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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.'"
It only lasted 2000 years.
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Jesus.
*sets alarm to wake himself up in 10,000 years*
which is totally what she said
Great, So when humans are all dead and long gone, Aliens will land on Earth and know to the trillionth of the second what time it is on Earth.
How will we know it is keeping accurate time if nothing else is as accurate to check it against?
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
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.
We've known about this since when? Oh yeah, since 1996. Yawn...
This is just a bunch of marketing fru-fru. The last 10,000-year clock I bought only lasted 6,738 years (give or take a month). Even if you take into account my time travel, I still should have gotten a good 8,500 years out of it, at least.
The real question is support. Will the manufacturer still be around in 3,000 years when you need to replace the little rubber feet? Are vendors and repair centers going to stock replacement parts? How much does an extended warranty cost?
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
The clock looks like ThinkGeek could sell quite a lot of them, it may be a little on the expensive side. A lot of high-tech mechanic combined with a polished look so that any other clock looks childish.
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The article is rather slow to get already so use mirrodot instead: http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/608e5b4931282247
No, it was most probably for monitoring the decay of disposable nappies in landfill sites.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
For every variable you introduce, the liklihood of defects rises fivefold.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
The natives of Cairo stripped the pure white polished casing stones from the great pyramid to build a large number of building in their city. Nothing against the need for public housing, but it is a shame. There are plenty of other examples as well.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Actually, the current NIST atomic clock is accurate to 1 second in 60 million years, which somewhat trumps the one in the article. There's nothing this one can do that the atomic clock and a good computer couldn't do a lot better. What's special is that it manages to do all this mechanically, and with a degree of accuracy beyond most mechanical clocks.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Anyone remember how "some" people get/got all worked up about the Mayan Calendar? How it "ends" at, oh I don't remember exactly, but it was supposed to end sometime around 2005 or 2006 I believe...
So...
Who's to say that the Mayan Calendar creators simply didn't do the SAME thing these people did? That is to make a Clock/Calendar which is accurate for 'n' number of years into the future.
There is NOTHING cosmic, or "End-of-the-world-doom-and-gloom" about the Mayan calendar either... It was probably something as simple as some Mayan's decided to make their Calendar last for a LONG DAMN TIME!!!
It is probably just THAT Simple!
Just a thought.
I am surprised by the questions/comments regarding practicality. Whatever happened to doing something neat simply because "you could"?
...both interiorlly, and exteriorlly.
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
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.
.. and when it suffers a power loss it will flash
12:00:00.0000
I'd like
Clock radios haven't changed at all since I first got one when I was about 5! Someone out there must be able to package up a glorified palm pilot with some big buttons and red led's and make a killing. These days you could put 802.11 in it and get weather/traffic reports on a led ticker
Yes, we could spend all day talking about the technicalities of the clock, the politicization of human calendars, and what the odds are of the thing not getting blown up by someone who thinks that only Allah Knows What Time It Is, etc... but the whole point of the project is cultural/philoshopical. It (as the finished project is conceived) is a conversation piece designed to make observers actually think past what they're going to have for lunch, and whether or not Battlestar Galactica is a re-run or not tonight.
By checking the clock to see what time it is, in the context of a 10,000-year swath of time (still a geological/evolutionary blink of an eye), one is at least encouraged to keep that larger context in mind. It's intended to dimish the long-term weight of petty squabbles, perhaps remind people that 10,000 years back we were in an ice age, that sort of thing. Might even make you think about your 401k contribution (or forget about it!).
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
500 years ago amirica was discoved (from the spanjard view), look what is acutally left of those ships.
2000 years ago the roman empire ended. Most what left of is are some ruins and some idea's
5000 years the piramids were build, look what is left of that. They are eroded. We have a vague clue of their purpose. (storing mummmies, but mummies were never found in it?)
10000 years ago? Star-gate might be right about it, maybe man did not exist in it's current form.
You might enineer it well enough to measure a wobble of the earth, but to actually package it so it can survive 10.000 years and still have a meaning is not only an engineering feat, it must be an antropology feat as well, to make people long after this understand what it is and leave it in pieces.
