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Recently it was mentioned on a documentary I've seen: 10,000 years of evolution, and the best thing to conserve information we came up with was stone tablets.

It's unfortunately true.

Wouldn't laser etching on a hardened-carbon (aka diamond) surface fare better than a stone tablet? As a bonus, you get to write a lot smaller than you could on a stone tablet, so you can pack a lot more information per tablet.

Perhaps it's true that the concept of a stone tablet is the best way to store information, but I'd bet there's a modern, high-tech way of implementing that concept that's far better than what the ancient world was able to produce.

It would be a very interesting project to try something like that with the goal to make information last millenia.

You mean something like this? Their main goal is to make a clock that will last 10,000 years, but it looks like they're working on library-ish projects too.

We totally shouldn't have government regulation. Except for the fact that pure capitalism tends to exploit children, exploit workers or both.

I'm all for free trade and as little government intervention as possible, too. But capitalism is all about short term gain regardless of the impact on the people or the environment. It's human nature that's got us screwed.

It's the main reason the ideas of The Long Now Foundation are so interesting.

Thanks for the link , it must have been amazing to have Feynman reporting! I specially like the honesty with which the article was written, for example: "By the end of that summer of 1983, Richard had completed his analysis of the behavior of the router, and much to our surprise and amusement, he presented his answer in the form of a set of partial differential equations. To a physicist this may seem natural, but to a computer designer, treating a set of boolean circuits as a continuous, differentiable system is a bit strange. Feynman's router equations were in terms of variables representing continuous quantities such as "the average number of 1 bits in a message address." I was much more accustomed to seeing analysis in terms of inductive proof and case analysis than taking the derivative of "the number of 1's" with respect to time. Our discrete analysis said we needed seven buffers per chip; Feynman's equations suggested that we only needed five. We decided to play it safe and ignore Feynman. The decision to ignore Feynman's analysis was made in September, but by next spring we were up against a wall. The chips that we had designed were slightly too big to manufacture and the only way to solve the problem was to cut the number of buffers per chip back to five. Since Feynman's equations claimed we could do this safely, his unconventional methods of analysis started looking better and better to us. We decided to go ahead and make the chips with the smaller number of buffers. Fortunately, he was right. When we put together the chips the machine worked. The first program run on the machine in April of 1985 was Conway's game of Life. " [ http://www.longnow.org/views/essays/articles/ArtFeynman.php ]

What about some great reading in HTML instead? It tells about where the real IT World was while MS was monkeying with some clone of CP/M

http://www.longnow.org/views/essays/articles/ArtFeynman.php

BTW, dear BillG: There is something called archive.org if you want to donate something to technical community. They offer standard MPEG and OGG files and Flash, which is current de-facto standard can stream them embedded if one is in hurry. Your attempt to kill Flash has failed, fire that team and target something else.

You might be interested in the Long Now Foundation

And I recommend that you first listen to this talk to regain your perspective and maybe your sanity. (Talk in OGG format)

The speaker is Bruce Sterling, and the title is The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole. I think this might be the single greatest talk I've ever heard about anything, not just the question of singularities.

The talk was by the brilliant cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling - Title: The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole. The OGG version is here. Make sure you have an hour and are wearing a diaper, because you might pee yourself.

Read the website maybe you'll understand their mission a little more clearly. Just because it will be difficult and may not last the whole 10,000 years doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. Maybe people will start to think more than 15 minutes ahead in life with discussions like these.

Are they going to make sure it can handle 5-digit years?

Yes. The Long Now Foundation even uses 5-digit years on their web site.

One of the conscious goals is to make it from cheap, plentiful, or otherwise unattractive-to-thieves materials.

Plenty more pictures (and plans too) where those came from.

Why is NASA getting grief here? Vast amounts of data from other organizations are deleted every day without comment. Rather, the space and astronomy communities are eager archivists precisely because the picture in question is a unique snapshot of the Earth and Moon at that moment and time - once deleted, irretrievably lost.

That budgets often fail to provide for long term maintenance is nothing to be surprised about. The real story here - as usual with NASA - is the strength of the organization's spirited staff. These data were saved - as all things of value are ultimately saved - due to their intrinsic value, not their monetary valuation.

