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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.)
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.
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.
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.