My employer will probably implement this as a timeclock...
I don't know the price but since their wristwatches start at around USD$8,000 and go up to over $200k, I suspect you could buy a very nice car for the price. Patek make rolex look like cheap crap (which is mostly true).
The references in other comments to atomic clocks miss the point entirely. Atomic clocks are about precision and accuracy. This clock is concerned with accuracy, but only at long scales. A mechanism to re-set to local noon, as described in the article, is plenty to catch the daily drift and would probably compensate for running fast/slow for many days if the sky were cloudy. For the kind of astronomical time this clock is concerned with, being a few seconds behind or ahead is irrelevant.
Lunchtime doubly so
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
These guys are geniuses, the kind you see in movies. Danny Hillis himself thought up the idea of parallel processing for his doctaral thesis while he was a grad student. They don't specialize in any fields, they apply their creativity to R&Ds in almost any field, be it medical, defence or engineering.
They are the ones who created that voicebox which replies incomprehensible snippets of your voice to prevent eavesdropping, a human-size Dino robot walking around Hong Kong Disneyland that can mingle with the tourist without any danger because it is able to shift its weight such that if its foot encounters an eggshell, it can back off without breaking it. (that's in the middle of a step) and the company also created a tabletop display that can show a 3D view of any location on earth by using thousands of pins to replicate the actual reliefs.
The timekeeping mechanism is self winding, but the display requires winding. The idea is that it will keep time regardless, but someone (or something) is required to read it, so "reward" them for being there by updating the display.
This clock is designed to be more of a monument than a useful timepiece - something that will help people understand their short time on earth, versus a science instrument.
However the engineering effort to make this clock as accurate and as long-lasting as promised is truly impressive. Few things built today are designed to last that long (exception: perhaps long-term nuclear waste storage?) The materials : stone, steel, tungsten - and the size of the parts, and the mechanics of the thing that allows for 10,000 years of wear, along with easy maintenance - man, these are not things that even your top-notch mechanical engineer does.
Interestingly enough, this guy is working on a long term clock, while others can't even get little clocks to work right. Some public clocks can be grossly imprecise. It's funny how someone running a time service can't get their own time right. Hopefully the telcos will hook up their time services to this clock - or NTP services. Whichever is easier.
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...
As an MIT undergrad in 1975, Hillis and his friends built a binary computer out of 10,000 Tinkertoy pieces. It could beat all comers at tic-tac-toe.
Damn, think it could win a thermo-nuclear war against itself?
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I read the article before it was slashdotted. He intends to build the final version of this clock in a limestone cave, half-way up the side of a 10,000 foot cliff. The entrance will look natural enough, especially after several thousand years, but as you go deeper into the cave, you begin to see the workings of the clock. First, the slowest moving things like the zodiac, then years, months, etc, getting to faster moving pieces as you go deeper into the cave. All the way back, you finally get to where the heart of the clock is ticking. This guy is definitely trying to create a "wonder of the world" and it's not hard to imagine an "Indiana Jones" type of event where some future archaeologist rediscovers this thing. The fact that the display freezes until someone else winds it (he mentioned stepping on a plate to wind the display), is genious. Imagine you're this explorer, sweeping away cobwebs to get a closer look at the machine. The display reads sometime in the 23rd century. As you step closer, you step on a plate in the floor that sinks under your weight. The display begins to move and when things settle down, the current date, maybe in the 57th century, is displayed.
Its actually not possible to "always" win at tic tac toe if the second player always plays perfectly.
If player one and player two are both perfect players the game will always be a tie.
I know this is true as my major was AI and my final project was investigating reinforcement learning where I designed agents to learn how to play tic tac toe and connect 4.
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 real question is support. Will the manufacturer still be around in 3,000 years when you need to replace the little rubber feet? Are vendors and repair centers going to stock replacement parts? How much does an extended warranty cost?
This is so ontopic! This is the one overshadowing design criterion. It should be possible to repair with whatever technology is available in 10000 years. And you can't rely on manuals, since you don't even know what languages there will be 10000 years down the road.
