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A Home-Made Power Supply that Lasts 1000 Years?
x_man asks: "This may sound a little strange but I've accumulated a lot of cool stuff throughout my life. Add to that my parent's stuff, my wife's stuff, and all of the other cool stuff I plan to accumulate before I die, and you have a lot of stuff. The problem is what to do with all of this stuff when I die. My descendants will want a few bits, but I can't bear the thought of my 1000+ collection of sci-fi books being scattered to the Goodwill winds. Therefore, I've decided to entomb my stuff. It will all go into an airtight stainless steel shipping container and be buried on a family plot for a 1000 years or so. I will have the ultimate geek time capsule, but there is one problem. Let's say you want to broadcast some sort of locator beacon in a 1000 years. How do you construct a reliable power supply that will last at least 1000 years or more? There's also the question of how to signal future generations. I'm thinking some sort of VLF for ground penetration."
This way, you don't have to design a power supply which is capable of lasting 1000 years AND giving a reasonably big power output.
Nuclear.
like in the space probes and spy satellites. Coupled to a thermoelectric couple, you can get 500 W of power on a quite long time with no moving parts. Voyager and Pioneer have been using this in deep space for more than 20 years, it should work if the half life of the material is well chosen (Pu, U-235 or C-60). Not easy to find however of you don't have Libyan terrorists among your friends like in Back to the Future...
Google passes Turing test : see my journal
The kind the pink bunny uses that "keep going and going and going." ...
....
;-)
I did something like this once....
put it on a geared mechanism, and then hang it high in your container. get a bio-degradable material, or some other perishable material that takes about 1000 years to degrade.
Use the degrade material to suspend the weight.
After 1000 years the material fails, releasing the weight. The gearing mechanism is used, like the mechanism on a grandfather clock that powers the pendulum, to "tick" every 10 seconds. At each 10 second interval a large ball-bearing will be dropped on to the now-defunct cymbal from your 80's drum set.
This audio signal will be far more likely discovered than a RF type signal.
Your only limits are how heavy the weight can be, how many ball-bearings you can trap at the top of your container, and how deep you bury it.
YMMV
gus
.. if only.
Instead of keeping all your stuff, you could just post it on you local Freecycle mailing list, and give it away to somebody who can use it.
Get one of those dirty bombs people have been talking about and set its timer for a good 300 years. Shouldn't be too hard to set a time up for that and it doesn't even have to be too accurate, just make sure it ignites when the power is lost. People will take notice of your radiation and be very interested to see what you have once it becomes safe to explore. Gotta be carefull and pick a place that people would actually notice, who knows what the population will be in 1000 years, maybe 1/100 of todays, figure a busy seaport, those should always have some traffic. That or what one of those 7 wonders, probably a non man made one in case someone gets political and tears a few down to make a point.
.. how do you make one yourself?
.. yeah, wake me up for that one.
"MAKE Magazine: the Radio-Isotopic Generator Issue"
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Which, of course you are not, this being April 1st.
I'd build a battery similar to the ones used to power the electronics of missiles. You have the electrolyte separated from the dry electrodes by a thin metal diaphram. Use a small explosive charge to rupture the diaphram and flow the electolyte onto the electrodes. A huge amount of immediate power and almost infinite shelf-life.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
http://www.longnow.org/
What are you putting in the capsule that you think should really be interesting in 1000 years? PS2 games with a TV and such? Spare them, please.
/. many times)
Think about the degradation of plastics, oxidation of the materials, and outside interference from shock, moisture on the container, and other items. Why try to make junk from today work forever?
It may be more interesting to put something personalized and written from you describing your life, rather than trying to bottle it. Your apparatus of the container is a good judgement of the technology available at the time. Also, you get to solve the "how should i communicate and store it" question (been done on
Then, the geek portion of you can still solve the issues of
- how to safely hold the contents
- when to wake up (never?)
- how to wake up
- how to detect premature tampering
- how to perform a self-diagnostic to let finders know if they're seeing your intended payload
- how to signal once awake
All these have great metaphors in CompSci/Networking references. I'd start there.
