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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
If your goal is simply to build a device that can tick off the seconds for 10,000 years, then perhaps your design has merit. But the whole point of building this is to create a human experience, not merely an horologic device. People need to be able to experience the clock and, where possible, interact with it. That experience and interaction, and the reflection about time and civilization that comes with it, is what these people are trying to create. Without the human element, the clock is just an artifact that can be easily lost or forgotten. If you put it far out into orbit, then you completely remove it from humanity, and what value can it then have? Even in this day and age, no one will be able to visit it. If civilization collapses sometime in the next 10,000 years - not inconceivable if you ask me - then no one will even know that it's there. In both cases it may as well not exist. If you build it as you describe and put it here on Earth, radioactive concerns aside, what will visitors see: a big hot ingot connected to a bunch of (possibly) indecipherable equipment, attached to a bunch of indecipherable "chips" (if they'd even be recognized as such) that would be difficult if not impossible to grasp except by someone with 20th+ century knowledge and tools. And that doesn't even begin to dive into maintenance or repair.
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.
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