7 ms·

A 500-Year-Long Science Experiment

94 points by longdefeat 8y ago

daveguy 8y ago
The article is about an experiment to periodically reconstitute two species of bacteria for the next 500 years. The instructions for the experiment are stored on a USB disk and on paper. Talking about how to keep the instructions up to date the article states: "No strategy is likely to be completely foolproof 500 years later. So the team asks that researchers at each 25-year time point copy the instructions so that they remain linguistically and technologically up to date." Seems like - if they also keep each version from today through 500 years - this may be almost as interesting as the bacteria longevity itself. Seems like this would be an interesting experiment in itself.
- everdev 8y ago
  And why stop at 500 years? Maybe instead have a stopping point if data remains consistent for X number of years.
  - eridius 8y ago
    They have to stop eventually because there's a limited number of vials, and presumably every test consumes some of those vials. I'd assume the 500 year mark is when they're going to run out of vials.
    - bonzini 8y ago
      They could go on with the backups.
- veddox 8y ago
  > Seems like this would be an interesting experiment in itself. And one we have already carried out many thousands of times. Just ask a classicist or a medieval historian ;-)
  - singularity2001 8y ago
    As useless as the bible might seem otherwise, from a linguistic point of view it is may be the most valuable document in the world. It is _the_ standard corpus for many languages going back 2000 years. The actual content becomes secondary.
  - daveguy 8y ago
    I see your point, but I was talking about a controlled experiment with specific changes to a specific text at short defined intervals. The texts that historians study -- are they so frequently updated and such a well defined piece of text for a specific purpose? Maybe some are, but from what I understand new editions are much more haphazard (there isn't a specific simple goal) and old editions are often lost. I wasn't aware of a specific long term language experiment specifically designed to keep revisions over a long term, but then I'm definitely not a historian. Just a thought.
    - elliekelly 8y ago
      > I wasn't aware of a specific long term language experiment specifically designed to keep revisions over a long term It doesn't even come close to ticking all of the boxes you've mentioned but perhaps the bible is the closest thing to what you've described?
      - daveguy 8y ago
        Agreed 100%, the bible is by far the closest that I can think of too. One lack there is there are usually multiple translations to a single language, but updates within language (eg KJV to New International) doesn't come along nearly as often as that initial "authoritative" translation. As singularity2001 said, from a linguist perspective it's probably the most valuable document in the world, regardless of content.
- drdeadringer 8y ago
  I first came to realize such a problem of advancing technology and compatibility when I watched 'Max Headroom', specifically this particular scene involving Blank Reg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me6oNB4M7N0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me6oNB4M7N0 Of course, there are sociological considerations in the mix as well.
gumby 8y ago
This reminds me of the 639-year-long piece being played in a German church (Cage’s “As slow as Possible”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_Slow_as_Possible https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_Slow_as_Possible ). Religious and educational institutions are likely the only ones with such longevity & continuity (not surprisingly they’ve been intertwined in several cultures for millennia)
- rzzzt 8y ago
  Arthur Ganson's "Machine with Concrete" is an installation that has 1:50 gears put in sequence, to the power of 12; the last section is embedded in concrete: https://youtu.be/5q-BH-tvxEg https://youtu.be/5q-BH-tvxEg There's also the pitch drop experiment, which IMO rivals watching grass grow: https://smp.uq.edu.au/pitch-drop-experiment https://smp.uq.edu.au/pitch-drop-experiment
  - benj111 8y ago
    >Arthur Ganson's "Machine with Concrete" I'd have called it unstoppable force and immovable object personally. I can see it having several disappointing failure modes though.
- shezi 8y ago
  There are various companies and institutions that have been around for more than 500 years, in various fields. Also schools and research institutions. Wikipedia has a list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_institutions_in_continuous_operation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_institutions_in... Most of the universities I can see on that list are not religiously affiliated. I think that in our quick-pace life where old technologies are 20 years old, we sometimes forget that the world is an old place.
  - gumby 8y ago
    It’s all one of perspective. In the case of the older educational institutions (e.g. King’s school, Bologna), the dividing lines between church and state were messy and overlapping and even now if they are not religiously affiliated their roots may lie there. My high school is “merely” 350+ years old (predates Newton) and started out with a curriculum that was mostly bible and classics although it would be considered unaffiliated today. I used the two words longevity and continuity because something can be old but have transformed unrecognizably, or close thereto (e.g. while amcountry may be ancient, the monarchies at its head can change radically. Likewise even some ancient commercial enterprises).
emptybits 8y ago
Designing for time scales that dwarf the designers' lifetimes is fascinating. Another one is The 10,000 Year Clock by The Long Now Foundation.[1] A huge clock is being built into a mountain owned by Jeff Bezos that will keep time for 10,000 years with minimal maintenance. [1] http://longnow.org/clock/ http://longnow.org/clock/
- pontifier 8y ago
