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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.)
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
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
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.
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make install -not war
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.
Somehow I think they only created this project to fuck with future generations' brains. Picture this: nuclear war, everybody forgets about the clock. Year 9434: archaeologists discover the clock, somehow make it work and then all the idiots start wondering why the clock only goes up to 10 000 and make up doomsday scenarios.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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*
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