Slashdot Mirror
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.
....
;-)
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.
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.