The other naive thing about many replies to this thread is the thought that - har, har, har - those folks back in the '60's sure didn't know what they was doin'! Rather, today's archivists are facing a vastly larger problem. Presumably the current technology choice would involve spinning storage at multiple sites, perhaps with a tape robot at a supercomputer center serving as deep storage. Those spinning disks will eventually halt - will inevitably halt - very quickly after funding runs out. The copy in deep storage relies on migrating data to new media with a cadence of something like every few years - this, too, requires an ongoing funding commitment.

Even data that are explicitly committed to optical or magnetic media with the intent of long term offline storage in a salt mine require some sort of perpetual maintenance. Modern high-density storage is no more permanent that tapes from the 60's - perhaps less so since it has been demonstrated that those old NASA tapes are still readable half a century later. These are nearly time capsule sorts of time scales.

In any event, just as with these NASA data, any attempt at permanent storage requires saving readers for the media, not just the media themselves. And this just pushes the question one level deeper as those tape drives or optical readers have to be compatible with appropriate computer technology. Save the computers? Then you have to be compatible with the evolving network standards.

Very few organization pay attention to such issues.

Regarding non-human lifeforms, Lomborg thinks that resources should be focused on preserving habitats and preventing extinctions. Both of these are many orders of magnitude cheaper that a rushed retooling of our entire energy industry, and they are being ignored. And here I agree.

I don't remember him addressing overpopulation, but here's what I'd say about that: human depopulation is far more likely than overpopulation. Look here for the authoritative talk on the subject, by Philip Longman. (mp3 and ogg of the talk)

Regarding non-human lifeforms, Lomborg thinks that resources should be focused on preserving habitats and preventing extinctions. Both of these are many orders of magnitude cheaper that a rushed retooling of our entire energy industry, and they are being ignored. And here I agree.

I don't remember him addressing overpopulation, but here's what I'd say about that: human depopulation is far more likely than overpopulation. Look here for the authoritative talk on the subject, by Philip Longman. (mp3 and ogg of the talk)

Regarding non-human lifeforms, Lomborg thinks that resources should be focused on preserving habitats and preventing extinctions. Both of these are many orders of magnitude cheaper that a rushed retooling of our entire energy industry, and they are being ignored. And here I agree.

I don't remember him addressing overpopulation, but here's what I'd say about that: human depopulation is far more likely than overpopulation. Look here for the authoritative talk on the subject, by Philip Longman. (mp3 and ogg of the talk)

Figure out who is going to manage the whole thing; a system can't just be put in a closet in a classroom...

To add to the learning experience, give your entire class a 50 year assignment: "To maintain or assign others to maintain the storage and/or the systems, to boldly go..." This project is an excellent idea, it's a classroom sized version of the longnow to try to get students to think beyond the next {insert ephemeral pop star} video.

I would try to find a 40 or 50 year old electronics device, disassemble it and a modern P.C. to show the students what has changed and what remains.

Most 40-50 year old electronic devices used vacuum tubes which were fragile and had a finite lifespan but they were designed for easy replacement. Comments about the short lifespan of Electrolytic capacitors (primarily the big ones in switching supplies) are absolutely correct, especially when power isn't applied. What I would do is:

• Find a motherboard which operates on 12VDC (e.g. laptop) and just assume that the 110-12VDC transformer won't work in 50 years but provide instructions for powering the device off a 12VDC source (e.g. car battery, photovoltaic battery or future power source).
• Don't try to store a car battery, but if you select a low power motherboard, you could store a solar power supply with the PC.
• Add a bridge rectifier in case the future archaeologist is careless with polarity.
• Don't rely on spinning magnetic hard drive, but choose a system which can boot from a spinning magnetic hard drive, a USB flash device, a CD and a DVD. Install your OS and applications redundantly on all of these devices.
• Upload the disk image to an online archive.
• Store extra copies of the flash, CD and DVD in various locations. Document the GPS coordinates of these locations in paper documents which are also stored at each of the locations.

Your project is possible. Last spring I was running software on an Amiga 1000 from 1985 and as recently as 2004, I've watched videos on a VCR from 1976 (one of the filter caps on the VCR was bad so the sound was buzzy, but otherwise it was O.K.)

