Slashdot Mirror
Long Now Clock Advances With Bezos Cash
heptapod writes "Wired has an in-depth article about the 10,000 Year Clock and The Long Now Foundation which has begun moving forward with Jeff Bezos's investment of $42 million. Recently he put up a website with more information." My favorite-yet article about the 10,000 Year Clock appeared on Kevin Kelly's site earlier this month. (Kelly always seems to be involved in interesting projects, and is one of the movers behind this one.)
This is important, by starting our own 10,000 year clock we should have plenty of time we can use once the Mayan calendar runs out.
won't this involve a lot of maintenance over a 10,000 year period? Are they establishing a perpetuity type scenario to support it?
Great, now I'll NEVER get to work on time
(on second thought, I'll take two, one to keep at the office to prove why I'm late)
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
Will future archaeologists interpret this as a sign that there was a cult based around timekeeping in Texas in the 2000's?
Probably not, but it is an interesting thought that it may be the case that many if not all of the most durable and long-standing monuments of ancient times essentially tell us nothing that's representative about the ancient cultures that built them. Take Stonehenge for example. Imagine if Stonehenge was built by a small group of people with too much money or resources on their hands who thought that it would be awesome to build a really, really big stone circle.
Should be abolishing daylight saving so you don't have to change it every 6 months
Even if the engineering challenges of it could be overcome (and I'm a little doubtful) humans will destroy it. Vandals 500 years from now, someone who thinks it'd make for a fun filled evening to piss on somebody's ambition.
The headline and article should be taken out back and shot. It's the humane thing to do.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Since the summary doesn't tell you, I will: it's a huge, useless clock being built in the desert. It's called the "10,000 year clock" because the hands of the clock move glacially slowly. It will truly be a wonder to behold, unless it stops working after 100 years and people forget that it's even there.
tl;dr version: big, useless clock.
I guess Stonehenge and the Pyramids if Gizeh evoked many of the same feelings when they were built. It seems to me mankind needs to have some sort of monuments to remind it of the majesty of time. It's easy to say that the universe is 13,7 billion years old, but it's hard to wrap your mind around the lenght of time it actually implies, the scale is simply beyond human. Things like these help us realize that. So i applaud the initiative.
A project to build a clock that will ring periodically through 10,000 years must include assurance that people will recognize the clock ringing, and what time it is on it, or it's just a tree falling in a forest with no one to hear. It would demonstrate nothing about a long duration "now" in planning, execution or just thinking through as a span, except that we presently suck at it.
Which is why this project is folly. All its effort is making a physical object durable, which is of course no assurance of longevity. The chances are high that sometime in the next 10,000 years some people (if not a nonhuman natural event, like volcano) will damage, dismantle or disable the physical clock - no matter how strong some of their ancestors once made it. But even if it does last, without ensuring people around throughout the 10,000 years can read it when it rings will mean they have failed to make a "10,000 clock", though they might have made a "10,000 year machine".
The project should focus on how to enable people to recognize that it's a clock ringing through its 10,000 year lifetime. And indeed the project could be limited to only that: ensuring that people can read how stars, the Sun, the Moon and planets align to "ring" when they reach certain layouts would use the much more long lived celestial bodies as a durable clock. If they want to build a machine that will point to the skies every decade/century/millennium that's a decent next step, even if the machine is just the caption to the real clock. And to the real achievement: planning 10,000 years of viable function.
--
make install -not war
Although he might have the one-hand patent?
Yea... uh can I have 84 million please?
While I think that this is a great start, I think that we need to broaden its scope. I propose that we start a "Y10K Long Range Planning Committee" NOW. What's going to happen to the world's critical software systems after December 31, 9999? We need to think about this: Will there be a sufficient number of COBOL programmers available for remediation? Why, the entire financial system of the future is potentially at risk!
As I have no intentions of dying any time soon, I hereby volunteer: Please vote for me, so that I may become a board member.
Tongue in cheek,
dj
A project to build a clock that will ring periodically through 10,000 years must include assurance that people will recognize the clock ringing, and what time it is on it, or it's just a tree falling in a forest with no one to hear.,
Actually it generally does not ring without people there to provide energy for the chimes.
As long as there are people around, there will be at least some sporadic visitation.
