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Work Progresses On 10,000 Year Clock
KindMind writes "CNet has pictures of a planned 10,000 year clock to be built in eastern Nevada by the Long Now Foundation. From the article: 'Running under its own power, the clock is an experiment in art, science, and engineering. The six dials on the face of this machine will represent the year, century, horizons, sun position, lunar phase, and the stars of the night sky over a 10,000-year period. Likely to span multiple generations and evolutions in culture, the thinking and design put into the monument makes it a moving sculpture as beautiful as it is complex.' This was reviewed on Slashdot in 2005. Really cool pictures, including one of a mechanical 'binary computer' that converts the pendulum into positions on the dial."
As opposed to a non-binary computer?
Yes
Oh no... it's the future.
Neal Stephenson's novel Anathem was inspired by the work and philosophy of the Long Now Foundation.
In brief: The narrator and many of the characters are members of a scholarly order which separates itself from the distractions of the outside world. Their monk-like existence is bound by many rules and rituals. Many of these center around the "winding" and tending of an immense clock.
Not a book for everyone, but I found it entertaining and intriguing.
This mechanical clock was completed 54 years ago. It has a 25,753 year cycle.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jens_Olsen's_World_Clock
(And it had to be completely renovated after 40 years...)
The Tower of the Winds, the public mechanical calendar/sundial in the old Roman agora in ancient Athens, was probably not more than a few hundred years old before it was stripped for parts, looted, and converted into the bell tower for a former Byzantine Christian church. If history is anything to go by, then this mechanism will also be broken up and destroyed long before 10,000 years have passed.
That's why one of the design considerations is avoiding valuable materials. This is nontrivial -- materials with good corrosion and wear resistance tend to be pricey. Obviously the clock won't be made of anything as low value as stone, but it is a consideration.
It's a big problem: build something pretty, and it becomes an object of desire, even to have a small part, and people will take. Build something that will last a long time, and it needs to be resistant to weathering, and therefore valuable, and people will take. Build something that has a function, it will be a source of political power to control it, and people who do not control it will try to destroy it. The engineering is only one part of the problem.
The other thing I worry about is that the design tolerances are going to be difficult to maintain. Anything that will last 10,000 years will experience seismic activity, no matter where you put it. Few large structures can withstand being shaken while retaining high tolerances. I've spent a fair bit of my youth around buildings that were only 2500-3000 years old (in Greece), and by and large, they were not in very good condition, even when not scavanged for building materials. We do not understand how to build structures to resist corrosion and weathering on millenial time scales -- that does not mean we shouldn't try, just that we aren't good at it, yet.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
We *didn't* understand that thousands of years ago. Today we have much better materials. Nickel, for instance, is much harder and more resistant to corrosion than the bronze that was used in ancient Greece. Marble and sandstone will show significant wear in a few decades if used in stairsteps, no wonder those old buildings are so worn out.
You're proposing to build stairs out of nickel? The Ancient Greeks were actually really good architects and civil engineers. Quite very good, if you take the time to study their techniques. There are buildings that are largely intact and have not moved, one stone relative to another, more than 1cm or so, over 3000 years (the Mycenean behive tombs), but they are rare among the buildings that still remain. These are just the buildings, I'm talking about, walls, floor, sometimes roofs. Forget complicated, moving mechanisms.
We are currently building few, if any, structures that are intended to last at the century scale. Most built form is intended to last at the decadal scale. We utterly lack expertise at the millennial scale -- although, as stated above, that does not mean we should not TRY. Just that it's hard.
And I'm not convinced at all that we have superior materials now than we did 2000 years ago for this purpose. Steel? Won't last. Stainless alloys? Corrosion still builds up over long time scales, and it's too valuable. Nickel? Valuable. Aluminum alloys? Still corrode. Valuable. Etc.
The only materials that won't oxidize at those time scales are those that are already oxidized. SiO2 (quartz, glass). CaCO3 (marble). FeOx (oxidized iron, but it's structurally worthless).
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
The Mayan clock does not have a digit rollover then. Their calendar system can run until the year forty octillion without modification. The previous, uninhabited iteration of the world in Mayan mythology was destroyed by the Gods after its 13th baktun, and our own world's 13th baktun ends in 2012. The Mayans were quite comfortable with the idea of a 14th baktun though.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?