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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.
The idea is to build a clock that lasts that long, not pay for repairs and maintenance to run a clock for 10.000 years. RTFA
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.
Maybe it will, based on their site, they're making it as reliable as it's possible, with multiple power sources and timekeeping instruments. I don't think the costs or the knowledge will be an issue: by design, it's made to be maintainable with Bronze Age tech and its purpose and workings are to be as clear as possible to allow even a primitive civilization to take a look at it and figure out what goes where, and what does what.
Hyperbole: I use it liberally!
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
No, you'd think that kind of information would be in TFA or else TFS would be rather un *summary* like.
Although he might have the one-hand patent?
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
You'd think that kind of information would be in TFS so we know WTF they're talking about. OMGWTFBBQ.
I'd say something about how you must be new here, but I think that a six-digit ID indicates otherwise (even if it's hardly something to brag about).
Merely leaving out critical information is pretty good for a slashdot summary. I've given up complaining unless the summary actively lies or misleads. (This still leaves me plenty of opportunities to complain!)
I'm just glad the Long Now Foundation is getting some publicity! Too many people in the industry have a hard time thinking past the next couple of years. 10k years may seem like a lot when you're dealing with human history, but in other fields (astronomy, geology, archeology), it's an eyeblink. I'm glad that a time_t on 64-bit Linux handles such date ranges, but a lot of UIs still assume that years have four digits.
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.
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.
I'm just glad the Long Now Foundation is getting some publicity! Too many people in the industry have a hard time thinking past the next couple of years. 10k years may seem like a lot when you're dealing with human history, but in other fields (astronomy, geology, archeology), it's an eyeblink.
Astronomy, geology, and archaeology deal with things created in the long past, most of which were not created by people, and those that were human creations served their purpose in their own time. (Someone is sure to mention the Pyramids, which were supposed to protect their dead inhabitants for an unspecified long time, but which were mostly looted often within living memory of the death).
Will future generations even want a 10k year clock? Other than a curiosity, do the Jaipur Sundials serve any purpose? In spite of their size, their accuracy is limited to about two seconds. They were obsolete before they were completed.
Would not a similar fate befall a 10k year clock? Would it not become a quaint, but useless curiosity, inaccurate enough to be useless in short order?
Building something that is obsolete before its even started, won't be maintained, is not even close to state of the art, but is expected to last 10000 years is mostly an exercise in grandiosity. "We thought this was cool, and it would make us cool, and we built it, so now all you wipper-snappers have to maintain it for centuries in our honor."
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
it's made to be maintainable with Bronze Age tech and its purpose and workings are to be as clear as possible to allow even a primitive civilization to take a look at it and figure out what goes where, and what does what.
Bronze Age tech? I don't think so. Have you even looked at all the stainless steal in it?
The most likely fate will be that it will be melted down after the last tourist loses interest.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
But the copyright on the things he sells may last forever.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
It has stainless steel in it now. But it can run with other materials too, I suspect the choice of materials now is optimized for initial longevity: the later they need replacements, the better chance of someone with the appropriate tech being around to fab them.
Hyperbole: I use it liberally!
We have CT machines and we still can't figure out exactly what the Antikythera device did. On the plus side the LNC will be quite a bit bigger and will (perhaps) not be flooded with ocean water.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
The whole thing has a post-apocalyptic mysticism about it.
Why would anyone suspect that it has to last a long time before anyone would be able to repair it?
Were you expecting the end of all human civilization and the rebirth there-of in the next 10 thousand years?
Someone has been watching too many movies.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The more appropriate question is: Can you exclude the possibility? Ten thousand years ago, we were still in the stone age. There have been civilizations which appeared and collapsed since then. And there's always the possibility of a global thermonuclear war destroying our civilization (although honestly I wouldn't expect the clock to survive an atomic bomb).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Last time I checked, it was an astronomical computer and mechanical calendar rolled into one. Granted, this came from the translation of what was left of the inscriptions, which match up with some months of the Metonic calendar...
Hyperbole: I use it liberally!
We have CT machines and we still can't figure out exactly what the Antikythera device did.
Well, Wikipedia has a quite detailed description for something which we don't have an idea of what it does. And that's for a device which is not complete, and no longer working.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Oh, I think it would survive easily. It's not near any important targets, has no military value to warrant pointing a warhead at it, and it's buried pretty deep to survive strikes nearby (up to certain values of nearby). Point is, there's no reason it shouldn't survive The Button.
Hyperbole: I use it liberally!
Maybe it will, based on their site, they're making it as reliable as it's possible, with multiple power sources and timekeeping instruments. I don't think the costs or the knowledge will be an issue: by design, it's made to be maintainable with Bronze Age tech and its purpose and workings are to be as clear as possible to allow even a primitive civilization to take a look at it and figure out what goes where, and what does what.
But wouldn't it make more sense to produce some replacement parts in advance, instead of relying on future people to be both able and willing to produce such replacement pieces with the necessary precision (note that it is not enough to understand the basic principle; unless you are able to produce the part with sufficient precision, it will be basically worthless).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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?
Sure, it would only be prudent. The same way they recommend testing out your newly built RepRap by printing yourself a new one.
Maybe they will leave a cache of parts, maybe just the vital ones that make the whole thing go. After all, leaving basically a duplicate of the 60-meter clock you just built would likely be prohibitively expensive...
Hyperbole: I use it liberally!
Yeah, maybe I will start a multi-generational cult whose most holiest quest is to seek down these kinds of hipster projects and return them to the chaotic elements from whence they were forged. A portable laser could vandalize the mechanism through the quartz glass with a slashdot symbol, couldn't it? Most certainly.