Long-Term Digital Dilemma

http://blog.longnow.org/2007/12/24/long-term-digital-dilemma/

Apparently, Hollywood is resorting to cellulose.

Hey, let's have those Super-8s reborn!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_8_mm_film

Right, plus, since our brain follows physical laws, those laws may reemerge in interesting ways in our brains themselves, much as Daniel Hillis describes happening with the Connection Machine in New Computer Architectures and Their Relationship to Physics or Why Computer Science Is No Good.

While I love Stephenson's earlier works, his later works are disappointing to me. If you could somehow plot a trend of his writing style, beginning with something like Snow Crash and continuing until the present, you'd find Anathem right on that trend line. If you've been reading his stuff all along, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. Anathem is like the Baroque cycle, but more so.

I agree with you about the trend line but I was not in the least disappointed with Anathem, I enjoyed it greatly.

The Baroque Cycle was the turning point for me. I'd love his earlier works. Re-read the first page of Snow Crash, it's brilliant. However I found the Cycle tedious in the extreme. This was despite the fact that that I had read many history books about the period and I am a Maths and Computer Science graduate from Trinity Cambridge - I must have been the perfect audience I thought and I still disliked these works.

I managed to finish Quicksilver and eventually bought and read Confusion as it was a Neal Stephenson book but couldn't even be bothered buying The System of the World.

Some time later I read The Birth Of Plenty http://www.amazon.com/Birth-Plenty-Prosperity-Modern-Created/dp/0071421920 that discusses way the basis for the economic fundamentals and legislative environment changed during the period covered by the Cycle and how this created the modern era. I suddenly understood what the books were about. I re-read the first two, rushed out and bought and read the third and I've since re-read the whole cycle twice.

Stephenson doesn't really write novels anymore, he uses novels as a vehicle to explore concepts that intrigue him. In Anathem he is exploring philosophical concepts and ideas around the Long Now http://www.longnow.org/ and no doubt ideas that I missed when reading Anathem.

It'd be fun if he wrote a really tight, enjoyable novel like Snow Crash again sometimes but I guess it's up to him to write what he wants to and up to us whether we give him money for writing it.

Just don't but a new Stephenson book until you see a review that says he's written a novel rather than a lecture if you don't enjoy what he seems to enjoy writing nowadays.

There was a Long Now Foundation talk covering the early stages of this story by Iqbal Quadir. (He was the guy who had the idea that the Grameen bank could fund cellphone purchase in small rural areas). Here's their written summary of the talk: Iqbal Quadir, "Technology Empowers the Poorest" (If you poke around on the site you can find the video of it, or listen to the mp3):

[...] a remarkable invention of another Bangladeshi, Mohammad Yunus, who developed micro-financing (and later won a Nobel prize for this invention). In Yunus' scheme a woman who owned virtually nothing could get a loan of $200 to purchase a cow. She would then sell the surplus milk of the cow to pay back the loan, earn both milk and an income for her family, and maybe buy another cow. Ordinarily, no bank would have lent her this trifling amount because she had no collateral, no education, and the costs of overseeing such a small loan with small gains, would have been prohibitive. Grameen Bank, Yunus' creation, discovered that these illiterate peasants were actually more likely to repay these small loans, and were very happy to pay good interest rates, and so that in aggregate, these micro-loans were more profitable than loaning to large industrial players.

Quadir proceeded to ask, what if the women could rent a cell phone instead of a cow? Grameen Bank could make a micro-loan to the poor for the purchase a cell phone, which they then could sell/rent minutes to the rest of the village. The enterprising phone-renter would benefit and more importantly, the entire village would benefit from the connectivity. It did not really matter if the minutes were expensive, because when you have no connection, you are willing to pay dearly for it. Quadir started off his GrameenPhone with 5 cell towers, and eventually GrameenPhone erected 5,000 towers.

http://longnow.org/

Hard to say from the OP what the right balance of effort/cost/risk is here. If it's a bunch of folks at a summer camp or family reunion (where everyone's probably going to have their own copies of the archive anyway), then the risk of losing data is low, even if the capsule archive is corrupted. The shotgun approach of multiple cheap formats, as suggested by others, would probably suffice.