The chances are high that sometime in the next 10,000 years some people (if not a nonhuman natural event, like volcano) will damage, dismantle or disable the physical clock - no matter how strong some of their ancestors once made it.
The chances are lowered a lot by the clock being quite remote, and you have to know where to look for it - no blazing neon signs.
Furthermore it's built on a scale that would make it very difficult to come away with anything from it, or to damage.
Also there is not just ONE clock. Other clocks are planned, the next to be in Nevada.... the places they have chosen are pretty geologically stable (at least on the order of 10K years).
The project should focus on how to enable people to recognize that it's a clock ringing through its 10,000 year lifetime. And indeed the project could be limited to only that: ensuring that people can read how stars, the Sun, the Moon and planets align to "ring" when they reach certain layouts would use the much more long lived celestial bodies as a durable clock.
That is in fact the POINT of the Long Now foundation, to make people think about such things. As for the celestial clock, that is in fact described in caves located inside the clock...
The physical clock is meant to act as a focal point to make people think about the more abstract concept of time and longevity.
You really need to read the book "The Clock of the Long Now" to understand philosophically what is going on here.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If you want this to last this long and not have somebody salvage it for the metal, you must make it temporary, Example: The Eiffel tower.
The world circa 12010 C.E.: The mainstream media generates unwarranted hype concerning a time-keeping device built by an ancient civilization purported to indicate the world's imminent demise.
Of all things, they're building this in West Texas.
West Texas.
Because, Texas as a whole is known for its long-term thinking.
When Jobs finally transfers His Eternal Spirit to a glossy obsidian iThrone deep in the heart of towering Mount Sosumi, built entirely from smashed Windows and Android devices, it's going to make the 10,000 year clock look like a bit of a silly ephemeral trinket.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
FTA:
It takes two or three visitors to push around the capstan of the clock and to lift its 10,000-pound stones.
The real question is: do they need to sing?
For a real working clock, I would power it with U235, kilogram produces about 1 MW of power, half life 770 million years, use custom designed sub-threshold MCML circuit that uses maybe 5 nanowatts of powers, suitably redundant and protected against, trace migration, micro thermal cycling, micro accelerations, cosmic rays and so forth and boost it into an orbit outside of geosynchronous so that it will take a million year plus orbital decay.
... is long!
To build a three meter cockpit!
But the copyright on the things he sells may last forever.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Which is why this project is folly. All its effort is making a physical object durable, which is of course no assurance of longevity. The chances are high that sometime in the next 10,000 years some people (if not a nonhuman natural event, like volcano) will damage, dismantle or disable the physical clock - no matter how strong some of their ancestors once made it. But even if it does last, without ensuring people around throughout the 10,000 years can read it when it rings will mean they have failed to make a "10,000 clock", though they might have made a "10,000 year machine".
The weird thing is that some people think this will be a failure because of possible natural disasters and people possibly not being able to read this clock etcetera, and get hissy fits about it, while the many of the same people don't mind at all that really, REALLY, REALLY!! dangerous nuclear waste has to be safely disposed of for about 25 times as long as the period this clock is designed for and still insist nuclear energy is safe.
People are weird!
What person will donate an airborne act of love?
Well, someone tried at least. :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Lustig
Come on! People are starving and they spend money on THIS?!? I think Bezos and Kelley are smart guys who have dome a lot, but this is ego-stroking, period.
Seriously, does the general public understand, or care about the longevity of a timepiece?
The media will talk about this project, and not mention that modern technology can do better and cheaper, because they simply do not care.
I find it interesting that Bezos site doesn't actually link to the Long Now site which has much more information on the clock. The quote to me makes it seem as though there isn't/wasn't another website despite the fact that long now has had one for some time.
Spending $42 million dollars on food for starving people will not make starvation go away--not in the long term. Certainly it is possible that it will help in the short term. After the food is gone, then what? The Fine Article actually talks about that very point. By encouraging long term thinking you may be able to take on problems that seem intractable, the example being that you could not eliminate starvation in 5 years, but given 200 years maybe it could be done.
Is Bezos cash Jeff's answer to Bitcoins?
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Bothers me in a snarky way that people (KK's linked article) building a 10,000 year clock don't know when the last millennium began.
