A Clock That Runs for 10,000 Years 438
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.'"
Outta time (Score:4, Insightful)
What about the human factor? (Score:3, Insightful)
Too Complex (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Some similarities (Score:1, Insightful)
Everything about this clock is deeply unusual.
I wouldn't say that. The idea of charging people extra for timepieces with functionality they'll never use is quite common. How else do you explain so many watches that can withstand water to a depth of > 1 metre?
Re:Outta time (Score:5, Insightful)
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A story about an atomic clock being 9 years out of date has a certain poetry to it .
Sundials (Score:2, Insightful)
10.000 year is a long time. (Score:2, Insightful)
2000 years ago the roman empire ended. Most what left of is are some ruins and some idea's
5000 years the piramids were build, look what is left of that. They are eroded. We have a vague clue of their purpose. (storing mummmies, but mummies were never found in it?)
10000 years ago? Star-gate might be right about it, maybe man did not exist in it's current form.
You might enineer it well enough to measure a wobble of the earth, but to actually package it so it can survive 10.000 years and still have a meaning is not only an engineering feat, it must be an antropology feat as well, to make people long after this understand what it is and leave it in pieces.
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.
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...
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.
Re:Not mentioned in the article... (Score:1, Insightful)
The word of the day is: bondsmen
Re:10.000 year is a long time. (Score:2, Insightful)
2000 years ago the roman empire ended. Most what left of is are some ruins and some idea's
Don't forget the roads!
Re:How do you win at tic-tac-toe? (Score:2, Insightful)
If player one and player two are both perfect players the game will always be a tie.
I know this is true as my major was AI and my final project was investigating reinforcement learning where I designed agents to learn how to play tic tac toe and connect 4.
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...)
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.
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.
Binary computers use gears! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The clock requires maintenance (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Great, does it have an alarm? (Score:2, Insightful)
cog
Touching, Moving, and Thought Provoking (Score:2, Insightful)
I see so many jokes, rants, and condemnations from people responding to this here on Slashdot, and it becomes immediately clear that these people have not read the article, and if they have, are completely shallow and selfish people.
There is so much meaning and thought that has gone into this that it's unspeakable to even consider anything but full support for this project. I want my place in time to have a reflection to civilizations thousands of years from now. The human race in the past no doubt realized the significance of speaking to future generations... why are we so thoughtless?
Maybe this is the clock.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Something seems to be missing... (Score:1, Insightful)
No, the panels will degrade within a few decades, tops.
Wind power?
Not likely that you could build moving parts able to handle the stress for a hundred years.
Radioisotope thermoelectric generator? (RTG)
Maybe, but to last 10,000 years you will need to use an isotope with a comparatively long halflife, and so the RTG will need a fairly large volume. And your power requirements will need to be pretty modest.
Re:10.000 year is a long time. (Score:3, Insightful)
How this relates to the clock project I'm not sure: maybe they should bring an Interstate out there shaped like a big arrow so that aliens or humans returning to Earth in a few millenia will know where to look...
Re:I want to have one! (Score:3, Insightful)
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:Outta time (Score:5, Insightful)
-- Charles Babbage
Re:Star field accurate? Why no modern tech.? (Score:3, Insightful)
Thus is exemplified the process of thinking too narrowly. The clock is not about showing us off to tomorrow, but about connecting us with them. It's a work of engineering genius, not a time capsule.
Re:The clock requires maintenance (Score:2, Insightful)
And they'll study it (Score:1, Insightful)