On the other hand, long-term, thermodynamically stable storage requires bulk physics -- engraved/punched metal/paper/plastic, acid-free printing, inert gas environments, etc. Expensive and labor-intensive to create and (probably) also to recover. As a recent article described, it's not for the faint of heart or wallet.

"But it was not the very first disk. That one is in space. In 2004 the Rosetta Space Probe was launched by the European Space Agency. This small craft was created to land on a comet in 2014. Before it blasted off, the ESA contacted us because we share names. They asked if we'd like to mount a version of the disk on their probe. Of course we would! We had manufactured a pure nickel disc with a subset of 6,000 pages of language translations, which was mounted on the payload section of the probe.

So assuming the mission continues well, in 2014 the Rosetta Probe will land on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, where it will measure the comet's molecular composition. Then it will remain at rest as the comet orbits the sun for hundreds of millions of years. So somewhere in the solar system, where it is safe but hard to reach, a backup sample of human languages is stored, in case we need one."

- http://blog.longnow.org/2008/08/20/very-long-term-backup/

* The Long Now Foundation uses five digit dates, the extra zero is to solve the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in about 8,000 years.

So yes, it's looking forward to avoid problems based upon our experiences with Y2K. What I want to know is: What about the centamilleniall approximately 98,000 years from now? Should be 001999 and 002008. Talk about short-sighted...

Won't somebody think of the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-[...]-great-grandchildren?

As far as I'm concerned, if the copy is good enough that it can't be told from the original without doing a detailed analysis with fancy equipment, it's just as good as the real thing.

I know this is slashdot, but that's an awfully narrow view of what art is and what it represents. That's like saying the same model watch is just as good as your father's watch when you paid to have the one your father wore.

To use the Long Now Foundation's terminology, ignoring the historical context and provenance of art is "faster/cheaper" thinking.

Regardless, as far as you're concerned, cheating people out of large amounts of money is okay apparently.

Physics fans may be interested to know that, according to http://www.longnow.org/views/essays/articles/ArtFeynman.php (Hillis' Physics Today essay) the only programming language Feynman was really familiar with was BASIC.

Gwyneth Cravens (along with Rip Anderson) gave a talk at the Long Now Foundation series some months ago:

• Summary by Stewart Brand

• Ogg format
• Mp3 format

It was a pretty good talk, I thought, with the information on the storage of nuclear waste in salt formations being some of the more interesting material.

But they lead off with a flat assertion that nothing but nukes will do to supply our energy needs in the absence of "fossil fuels" -- that's a point that needs more support than that. Myself, I believe they're correct, but alt.energy freaks aren't just going to take someone's word for it. This interview is similar, just mentioning "base load" power without explaining much about it. Maybe her book goes into this in more detail, haven't read it yet, myself.

Why don't you enlighten us then, and explain how cell phones and iPods can be used to better educate our kids? What's that? You can't? Didn't think so.

I don't have iPod, I've a tiny cheap Chinese mp3 player with 256 MB of Flash memory on it.

I can load more than a day worth of interesting lectures on it, I can also load the CNN News Update mp3 straight from their RSS. And I actually do, it's great I can go anywhere, with my hands free and enjoy listening to something interesting and educational at the same time.

I pick my own topics, I'd probably not find anything a high-school student learns particularly interesting, even if I was at that age.

Using 3rd party tools you can convert the free lectures on the internet to mp3 or other format compatible with your device. I particularly like to listen to SALT - Seminars about Long Term Thinking. It covers wide range of topics, from technology, ecology, society, business and so on.

I'm the kinda guy who also thinks high-school education is boring the hell out of people, and frequently force feeding them facts they forget in a month or two. It could be so natural, and provoke kids to seek information themselves, if you connect with their world and provide them relevant information they may be interested in.

But if all you see when you look at iPod is "goddamn kids and their rap music", then there's no way you can connect to those kids and help them improve actively, you'll just be the old angry man trying to stubbornly keep Earth still.

