[jmadsen]

I voted you back up.

There's famine, there's lack of clean water and toilets, there's lack of potable water, etc, etc, etc...

I'm a defender of "pure science", but there are better engineering projects to challenge yourself with.

[sitharus]

I too would love those projects to be tackled. Unfortunately a clock engineer doesn’t make a good sanitation engineer. As much as we wish human ingenuity was interchangeable it isn’t.

Also a lot of the countries with problems have political issues as well as sociatal ones which makes solving the problems hard.

[jtmcmc]

It's funny because the point of the long now and the 10,000 year clock is to encourage long term thinking and planning which leads directly to thinking about these tough long term problems rather than the next election or next quarter.