I love the dream of building things to last. If humans left earth this instant, what would remain useful in 1000 years? Most of what we use today would perish, so there is a sense of overwhelming disposability or high-maintenance around our lifestyles.
Rather than viewing this disposability as a weakness, perhaps we can see it as an element of wise design. By analogy, the human body leans heavily towards self-repair rather than monolithic permanence. Perhaps it is a good thing that our day-to-day designs depend so much on active use and maintenance. If no one continues to use it, why does it need to keep working?
This only works if design is whole-lifecycle design - if the cheap disposable crap we produce (and rely on, and luxuriate in) can be taken apart and reused after. If cheap fashion predominates, with clothes that fall apart after a season, you need a plan for disposing of those clothes more urgently than you need a plan for disposing of clothes that last a decade.
So, I admit I didn't last all through this article, but there was a mention of titanium. I assume rare metals are needed to build a mechanism that is durable enough to last 10.000 years. But how are they going to deal with the fact that rare metals are also very desirable? I can guarantee that it won't take 10.000 years for someone to steal it and repurpose it.
The clock is mostly stainless steel, and it will live in a cave in a rather remote location. If civilization collapses in the future, there will be much easier things to steal.
If they really wanted to prevent theft, the builders could alloy the metals with something poisonous or radioactive. But that's harder than it sounds. Not much stuff stays dangerous for 10,000 years. If I were in charge, I'd build some cool Indiana Jones-esque traps. :)
> If they really wanted to prevent theft, the builders could alloy the metals with something poisonous or radioactive. But that's harder than it sounds.
I'd also point out that such a technique would run opposite Long Now's goal of having visitors - I mean, it's hard to build a clock that lasts 10k years, hard to contain radioactive materials in casks buried underground in salt flats for 10k years, how much harder would it be to do both simultaneously?
They want people to come in and periodically wind the peripheral parts of the clock. That's kind of incompatible with building an Indiana Jones dungeon.
Actually, you know what? Forget about clocks. I want to know how we can make elaborate dungeon traps last thousands of years.
Given that the majority of Titanium's cost is in its processing, its cost is pegged to that of electricity, in a way - should we improve our energy tech (something that we're undoubtedly going to be working on for a while yet) the cost of Titanium should drop with every breakthrough - by any time that one could steal those metal components they may very well be cheap to manufacture...
It's rare in its pure form though, as far as I'm aware. And I guess even steel has some value.
Point being that over 10.000 years (heck, let's just say over 100 years), someone is going to tear that thing apart and use the components for some thing else.
I'm not sure I like that the article opens by giving most of the credit to Jeff Bezos, "Billionaire Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos has a long-term plan...". Yes, he is footing the bill for the Clock, but its hardly his.
Danny Hillis's concept and planning and the Long Now Foundation all preceed Bezos's involvement.
It would be much more genuine to attribute Jeff Bezos as the sponsor of the clock, but not as if it was entirely his idea.
It sounds like Jeff and Danny have known each other for a couple decades, and have been working actively together on the clock for at least 5 years. It also sounds like Jeff may have had significant involvement in helping to put the team together and actually make it happen, and he's philosophically invested in its purpose.
Yeah, this article seriously rubs me the wrong way. The tone throughout is "Rich Nerd Buys Cool Toy." And in that context a lot of the talk about the clock's "greater purpose" comes off as bootlicking.
If I were Bezos, I'd be particularly upset about what the writer puts into his mouth about the Gates Foundation and other charities - "Well, Bill Gates has already cured AIDS and malaria, so all that's left for me is to build a fuck-off huge clock!"
While this article seems solid, I think it might push the gee whiz engineering aspects of the project (of which there are many very impressive ones) too much.
Bruce Sterling has a wonderful critique of the clock project and suggestions on how to impart it with some sort of higher level cultural permanency.
What is really heartening to me is that much of the clock design seems to have taken this into account: the constantly change chime sequence, the difficult to access location, etc.
The real cleverness seems to be in Hillis's mechanical digital logic for time-keeping; I looked up the patents once to look at the diagrams, and realized I had no idea what I was looking at. (Still looked pretty cool, though.)
I would add, for you silicon valley/SF residents, that longnow.org puts on monthly lectures (http://longnow.org/seminars/), some of which are very interesting. E.g. the next speaker is Timothy Ferriss.
In 10k years, in the year 12011. the human race is going to be extinct one way or the other, either we all kill each other over resources or we advance way beyond biological and physical barriers, I hope someone finds this clock and thinks, how quaint.
Though it will probably just be a novelty, as we would stumble upon a hole in the ground some animal left in the jungle. The animal thinks it's a genius, we shrug and say eh, I could make that in 5 seconds.