• NASA's Deep Space Network - the Voyager spacecraft still function because of this.
• The Granite Mountain Record Vault at Little Cottonwood Canyon, Utah. Maintained by the Church of Latter Day Saints.
• Google's server farms. I believe they got that one correct.
• SETI@HOME - my "grid computing" example
• Linux OS/GNU tools. Got that one partially correct.
• the US's early warning system for detecting nuclear explosions, missile launches, etc.

The Jimmy Wales talk I was refering to is summarized here but to get the Q&A session you'll need to listen to it.

Here's a quotation from the summary:

The secret of Wikipedia's content-generating process, Wales explained, is the nurturing and shaping of trust, instead building everything around distrust. He said that most social software systems are designed around expected problems. "Suppose you ran a restaurant that way. If you serve steak, that means steak knives, which are really dangerous in the wrong hands, so you need to put barriers between the tables."

"If you prevent people from doing bad things, you prevent them from doing good things, and it eliminates opportunities for trust."

The Jimmy Wales talk I was refering to is summarized here but to get the Q&A session you'll need to listen to it.

Here's a quotation from the summary:

The secret of Wikipedia's content-generating process, Wales explained, is the nurturing and shaping of trust, instead building everything around distrust. He said that most social software systems are designed around expected problems. "Suppose you ran a restaurant that way. If you serve steak, that means steak knives, which are really dangerous in the wrong hands, so you need to put barriers between the tables."

"If you prevent people from doing bad things, you prevent them from doing good things, and it eliminates opportunities for trust."

That's why people like the Long Now Foundation are looking at media that could be readable in thousands of years time.

Very, very clever. If I had mod points I'd give them! If Microsoft is really serious about doing this, then they will be doing the very antithesis of what they have been doing since, well, ever. Proprietary file formats anyone? Secret protocols? DRM? All of these things which they've been doing and promoting from the very beginning are precisely the sorts of things that will frustrate future digital archaeologists to no end. Consider the simple fact that we can still read Galileo's technical writings from the 1560's, but not Marvin Minsky's technical writings from the 1960's, thanks to proprietary storage hardware. Stuff is basically written on the wind these days, and Microsoft has done more than any single organization (largely because of their market monopoly) to make information as evanescent as it is now.

MS couldn't be original if their lives depended on it:

http://www.longnow.org/about/

The humor of your comment is not lost. Sadly, there are people who really live with a mentality that doesn't extend beyond their own lifetime. I think people should all be planning for at least 10,000 years beyond their lives if we want to make civilization perfect. Take these people for instance.

As the Morse code-like UNICODE implimentation (again, basically Morse but with slightly longer namespace to account for more characters) has no known key, or target to try and translate it to. Such an encoding is incredibly simple, but makes translation all but impossible without knowing what you're trying to get out of it or having a known target. This applies for any computer-readable language: it's an encoding, and often a very complex one.

Hmmm so the creator of the archives went to great effort to build an archive capable of withstanding a 9.0 earthquake fabricate data storage and encoding that would last thousands of years, but forgot to scribble on the wall...

• A .-
• B -...
• C -.-.
• D -..
• E .

I really like the idea for these disks... the only thing I'd add is to avoid is making the disks pretty so there worthless as jewelry. Forget about some handy reader make the encoding readable by '17th century' microscope

The archivists would be _much_ better off creating, say, nine much cheaper repositories (1) three per continent, each archive having triplicate copes of every volume. (One highly accessible (next to the front door), one moderately accessible (behind a corridor filled with concrete) one very inaccessible (as moderately but say each disk individually sealed inside a massive concrete block so you would have to chip away the whole block to extract a complete set of disks.). Each repository would have the location of two others on different continents, set up in three separate, so if a hypothetical knowledge destroying cult found a repository would have a hard time getting to the others and would only know where a thrid of them were

(1) The main cost in creating these disks is the set up, once that is done you may as well make 30 while your at it or why not 300? forget about hermetically sealing the store just find lots of remote dry caves in geologically stable areas

there is more about this sort of thinking at the The Long Now Foundation I particuarly like the The 10,000 Year Clock

As the Morse code-like UNICODE implimentation (again, basically Morse but with slightly longer namespace to account for more characters) has no known key, or target to try and translate it to. Such an encoding is incredibly simple, but makes translation all but impossible without knowing what you're trying to get out of it or having a known target. This applies for any computer-readable language: it's an encoding, and often a very complex one.

