What is a 10,000-year clock and what is the Y10K bug?

What do ancient ceramics have to do with the way that we build ball bearings and satellites?

Have we entered a digital dark age where we're losing more knowledge than we're preserving?

Why do some organizations last millennium? What does this have to do with bristlecone pine trees

or symbols in drum sets or a hotel that's still running that started in the sixth century?

If humanity disappeared tomorrow, what from our era would still be legible thousands of years from now?

Join me today for thinking about ourselves on a 10,000-year time scale with guest Alexander Rose.

Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman.

I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford, and in these episodes, we dive deeply

into our three-pound universe to uncover some of the most surprising aspects of our lives.

Okay. Today's episode. Today's episode springboards from last week's episode on the topic of persistence about things lasting through

time. Last episode, we talked about why things last, and we saw that some do because they are

optimized, like the body plan for sharks. Other things endure because they constantly repair themselves like Roman concrete, which self-heels

when it gets cracks. Some things endure because they are memorable or they seem explanatory,

like urban legends. And some things persist because they're fragile, but infinitely copyable,

like paper or DNA.

But this week I want to turn to much longer timescales, specifically millennia.

So today we're going to do something that's a little unusual for a species that thinks in election cycles or fiscal quarters and all of our short-term deadlines,

we're going to step into deep time,

beyond decades, beyond centuries.

We're going to stand on the long arc of civilization,

where the unit of measurement is millennia.

...