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A Clock That Runs for 10,000 Years
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wed Oct 19, 2005 06:58 AM
from the that-is-quite-a-marathon dept.
from the that-is-quite-a-marathon dept.
Justin Blanton writes "Discover magazine is running an article about a clock designed to run accurately for 10,000 years. It's essentially a "future-proof" clock that blurs the line between art and functionality through advanced engineering. From the article: 'Everything about this clock is deeply unusual. For example, while nearly every mechanical clock made in the last millennium consists of a series of propelled gears, this one uses a stack of mechanical binary computers capable of singling out one moment in 3.65 million days. Like other clocks, this one can track seconds, hours, days, and years. Unlike any other clock, this one is being constructed to keep track of leap centuries, the orbits of the six innermost planets in our solar system, even the ultraslow wobbles of Earth's axis.'"
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Work Progresses On 10,000 Year Clock 307 comments
KindMind writes "CNet has pictures of a planned 10,000 year clock to be built in eastern Nevada by the Long Now Foundation. From the article: 'Running under its own power, the clock is an experiment in art, science, and engineering. The six dials on the face of this machine will represent the year, century, horizons, sun position, lunar phase, and the stars of the night sky over a 10,000-year period. Likely to span multiple generations and evolutions in culture, the thinking and design put into the monument makes it a moving sculpture as beautiful as it is complex.' This was reviewed on Slashdot in 2005. Really cool pictures, including one of a mechanical 'binary computer' that converts the pendulum into positions on the dial."
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how very useful (Score:4, Funny)
Re:how very useful (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The clock requires maintenance (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The clock requires maintenance (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:mice spiders and rodents (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:The clock requires maintenance (Score:4, Insightful)
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Outta time (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Outta time (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Outta time (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Outta time (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Outta time (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Outta time (Score:5, Insightful)
-- Charles Babbage
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Is it noon? (Score:3, Informative)
Local noon is an easy time to measure. When the sun is due south, it's local noon. Due south is halfway between local sunrise and local sunset. If the clock were to drift, it would be saying something like "it's two oclock" whereas the sun would be telling you it was local noon so you'd know the clock was wrong. The clock is designed to reset itself based on the position of the sun using a bimetallic strip so u
Re:Is it noon? (Score:4, Informative)
You are wrong. Most cathedrals are no longer there. Most cathedrals collapsed within two centuries after being built, and many others will collapse within 50 years because of car traffic.
You are also wrong about the Germans. A number of old inner cities and over 200 medieval castles in my country (the Netherlands) were destroyed beyond repair by the Germans in the 4 days we fought them. Paris was saved because it wasn't fought over. Still the Germans are not more destructive than our other neighbours. Overall they are our most peaceful neighbours.
The town I live in now was for instance razed and flooded by the sea in 1350 in a civil war, and razed again in 1572 by a Spanish army, who also murdered the entire population. It was rebuilt in 1574 with strong city walls and shelled again in the same year by the Spanish. It was shelled by the French in 1672, and by our own army liberating it in 1673. Last time it was shelled was again by our own side in 1814, after Napoleon lost the battle of Leipzig, and the French garrison refused to surrender to Dutch militia claiming the town.
The town I grew up in was destroyed by the English fleet in 1809. The inner city was largely destroyed again in 1940 and in 1945, when the Allies also flooded it by bombing the dikes. Sources also recount that the town was razed to the ground twice in the middle ages by the Flemish because of our excessive river tolls.
It is really just a fluke that some buildings survived over the centuries, and generally speaking it is the best buildings that survive.
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Re:Star field accurate? Why no modern tech.? (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you really think an LCD display will last 10000 years? BTW, it would go against the project goals (which is not to impress future visitors). As the article states, the clock shall be understandable without taking it apart.
The point is not a technology demonstration. The point is to alter the thinking of the people about long time spans.
