave positive comments. My words were reaching people, and the people were responding.

I was raised by a scientist, but more importantly, by well-educated, empathetic people. Loving my planet was part of the gig when I was growing up. In high school, I began to see where my privilege in this education existed. My friends at school didn’t seem to care about the things I’d be taught to care about. Water consumption, electricity, knowing the landscape on which your house is built. I knew important moments in history, and how they affected me. I had early knowledge of politics, to the point where I knew who George Bush was before his presidency ended (when I was 10). Ignorance and empathy tend to go hand-in-hand, mostly because ignorance leads to apathy. We’ve seen this cause-and-effect equation hold catastrophic, deadly consequences in 2020.

When I arrived at SERC, it didn’t slip by me that I suddenly had access to information that most people only dream about. Many of us are ignorant (I remain ignorant to 99.9% of what happens on this Earth) by circumstance, not by choice. Accessibility is one of our biggest problems of a global society attempting to function in a digital, climate change-riddled world. Sixty percent of the globe now has Internet access, but that leaves 3.08 billion people without the knowledge they need to protect themselves from the setbacks of climate change. Most of those people, as it would turn out, are terribly affected most by war, poverty, hunger, climate, social injustice, etc. These things intertwine and cause one another. Not always, but often.

My position at SERC gifted me access to science occurring in real-time. When the Pandemic would hit a year later, it would be surprising but not shocking. On a planet where politics and science are brothers, and the population is soaring too high to properly maintain, containing a spreadable virus is like trying to hold a cup of water in your bare hands. Sooner or later, it’s going to slip between the cracks and go everywhere. If it slips far enough, you’ll never find a towel strong enough to collect it all.

In March of 2020, when I moved home to isolate, I knew the rest of college was trashed. Not my degree, necessarily, but the experience of college. I would lose that experience in its normalcy, and therefore the skills which develop from that normalcy.

I did soon realize, however, that we are not always fortunate enough to do something about mass-casualties or problems. There’s not always an answer, straightforward or not. When there is one, you should grab it with both hands.

That summer of 2020, I decided I wanted to pursue a master’s degree after college. Higher education is not unknown in my family; we boast high degrees from prestigious universities. I am the opposite of a First-Generation student (one of my great-grandparents also had a master’s degree). Graduate school had already been on my mind when I started college, but I didn’t know what for. An MFA in fiction had felt the most logical to my teenage self in 2017, but by 2018, that felt out the window. What I had realized by the summer of 2020 was that, in the midst of the chaos and absurdity, was that I could in fact do something about what was going on. I can’t solve climate change, or house the homeless, or save every polar bear, or even eradicate a virus, but I can help in my own way. On some level, I can do something about the many crises. This, in itself, is “doing something”.

Science writing is a polarizing subject, of this I have been aware my entire life. Unfortunately, we’ve made science political, though politics are generally opinion (with strong empathy) and science is fact. It’s a tough, competitive field, but so is everything else. If you want to “make it” in this world, you have to willingly shed blood, tears, and probably sweat profusely. As I watched the COVID cases skyrocket simultaneously to the people I knew who cared not to stay home, I could tell something was off. People weren’t listening. If they were, it was usually to the ignorant voices on television.

I could feel my cheeks burning as I watched the Johns Hopkins map. It seemed cruel that we, as a society, could do that to ourselves. That we could allow this virus to spread and kill, but also that we had put ourselves in this position. I had already been envisioning myself as a science writer every day since my time at SERC had begun. Finally reckoning with the knowledge that not everybody is a scientist, nor cares to be one, was the icing on the cake. I couldn’t fix it all, but I could offer my help. So, I would.

When I began this blog two years ago, it was solely for abroad purposes. It was a fabulous way to let anybody who cared know what I was experiencing and how I was handling those experiences. Studying abroad, no matter how or where or how long, is difficult. Studying in general, for any length of time on any subject, is mindboggling tedious. I give kudos to my friends and family who have any advanced, foreign, or nontraditional education.

What I discovered after I began writing blog posts and sharing my thoughts is that there’s always more to the story than the words on the page. That’s why I’ve added to this blog in the year and a half since my abroad semester ended; there is always more to tell.

In a few weeks, I begin my master’s degree at Northwestern University in Chicago. My degree is in journalism, with a specialization in Science and Health reporting. I’m nervous to my core, as I am with any new adventure. I just graduated college last weekend, so my emotions are running wild. Yet, I have a feeling I’m about to finally be where I’ve wanted to be for years. I love words. I love messing with them, shaping them, using them to fit whatever project I want. I also love science. I love knowing what is happening around me, and why and how it is. Combining them already feels like a dream come true, so I’m sure the next year will feel magical.

