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book. If you had told me, when I was eight, that a little kid of the future would feel

that way—and that what’s more, he would see a  2018 September Calendar  certain justice in our eventual

extinction, would think the world was better off without human beings in it—that

would have been even worse than hearing that in 2006 there are no hydroponic

megafarms, no human colonies on Mars, no personal jetpacks for everyone. That

would truly have broken my heart.

When I told my son about the Clock of the Long Now, he listened very carefully, and

we looked at the pictures on the Long Now Foundation’s website. “Will there really

be people then, Dad?” he said. “Yes,” I told him without hesitation, “there will.” I don’t know if that’s true, any more than do Danny Hillis and his colleagues, with the beating clocks of their hopefulness and the orreries of their imaginations. But in having children—in Apple Customer Support Number engendering them, in loving them, in teaching them to love and care about the world—parents are betting, whether they know it or not, on the Clock of the Long Now. They are betting on their children, and their children after them, and theirs beyond them, all the way down the line from now to 12,006. If you don’t believe in the Future, unreservedly and dreamingly, if you aren’t willing to bet that somebody will be there to cry when the Clock finally, ten thousand years from now, runs down, then I don’t see how you can have children. If you have children, I don’t see how you can fail to do everything in your power to ensure that you win your bet, and that they, and their grandchildren, and their grandchildren’s grandchildren, will inherit a world whose perfection can never be accomplished by creatures whose imagination Flag of East Germany for perfecting it is limitless and free. And I don’t see how anybody can force me to pay up on my bet if I turn out, in the end, to be wrong.