  As I get older I am getting increasingly annoyed by anything that requires me to keep up with some sort of schedule or it falls apart. I particularly loathe monthly events (especially bills and subscriptions), and even yearly tasks seem like they are coming faster and faster. I'm starting to wish everything would be designed with unattended 10,000 year time scales in mind.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Totally agreed. Sci-fi books and shows often feature a trope of the protagonists unearthing some ancient alien/precursor tech that's many thousands of years old, and still in working condition[0]. Ever since encountering this theme, I too find myself wishing tech was built for longevity. Wouldn't it be cool if in far future, my great-grandkids find some piece of tech I was using, and it would still be working? Related is my hatred for planned obsolescence and related business moves - often justified by saying that good engineering means minimizing costs, and thus designing for "just right" longevity; somehow this "just right" lifespan always ends up being perfect for generating recurring revenue for the manufacturer. Totally by coincidence. -- [0] - See e.g. StarGate series, which deals with this a lot - from the stargate network itself to various other ancient doodads they find and repurpose or reverse-engineer.
    - kbenson 8y ago
      > Wouldn't it be cool if in far future, my great-grandkids find some piece of tech I was using, and it would still be working? We have this, it's just relegated to the extremely expensive or extremely simple. Basically, metal items without too many fine parts. Old swords and knives might last for a few hundred years in a good environment (and alloys might help? That's a technology of itself), and gold lasts quite a long time, but is limited in which items it's appropriate to use for. It's not impossible to believe that my great grandkids might use my favorite paring knife. It's also not all that special sounding, since we've had that for centuries, so it doesn't seem all that amazing. I imagine there was some point in history it did though.
ocfnash 8y ago
This reminds me of pitch-drop experiments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment Pitch flows _slowly_. Apparently it is so viscous that at room temperature a suspended blob might release a drop about once a decade or so. A few university physics departments have had experiments to watch pitch drop running for almost a century.
- veddox 8y ago
  Guess what? The first pitch-drop experiment is mentioned in the article... ;-)
  - ocfnash 8y ago
    I plead guilty to commenting without reading. Thank you for the gentle reminder!
veddox 8y ago
Good article! I just have one nag: although the science behind it is good, the history is less so... > “Of course, for an experiment to go on like this, I’m assuming that science still looks somewhat like today, in the sense that universities will exist, there will be professors with labs, and so on,” says Lenski. “Yet if one looks not so far into the past, that isn’t how science was done.” I have the highest regards for Lenski as a biologist, but this is pretty wrong (unless he was quoted out of context). Universities have been around for the past millennium, and have not fundamentally changed during that time. Provided civilisation survives, I have no reason to expect they won't survive the next 500 years. Also, the issue with how to preserve the instructions is not as big a deal as they make out. There's plenty of paper books still legible from 500 years ago. As long as you are careful about storing it, that shouldn't be a problem. (Though of course, creating new copies is still prudent.)
- klmr 8y ago
  > Universities have […] not fundamentally changed during [the past millennium]. I mean, that’s just completely wrong. The scientific method itself isn’t that old. The institution of Universities has been around for a thousand years, give or take. But if you were to compare them now and then, you’d find them mostly unrecognisable. Their aims, their organisation, their funding, their constituents … pretty much everything changed, multiple times, over the years. You might argue that they won’t change enough in 500 years to threaten the experiment and you might be right (I certainly hope so) but it’s far from obvious.
  - veddox 8y ago
    First of all, universities are not per se linked to the scientific method as we understand it nowadays. (Also, assuming that the scientific method is the only valid way to achieve knowledge completely ignores almost everything that is not a natural science. But that is an aside, because we're specifically talking about universities as an institution here.) And I still argue that universities have not changed their fundamental nature, much as their exterior might have. Universities were founded as a universitas magistrorum et scholarium, a community of teachers and scholars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University), as they still are today. Already in medieval times, their two-fold purpose was to school the next generation of leaders and thinkers, and to provide a place for new knowledge to be discovered. That goal has not changed in any way. Even when you go into further detail, things haven't changed as much as you make out. Funding continues to come from tuition fees, governments, and other big public organisations with a stake in the outcome of the universities' work. Their students continue to be mostly well-to-do young people aiming for a higher career; be that administrative, educational, theological, medical, legal, or academic. Their organisation in many places still revolves around the core concept of a group of professors, each in charge of their own research group (with attached students), and collectively in charge of the whole corporation. Other things too: the teaching forms of lectures and seminaries, the international community of university scholars, all that hasn't really changed in the last 1000 years. Book suggestion: James Hannam, "God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science", is a good popular introduction into scholarship in the Middle Ages, and specifically talks about the rise of the university in this period. (https://www.amazon.com/Gods-Philosophers-Medieval-Foundations-Science/dp/1848311508/ https://www.amazon.com/Gods-Philosophers-Medieval-Foundation...)
tw1010 8y ago
Linguistically updating the instructions every 25 years seems a little unnecessary. We have plenty of documents from 1500 that scholars have little problem parsing.
- dmurray 8y ago
  Ideally you would want to reproduce the experiment without needing to involve a language scholar. And even if unnecessary for linguistics, it may be useful for the other reasons mentioned in the article (new scientific methods, new forms of writing and archival).
- benj111 8y ago
  Maybe its just to keep it in peoples minds. 100+ years means several generations have passed through without interacting with the experiment, so it just gets filed away, and forgotten. 25 years you're likely to have at least 1 old timer (when was Logan's Run set?) that was around the last time a vial was opened.