The classes of 2020 and 2021 are probably the most resilient in history. A Pandemic, racial and social injustice, wildfires, remote learning, wifi issues. We’ve seen it all, and it’s made us stronger every day.

I think I’ve worn this blog out for this phase of life. My thoughts on what I’ve talked about here are valid and important, but they don’t exist alone. For somebody who’s pretty much been writing since she could hold a pencil, I hate journaling. I’ve tried so many times, and never succeeded, with the exception of this blog. That said, it gave me an incredibly strong, consistent manner of getting my thoughts on the page, for which I am endlessly grateful. If you’ve kept reading my thoughts and words, you should know I’m endlessly grateful for you, too.

All of this is saying that, whether you’re ready or not, life keeps going. Life can be cruel, it can be challenging, it can be beautiful. No matter what, it keeps going. As my friend Ferris once said, if you don’t stop and look around from time to time, you could miss it. So much changed so drastically in the last year. I’m still processing it. I might always be processing it. Most importantly, I think, is that I’ve learned to flow with it wherever it goes. It’s harder sometimes than other, but the result is usually worth the grind.

You might read my stuff in the Times once day, or (my personal favorite dream) National Geographic. I don’t know honestly know where I’m going, but I’m okay with that because I do know that I’m on my way. I’m still going. When life continues, you should go, too. You never quite know where the climb will lead, but you do know that the view will be great.

[writing-worlds-and-tips]

Dystopian Tips

Dystopian is also a genre that takes a lot of world-building, but its elements are more realistic than sci-fi or fantasy. Common topics that dystopian novels will be centered upon are war, corrupt governments, and diseases. If you want to try this genre, here are some tips that will hopefully help.

Read dystopian books. I say this about every post that is about a specific genre, and you might’ve gotten sick of it by now. But this is extremely important. If you’ve never read a dystopian novel, there’s no way you’ll be able to write a good one. Take inspiration (but don’t plagiarize) from your favorite dystopian novels. I recommend The Hunger Games, Divergent, and Matched.

Find your issue. Do you want to write about war (in that case, check out my post on writing about war)? Most dystopian novels have government systems that are...questionable. What other problems are facing your world? Poverty? Disease?

Think about the current world. Think about current technologies, the current government system etc. There are also many problems facing the environment today, such as climate change. It’s beginning to affect our world slowly, if we don’t fix it fast enough.

Think about your future world. The future should definitely be different from it is now, because dystopian tends to be in the future, when things have become corrupt. Regarding the climate change issue in the point I discussed above, maybe the world is slowly dying because of climate change and your protagonist has to fix it.

Think about what changed. Worlds don’t magically get destroyed overnight. Something has to have happened between modern life and your future dystopian world. You should be able to explain that in your novel, without info-dumping. Maybe the government’s refusal to solve the climate change problem caused the world to slowly die.

Your protagonist should be pushing for change. Because things are normally corrupt in a dystopian novel, your protagonist is the one tasked to change it. They shouldn’t do it by themselves, however, because one person cannot change the world alone. Maybe a teenage girl is tasked to save the world from meeting its doom, and she works in a lab to help climate change subside a bit, along with older scientists and mentors.

World-build effectively. Dystopian is one of those genres that require intense world-building, like fantasy and sci-fi. However, it can be easier than the two genres above because some of the elements you need to world-build can be rooted in current realities. A world where the consequences of climate change has taken over is based on our current issue here. There should also be rules for the government, economy, etc.

There has to be a breaking point. What makes the public or government realize that things really need to change and they can’t put it off anymore? Maybe your protagonist and their friends expose a secret government scheme so everyone knows just how corrupt it is. Or maybe the president dies as a cause of climate change, which leads to the government to want to change. This is normally the climax of a novel.

Be descriptive. People should be able to imagine the events of your book happening in real life. After all, it could happen in the future. Describe your world with sights, sounds, feelings, smells, and tastes that your readers will never forget. It’ll make the world you built and your characters’ emotions come alive. Make them smell the dirty air and the panic among the citizens in the example I used.

Remember to edit well. Editing is important in dystopian novels, because there are many rules that you have created that world. It’s easy to accidentally break a rule without reasonable explanation somewhere in the middle or towards the end. Like any other novel, you should edit well.

If you love dystopian novels, maybe you should try to write one yourself. I’m planning to write one at the time I wrote this (March 10, 2020), but it might be started already after I wrote this. (I’m going to start in April). Read dystopian books, build worlds and characters, and have fun!

