A sense of wonder requires a level of accessibility. Once a thing becomes too complicated, you can be impressed with the functionality, the “gee wiz” aspect, but it’s tremendously difficult to comprehend it enough to have that sense of wonder. Flying cars are similar enough to the cars we drive today that we have some understanding of what it is we don’t understand, but far fewer people have that same degree of comprehension of the microwave-frequency design engineering that goes into a gigahertz-range microprocessor. We know what we know about it–gee wiz, it sure makes that game run fast–but we don’t know what we don’t know about it.

Why is the 10,000 year clock a mechanical clock? It’s hard to believe it’s for repairability. After all, you’re planning to build it out of super-hard jade and advanced metal alloys–anyone wanting to replace those components will have to have a fair bit of technology to back them up. Perhaps, instead, it’s to engender a sense of wonder in the observer. Gears are complex, it’s true, but they’re also simple enough that we realize that we could understand them, given enough time to trace the linkages. They give us a sense of what it is we don’t know, a cognitive sense of scale.

An interesting question to me is how can someone recapture that sense of wonder with the tremendously complex systems we’re seeing in high tech, biotech, and eventually nanotech. It can be done. For instance, one doesn’t have to be a molecular biologist to look at a fern and be struck with wonder by the fact that it’s a fractal, right down to ridges on the leaves, yet a fern is far more complex than anything we’ll be building any time soon. If we could recapture that sense of wonder, perhaps people will once again become future oriented.