94 points by longdefeat 8y ago

The article is about an experiment to periodically reconstitute two species of bacteria for the next 500 years. The instructions for the experiment are stored on a USB disk and on paper. Talking about how to keep the instructions up to date the article states: "No strategy is likely to be completely foolproof 500 years later. So the team asks that researchers at each 25-year time point copy the instructions so that they remain linguistically and technologically up to date." Seems like - if they also keep each version from today through 500 years - this may be almost as interesting as the bacteria longevity itself. Seems like this would be an interesting experiment in itself.

everdev 8y ago
And why stop at 500 years? Maybe instead have a stopping point if data remains consistent for X number of years.
- eridius 8y ago
  They have to stop eventually because there's a limited number of vials, and presumably every test consumes some of those vials. I'd assume the 500 year mark is when they're going to run out of vials.
  - bonzini 8y ago
    They could go on with the backups.
veddox 8y ago
> Seems like this would be an interesting experiment in itself. And one we have already carried out many thousands of times. Just ask a classicist or a medieval historian ;-)
- singularity2001 8y ago
  As useless as the bible might seem otherwise, from a linguistic point of view it is may be the most valuable document in the world. It is _the_ standard corpus for many languages going back 2000 years. The actual content becomes secondary.
- daveguy 8y ago
  I see your point, but I was talking about a controlled experiment with specific changes to a specific text at short defined intervals. The texts that historians study -- are they so frequently updated and such a well defined piece of text for a specific purpose? Maybe some are, but from what I understand new editions are much more haphazard (there isn't a specific simple goal) and old editions are often lost. I wasn't aware of a specific long term language experiment specifically designed to keep revisions over a long term, but then I'm definitely not a historian. Just a thought.
  - elliekelly 8y ago
    > I wasn't aware of a specific long term language experiment specifically designed to keep revisions over a long term It doesn't even come close to ticking all of the boxes you've mentioned but perhaps the bible is the closest thing to what you've described?
    - daveguy 8y ago
      Agreed 100%, the bible is by far the closest that I can think of too. One lack there is there are usually multiple translations to a single language, but updates within language (eg KJV to New International) doesn't come along nearly as often as that initial "authoritative" translation. As singularity2001 said, from a linguist perspective it's probably the most valuable document in the world, regardless of content.
drdeadringer 8y ago
I first came to realize such a problem of advancing technology and compatibility when I watched 'Max Headroom', specifically this particular scene involving Blank Reg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me6oNB4M7N0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me6oNB4M7N0 Of course, there are sociological considerations in the mix as well.

