
Engineering The 10,000 Year Clock - Arjuna
https://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/profiles/engineering-the-10-000year-clock
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drallison
I find very idea of the 10,000 year clock fascinating. There are few human
artifacts which are older than 10,000 years and none which perform an
autonomous function like measuring time. <http://www.longnow.org> As with
Asimov's Foundation Series books, the Long Now Foundation clock has a social
component whose function is to fix things when they need attention. Time will
tell whether they made the right choices.

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thebigshane
Definitely agree. As Bezos says: "It's a challenging engineering problem and
so fun in its own right"

Brings a whole new perspective to "UX" design:

    
    
       But what if you were the first person to visit the clock
       in centuries, or even millennia? Given the vagaries of 
       human history, it's reasonable to expect that people 
       might one day forget the clock even exists. So for the 
       sake of the wayward traveler who just happens upon the 
       clock by accident, the operation had to be obvious just 
       from looking at it.
    

But the part that hit me the hardest:

    
    
       For all the creative deliberation, hard work, and 
       long-term planning, there's one thought that continues 
       to haunt these engineers. "My biggest fear is that 
       people will destroy it on purpose," Rose says.
    

EDIT: There is some irony here that the Wikipedia article for The Long Now
Foundation is marked for deletion:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Long_Now_Foundation)