Hmmm so the creator of the archives went to great effort to build an archive capable of withstanding a 9.0 earthquake fabricate data storage and encoding that would last thousands of years, but forgot to scribble on the wall...

• A .-
• B -...
• C -.-.
• D -..
• E .

I really like the idea for these disks... the only thing I'd add is to avoid is making the disks pretty so there worthless as jewelry. Forget about some handy reader make the encoding readable by '17th century' microscope

The archivists would be _much_ better off creating, say, nine much cheaper repositories (1) three per continent, each archive having triplicate copes of every volume. (One highly accessible (next to the front door), one moderately accessible (behind a corridor filled with concrete) one very inaccessible (as moderately but say each disk individually sealed inside a massive concrete block so you would have to chip away the whole block to extract a complete set of disks.). Each repository would have the location of two others on different continents, set up in three separate, so if a hypothetical knowledge destroying cult found a repository would have a hard time getting to the others and would only know where a thrid of them were

(1) The main cost in creating these disks is the set up, once that is done you may as well make 30 while your at it or why not 300? forget about hermetically sealing the store just find lots of remote dry caves in geologically stable areas

there is more about this sort of thinking at the The Long Now Foundation I particuarly like the The 10,000 Year Clock

That was Danny Hillis, who went on to found "Thinking Machines", which spawned WAIS, the first real internet search engine. Now Hillis' big thing is the Clock of the Long Now

You should check this out:
Clay Shirky
Making Digital Durable: What Time Does to Categories
http://www.longnow.org/projects/seminars/
(about half way down the page)

I think Bruce Sterling gave a talk on this subject, it can be found a bit down on this page: Long Now Seminars.

My personal whimsical theo.. hypoth... idea is that alien civilizations turn into (towards us) apathetic singularities, and that's why we will never hear Chenjesu's crystaline humming calling us. Maybe the universe will end in some sort of rather dull uniform black technological singularity goo.

Why do people feel the need to debunk another person's personal beliefs? Especially when it has absolutely no consequence to anyone but that person? If someone's mom or dad is going to have heart surgery where there is a good change they can die, and it comforts them to pray for a good outcome, who gives a shit? I'm not religious, but at the same time I don't get why science always has to have something to prove. It comforts people to pray for their loved ones, and themselves. Why do you give such a shit whether people pray, or believe in Bigfoot, or give money to Miss Cleo?

Go here and scroll down to "View from the end of the world". The long now foundation has some very interesting lectures and this one is on the dangers of religious thought. The two second version is that it is dangerous to have people around who can opt out of logical thinking.

-CGP

Cheers to this guy for surving cancer, but the article states in the footnote that the author is the owner of this business. He also continues to drone on about the employees obligation to his/her employer explains itself if you start from the bottom of the article.

I know it's out of fashion, but this is known as "professionalism". I own my own business, and I feel the same way. Not because I have employees (I don't), but because I want to do a good job. I only take on projects that I want to see succeed after I'm gone. Whether that happens because I take a different project or because I'm pushing up daisies doesn't matter for that.

If you think he's a jackass, I'm sure you think I'm crazy, too. But I think it's part of living in what some call the Long Now. When I die, it's not like they're going to turn out the lights and pack it all up. The world will go on. I try to think of the choices I make in that bigger context.

Christian (and Islamic and Judaeic) dogma inevitably and logically results in fundamentalism and rejection of all secular (ie, rational) thought and belief. To think otherwise is to ignore the very scripture one claims to believe in.

(Long Now has a great talk given by Harris available for free download in Ogg Vorbis or MP3)

I think Google has lots of information, as well as lots of brain to process it. But another thing is, it is wise not to telling the things, but listening. And it looks like a far-looking company. However, I would like that this company started thinking not in 10s of years, but in hundreds. There is not so much where to be hurry. Google, try reading some of the http://www.longnow.org/views/essays/

Are the Gen IV water reactors fast reactors? I see absolutely zero point in putting non-fast reactors online. And I'm very partial to the Integral Fast Reactor. Exemplary safety, far better than anything else made, no PUREX (another kind of safety right there), burns existing waste (fast reactor), exemplary energy use (99% of available energy v. the 2% of the modern once through cycle).... and we had one working for quite a number of years. Till Clinton shut it down. Because it was a 'reprocessing' reactor, what idiots.