The battery is a chemistry problem, driven by how much power you'll need. If you act like a RF beacon and signal 1kW once every 24 hours, you can decide how much power you'll need. A pulsed beacon will definitely singal longer than most. RF will be more detectable than other sources (especially if underground), and best if you sweep a wide freq. on each pulse.
Also, work out the location: Are you buying land in a relatively quiet place on the earth? Not on a geologic fault, floodplain, mild temperature ranges, development area, etc. You could probably only extrapolate about 300years into the future with any chance of a lucky guess, IMHO.
And really, you could just toss it into a FreshKills, NY (a trash dump). Your signal will lead our descendants to a treasure trove of items.
Please, let us know the date and place of your entombment. A group of us will show up the following day, dig up your stainless steel time capsule, cast your precious 'stuff' to the 4 winds and various charities (of our choosing), all the while merrily chanting "You thought you could take it with you! HA HA. April Fool!"
I'm not quite sure why you'd want to entomb all of your stuff with you. Do you really think you'll need all of that baggage in the afterlife, a la the Pharaohs of old? Or would you even care once you are in the ground for eternity? I think not. I imagine it boils down to the questin of whether you believe in an afterlife, and if so, would you be granted an existence in which you'd need all of your stuff? (The existence of an afterlife which necessitates a PSP seems rather dreary to me).
I think it may be more effective to give all of your "stuff" to your descendents using some sort of protected legal intitution like a persistent "foundation" or "library" that may change hands over the years but will remain accessible by those that come after you.
Incidentally, why would you want to bury it under the ground? In 1000 years, the state of life on Earth may be such that you could put it anywhere and people might find it once you start broadcasting a signal. Why not just toss it into the ocean? Or launch it into space?
For the "toss it in the sea" option, I recommend somewhere close to a (contemporary) major shipping lane far from known volcanic activity or subduction zones. That way, it's less likely to be destroyed or covered by lava, and future archaeologists or "treasure hunters" will be more like to find it. You never know if people 100s of years from now will start digging up the ground for more development space.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, simulate.
Who knows how to decode a 1000 year old radio signal?
USE A COVER STONE.
-Peter
The radio issue is what will kill you. In a thousand years, our descendents will communicate with mind waves. Take two largish chunks of plutonium and separate them with a membrane that will last 1000 years. Once the membrane fails, the resulting explosion should be hard to miss.
SD
âoeWho knew something as harmless as willful ignorance could end up having real consequences?â
Google for "Duluc Dry Pile".
Also google for "Oxford Electric Bell". This particular type of battery has been ringing a bell (albeit inaudibly) in the foyer of a lab in Oxford for over 160 years.
The gist of it is that you get small circles of zinc foil, silver foil, and paper. Then you stack 'em up (silver, zinc, paper, repeat). Next you stick the whole thing in a glass tube and compress it. You want several thousand of them, basically. Once you're done, coat the whole thing in plastic to prevent oxidation from eating it away.
What you end up with is a battery that will power something reasonably small for a long, long, long time. Certainly could power a simplistic clock for a thousand years. Once your clock goes off, you make some sort of signal. Audio perhaps, since that's probably more reliable than radio would be over that time period.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Timmy: [Reads] "I am _ _eek, and this is __ __me capsu__"...
Mom: What do you have there, little Timmy?
Timmy: I don't know, mommy. What does this mean?
Mom: He was Eek, and this is Me Capsu. Oh my goodness, little Timmy...you've found the remains of an ancient king, Eek, and his wife, Me Capsu!
"Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world." -Archimedes
just like those watches that never need winding
Just put in a few things from each catagory (games,music,books...). Give the rest to some one/organization were they can by used right now. Also, why not set the signal to start after a shorter time (like 100 yrs) and leave a message asking the finder to replace/reset the beacon, and to add some important things from their time and "redeploy" the capsule.
- Shrödinger's Cat is Dead, Or is it?
If it's a sci-fi library worth a flip, it has to contain Heinlein. Read Time Enough for Love. The solution is there.