[pope-francis-quotes]

9th August >> (@VaticanNews By Robin Gomes) #Pope Francis #PopeFrancis discusses populism in #Europe, also touching upon politics, migrants, the Pan-Amazonian Synod, and the Church's evangelizing mission. @LaStampa

Pope Francis: isolationism and populism lead to war

In an interview with the Italian daily La Stampa-Vatican Insider, Pope Francis says that Europe needs to respect identities of peoples without closing itself in. He touches upon several issues such as politics, migrants, the Synod on the Amazonia, the environment and the evangelizing mission of the Church.

By Robin Gomes

Europe must be saved because it is a heritage that "cannot and must not be dissolved". Dialogue and listening, "starting from one's own identity" and from human and Christian values, are the antidote against “sovereignism” and populism, and are also the engine for "a process of relaunching" that never ends.

Pope Francis spoke about these and other issues with Domenico Agasso, the Vatican expert and coordinator of “Vatican Insider”, the online project of Italy’s daily newspaper "La Stampa".

Europe and its founding fathers

The Pope hopes that Europe will continue to be the dream of its founding fathers. It is a vision that became a reality by implementing the historical, cultural and geographical unity that characterizes the continent.

Despite Europe’s "problems of administration and internal disagreements", the Pope is optimistic about the appointment of Ursula von der Leyen as President of the European Commission. He is happy about her appointment “because a woman can be the right person to revive the strength of the founding fathers.” “Women”, he said, “know how to bring people together and unite."

Europe’s human and Christian roots

According to the Pope, the main challenge for Europe in relaunching itself comes from dialogue. "In the European Union we must talk to each other, confront each other, know each other", says the Pope, explaining how the "mental mechanism" behind every reasoning must be "first Europe, then each of us".

To do this, he says, "we also need to listen", while very often we only see "compromise monologues". The starting and relaunching point, he explains, are the human values of the person. It is a fact of history that Europe has both human and Christian roots. “And when I say this,” the Pope says, “I don't separate Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants. The Orthodox have a very precious role for Europe. We all have the same founding values.”

Identity that is open to dialogue

The Pope explains that each of us is important, no one is secondary. Hence in every dialogue, “we must start from our own identity”. He gives an example: "I can't do ecumenism if I don't start from my being Catholic, and the other who does ecumenism with me must do so as a Protestant, Orthodox etc... Our own identity is not negotiable; it integrates itself.”

The Pope said that the problem with exaggerations is that we isolate ourselves without opening up. Identity, he says, is cultural, national, historical and artistic wealth, and each country has its own, but it must be integrated with dialogue. It is crucial that while starting from one’s own identity, one needs to open up to dialogue in order to receive something greater from the identity of others.

Never forget, the Pope says, that “the whole is greater than the parts.” Globalization and unity”, he says, “should not be conceived as a sphere, but as a polyhedron: each people retains its identity in unity with others".

“Sovereignism” and populism

The Pope expresses concern about what he terms as “sovereignism” which he describes as an attitude of isolation. He says he is worried about speeches resembling those of Hitler in 1934 that speak of “Us first. We... we...”

While “sovereignism” involves closing in upon oneself, sovereignty is not, the Pope explains. Sovereignty must be defended and relations with other countries, with the European Community, must also be protected and promoted.

“Sovereignism” is an exaggeration that always ends badly: "it leads to wars", the Pope says. Populism, he explains, is a way of imposing an attitude that leads to “sovereignism” and should not be confused with "popularism", which is the culture of the people which needs to be expressed. Suffixing “-ism” to “sovereign”, the Pope says, is bad.

Migrants: primacy of right to life

On the issue of immigration, Pope Francis stresses on the four principles of welcoming, accompanying, promoting and integrating.

The most important criteria in this, he says, is the right to life, which is linked to conditions of war and hunger that people flee from, especially from the Middle East and Africa. Governments and those authorities are required to think about how many migrants they can take.

The Holy Father also calls for creative solutions, such as filling up labour shortage in the agricultural sector. Some countries have semi-empty towns because of the demographic decline. Migrant communities could help revitalize the economy of these areas.

Speaking about war, Pope Francis says “we must commit ourselves and fight for peace.” Hunger mainly concerns the African continent which, he says, is the victim of a cruel curse, that it should be exploited. Instead, he says, part of the solution is to invest there to help solve their problems and thus stop migratory flows.

Urgency of the Amazon Synod

On being asked about the Synod on the Amazon in October in the Vatican, the Pope says “it is the ‘child’ of ‘Laudato si’”. He clarifies that “Laudato si” “is not a green encyclical but a social encyclical based on the “green” reality of the custody of creation.

