Like those insane gear ratio videos on YouTube... You know the final gear is turning, logically, but the fact that the Sun will eat the Earth long before the gear completes a single turn lends a strange perspective.

I saw a neat one where they put the last gear in a block of cement while still spinning the first one quite fast.

Is the idea that it never moves, or that the cement will degrade by the time it does?

I think the artist put it as "and then the last gear turns so slowly it doesn't really matter, so I cast it in concrete."

Assuming we're talking about Arthur Gansons "Machine with concrete"[0] of course. I quite like how a lot of his work seems to have a punchline to it.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5q-BH-tvxEg

It moves slowly enough that the wheel will approximately never turn enough to generate significant torque.

Reminds me of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment

"Each droplet forms and falls over a period of about a decade."

"it is expected there is enough pitch in the funnel to allow it to continue for at least another hundred years"

I guess with enough pitch you an make a millennium-scale "water" (liquid) clock?

clock of the Long Now!