Again, the project isn't about teaching future people about our knowledge, it's about teaching current people to think long term. However, I could imagine that the star movement would be a great tool for that. Assuming those 10.3 arcseconds per year will not change in the future (and neither the direction), in 10000 years it will have moved about 28.6 degrees. This is indeed a quite visible difference. Of course, if the clock should track the movements of the stars as well, its price might grow from exorbitant to unaffordable
I bet that in 10000 years any HD-DVD produced today will be completely unreadable.
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Re:Outta time (Score:3, Informative)
A bit more accurate than 10-9 sec/day
lame (Score:5, Funny)
What about the human factor? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:10.000 year is a long time. (Score:5, Interesting)
The anthropologic aspect of this project is going to be the most difficult, simply because society is a factor. The rise and fall of civilizations happens much more often than the rise and fall of material objects. We can still recover bronze-age artifacts (circa 5000 years old), and even some from the stone age (anywhere from 8,000 to 30,000 years old), but we have very little information on what the societies were like. Most of what we have is just a guess.
The good news is that those same design principles that make it physically longstanding address these problems from a sociologic / anthropologic POV also.
Maintainability - The clock should be maintainable with bronze-age technology
Maintainability and transparency:
(emphasis added)
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Boring old news... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Boring old news... (Score:5, Funny)
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Once bitten, twice shy (Score:5, Funny)
This is just a bunch of marketing fru-fru. The last 10,000-year clock I bought only lasted 6,738 years (give or take a month). Even if you take into account my time travel, I still should have gotten a good 8,500 years out of it, at least.
The real question is support. Will the manufacturer still be around in 3,000 years when you need to replace the little rubber feet? Are vendors and repair centers going to stock replacement parts? How much does an extended warranty cost?
Re:Once bitten, twice shy (Score:4, Funny)
Does it matter? In 10,005 years, you think you'll find the receipt?
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Support in 10000 years (Score:3, Insightful)
This is so ontopic! This is the one overshadowing design criterion. It should be possible to repair with whatever technology is available in 10000 years. And you can't rely on manuals, since you don't even know what languages there will be 10000 years down the road.
I want to have one! (Score:5, Informative)
The article is rather slow to get already so use mirrodot instead: http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/608e5b4931282247
The Danger of Vandals and Other Human Disasters (Score:3, Insightful)
The natives of Cairo stripped the pure white polished casing stones from the great pyramid to build a large number of building in their city. Nothing against the need for public housing, but it is a shame. There are plenty of other examples as well.
Re:The Danger of Vandals and Other Human Disasters (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, it just occurred to me... (Score:4, Interesting)
So...
Who's to say that the Mayan Calendar creators simply didn't do the SAME thing these people did? That is to make a Clock/Calendar which is accurate for 'n' number of years into the future.
There is NOTHING cosmic, or "End-of-the-world-doom-and-gloom" about the Mayan calendar either... It was probably something as simple as some Mayan's decided to make their Calendar last for a LONG DAMN TIME!!!
It is probably just THAT Simple!
Just a thought.
Re:Actually, it just occurred to me... (Score:3, Informative)
2014, I think. There was a difference in opinion between lowland Mayans and highland Mayans but it was only a matter of a year.
Also, they didn't think it was the end of the world; they thought the Gods would return and judge our progress. If they didn't like what they saw, THEN it would be the end of the world. So, obviously, we're okay...er...where's the exit again?
TWW
Surprising (Score:4, Interesting)
A clock (Score:4, Insightful)
A server which last 10,000 Milliseconds .
A story about an atomic clock being 9 years out of date has a certain poetry to it .
I first read about this in 1998 (Score:4, Informative)
flashes 12:00 (Score:3, Funny)
12:00:00.0000
Great, does it have an alarm? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd like
Clock radios haven't changed at all since I first got one when I was about 5! Someone out there must be able to package up a glorified palm pilot with some big buttons and red led's and make a killing. These days you could put 802.11 in it and get weather/traffic reports on a led ticker
You've just scratched the surface (Score:5, Insightful)
What's needed is some thoughtful design.