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.
Local noon is an easy time to measure. When the sun is due south, it's local noon. Due south is halfway between local sunrise and local sunset. If the clock were to drift, it would be saying something like "it's two oclock" whereas the sun would be telling you it was local noon so you'd know the clock was wrong. The clock is designed to reset itself based on the position of the sun using a bimetallic strip so unless it breaks completely, it should keep time.
The bigger problem to my eyes is they're planning on tucking it hell and gone inside a mountain so no one will steal or vandalize it. For a monument that is intended as a statement of hope for the future, that strikes me as counter productive. "Umm, we built this thing for you kids whom we've never met but we figure you're not trustworthy enough to let you know where it is."
The architects in the middle ages trusted their offspring to finish and maintain the cathedrals that the architects laid the foundations for. Seems that turned out ok - most of the cathedrals are still here and don't show signs of being stolen or vandalized. Even the Germans had the good sense to leave Paris alone during both wars and they're the original Vandals.
Put it in the desert to keep it free from humidity but don't go and hide the damn thing. Kind of defeats the idea.
This article is amazing. It really moved me. The concepts and level that the people involved in this are thinking on really makes a person stop to consider how thoughtless we are today to our culture and the impact that we have on not only ourselves and the rest of the world in the here and now, but how such an idea can be a profound testiment to the achievements of the human race for generations long after we're gone.
I see so many jokes, rants, and condemnations from people responding to this here on Slashdot, and it becomes immediately clear that these people have not read the article, and if they have, are completely shallow and selfish people.
There is so much meaning and thought that has gone into this that it's unspeakable to even consider anything but full support for this project. I want my place in time to have a reflection to civilizations thousands of years from now. The human race in the past no doubt realized the significance of speaking to future generations... why are we so thoughtless?
A community-oriented lyrics site
And then the boulder starts rolling, arrows, pygmies, etc. Lets put a video camera in there, Lucas will foot the bill.
That John Titor will need for time travel. :)
It's called "the sun."
I think it's got another 5 billion or so years left on it, too.
What?
Readers of Wired Magazine (both of them!) have known about this since 1995. Go to this page and scroll down to "The Millennium Clock/An essay by Danny Hillis from 01995" They were already Y10K compliant ten years ago!
http://www.longnow.org/projects/clock/
Tag lost or not installed.
I stumbled across this project 5 years ago & was immediately in love. The scope of the project is amazing, the engineering that went into some of the pieces is incredible, and the final product (the first prototype) was gorgeous. I read everything I could about it & even had it as my wallpaper for a while. If you like mechanical devices, take some time to look at this project - it's well worth it!
i mages/general-EqOfTimeDtl1_00Lo.jpg
Currently, you can find the project's web page at http://www.longnow.org/projects/clock/
The mechanical computer, the solar synchronizer, and the power mechanism are all very cool pieces of engineering. However, the most fascinating part of the entire clock is the "Equation of Time Cam". A bit more information about the cam follows.
The proposed clock not only keeps accurate solar time (it resets itself every day at noon via the solar synchronizer), it also keeps accurate "clock time". How it does this is pretty amazing:
In general, when the sun reaches its highest point ("solar noon"), you can look at your watch & find that it's not really noon. On any given day, the variation between "solar noon" & "clock noon" is +/- 15 minutes. Of course, this variation chanages through out the year, following a well defined curve known as the "equation of time" (http://www.sundials.co.uk/equation.htm) (it looks like a 5th order polynomial equation).
So, when the mechanical clock resets itself at "solar noon", it's needs to account for this variation to determine "clock noon". One way to do this is to make a disc that is not perfectly round; it has a wider diameter at portions & a narrower diameter at other parts (something like a cross between a circle & an ameoba). This "disc" makes one revolution per year, and the variations in its diameter represent the difference between "solar noon" & "clock noon". So, at "solar noon", the clock resets itself & uses a feeler gauge on the disc to figure out how much variation to add or subtract to display "clock noon". So, assuming you have a sunny day every once & a while, you have a clock that will always have accurate clock time. Ingenious!