gumby 8y ago

This reminds me of the 639-year-long piece being played in a German church (Cage’s “As slow as Possible”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_Slow_as_Possible https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_Slow_as_Possible ). Religious and educational institutions are likely the only ones with such longevity & continuity (not surprisingly they’ve been intertwined in several cultures for millennia)

rzzzt 8y ago
Arthur Ganson's "Machine with Concrete" is an installation that has 1:50 gears put in sequence, to the power of 12; the last section is embedded in concrete: https://youtu.be/5q-BH-tvxEg https://youtu.be/5q-BH-tvxEg There's also the pitch drop experiment, which IMO rivals watching grass grow: https://smp.uq.edu.au/pitch-drop-experiment https://smp.uq.edu.au/pitch-drop-experiment
- benj111 8y ago
  >Arthur Ganson's "Machine with Concrete" I'd have called it unstoppable force and immovable object personally. I can see it having several disappointing failure modes though.
shezi 8y ago
There are various companies and institutions that have been around for more than 500 years, in various fields. Also schools and research institutions. Wikipedia has a list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_institutions_in_continuous_operation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_institutions_in... Most of the universities I can see on that list are not religiously affiliated. I think that in our quick-pace life where old technologies are 20 years old, we sometimes forget that the world is an old place.
- gumby 8y ago
  It’s all one of perspective. In the case of the older educational institutions (e.g. King’s school, Bologna), the dividing lines between church and state were messy and overlapping and even now if they are not religiously affiliated their roots may lie there. My high school is “merely” 350+ years old (predates Newton) and started out with a curriculum that was mostly bible and classics although it would be considered unaffiliated today. I used the two words longevity and continuity because something can be old but have transformed unrecognizably, or close thereto (e.g. while amcountry may be ancient, the monarchies at its head can change radically. Likewise even some ancient commercial enterprises).

emptybits 8y ago

Designing for time scales that dwarf the designers' lifetimes is fascinating. Another one is The 10,000 Year Clock by The Long Now Foundation.[1] A huge clock is being built into a mountain owned by Jeff Bezos that will keep time for 10,000 years with minimal maintenance. [1] http://longnow.org/clock/ http://longnow.org/clock/

pontifier 8y ago
As I get older I am getting increasingly annoyed by anything that requires me to keep up with some sort of schedule or it falls apart. I particularly loathe monthly events (especially bills and subscriptions), and even yearly tasks seem like they are coming faster and faster. I'm starting to wish everything would be designed with unattended 10,000 year time scales in mind.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Totally agreed. Sci-fi books and shows often feature a trope of the protagonists unearthing some ancient alien/precursor tech that's many thousands of years old, and still in working condition[0]. Ever since encountering this theme, I too find myself wishing tech was built for longevity. Wouldn't it be cool if in far future, my great-grandkids find some piece of tech I was using, and it would still be working? Related is my hatred for planned obsolescence and related business moves - often justified by saying that good engineering means minimizing costs, and thus designing for "just right" longevity; somehow this "just right" lifespan always ends up being perfect for generating recurring revenue for the manufacturer. Totally by coincidence. -- [0] - See e.g. StarGate series, which deals with this a lot - from the stargate network itself to various other ancient doodads they find and repurpose or reverse-engineer.
  - kbenson 8y ago
    > Wouldn't it be cool if in far future, my great-grandkids find some piece of tech I was using, and it would still be working? We have this, it's just relegated to the extremely expensive or extremely simple. Basically, metal items without too many fine parts. Old swords and knives might last for a few hundred years in a good environment (and alloys might help? That's a technology of itself), and gold lasts quite a long time, but is limited in which items it's appropriate to use for. It's not impossible to believe that my great grandkids might use my favorite paring knife. It's also not all that special sounding, since we've had that for centuries, so it doesn't seem all that amazing. I imagine there was some point in history it did though.