Alarm clocks are a prime example of a product in which the inmates are running the asylum. Each new half-baked feature clock makers add gets appended in the clunkiest possible way. These things aren't designed around the user, they're made according to the specs of the parts.
The gold standard for our new design will be: I must be able to operate the clock's basic features when I wake up in the morning, blurry-headed and without my contacts in. This basic problem -- that they're used by sleepy people -- seems to have escaped current makers of alarm clocks.
None of this has anything to do with "long time" though, not any more than with atomic clocks. (One of the obvious, obvious features of a decent alarm clock being that it'll synch with the atomic clocks and get back on track after a power outage or whatever...)
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Re:You've just scratched the surface (Score:3, Interesting)
One could also make a point for a design where it is hard to stop the alarm when you are not completely awake. This would reduce your risk of just falling asleep again after cancelling the alarm.
Lots of nerds missing the point, here (Score:5, Interesting)
By checking the clock to see what time it is, in the context of a 10,000-year swath of time (still a geological/evolutionary blink of an eye), one is at least encouraged to keep that larger context in mind. It's intended to dimish the long-term weight of petty squabbles, perhaps remind people that 10,000 years back we were in an ice age, that sort of thing. Might even make you think about your 401k contribution (or forget about it!).
Re:Lots of nerds missing the point, here (Score:3, Funny)
Since the current season of BSG has ended the answer to that question is yes so you need not bother to wonder.
Reminds me of this (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know the price but since their wristwatches start at around USD$8,000 and go up to over $200k, I suspect you could buy a very nice car for the price. Patek make rolex look like cheap crap (which is mostly true).
Impressive engineering. (Score:3, Insightful)
However the engineering effort to make this clock as accurate and as long-lasting as promised is truly impressive. Few things built today are designed to last that long (exception: perhaps long-term nuclear waste storage?) The materials : stone, steel, tungsten - and the size of the parts, and the mechanics of the thing that allows for 10,000 years of wear, along with easy maintenance - man, these are not things that even your top-notch mechanical engineer does.
Interestingly enough, this guy is working on a long term clock, while others can't even get little clocks to work right. Some public clocks [blogspot.com] can be grossly imprecise. It's funny how someone running a time service can't get their own time right. Hopefully the telcos will hook up their time services to this clock - or NTP services. Whichever is easier.
This guy IS a genius! (Score:3, Funny)
Damn, think it could win a thermo-nuclear war against itself?
Brian Eno Did an Album for This (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe this is the clock.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Interesting Stuff (Score:5, Informative)
Currently, you can find the project's web page at http://www.longnow.org/projects/clock/ [longnow.org]
The mechanical computer, the solar synchronizer, and the power mechanism are all very cool pieces of engineering. However, the most fascinating part of the entire clock is the "Equation of Time Cam". A bit more information about the cam follows.
The proposed clock not only keeps accurate solar time (it resets itself every day at noon via the solar synchronizer), it also keeps accurate "clock time". How it does this is pretty amazing:
In general, when the sun reaches its highest point ("solar noon"), you can look at your watch & find that it's not really noon. On any given day, the variation between "solar noon" & "clock noon" is +/- 15 minutes. Of course, this variation chanages through out the year, following a well defined curve known as the "equation of time" (http://www.sundials.co.uk/equation.htm [sundials.co.uk]) (it looks like a 5th order polynomial equation).
So, when the mechanical clock resets itself at "solar noon", it's needs to account for this variation to determine "clock noon". One way to do this is to make a disc that is not perfectly round; it has a wider diameter at portions & a narrower diameter at other parts (something like a cross between a circle & an ameoba). This "disc" makes one revolution per year, and the variations in its diameter represent the difference between "solar noon" & "clock noon". So, at "solar noon", the clock resets itself & uses a feeler gauge on the disc to figure out how much variation to add or subtract to display "clock noon". So, assuming you have a sunny day every once & a while, you have a clock that will always have accurate clock time. Ingenious!
