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?
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
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
Remember, we're talking about 10,000 year timescales. A nine year old story is practically lightning fast!
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.
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.
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.
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)
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!