Reminder: Jeff Bezos is Building a 10,000-Year Clock Inside A Mountain
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This week Jeff Bezos announced he would be stepping down as CEO of Amazon. We thought this would be a good opportunity to remind you that he is also building a 10,000 year clock inside a mountain.
Unfortunately, it’s precisely our short-term thinking that could mean life is far worse for future generations than it might otherwise be. How can we combat this deeply embedded short-termism and get people to think about centuries, millennia, and beyond? (File photo: Marco Xu/Unsplash)
“Where do you see yourself in five years?” It’s a classic job interview question, designed to probe your level of ambition and aspiration. And it probes about as far ahead as many of us are likely to think: with so many distractions in the here and now, so many crises and challenges and opportunities that will arise, and so much that seems likely to change, who can meticulously sit and plan for decades ahead?
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Longyearbyen, located on the west coast of the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen in the Svalbard archipelago, is cold. It always is: The annual average temperature there is -5˚C, but between January and March that average drops to -13˚C. In July, by contrast, you can expect an almost tropical 7˚C. It has a population of under 3,000 people, a single-screen cinema that plays films on Wednesdays and Sundays, and a school whose 270 students show up for their first day in August in mittens and hats. When school trips head into the mountains, teachers carry rifles to account for the risk of polar bears.