And no reason for it to survive either. There is simply no need of a musical clock in a post-apocalyptic world.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
That's true as well. But we were talking about whether it would survive the war itself. What comes afterwards is another thing, and it's quite possible that it'll be melted down for the raw materials to be used in rebuilding.
Hyperbole: I use it liberally!
At no time did civilization collapse.
Societies and governments have collapsed, but civilization persisted, machines still ran, farmers still planted, and clock makers still made clocks. Nothing was un-invented. Various disasters made small localities uninhabitable, often with loss of life, but people moved on, their education (such as it was) and capabilities intact, and civilization always survived. At no time did mankind say you know what, this isn't working, lets all go back to caves and rocks, and rules of behavior, and to hell with this whole mess.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Yeah, because we all know there won't be any metal laying around once the bombs go off.....
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Well, someone tried at least. :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Lustig
Oh, there will be scrap aplenty. Twisted, rusted, neutron-activated radioactive scrap. Quit splitting hairs, and try to maintain mature discussion!
Hyperbole: I use it liberally!
The fall of the roman empire resulted in the loss of a rather large number of inventions for a long time. We may not have gone back to living in caves, but things were lost. The fall of specific societies can set us a species back technologically. Societies are fragile on large time scales.
Xavier Rabourdin for president 2012
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.
That's certainly not true. There are a great many discoveries, tools, machines, and more, which were known to ancient societies and lost to time. Some of which have been rediscovered and become central to us in modern times. Others were obsoleted by modern instruments before they were rediscovered, etc, etc.
Concrete is perhaps the most striking example, used extensively until the fall of Rome, lost to time, and only (independently) rediscovered in the 18th century, and which is again, a fundamental building block of nearly all modern buildings, and very, very extensively used.
Among the others, the Baghdad Battery, The Antikythera Mechanism, and innumerable other machines, formulations, stone-mason tools, etc. Some of the most persistent mysteries about ancient people are how they A) Built large, complex stone structures more quickly than we would be able to even with modern tools, and B) Moved and manipulated into-place very large objects significant distances without more modern technology we don't believe they had, and with far fewer people than we believe they could have had available. So there are likely still many technologies out there yet to be rediscovered. These all may, in narrow instances, in fact be superior to our modern alternatives which perform similar tasks.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Is Bezos cash Jeff's answer to Bitcoins?
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Concrete is perhaps the most striking example, used extensively until the fall of Rome, lost to time, and only (independently) rediscovered in the 18th century, and which is again, a fundamental building block of nearly all modern buildings, and very, very extensively used.
I'm sorry, but you have totally misstated the history of cement. It was not lost to time upon the fall of Rome, and continued to be used in Europe, China, India, from medieval times right up to modern times.
The only thing that happened in the 18th century was someone wrote down a formula, but that formula was well known by the building trades throughout medieval times and in continuous use in various places in the world. Further the trend to poor grades of cement began DURING Roman times, not after.
I refer you to Lea's Chemistry of Cement and Concrete By Peter Hewlett.
There is an unfortunate tendency to believe any technology tried and abandoned centuries ago represents a lost art, knowledge of the ancients, somehow lost to modern man due to the collapse of a particular society. When in fact those technologies were never cost effective even when they were in use, and required the enslavement of huge numbers of people. Surviving examples such as the Pyramids, the Colosseum, are pointed to as examples of every day miracles of the ancients, when in fact much of roman architecture simply fell down due to bad mortar and was incorporate into other buildings, or used as rubble fill.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
What about if it's wound up every day by monks that carry around pilates balls?
I'm sure there's a book in that.
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.
There may be some truth to that, but there are a number of counter-examples. The contrary belief, that little or nothing of value has been lost to history is absolutely and provably wrong.
The Pyramids most certainly weren't the work of a large number of slaves. In fact it's merely a persistent myth, completely unsupported by evidence.
And I fail to follow your logic either. How does the fact that some buildings were substandard, take anything away from the Pyramids or the Colosseum?
I'd throw the Parthenon in there as well, again as an example where we can't comprehend how it could have been constructed in the time-frame it was, or for the modest price we know was paid. Today, even with modern technology at hand, we've spent vastly longer and vastly more money just restoring problematic bits of it. There are plenty of unanswered questions in history.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
It is in Texas because it is land that Jeff Bezos already owns. RTFA to see the details of why, but I'd argue.... why not?
The new site is for this specific implementation of the clock. They are also likely to put another version up in their Nevada site, which is more of what the Long Now website focuses upon. It really is two projects where the one that Bezos is working on is also helping to finance the one in Nevada as well.
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);}
The roman empire didn't "fall", it lost its western half. The byzantine empire is the roman empire. For more than a century, the scientific and cultural center was already Constantinople, not Rome, and everything was preserved there. Out of the roman realm, western Europe couldn't benefit from well-maintained roman infrastructure and administration, life was much, much harder for a long time, but civilization did not go backward,
Everything was not preserved. Lots of stuff was, some wasn't. You see the same pattern any time a large society with specialized knowledge falls. Look at the example of the Baghdad batteries. They seem to have been simple batteries, something that wouldn't be rediscovered for centuries.
Xavier Rabourdin for president 2012
Isn't that the opposite of normal knowledge-to-wikipedia relations?
No.
I'm sure there was lots of cheap labor, and that may have contributed indirectly. But actually building the pyramids was just a few thousand skilled craftsman. The slave labor didn't enter into it, at least not directly.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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>