“It will be our synod of urgency”, the Pope says, expressing shock that on Earth Overshoot Day, 29 July, man has already exhausted all the regenerative resources for the current year. This, together with the melting of the glaciers, the risk of rising ocean levels, the increase in plastic waste in the sea, deforestation and other critical situations, he says, makes the planet live in "a situation of world emergency”.

Synod, work of the Holy Spirit for evangelization

The Synod, however, the Pope points out, is not a meeting of scientists, politicians or a parliament. “It was convened by the Church and will have an evangelizing mission and dimension. It will be a work of communion guided by the Holy Spirit.”

The important themes of the event are those concerning "the ministries of evangelization and the different ways of evangelizing".

Amazonia key to the future of the planet

The Pope explains the choice of Amazonia for a synod is because the region involves as many as nine States. "It is a representative and decisive place. Together with the oceans, it contributes decisively to the survival of the planet. Much of the oxygen we breathe comes from there. That's why deforestation means killing humanity.”

Politics

Asked about politics, the Pope says that "the threat to the lives of the populations and the territory derives from the economic and political interests of the dominant sectors of society". Thus politics must "eliminate its connivances and corruptions”. “It must take concrete responsibility, for example on the subject of open-cast mines, which poison water and cause so many diseases".

Hope in young people

The Holy Father expresses confidence in young people and their movements for a new attitude towards the care of Creation, like the Swedish teenage activist, Greta Thunberg, who is leading a worldwide protest against climate change. The Pope says he was moved to see a placard of hers that read: “We are the future”. It means promoting attention to the little everyday things that "affect" the culture "because they are concrete actions", the Pope says.

Topics

POPE FRANCIS

INTERVIEW

EUROPE

AMAZONIA

POLITICS

MIGRANTS AND REFUGEES

#SINODOAMAZONICO

09th August 2019, 13:23

[cashcounts]

This $42 Million-Dollar Timekeeping Device Runs for 10 Millennia

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in an edition of NOVA’s email newsletter, NOVA Lens, and has now been repurposed for NOVA Next. Sign up for NOVA Lens here (select “NOVA Newsletters”).

Mindfulness gurus tell us to focus on the present, but what if we chose to be much more forward-thinking? How would society function if we saw a year as not 12 months, but a sliver of a century?

That’s the philosophy behind the Long Now Foundation, which has entered the spotlight for its support of a Franklin-esque invention: a futuristic timekeeping device that can last for 10 millennia. This “10,000-year clock” looks like it’s straight out of a Star Trek episode—or the set of Interstellar. The team behind this impressive feat of engineering hopes that the clock will inspire people to think long-term.

The 10,000-year clock, shown here, was first conceived by Danny Hillis in 1986.

Danny Hillis began fantasizing about what he then called a “millennium clock” in 1995, when the American scientist, entrepreneur, and writer penned this column for Wired magazine. Hillis’s family and friends thought he was crazy—but Alexander Rose didn’t. He had heard about Hillis’s idea through his friend, Stewart Brand, one of the founders of the Long Now Foundation and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. As a child, Rose played near the old World War II shipwrecks in the San Francisco Bay—“I grew up literally in a junkyard,” he says—so he has a penchant for building things.

“I went to a [Long Now Foundation] board meeting and met Danny Hillis and started working with him immediately on the first prototype,” Rose said. They completed an initial prototype in 1999, which is now on display at the Science Museum in London. In 2010, they broke ground on the project in western Texas.

Now, they’re beginning the underground installation of the 500-foot mechanical marvel—yes, underground, carved into the side of a mountain where the clock will be protected from the elements. Visitors will be able to hike to the clock and then descend a secret staircase to see it for themselves. As an extra precaution against wear-and-tear over many millennia, the scientists made the clock out of mostly stainless steel and titanium. Dry-running ceramic bearings (which don’t need lubrication to run) separate the dissimilar metals so that they don’t react to each other. “Those used to cost about $15,000 each,” Rose said. “Now they’re in rollerblades and fidget spinners.”

The clock’s first prototype

Here’s how the clock works. Its energy is stored in a large weight, similar to how a grandfather clock operates. The weight moves as a result of changes in temperature throughout the day. One air tank near the surface of the mountain (above the device) heats up while it’s exposed to the Sun, while another tank is kept cool inside the mountain. The difference in temperature throughout the day (a few tens of degrees) causes the air to move from the hot tank to the cool one. When the surface tank cools down at night, the airflow reverses. The potential energy stored in the lifted weight then drives a series of gears, which regulate the speed of a six-foot balanced pendulum.