There's a problem, though: each year, the equation of time changes slightly. So, in order to keep accurate clock time for 10,000 years, you need 10,000 of these discs, each representing the distinct equation of time for each year. The Long Now foundation solves this problem by making an "Equation of Time Cam" - a continous stack of these cylinders. In my mind it is a thing of beauty - engineering at its best - well thought out and so simple. Here's a picture of the cam - it's the cylinder that looks like it melted a bit:
http://www.longnow.org/projects/clock/prototype1/
The Long Now's explanation can be found here (complete with Cad drawings!):
http://emsh.calarts.edu/~mathart/Clock_Cam.html [calarts.edu]
I hope everyone enjoys this project as much as I have - Have fun!
Now Then (Score:4, Insightful)
How can they possibly be sure that anything they make will be readable as a "clock" 10,000 years from now? That's the biggest problem: if humans even remain on Earth after 3x our current civilization's lifetime has passed, how will they read the clocks? The Egyptian Pyramids are increasingly clearly "clocks", like Stonehenge, for telling "what time it is" in the sky, among the constellations. That revelation only appeared to one guy, about 10 years ago, and is still known only to a few interested people. We still don't know how to tell when the "alarm" goes off, beyond some basics (which could be wrong). Even Stonehenge, recognized as a clock for longer and by more people, isn't really readable. And those clocks are only maybe 5-7,000 years old, mostly millennia where humans didn't change nearly as much as we have in the past millennium, or (likely) as much as we'll change in the next century or so.
We've already built "long now" clocks, that haven't quite worked. They probably did achieve the same goals of the Long Now Foundation: giving society a way to learn to think about long periods of time with the same immediacy and importance as we think about the present moment. We should learn from the long experience in that project by solving the fundamental problem: communicating with our descendents 10,000 years from now. We can probably rely, like our ancestors, on celestial mechanics remaining readable by humans in such an (astronomically) brief time. A real Long Now Clock would merely promote human synchronization with those movements. Maybe a new stone megalith that points at decade/century/millennium markers in the sky. No moving parts, just pictures of humans reading the skies (showing the actual celestial mechanics and how the person decodes them).
Baby Boomers, like the Long Now Foundation people, always think they're the first to invent or do anything, especially if it's fun. And they're great at reinventing the mistakes of history as they ignore it. They do get people motivated to do something as if it were new and exciting, though. So the best thing that this new toy clock they're building could do would be to perish, and pronto. Then we'd get a "second chance" (puns intended) to use the clocks we've already got, and change ourselves to use them. That change would also make us better people, with a longer view of "now", the future, and our place in it.
Re:I have to change mine... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:I have to change mine... (Score:5, Funny)
Dear Customer,
It has come to our attention that your Clock of the Long Now (TM) was exposed to a liquid spill 500 years ago. Although it may not have caused the failure, AwesomeClock, Inc. does not cover the repair or exchange of a machine resulting from misuse, accident, modification, unsuitable physical or operating environment, improper maintenance by you, or failure caused by a product for which AwesomeClock is not responsible. The warranty is therefore voided.
However, you can buy a new mechanical system board for 895 KiloDollars, and your warranty will be extended for 90 days. If you wish to dispute this finding, we can email you pictures that will never actually reach your inbox. Thank you for choosing AwesomeClock, Inc.
AwesomeClock Warranty Claims Dept.
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Re:What Time Is It Now? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:enough? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, an atomic clock is more accurate, and more useful, but it requires electricity, and I'm sure some attention to keep things running smoothly.
Although, I wonder if this mechanical clock will need to be lubricated every now and again... 5000 years from now there'll probably be some wierd religion where the priest pours holy oil over the sacred time keeper, or some such...
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Re:Too Complex (Score:5, Insightful)
For every variable you introduce, the liklihood of defects rises fivefold.
For every generalised statistic you quote, the likelihood of talking accurately about any specific application decreases fivefold.
These people seem to have put so much effort into thinking through possible variables that could effect this clock, from the value of the materials to the transparency of the operation, that I'd be very surprised if they didn't stop to consider one of the two most fundamental aspects: reliability.
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