Your right though, pebble bed is worthless. I want someone to come up with a history for how these stupid things got proposed and integrated into US policy.

Anyways, Long Now just had a nuclear forum. Good discussion, please join.

What will survive of our world today in 10,000 years time?
Check out the Clock of the Long Now
Also, the Rosetta project
Anyone know of other long term projects, like long term nuclear fuel storage facilities (ie that will survive into future 'barbaric' time periods) or animal/plant genetic preservation libraries?

What about long-term human knowledge preservation projects (i.e. written on 'long-lasting paper'!)? doomsday or not, data CDs are good for a few years at best, and my 10 yr old college text books are ragged (and obsolete).

Err.. huh?

First of all, it's not clear that the Long Now people are planning to use atmospheric pressure variations for their clock. They point out explicitly on their website the drawback of such a system: you need close fitting moving mechanical parts, which means you need someone around with the skills and materials to replace them regularly. See http://www.longnow.org/projects/clock/principles/ for a list of what is currently being considered.

Second, if alpha does change, it's revolutionary and very exciting - but it happens on timescales of billions of years. In 10'000 years, you'd never notice it. Laboratory limits on the variation of alpha are currently something something like 1/alpha * d(alpha)/dt 2e-16 /yr.

If your atomic clock frequency scales as alpha^2/h (as the cesium hyperfine transition does, to lowest order) and you suspect h is the part of alpha that changes, then you're "off" by less than a second after 10'000 years. (I put the word off in quotes because at present we've chosen to define time based on the cesium clock itself, so it you want to be pedantic about it a cesium clock is perfectly accurate and it's the gravitating objects and other clocks that are off.) At the moment, you can't actually build an atomic clock that's good to more than about 1 part in 10^15 on the ground anyway.

There's no mechanical or gravitational system that we can measure to anywhere near that accuracy. If your goal was the best accuracy possible, you'd be well advised to use an atomic clock, even if you intend to keep it running forever.

The reason Long Now isn't building an atomic clock is that you need someone around who is able and willing to maintain it in order to keep it running. They aren't the sort of thing you can stick in a mountain and expect to come back and find it still going after a few centuries of neglect. Even if you were confident that there would be a group of people with enough technical knowhow around to maintain the thing forever and some way to pay for their keep, you'd still have to create a huge stockpile of spare parts. The thing becomes a prime target for either looting or abandonment.

The Long Now project aims to build a clock that can be forgotten for a century and then repaired by someone with hand tools. That's why they clock is mechanical and corrects itself with a sundial.

You can get DWG or PDF drawings of the original prototype - the one in London - at Long Now's shop page, http://longnow.org/shop/free-downloads/

...
There's a problem, though: each year, the equation of time changes slightly. So, in order to keep accurate clock time for 10,000 years, you need 10,000 of these discs, each representing the distinct equation of time for each year. The Long Now foundation solves this problem by making an "Equation of Time Cam" - a continous stack of these cylinders. In my mind it is a thing of beauty - engineering at its best - well thought out and so simple. Here's a picture of the cam - it's the cylinder that looks like it melted a bit:

http://www.longnow.org/projects/clock/prototype1/i mages/general-EqOfTimeDtl1_00Lo.jpg [longnow.org]

Aha, I see, each year it uses a different 'slice' of the cylinder. Well, as you say, it's not quite a cylinder. It actually looks like the stomach-and-hips area of a human female. I'm not projecting, am I?

Perhaps future humans will see it and think "Oh, that's the shape of the most desirable female at the time this thing was built."

I'm not usually one to complain about the age of articles on Slashdot, but I first read about the Long Now project in a Wired cover story published in 1998. Perhaps the article submitter didn't know about it until now, but this is far from a new project.

I think if Slashdot can cover Linus's every burst of indigestion and Microsoft's every scary move, it seems reasonable to check in on the Clock of the Long Now every decade or so. Especially since there is actual news: Discover just put the clock on the cover because the Long Now just completed the display of the solar system.