ocfnash 8y ago

This reminds me of pitch-drop experiments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment Pitch flows _slowly_. Apparently it is so viscous that at room temperature a suspended blob might release a drop about once a decade or so. A few university physics departments have had experiments to watch pitch drop running for almost a century.

veddox 8y ago
Guess what? The first pitch-drop experiment is mentioned in the article... ;-)
- ocfnash 8y ago
  I plead guilty to commenting without reading. Thank you for the gentle reminder!

veddox 8y ago

Good article! I just have one nag: although the science behind it is good, the history is less so... > “Of course, for an experiment to go on like this, I’m assuming that science still looks somewhat like today, in the sense that universities will exist, there will be professors with labs, and so on,” says Lenski. “Yet if one looks not so far into the past, that isn’t how science was done.” I have the highest regards for Lenski as a biologist, but this is pretty wrong (unless he was quoted out of context). Universities have been around for the past millennium, and have not fundamentally changed during that time. Provided civilisation survives, I have no reason to expect they won't survive the next 500 years. Also, the issue with how to preserve the instructions is not as big a deal as they make out. There's plenty of paper books still legible from 500 years ago. As long as you are careful about storing it, that shouldn't be a problem. (Though of course, creating new copies is still prudent.)

klmr 8y ago
> Universities have […] not fundamentally changed during [the past millennium]. I mean, that’s just completely wrong. The scientific method itself isn’t that old. The institution of Universities has been around for a thousand years, give or take. But if you were to compare them now and then, you’d find them mostly unrecognisable. Their aims, their organisation, their funding, their constituents … pretty much everything changed, multiple times, over the years. You might argue that they won’t change enough in 500 years to threaten the experiment and you might be right (I certainly hope so) but it’s far from obvious.
- veddox 8y ago
  First of all, universities are not per se linked to the scientific method as we understand it nowadays. (Also, assuming that the scientific method is the only valid way to achieve knowledge completely ignores almost everything that is not a natural science. But that is an aside, because we're specifically talking about universities as an institution here.) And I still argue that universities have not changed their fundamental nature, much as their exterior might have. Universities were founded as a universitas magistrorum et scholarium, a community of teachers and scholars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University), as they still are today. Already in medieval times, their two-fold purpose was to school the next generation of leaders and thinkers, and to provide a place for new knowledge to be discovered. That goal has not changed in any way. Even when you go into further detail, things haven't changed as much as you make out. Funding continues to come from tuition fees, governments, and other big public organisations with a stake in the outcome of the universities' work. Their students continue to be mostly well-to-do young people aiming for a higher career; be that administrative, educational, theological, medical, legal, or academic. Their organisation in many places still revolves around the core concept of a group of professors, each in charge of their own research group (with attached students), and collectively in charge of the whole corporation. Other things too: the teaching forms of lectures and seminaries, the international community of university scholars, all that hasn't really changed in the last 1000 years. Book suggestion: James Hannam, "God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science", is a good popular introduction into scholarship in the Middle Ages, and specifically talks about the rise of the university in this period. (https://www.amazon.com/Gods-Philosophers-Medieval-Foundations-Science/dp/1848311508/ https://www.amazon.com/Gods-Philosophers-Medieval-Foundation...)

tw1010 8y ago

Linguistically updating the instructions every 25 years seems a little unnecessary. We have plenty of documents from 1500 that scholars have little problem parsing.

dmurray 8y ago
Ideally you would want to reproduce the experiment without needing to involve a language scholar. And even if unnecessary for linguistics, it may be useful for the other reasons mentioned in the article (new scientific methods, new forms of writing and archival).
benj111 8y ago
Maybe its just to keep it in peoples minds. 100+ years means several generations have passed through without interacting with the experiment, so it just gets filed away, and forgotten. 25 years you're likely to have at least 1 old timer (when was Logan's Run set?) that was around the last time a vial was opened.