Reddit mentions of The Clock Of The Long Now: Time and Responsibility

The Clock of the Long Now (Link is amazon.) Covers some of these questions about how do we deal with engineering aspects that needs centuries or millennium. The short comings we run into and how we think about things.

As you're subject was a discussion on science fiction. Check out /r/TheExpanse/ Another set of books (now tv show) Asimov's Foundation series or I, robot series. Even the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy touches this idea with Spoilers The earth and all the living things upon it being a 10 billion year old program whose output is a single human being.

Asimov touches on this in the foundation series where no prediction or computer program can be correct over such a long life span, a set of humans in a "cult or church" type environment constantly make changes and minor adjustments to the program over the course of hundreds or thousands of years.

Happy reading.

If you're intrigued by this idea, I can recommend The Clock of the Long Now.

Along with a few of the others here...

The Clock of the Long Now - Stewart Brand.

Plus Parallel Worlds - Michio Kaku

I picked up a book about this about 5 years ago and cannot recommend it enough.

FWIW, last time I took political compass quiz I was left libertarian, the exact opposite of all the presidential candidates. I think from their questions they plot me libertarian mostly on anti-war grounds. ;-)

Also, maybe I'm more leftist then I think. ;-)

Though I lean somewhat libertarian, personally I think the US libertarian party is much worse than the major parties on protecting positive liberties and rights. If I had to align with a party, it would be the Greens.

They take both positive rights and liberties seriously and are future focused, something sorely lacking in our society.

Stewart Brand's Clock of the Long Now and Whole Earth Dicipline have highly influenced my thinking.

If you don't know who Stewart Brand is, he is one of the most influential people of the last century in both environmentalism and technology, and is a deep pragmatist worth taking seriously, unlike many in the movement he helped start.

A few reddit favorites: House of Leaves

Neuromancer

Slaughterhouse Five

1984

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Ishmael

Cryptonomicon

The Monster at the End of This Book (and that's no a joke, it was so important to me as a child, because of what it did with the story that I read it to my own son)

and a few not on that list: The Clock of the Long Now (by Stewart Brand)

Hot House (by Pete Early)

Underworld ( by Don Delillo)

Disgrace (by J.M. Coetzee)

The Eden Express (by Mark Vonnegut)

And one book I recently picked up (because I liked the author's first novel) really blew me away: The Unnamed (by Joshua Ferris).

The Clock of the Long Now, by Stewart Brand. A short, open-ended discussion about history, technology, information, time.