
How to build something that lasts 10k years - wpietri
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190611-how-to-build-something-that-lasts-10000-years
======
vincnetas
Finland is building nuclear waste storage facility which is planned to last
for 100.000 years.

There are quite few interesting design decisions to be made taking this
lifespan in to account, for example if current civilization will be wiped out,
what symbols you should put on a door to discourage someone in future to
opening the door.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoyKe-
HxmFk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoyKe-HxmFk)

~~~
phito
This place is a message... and part of a system of messages ...pay attention
to it!

Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a
powerful culture.

This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated
here... nothing valued is here.

What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning
about danger.

The danger is in a particular location... it increases towards a center... the
center of danger is here... of a particular size and shape, and below us.

The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.

The danger is to the body, and it can kill.

The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.

The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place
physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-
time_nuclear_waste_warnin...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-
time_nuclear_waste_warning_messages)

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
Funny thing is, if we discovered some ancient tomb or burial site with these
messages we'd write it off as superstition and open it up anyway. I'm not sure
some future civilization would be any different.

~~~
sago
I agree. Hiding something and saying "please don't look for it," seems
extraordinarily naïve of human nature.

If the threat is widespread human and environmental destruction, I wonder if
an additional layer of warning does not need to consist of more constrained
lethality. "We're going to show you what this stuff is, you should've really
paid attention to the warnings."

"It is a place of evil: all who venture into the pit die in agony within a few
days," seems like something that would have more cultural weight. And be
trivially re-discoverable at any point. People don't go wandering into lava to
see what's below. People wouldn't have stripped the Egyptian tombs if the
warnings on the wall consistently came true. Perhaps the best warning of
danger is danger.

And then, if the threat model is drilling, it seems to me very unlikely that a
future mining civilisation would not understand pictures, maps and diagrams
illustrating the content. Is an illustration really more culturally ambiguous
than language?

~~~
jaggederest
Especially given we know cave paintings from several thousand years ago are
relatively intelligible. People hunting bison.

------
ninju
The ROI for all the NASA investments

>Over 20 years ago when I started this project in researching bearings, we
found the perfect solution: an all ceramic bearing created for use in
satellites and spacecraft

>There was only one problem: when I first heard of these bearings, __they cost
tens of thousands of dollars __and were only used in aerospace.

>...they have become more common and are now __used in roller blades and
fidget spinners and can cost as little as $10 __

~~~
agumonkey
Who studies these evolutions ? Is there a fastest curve to low price ? not too
fast to avoid killing incentives for people working on it in the first place
but avoiding stalls too.

------
oftenwrong
"The Rosetta Stone didn't survive thousands of years in the desert because of
some intrinsic cultural value. It survived because it's made of stone. ... The
future disagrees about what is and is not important, and why. That's the
defining characteristic of the future. No one today cares what the Rosetta
Stone actually says, yet it is more important to us (as the key to
hieroglyphics) than it was to the society that made it."

[http://carlos.bueno.org/2008/08/save-
web.html](http://carlos.bueno.org/2008/08/save-web.html)

[https://web.archive.org/web/20171104052354/http://carlos.bue...](https://web.archive.org/web/20171104052354/http://carlos.bueno.org/2008/08/save-
web.html)

(I am a bit amused to realise, after reviewing the Internet Archive snapshots,
that this article has changed quite a bit over the years.)

~~~
masklinn
> "The Rosetta Stone didn't survive thousands of years in the desert because
> of some intrinsic cultural value.

I get the point but the reference is pretty crummy, the rosetta stone is a
very young artefact on the scale of long-term preservation (most extant bog
bodies are older).

------
newman8r
the lazy man's way to make something that will last thousands(or more) years:
dry stone masonry. I've built a few walls, they're not going anywhere.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_stone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_stone)

~~~
onion2k
The mechanical stability of a drystone wall is amazing, but the political
stability of the border it represents is very, very fragile. It won't fall
over but someone might knock it down. That's the problem the Long Now clock
might have solved - it's been marketed as a symbol of human persistence.
People are being persuaded that it's important. We maintain our symbolic
icons. That political stability is what might keep it standing for millenia,
unless people forget what it means.

~~~
jpalomaki
Could you get a space vehicle on a trajectory that brings it close to earth
only every 1000 - 10000 years?

Add there some mechanism that draws attention and transmits it’s message
through radio. Would it be doable to have some primitive electronics that
would survive so long?

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
Seems it would be possible to have it spin on its axis so that it reflects the
light from the sun towards Earth in some kind of pulsing flashing manner. That
would attract attention. No need for electronics. Of course encoding a message
in the flash would be almost impossible, but it could serve as a beacon for a
future civilisation to attempt to go up there and retrieve it.

~~~
glaurung_
Maybe facet the mirrors so that the reflections would flicker in some
something like Morse code. I imagine it would be very difficult to decipher
and could only convey a few bytes though.

Maybe just send a sealed capsule capable of re-entry into an orbit that would
actually intersect earth in a few hundred thousand years. I doubt we're
capable of that sort of precision though..

