The lesson is clear: Neither history repeating nor the End of History is really an end state.

The genocide Ozymandias orchestrated to avert nuclear doomsday had merely restarted the cycle under a new regime of fear. Manhattan, MooreвЂ™s obvious critique of the Nietzschean Гјbermensch, is admonishing OzymandiasвЂ™ Hegelian ambitions of a permanent peace. Manhattan, an immortal stand-in for Superman in the Watchmen story. While in the long run, as they say, weвЂ™re all dead, society spins along. Fixating on a future long beyond the lives of our great-great-great-grandchildren might be as defeatist as worrying about apocalypse with every little advance made by human societies.Д«ut whether itвЂ™s against myopia, utopia, or doomsday, someone must think of the children. As Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner show in their book Superforecasting, in a theme seen throughout TetlockвЂ™s work, humans routinely fail at predicting the future even a few years out. But there may also be danger too in thinking too long-term. Now you might, as I do, find the messaging around doomsday distasteful and demoralizing. And what are doomsdays and dystopias but inverted utopias? If we can create useful utopias, making progress toward them if never quite reaching providence, then surely we can create useful doomsdays, cautioning against our worst impulses but, hopefully, stopping short of outright paralysis. We all unavoidably imagine our own utopias. I have my own vision, after all, of what a bright future might look like. Whether itвЂ™s against myopia, utopia, or doomsday, someone must think of the children. It will be, quite simply, the best clock ever constructed: built to withstand eons of material wear and tear, geologic disturbance, and social, political, and technological change. The brainchild of Danny Hillis and Stewart Brand of the Long Now Foundation, that clock is designed to tick for 10,000 years. Whether I was meant to or not, I immediately saw the Millennium Clock as a facsimile for the Clock of the Long Now, a real machine that is currently being constructed in a remote Texas mountainside. To write more would be to spoil the showвЂ™s plot and themes, but suffice it to say, Lady Trieu intends the Millennium Clock to transcend the very notion of time. In the new story, a trillionaire (with a T) named Lady Trieu is building an enormous clock outside Tulsa, Oklahoma. But while the Doomsday Clock itself is nowhere to be found in the show, I was surprised to encounter a different, fictional one called the Millennium Clock. Time and clocks are a central motif in the novel and in LindelofвЂ™s new series, which takes place in an alternate historyвЂ™s 2019.

Counting down work clock