
Jeff Bezos commissioning a giant clock to last 10,000 years. - teej
http://www.10000yearclock.net/learnmore.html?
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nl
[http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2011/06/the_clock_in_...](http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2011/06/the_clock_in_th.php)
is a much more detailed article from Kevin Kelly, who is involved in the
LongNow foundation.

~~~
JacobAldridge
And here is the HN discussion on that great article, from last week -
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2665380>

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gwern
It's such a neat topic that I can't really begrudge reposts, and the homepage
seems to include different details.

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JacobAldridge
Agreed - I was happy to repost the comments as well to add some more to the
burgeoning discussion.

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zimpenfish
You know people were working on this years before Bezos decided to fund it and
donate land?

"The idea for the clock has been around since Danny Hillis first proposed it
in WIRED magazine in 1995. Since then, Hillis and others have built prototypes
and created a nonprofit, the Long Now Foundation, to work on the clock and
promote long-term thinking."

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rudepeklo
It's written in the article:

"The father of the Clock is Danny Hillis. He's been thinking about and working
on the Clock since 1989."

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marcamillion
I love how Bezos chooses to spend his money. When you think of being a
billionaire, you (or the common train of thought is) think of consuming stuff
or investing in businesses/buying companies.

You hardly think about doing large civilization-type stuff. Or rather, I
hardly hear about it so I don't think about it much.

But this is so awesome. Feels like we are in the days of the Roman empire that
made statues and told stories of legends from generation-to-generation.

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biot
Literally, what makes it tick? Is there some crazy large pendulum powered by
tidal forces that triggers the once per year tick?

edit: Details found here: <http://longnow.org/clock/principles/> ... though
I'm a bit disappointed it seems it will require human intervention.

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dexen
_> ..it seems it will require human intervention._

The article [1] linked to by nl describes it quite well.

There are three separate energy reserves in the clock. The hands (dials)
mechanism requires human winding -- but only to indicate time, which is kept
independently. The chime mechanism is to be primarily ran on human winding.
The main (timekeeping) mechanism extracts energy from thermal differences
between day and night, and may also be wound by humans.

Moreover, if the main mechanism's reserve accumulates enough energy, it is
engineered to overflow and wind up the chime mechanism -- thus the chime will
ring once in a while even without humans to wind it. Quite cute, if you ask
me.

Another cunning contraption uses Sun's thermal energy for adjusting the clock
to solar time (apparent time).

\----

[1]
[http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2011/06/the_clock_in_...](http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2011/06/the_clock_in_th.php)

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ThomPete
Not in the same scale at all.

But a friend of my father an old hacker (reverse engineered apple2 back in the
days and is just crazy good at hacking together stuff) build this
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jens_Olsen%27s_World_Clock> in half the size al
in hand.

One of the cogs takes 400 years to rotate around it's own axis.

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dereg
How do you measure/test the life of something that's supposed to last for a
really long time?

For example, we refit our house with some (beautiful) CREE LED downlamps that
are supposed to last about 25 years. While that's nice to know, is it possible
to test that claim, or is it purely theoretical? It's not like they have been
keeping the same bulb on since 1986.

~~~
dtegart
Former Reliability Engineer here. Not sure for bulbs, since my experience was
automotive, but I imaging it is similar. In general, we tried to determine all
the factors that lead to failure - vibration, force, impurities, sunlight etc,
then you try to accelerate these. So for sunlight, you might raise the
intensity of UV etc. There are settings so X hours of acceleration == to X
years normal use. These settings are developed in a variety of ways. After you
run the test, you apply some stats analysis and a bit of handwaving and
proclaim 25 years.

~~~
gcb
interesting. are those ever applied all together?

~~~
fraserharris
Yes. In those experiments goal is to figure out the most likely failure
mechanism, not the estimated lifetime.

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fastfinner
This is exactly the type of rich person that I love. Contributing to public
art and creating cultural value.

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kashif
I mentioned this to someone and they thought it might start a religion
(eventually) - I think it just might.

~~~
wmf
That's covered in _Anathem_ ; you should check it out.

~~~
alanfalcon
Anathem was the first thing I thought about when I read this article. A quick
Google Search shows that Neal Stephenson was unsurprisingly inspired by the
Long Now Foundation, so the parallels between this project and the novel are
not remotely coincidental. (To me that makes it all the more cool).

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erik_nygren
Anathem anyone?

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geuis
Yes. I own mathic.org. This clock will need a math...

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pavel_lishin
Would you mind putting something up on it?

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geuis
I'd love to but I've never been known what it should be. Any ideas?

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pavel_lishin
Honestly, anything is better than a dead Godaddy domain.

I have a few dead domains that I basically registered during a drunken binge;
<http://widgetsex.com/> is a good example, the dog you'll see is my friend's
and his name is widget; if you let it refresh long enough, you should see an
easter egg.

If you want real content, I'd probably just put up some links to information
about Anathem, the clock, and the Long Now foundation, with maybe a contact
form that accepts suggestions that are better than mine :P

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superbeefy
Here is Alex Rose of the long now foundation talking about the engineering
behind the 10,000 year clock
[http://fora.tv/2011/05/22/Alexander_Rose_Engineering_of_the_...](http://fora.tv/2011/05/22/Alexander_Rose_Engineering_of_the_10000_Year_Clock)

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athst
It definitely reinforces Bezos' long-term view of business that he always
talks about. And the subtext here is that he is building Amazon to be a
company that is still around 10,000 years from now.

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yarapavan
Wired Article: [http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/06/10000-year-
clock/all/...](http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/06/10000-year-clock/all/1)

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rch
One of the 'guidelines for a long-lived, long-valuable institution' is 'ally
with competition'.

\-- <http://longnow.org/about/>

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clutchski
Alas, how we'll hollow out a mountain that'll stand for ages, so a rich man
has a place for his wrist watch.

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Apocryphon
A huge clock is nice, but we need a secret giant archive of humanity's
intellectual works to go with it. We need a Foundation to support the clock
keepers who will maintain this clock.

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clistctrl
The purpose of the clock is going to get lost, and eventually there's going to
be holo-documentaries on how the 20th century "Americans" predicted the end of
the world.

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younata
I think that, as part of the clock, a sign should be placed near it that
states "not predicting the end of the world."

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shazow
I can just see the "not" getting removed at some point in history and hijinks
ensue.

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innes
Look upon my big clock, ye mighty, and despair.

 _Edit: apologies for light-hearted comment._

 _Edit2: amazing how quickly you get slow-banned on News.YC. Thanks
downvoters._

~~~
thucydides
Not fair: I instantly thought of Ozymandias, too.

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pgagliardi
At first glance, I read the headline as giant cock. I mean if you're going to
memorialize something for 10k years?