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/
The Long Now's explanation can be found here (complete with Cad drawings!):
http://emsh.calarts.edu/~mathart/Clock_Cam.html
I hope everyone enjoys this project as much as I have - Have fun!
The last part of that sentence indeed summarizes the chief obstacle to longevity of any monument.
Incidentally, this is not the first time that such a time-scale has been deliberately studied. A while ago the U.S. Dept. of Energy actually commissioned a study into the problem of marking a long-term nuclear waste repository (WIPP in New Mexico, Yucca Mountain if it ever opens) so as to prevent unintentional intrusion and possible spread of contamination.
Physicist and SF author Gregory Benford was on the team, and his account appears as the first chapter of his book, Deep Time. The book is, it seems, out of print, but still available on Amazon. There is a slightly garbled copy of that chapter online, minus the cool illustrations of several marker concepts. Some illustrations appear in the excerpted report of the WIPP Marker Panel. Fascinating and slightly unsettling stuff.
small micro-accumulation will occur in the darndest of places. if a chamber is sealed, bugs and critters are sure to get n there, and if some mice bring in a bunch of twigs and gum up the works -- and you have insects with a few centuries of grit in the device -- does it run as smoothly? the crawlspace under my house has loads of activity from little scurrying creatures -- anything that relies on exact tolerances for anything is sure to be gummed up -- its only a mattter of time.
Maybe the machine is too complex, too expensive, too ponderous and big and pointless-- but it's such a beautifully human little thing to build that I can't help but love it. Not only that, but it's human in a way that is perhaps unique to modern times. The retrospection-- the self consciousness of a people that have discovered they are a part of *history*-- that's what I appreciate in this machine.
Have you ever wondered why we don't find time capsules from two thousand years ago with messages for the future? It, apparently, simply didn't occur to anyone that they might be able to, by leaving a durable message, communicate in a one sided way with the future. That the human race now can think "I wonder what people will think of us when we're gone... we'd better let them know what kind of folks we are so they don't get the wrong impression", is a very hopeful sign. It indicates to me an elevation of consciousness-- the kind of consideration for the future that might make it so we don't *need* to build devices explaining our society to a hypothetical post-apocalyptic people.
Maybe we can make this whole civilization thing sustainable after all. The big concern is, are there enough people like this?
Oh, I'm sorry... Slashdot, right. "Yes, but does it store phone numbers?
IIRC it was a small blurb in Scientific American a few years back (perhaps even pre-Y2K) where I first read of the LongNow Clock, and it got me interested in other long-term projects and ideas as well (which there aren't many).
There's a HUGE time capsule at Oglethorpe University called "The Crypt of Civilization". Most time capsules you may have read about are small things about the size of a shoebox meant to be opened 50 to 100 years after they are sealed. The "Crypt" was a (indoor, apparently) swimming pool (emptied of water, of course) loaded up with many artifacts and sealed in 1930, and scheduled to be opened in about 6,000 years.
Oglethorpe is also the home of The International Time Capsule Society. Notable pages on the website are Tips on Building a Time Capsule and The Nine Most Wanted Time Capsules.
As I discussed on the forum at that site, it would be interesting to couple one or more time capsules to such a clock, to have each capsule be opened at a pre-programmed time.
Disclaimer: I have no connection to Oglethorpe, just a fan of the site, and the "most prolific" contributor to the site's time capsule forum (three of the six posts).
The clock is certainly a "Next-Generation" design, bring the very first Y10K-compliant device.
Tag lost or not installed.
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.
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make install -not war
They probably won't use titanium. One of the requirements is that the clock not be made of anything valuable enough to make it worth tearing up the clock.
Actually the mechanism is based on a binary 28bit set of discs. So even if its gummed up a bit, it'll be a zero or a one. The magazine discussed this. I wonder if mice even live at the site they picked out.
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.
This project assumes we'll be more advanced in 10,000 years. It's possible a tribe could stumble across it and start worshiping it. Or maybe they'll think that the clock is what's running the earth. I'm not sure they can really anticipate what effect this will have, if any at all. Kind of a useless and vain thing to do, imho.