Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
*sets alarm to wake himself up in 10,000 years*
which is totally what she said
How will we know it is keeping accurate time if nothing else is as accurate to check it against?
If this one fails in 2000 years as well, where do I get my warranty refund?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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
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.
Will we leave a detailed description of Daylight Savings TIme? Goodness knows it confuses enough Earthlings.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
Dear Customer,
It has come to our attention that your Clock of the Long Now (TM) was exposed to a liquid spill 500 years ago. Although it may not have caused the failure, AwesomeClock, Inc. does not cover the repair or exchange of a machine resulting from misuse, accident, modification, unsuitable physical or operating environment, improper maintenance by you, or failure caused by a product for which AwesomeClock is not responsible. The warranty is therefore voided.
However, you can buy a new mechanical system board for 895 KiloDollars, and your warranty will be extended for 90 days. If you wish to dispute this finding, we can email you pictures that will never actually reach your inbox. Thank you for choosing AwesomeClock, Inc.
AwesomeClock Warranty Claims Dept.
OpenSource.MathCancer.org: open source comp bio
The anthropologic aspect of this project is going to be the most difficult, simply because society is a factor. The rise and fall of civilizations happens much more often than the rise and fall of material objects. We can still recover bronze-age artifacts (circa 5000 years old), and even some from the stone age (anywhere from 8,000 to 30,000 years old), but we have very little information on what the societies were like. Most of what we have is just a guess.
The good news is that those same design principles that make it physically longstanding address these problems from a sociologic / anthropologic POV also.
Maintainability - The clock should be maintainable with bronze-age technology
Maintainability and transparency:
(emphasis added)
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
You are wrong. Most cathedrals are no longer there. Most cathedrals collapsed within two centuries after being built, and many others will collapse within 50 years because of car traffic.
You are also wrong about the Germans. A number of old inner cities and over 200 medieval castles in my country (the Netherlands) were destroyed beyond repair by the Germans in the 4 days we fought them. Paris was saved because it wasn't fought over. Still the Germans are not more destructive than our other neighbours. Overall they are our most peaceful neighbours.
The town I live in now was for instance razed and flooded by the sea in 1350 in a civil war, and razed again in 1572 by a Spanish army, who also murdered the entire population. It was rebuilt in 1574 with strong city walls and shelled again in the same year by the Spanish. It was shelled by the French in 1672, and by our own army liberating it in 1673. Last time it was shelled was again by our own side in 1814, after Napoleon lost the battle of Leipzig, and the French garrison refused to surrender to Dutch militia claiming the town.
The town I grew up in was destroyed by the English fleet in 1809. The inner city was largely destroyed again in 1940 and in 1945, when the Allies also flooded it by bombing the dikes. Sources also recount that the town was razed to the ground twice in the middle ages by the Flemish because of our excessive river tolls.
It is really just a fluke that some buildings survived over the centuries, and generally speaking it is the best buildings that survive.