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A Clock That Runs for 10,000 Years
Justin Blanton writes "Discover magazine is running an article about a clock designed to run accurately for 10,000 years. It's essentially a "future-proof" clock that blurs the line between art and functionality through advanced engineering. From the article: 'Everything about this clock is deeply unusual. For example, while nearly every mechanical clock made in the last millennium consists of a series of propelled gears, this one uses a stack of mechanical binary computers capable of singling out one moment in 3.65 million days. Like other clocks, this one can track seconds, hours, days, and years. Unlike any other clock, this one is being constructed to keep track of leap centuries, the orbits of the six innermost planets in our solar system, even the ultraslow wobbles of Earth's axis.'"
How will we know it is keeping accurate time if nothing else is as accurate to check it against?
I suppose this is a moot point, but there's always the human factor. Different countries' changing stances on daylight savings time, scientists deciding to eliminate a second here or there to gain a minute here or there, etc.
Which lasts 10,000 years.
A server which last 10,000 Milliseconds .
A story about an atomic clock being 9 years out of date has a certain poetry to it .
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
The thing that most impresses me about this clock is that it will run by itself with no required interaction for 10,000 years. It requires no external power, no attention at all. It is self-winding (he mentions barometric pressure change as a power source). As far as accuracy goes, it synchronizes to the sun when sunlight through a peep-hole heats a bimetal strip. That should re-sync the time every sunny day, so it should be accurate until it quits working. Imagine a future, several thousand years from now... maybe there's been another "dark ages" and people are just rediscovering bits of technology. Some explorer notices this cave in the side of this mountain, climbs up there, and discovers this massive clock. That's what this guy is after. He's trying to create something on the scale of a "wonder of the world" that will exist (and continue running) for millenia and cause future generations to marvel at the technology that these ancient people had.
Sure, an atomic clock is more accurate, and more useful, but it requires electricity, and I'm sure some attention to keep things running smoothly.
Although, I wonder if this mechanical clock will need to be lubricated every now and again... 5000 years from now there'll probably be some wierd religion where the priest pours holy oil over the sacred time keeper, or some such...
For every variable you introduce, the liklihood of defects rises fivefold.
For every generalised statistic you quote, the likelihood of talking accurately about any specific application decreases fivefold.
These people seem to have put so much effort into thinking through possible variables that could effect this clock, from the value of the materials to the transparency of the operation, that I'd be very surprised if they didn't stop to consider one of the two most fundamental aspects: reliability.
What's needed is some thoughtful design.
Alarm clocks are a prime example of a product in which the inmates are running the asylum. Each new half-baked feature clock makers add gets appended in the clunkiest possible way. These things aren't designed around the user, they're made according to the specs of the parts.
The gold standard for our new design will be: I must be able to operate the clock's basic features when I wake up in the morning, blurry-headed and without my contacts in. This basic problem -- that they're used by sleepy people -- seems to have escaped current makers of alarm clocks.
None of this has anything to do with "long time" though, not any more than with atomic clocks. (One of the obvious, obvious features of a decent alarm clock being that it'll synch with the atomic clocks and get back on track after a power outage or whatever...)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Do you really think an LCD display will last 10000 years? BTW, it would go against the project goals (which is not to impress future visitors). As the article states, the clock shall be understandable without taking it apart.
The point is not a technology demonstration. The point is to alter the thinking of the people about long time spans.
Again, the project isn't about teaching future people about our knowledge, it's about teaching current people to think long term. However, I could imagine that the star movement would be a great tool for that. Assuming those 10.3 arcseconds per year will not change in the future (and neither the direction), in 10000 years it will have moved about 28.6 degrees. This is indeed a quite visible difference. Of course, if the clock should track the movements of the stars as well, its price might grow from exorbitant to unaffordable
I bet that in 10000 years any HD-DVD produced today will be completely unreadable.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The Idea behind the The Long Now Foundation is to think about the future, not in the terms of tomorrow or next week or even next year, but int the terms of next century and next millenium and so on. They want us to have a far reaching view of the future so as to understand our actions have consequences beyond our generation.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
I've been a member of Bruce Sterling's Viridian Movement since before it started, which featured the Long Now's "Long Clock" project when it kicked off. I've even been to international design conferences where Sterling and Long Now people have presented, talking about the Clock. But they've obviously learned nothing from their own intriguing proposition.
How can they possibly be sure that anything they make will be readable as a "clock" 10,000 years from now? That's the biggest problem: if humans even remain on Earth after 3x our current civilization's lifetime has passed, how will they read the clocks? The Egyptian Pyramids are increasingly clearly "clocks", like Stonehenge, for telling "what time it is" in the sky, among the constellations. That revelation only appeared to one guy, about 10 years ago, and is still known only to a few interested people. We still don't know how to tell when the "alarm" goes off, beyond some basics (which could be wrong). Even Stonehenge, recognized as a clock for longer and by more people, isn't really readable. And those clocks are only maybe 5-7,000 years old, mostly millennia where humans didn't change nearly as much as we have in the past millennium, or (likely) as much as we'll change in the next century or so.
We've already built "long now" clocks, that haven't quite worked. They probably did achieve the same goals of the Long Now Foundation: giving society a way to learn to think about long periods of time with the same immediacy and importance as we think about the present moment. We should learn from the long experience in that project by solving the fundamental problem: communicating with our descendents 10,000 years from now. We can probably rely, like our ancestors, on celestial mechanics remaining readable by humans in such an (astronomically) brief time. A real Long Now Clock would merely promote human synchronization with those movements. Maybe a new stone megalith that points at decade/century/millennium markers in the sky. No moving parts, just pictures of humans reading the skies (showing the actual celestial mechanics and how the person decodes them).
Baby Boomers, like the Long Now Foundation people, always think they're the first to invent or do anything, especially if it's fun. And they're great at reinventing the mistakes of history as they ignore it. They do get people motivated to do something as if it were new and exciting, though. So the best thing that this new toy clock they're building could do would be to perish, and pronto. Then we'd get a "second chance" (puns intended) to use the clocks we've already got, and change ourselves to use them. That change would also make us better people, with a longer view of "now", the future, and our place in it.
--
make install -not war
Thus is exemplified the process of thinking too narrowly. The clock is not about showing us off to tomorrow, but about connecting us with them. It's a work of engineering genius, not a time capsule.