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.'"

Comments

Outta time

[WiseOwl2001]

How will we know it is keeping accurate time if nothing else is as accurate to check it against?

Re:Outta time

[TummyX]

Yeah, either that or you're in the southern hemisphere.

Re:Outta time

[Just Some Guy]

On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!], "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

-- Charles Babbage

Re:Too Complex

[Itchy Rich]

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.

You've just scratched the surface

[ianscot]

It isn't necessarily a feature list you're really pining for. If the current makers of alarm clocks added the stuff you want, they'd do so with 12 extra incomprehensible little plastic buttons, all of which would be tucked in back of the clock and all of which would look and feel the same. The volume control would be a wheel exactly like the tuning control on the radio, with one on the left side and one on the right, and you'd always have to re-learn which was which.

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...)

Re:Star field accurate? Why no modern tech.?

[maxwell demon]

Why doesnt the clock have an LCD display?

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.

It seems like they used lame tech. Sure they demonstrate some knowledge of analog mechanical computing ability .. but this ability has been around since the forties .. before the space age.

The point is not a technology demonstration. The point is to alter the thinking of the people about long time spans.

We want humans of the future to know that we understood that the stars themselves are moving (ie, certain stars would no longer have the same relative positions in the sky ..example: Barnard's star is moving at 10.3 arcseconds per year against the background. We want to show we have that knowledge ..

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 ...

Heck even include a copy of Wikipedia on HD DVD in a simplified binary format without any complicated enoding scheme.

I bet that in 10000 years any HD-DVD produced today will be completely unreadable.