I see your point, but respectfully disagree. There are SO many pressing problems and SO many people that could be helped with that kind of money! $42M!! That's a lot of money for a damn hobbyhorse clock. It's a cool idea, sure, but $42M!!!??? I think that's obscene, no matter the rationale. We may not even be here in 200 years unless we accomplish certain goals within the next 20 years. We *don't have* 200 years.
Anyone else find it troublesome that Bezos is putting $42M into THIS? Or more troublesome still, that Bezos HAS $42M. Or that he has $42M to THROW at anything?
At 4% that money could generate $1,680,000 per year for scholarships, or school renovations, health education or or or or or.
*sigh*
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
This is a DIRECT rip of the Millenial clock(s) described in Neal Stephenson's Anathem. As a community of geeks, I'm surprised nobody else has made the connection.
The millenial clock in anathem:
- was synchronized by a shaft of sunlight
- triggered an 'event' (in this case opening a door) every 1, 10, 100, and 1000 years (ok so he didn't describe how the 1000 year door worked)
- was human-powered, and wound by people working on a capstan-style winder
- had a backup power supply, in the event it wasn't wound for an extended period of time (the backup supply was supposed to last 100+ years)
The similarities are so close that this is actually a direct copy, not original work. And in the absence of any kind of credit or mention of Neal Stephenson's name, the word plagarism leaps to mind.
char*f="char*f=%c%s%c;main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}";main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}
In 9998 years, whatever passes for a bookstore will have sections devoted to the end of the world as predicted by this clock and its makers who obviously knew something in 2011 that we don't know 12011.
ON THIS DAY, when we seek answers as to what people were thinking 3,000 years ago,
We visit the pyramids of egypt, read the proud inscriptions of stone, lovingly preserved, which tell us of distant kings and conquest of astronomy and dreams.
Today we build from steel, concrete, and glass. Our digital media is designed to last 20 years -- perhaps 100 years, tops. It is plastic, mostly photo sensitive. Most working data is etched invisibly as miniscule loci of magnetic polarity-shifts, packed together on thin substrate on aluminum platters spinning in near-vacuum.
Our scientisis are squinting through electron tunneling microscopes, gently prodding single molecules with tiny movements like a dung beetle rolling its treasure up a hill.
We could etch the Bible on the head of a pin, so small there would be plenty of room for several angels, besides.
I have a book printed in 1902 whose binding is firm, pages a smooth firm, uniform mustard color.
I have a book printed in 1992, whose brilliant white smooth pages have long since turned rough, pages are almost brown, the leafs easily detaching from the spine at the gentlest tug.
I originally wrote this some 12 years go, I distinctly remember typing these words; but I am typing them again because searches through hundreds of files in dozens of accumulated directories yielded not one occurence of a remembered phrase.
Several times in the last 10 years, I have suffered complete disk crashes; once the data was recovered at great cost, once a fileset months-old was restored from tape; most of the time, everything was mirrored on adjacent disks, some things are gone forever.
Nothing is being carved in stone. It is my wish that upon my spiritual dissolution, my remains cleansed by fire, ashes where you may, no stone or crypt, I would rather join the ashes of campfires, drawn again up into the veins of trees, through their leafs, glimpse the sun again. No stone to record my name -- what use would it be without the tales I have told?
Tell me rather a silly story in a tiny village, than read ten million empty names.
AND THUS... 3,000 YEARS FROM THIS DAY, when people are curious to know what life was like in the past,
They will visit the pyramids of egypt, read the proud inscriptions of stone, lovingly preserved, telling them of distant kings and conquest of astronomy and dreams.
The rest of the world will be a strangely twisted heap of wonder and disaster... none will find words there.
Let my name be told to the wind, which is more than it deserves.
But please, kind stranger, tell my stories to your children, so some may remember threre was once one such as I.
________
What will happen on the day Facebook goes down and people glance 'round and there are no photographs, there are no letters, no cassette tapes of young children's voices?
There are only vague memories, and a pile of crashed hard disks in the closet, each with a label with circles and arrows that says what each one is and what is on them, for that day you strike it rich and can afford recover the data...
Oops. The labels have fallen off. You are now extinct.
Your only hope for immortailty was to help build the Clock.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>