------
adolph
Snoopy may last that long:

 _After Stafford and Cernan docked with Charlie Brown and re-entered it,
Snoopy 's ascent stage was sent on a trajectory past the Moon into a
heliocentric orbit by firing its engine to fuel depletion (unlike the
subsequent Apollo 11 ascent stage, which was left in lunar orbit to eventually
crash; all ascent stages after Apollo 11 were instead intentionally steered
into the Moon to obtain readings from seismometers placed on the surface,
except for the one on Apollo 13, which did not land but was used as a "life
boat" to get the crew back to Earth, and burned up in Earth's atmosphere.)
Snoopy's ascent stage orbit was not tracked after 1969, and its current
location is unknown. In 2011, a group of amateur astronomers in the UK started
a project to search for it. It is the only once-crewed spacecraft still in
outer space without a crew._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_10](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_10)

~~~
chrischattin
They may have just succeeded...

[https://www.sciencealert.com/astronomers-are-98-sure-they-
ve...](https://www.sciencealert.com/astronomers-are-98-sure-they-ve-found-
snoopy-the-missing-apollo-capsule-drifting-in-space)

------
andrewla
The only way to build something that lasts 10k years is to build hundreds of
things designed to last 10k years, and maybe one or two of them will actually
last. That's the only technique that's worked in the past.

~~~
mywittyname
Some future archeologist is going to dig up a cell phone.

~~~
jandrese
And it will be a Nokia 3310 that still works and has 30% battery life
remaining.

------
bambax
> _engineers are building a clock in the Texan desert that will last for
> 10,000 years_

Well, we don't know that. There is no way to know. Selling this to rich guys
like Bezos is kind of like selling "after the rapture pet care"...

~~~
jotm
It wont last 10,000 years. Nothing more complicated than scribblings on a
tough rock will, and even those will likely be indecipherable.

Seed banks are especially funny/sad. They need to constantly produce seeds,
which means constant growth of male/female plants, under human supervision.

No seeds last more than a few years under ideal conditions. Even DNA is
unrecoverable/unusable after a few centuries iiirc.

~~~
asdff
>Even DNA is unrecoverable/unusable after a few centuries iiirc

Only if poorly stored. We have plenty of neanderthal DNA, because we have lots
of neanderthal teeth which we drill into to extract this ancient DNA. Properly
stored, DNA can last thousands of years, I'd wager indefinitely in the right
buffer and in liquid nitrogen.

------
Causality1
This is an admirable project but realistically speaking, six weeks after it's
no longer being visited every day some 4channer is going to hike out, break it
with a hammer, and then draw dicks on it.

~~~
jrootabega
They thought of that, the clock is almost completely made of hammers and
dicks.

------
juanuys
The best description of building something that lasts I've seen in recent
fiction is Cixin Liu's Death's End [1] where he writes [2] about mankind's
museum (a forever tombstone).

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death%27s_End](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death%27s_End)

[2]
[https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=nUkoCwAAQBAJ&pg=PT539&lp...](https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=nUkoCwAAQBAJ&pg=PT539&lpg=PT539&dq=death%27s+end+Luo+Ji+museum&source=bl&ots=ZnTy2OYgV4&sig=ACfU3U1SzAqJmzFS9kmwZvYfzKDtyyiD8w&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjq_aTzieTiAhUJxoUKHbCZBr0Q6AEwBnoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=death's%20end%20Luo%20Ji%20museum&f=false)

~~~
jandrese
The forever tombstone was destroyed when the universe was flattened.

------
theaeolist
Make it disposable. Make it from plastic.

~~~
oftenwrong
Perhaps our descendants, 10000 years in the future, will be exploring the
purpose of The Great Pacific garbage patch.

~~~
cobbzilla
Assuming some break with history or loss of cultural memory, after 10k years
of photodisintegration and absorption into the biosphere, there will be no
Garbage Patch.

Our descendants would then be left to wonder at the odd adaptations that life
must have made to accommodate complex polymers into their biology, and where
those complex polymers might have come from.

------
syn0byte
Step one I assume is calling it "interim" or "temporary".

------
ptah
If you can somehow come up with a way to keep time using a forest, it would be
way easier

~~~
aetherspawn
That’s a really interesting idea.

If you plant a tree that lasts for 10,000 years (is there such?), I wonder if
you can use its height or the shadow it casts (trunk thickness) to measure
time.

Of course, someone would just come and kill it. Unless you can make it
undesirable to get close to it.. for example fill it with thousands of snakes
and spiders.

~~~
abdullahkhalids
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest-
living_organis...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest-
living_organisms)

As far as we know, there are a few clonal plant colonies that have survived
longer than 10K years. No individual plants have quite made it to 10K, but
some have made it past 2-3K years.

~~~
scrumbledober
Scientists recently discovered a bristlecone pine over 5000 years old
[https://www.livescience.com/29152-oldest-tree-in-
world.html](https://www.livescience.com/29152-oldest-tree-in-world.html)

------
roland35
Without giving away any spoilers, this idea was touched on in Cixin Liu's
Three Body Problem (later on in trilogy) as a way to memorialize humanity to
other civilizations in the future.

------
grandridge
Make something out of plastic?

------
amypellegrini
I don't think software developers could survive this test...

------
KboPAacDA3
It may be designed for 10,000 years, but it will fail at year 3000 because the
gears will get clogged from the blood of human sacrifices.

~~~
jandrese
I think "designed to last for 10,000 years" and "moving parts" are largely
mutually exclusive.

------
FrozenVoid
Thats easy: build it out of 10m thick acid-resistant stainless steel walls.

------
tabtab
1\. use COBOL.

------
toinetoine
No memory leaks

------
msiyer
We can learn from Nature - atoms, photons, DNA... all last long. Really long.

~~~
jotm
Atoms, photons, sure. DNA is dead for all practical purposes after less than
1000 years.

~~~
asdff
We have neanderthal DNA sequenced. All depends on storage conditions.