While the clock’s partitions of time come from the pendulum, which completes one back-and-forth about every seven seconds, it also recalibrates to the Sun at solar noon. Because of that idiosyncrasy, the clock is more like a calendar, according to Steve Allen, a member of the software team at the University of California’s Lick Observatory. The clock will actually “tick” once a year for 10,000 years, its century hand will move every 100 years, and a cuckoo will emerge every 1,000 years. The musician Brian Eno composed a different chime sequence for each day (listen to some sample tracks here).

But there are a few major differences between the 10,000-year clock and the antique grandfather clock at your, uh, grandfather’s house.

For one, the clock also derives some of its energy from manual labor. When people come to visit it, they will have to wind the clock to make visible—on a set of dials—what the clock already “knows” internally about how much time has passed.

“It doesn’t show you the time that it is when you arrive,” Rose said. “It shows you the time of the last people who visited it, and then you wind up the dials until it stops at the ‘now’ point to see the difference. So if it was 100 years since the last people were there, you would wind it for quite a while.”

In this way, the 10,000-year clock is symbolic of not just long-term thinking, but it also illustrates a fundamental tension in how humans have recorded the passage of time—and how today’s advanced methods of timekeeping still struggle with vestiges of past practices.

For most of our existence as Homo sapiens, time was set by watching the sky (and was aided with a transit circle telescope in later years). The Sun was, quite literally, the ultimate arbiter of time.

“Years ago, if you looked at [fire] insurance policies, they would all expire at noon,” Allen said. “The insurance company could be reasonably sure that someone who witnessed a fire would have noticed whether the sun was on the east side or the west side of the building when the fire happened, and they would know whether [the policy] expired.”

Though the Sun was still supreme, our notion of time began to change gradually in 1656, when Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens invented the first pendulum clock that measured what we now know of as a second. Electric-motorized clocks (late 19th century) and quartz clocks (1927) made time measurement even more precise.

Then in the 1950s, the atomic clock changed everything. “It became immediately clear that they were better than any other timekeeping device that had ever existed,” Allen said. Atomic clocks apportion time based on the vibrations of cesium atoms, and they’re critical to the functioning of GPS, satellites, and more.

But far from being the foremost authority on time, atomic clocks sent our timekeeping systems into conflict. Neither the calendar nor the clock quite line up with each other. The Earth’s rotation is not always consistent (it fluctuates in response to events like earthquakes, dramatic changes in climate, etc.), yet many technologies require unchanging atomic time, so the world was forced to reconcile the two. The compromise, which throws what’s called a “leap second” into the mix, is now known as Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

“The leap second was the answer, because that allowed you to say, ‘We’re going to keep the calendar day defined by watching the sky. Each second will be defined by cesium. Whenever they disagree, we’ll throw in another second,’” Allen said.

As early as 1999, the leap-second has been in danger of being scrapped by the International Telecommunications Union, an arm of the UN that helps coordinate global communication standards, which depend on accurate timekeeping. Some people felt (and still feel) that the leap second is an imperfect hack to resolve the difference between calendar time and atomic time.

That is, should we adjust our clocks to the Earth’s slowing rotation, or should we drop leap seconds and let atomic clocks be fully responsible for measuring time? So far, the scientific community has failed to reach an agreement on this question (case in point: this 2016 NPR story).

Allen says the 10,000-year clock highlights this very issue (he and others wrote a paper about it in advance of a colloquium held in 2011).

Rose points out that “the 10,000-year clock is one of few devices that tracks natural and absolute time simultaneously.” Because of that, it is representative to many of this debate—this tension—over whether humans should decouple timekeeping from natural cycles.

Jon Giorgini, an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who was a co-author on the aforementioned 10,000-year clock paper, says he’s impressed by the scale of the project. “Most engineers designing software or hardware build and keep a mental model of the system in their head,” he said. “They observe it in their mind’s eye, take it apart, and ‘watch’ it work. Doing this for a system running over 10,000 years is really mind-expanding.”

Rose says the team picked the number 10,000 because that’s roughly how long it’s been since agrarian civilizations began. “How do we place ourselves not at the end of a 10,000-year story, but in the middle of a 20,000-year one?” he asked. “And if you did that, how would you act differently?”

Climate change and world hunger, for example, are things that we can’t solve in a quarterly report or over the course of a four-year election cycle. But in 200 years, society could make a difference. “It’s a multi-generational effort,” Rose said. “We want to put that kind of thinking back on the table.”