I’m wearing a blue Atari hoodie. I’ve got some kind of purple t-shirt on underneath.

The sky is overcast. It’s a typical British day. The camera’s sort-of top down, I’m looking up ever so slightly into it. My sister’s stood next to me, she’s looking square on at the camera, grey hoodie.

My parents – probably my Dad – is taking the pictures. Apple Photos says it’s a Panasonic camera. The date’s July 31st 2009, 10.30am and 26 seconds.

Behind me is Stonehenge.

Something about Stonehenge has always fascinated me. What’s it for? Who used it and why does it have what feels like an almost magical alignment with the stars?

I visited it again for the first time in 14 years last week – took the same photo. Stonehenge is behind. In front of me is Sue.

Stonehenge is a World Heritage Site, probably the most sophisticated stone circle in the world.

I remember as a kid watching tons of documentaries on Stonehenge, I actually wanted – for a brief fleeting moment – to become an archaeologist.

We have no idea what their original thinking was and their purpose might have changed because it took about 500 years to finish it off so during that time people’s ideas might have changed.

What I love about Stonehenge is that people have lived here, they’ve used the site, and they’ve been interested in it for thousands of years. People have also laid their own stories down, their own interpretations.

Some of them more historically sound than others, some interpretations more based on facts than fiction, but I think all of them are valid.

They didn’t write and they didn’t leave us any pictures so it’s anybody’s guess really what they were up to.

The stones reminds me of cycles within cycles. The turning of the seasons, the rising and setting of the sun, the tide, high and low. There’s quite literally circles within circles at the site.

The first evidence that we have of humans in this exact location is some Mesolithic post holes. They’re the remains of holes that would have held some very big timber posts. They date back to about 8000 BC. Following that you have the cursus, which is a very very long earthwork which runs all the way along the back of the Stonehenge landscape. That dates to about 3300 BC. And then you have around about 3000 BC the henge monument itself was constructed. The henge is the ditch and bank that goes all the way around the outside of the monument. And then about 500 years later they brought the big stones and started to construct the monument as we see it today.

Both times I visited I couldn’t help but feel a deep connection with the past, with the recurring patterns that define humankind.

Civilisations have risen and fallen, countries formed and forgotten, wars have been fought, won and lost. We’ve explored the stars! We’ve come so far as a species and this monument, this magical mysterious monument has been a passive witness to the whole thing.

It’s unique, it tells us a story about the sophistication of the people which I think when we look back at 5,000 years we may think the people were very primitive but they weren’t. They were fabulous mathematicians, they were as clever as we are and how inspired they must have been to have thought of doing something like this.

There’s a sense of wonder in knowing that this monument has stood for thousands of years and my two photos, 14 years apart, just a very small blip on what hopefully is a very, very long standing future…

I’d be lying if I said that this affected me in quite the same way as this makes it sound but also it must have affected me in some way because I’m making an entire podcast about it.

A few months ago, you might remember that I went on morning walks and whilst I was on these morning walks, I saw some deer.

The story basically was that the deer, whenever I looked for them, weren’t there. When I stopped looking, they sort of appeared every time.

I’ve just come back from a walk…

I saw one of the deer on the side of the road this morning.

It’s eyes, eyes that had once sniped me from ferns on the hillside, were glazed over.

It’s autumn now and those ferns are dying too.

I guess the deer is a symbol. It’s fragility. It’s us encroaching on their home. We continue to push the limits. This estate continues to grow. We continue to force creatures like these into ever shrinking habitats where encounters with humans, with me, with cars, become increasingly perilous.

There’s a second deer.

As I walked, the remaining deer watched me from the woods. It was a silent exchange. The deer didn’t move.

Startled, maybe… Used to me, maybe.

Am I to blame? Am I the reason the other one got so close to a car?

Bit of a weird one for you. I’m still not sure how I feel about it.

It’s August 31st 8023 – six thousand years in the future – and you are in a mountain in Nevada.

It has taken you several days to get here. You’ve had to hike, you’ve had to endure the harsh heat – the thorns – and you’ve stumbled upon a set of metal doors. This is what you’ve been looking for. The doors are a kind of crude airlock, keeping out dust and animals.

You head into the darkness of a long tunnel. There’s the mildest hint of light ahead that you slowly find your way to.

You look up.

A faint light filtering down now through giant gears, illuminating the beginning of a spiral staircase. You start climbing. It winds up the outer rim of the tunnel, rising towards the gears and faint light overhead. The stairs are carved out of the rock.

After climbing about 100 feet you encounter a large bronze egg filled with concrete. It’s about the size of a small car and weighs 5,000 kilograms. After you pass the weights you keep climbing, pass more giant gears, some over 8 feet in diameter – and then you find it. The world’s slowest computer. And it plays a chime for you. Simple bells, but a unique combination nobody in living memory has ever heard, nor will ever hear again.

This is a clock.

I started just thinking about, just as a project for myself, the idea of building a very slow clock that would last for 10,000 years. Sometime in the 1990s, I started noticing the year 2000 was kind of a mental barrier for people. It was hard for them to think past it. And so I started just thinking about, just as a project for myself, the idea of building a very slow clock. And 10,000 years being a kind of nice number because our history is kind of 10,000 years old. So we ought to have a future that’s as big as our history.

It’s not a work of science fiction. It’s real.

Danny wanted to design a symbol of the future in the same way the Pyramids of Giza are a symbol of the past. If you go to the pyramids in Egypt and you touch those stones, I mean those are stones that human hands touched thousands of years ago. Is there anything we can put into the world where you would be touching this thing and this thing would endure and you would know that people in the year 7000 or something might also touch that same thing and think about you and does that build some kind of a connection across time?

The 10,000 Year Clock, or the Clock of the Long Now, is the work of the Long Now Foundation.

The Long Now Foundation is a nonprofit here in San Francisco that’s trying to help people think about the next 10,000 years. And the way we want to do that is by also helping them think about the last 10,000 years. When we’re thinking about the future, there’s so many organisations or cultural narratives that want to convince people or talk about how we’re at the end of the civilisational narrative. That’s the idea is that you’re really looking out at a multi-thousand year time horizon. You’re thinking about how the decisions that you’re making today affect people in 400 human generations. You’re going to do things a little bit differently. And that might actually be really important.

This clock really encapsulates everything that I love.

It’s oddly obsessive about something that’s impossible to predict. It’s incredibly philosophical and I think it’s really important. It’s all about fostering long-term thinking. It’s all about projecting further into the future than the financial year or your five-year plan or dare I say it – you. It’s all about hope and about the possibility that that there might be a future and that’s so refreshing in a world where we’re constantly told that the clock is ticking…