[jecel]

I only know a little about the Long Now Foundation so I could be getting it wrong, but I understood their goal was to help people think about problems beyond the short term. For example, why would anyone plant a tree if they will be long dead before that tree reaches its normal height?

Instead of just sitting around discussing vague ideas they thought it would be interesting to design and build something to showcase their ideas, so the "ten thousand year clock" was proposed. It is amazing how many problems you have to solve to build a clock that has even the slightest chance of still be running ten thousand years from now.

A side effect of the clock project was that some of the dates involved would have five digit years, so they thought using five digit years for current dates would be a good way of shocking people and exposing them to their ideas.

[kragen]

Indeed! But it can be difficult to talk about any kind of new idea on a site full of people who are driven into uncontrollable rages when they see someone deviating from a social convention, however minor.