A challenge to think in multimillennial terms

You've no doubt heard about the Y2K problem. Well, as it turns out, that's not the half of it.

Some of technology's leading lights have identified a Y10K problem, though this one has nothing to do with improperly programmed computer systems.

The culprit in this case is technology itself, the entire Information Age, and the way it is foreshortening everyone's sense of time.

Identifying the problem is a group of technology inventors, futurists, and loyal advocates who have founded something here called the Long Now Foundation. Its mission: to "explore whatever may be helpful for thinking, under- standing and acting responsibly over long periods of time." Long as in, say, 10,000-year increments.

Specifically, the Long Now Foundation is planning, among other projects, to build an eight-story-high mechanical clock that will run for 10,000 years, ticking once a year, bonging every century, and sending out a cuckoo each millennium.

It's a monument to remind us we're in this for the long haul.

The foundation has been around since 1996 but is about to go public in a big way. Its work will be unveiled internationally this week at the prestigious World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

In some respects, the clock's originators see it as the perfect antidote to the millennium madness now sweeping the land. "The 2000 thing is about the moment. The clock is about everything but the moment," says Stewart Brand, inventor of the Whole Earth Catalog, co-founder of the futurist Global Business Network, and a prime mover of the Long Now Foundation.

Mr. Brand's band of conspirators includes Danny Hillis, a pioneer in the massive processing used in supercomputers and now a Walt Disney Imagineering vice president; Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, Calif.; author Esther Dyson; and Brian Eno, British musician and acclaimed installation artist.

These are all, as Brand calls them, techno-optimists. Not a Luddite among them. Yet they're convinced the world's accelerating technology obsession has encouraged us all to think and act short term, worshiping concepts like "faster and cheaper" instead of "slower and better."

There is some whimsy in the venture, to be sure. But that's only because the group understands the need to capture people's imagination. Behind what Brand calls the mythic qualities of the clock are many hoped-for practical achievements.

A key component of the foundation's work is a long-term library, which will preserve for centuries records on research, science, and public policy.

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