Jacobs mentions the Long Now Foundation in Breaking Bread with the Dead. I’m most interested in them for their timekeeping project: building a mechanical clock that will run for 10,000 years. I’ve seen their Prototype 1 clock at the British Science Museum, and even that “rough draft” is a remarkable feat of engineering. The 10,000 year clock also gave Neal Stephenson the inspiration for the monastery in his book Anathem. There, the monks live in different walled-off sections of an enormous compound. A giant clock at the heart of the compound opens gates between those sections and the outside world periodically. Some monks can come and go every year. Other monks see their gates open only once a decade. Yet others live in a section with gates that open once per century, and some live in a section whose gates open only once every thousand years!