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Jeff Bezos commissioning a giant clock to last 10,000 years.
- erik_nygren 15y agoAnathem anyone?
- klbarry 15y agoNeal Stephenson was inspired by this exact clock for the book.
- erik_nygren 15y agoAha, figures. Would have been surprised if it had been the other way around, he doesn't seem to have any ideas that are his own. Then again, I guess that's the hypothesis of somethingrather - there are no new ideas.
- arethuza 15y ago"there are no new ideas" There is an order of avout in Anathem, the Lorites, who are based around that very idea.
- alanfalcon 15y agohttp://www.everythingisaremix.info/everything-is-a-remix-part-3/ http://www.everythingisaremix.info/everything-is-a-remix-par...
- geuis 15y agoYes. I own mathic.org. This clock will need a math...
- wmf 15y agoThis location is remote enough that it should survive the sacks (as long as the extras don't build a city around it).
- pavel_lishin 15y agoWould you mind putting something up on it?
- geuis 15y agoI'd love to but I've never been known what it should be. Any ideas?
- pavel_lishin 15y agoHonestly, 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/ 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
- biot 15y agoLiterally, 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/ http://longnow.org/clock/principles/ ... though I'm a bit disappointed it seems it will require human intervention.
- Robin_Message 15y agoHuman intervention to activate the dials and wind the chimes, but the timekeeping is good for 10000 years (they went for daily temperature changes as well as the pendulum.) From http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2011/06/the_clock_in_th.php http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2011/06/the_clock_in_...: So how does the Clock keep going if no one visits it for months, or years, or perhaps decades? If it is let to run down between visits, who would keep resetting it? The Clock is designed to run for 10,000 years even if no one ever visits (although it would not display the correct time till someone visited). If there is no attention for long periods of time the Clock uses the energy captured by changes in the temperature between day and night on the mountain top above to power its time-keeping apparatus. In a place like a top of a mountain, this diurnal difference of tens of degrees in temperature is significant and thus powerful. Thermal power has been used for small mantel clocks before, but it has not been done before at this scale. The differential power is transmitted to the interior of the Clock by long metal rods. As long as the sun shines and night comes, the Clock can keep time itself, without human help. But it can’t ring its chimes for long by itself, or show the time it knows, so it needs human visitors.
- dexen 15y ago> ..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_th.php http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2011/06/the_clock_in_...
- zimpenfish 15y agoYou 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 15y agoIt'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."
- lo_fye 15y agoTotally. I think using the word "commissioned" in the headline is very misleading. It implies that Bezos paid to have it designed & created, when in fact he's just giving Hillis the money he needs to finally make it a reality.
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- nl 15y agohttp://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2011/06/the_clock_in_th.php http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2011/06/the_clock_in_... is a much more detailed article from Kevin Kelly, who is involved in the LongNow foundation.
- JacobAldridge 15y agoAnd here is the HN discussion on that great article, from last week - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2665380 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2665380
- gwern 15y agoIt's such a neat topic that I can't really begrudge reposts, and the homepage seems to include different details.
- JacobAldridge 15y agoAgreed - I was happy to repost the comments as well to add some more to the burgeoning discussion.
- edw 15y agoIf you find yourself in SF between Fisherman's Wharf and the Golden Gate bridge, you should check out the Long Now Museum. It's a charming little tribute to impractical arty earnest nerd idealism. It's not a museum in the traditional sense, but interesting.
- dereg 15y agoHow 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.
- yread 15y agowell you can let 1000 of them run for a year and from the ratio of those that failed calculate (or rather guesstimate) for how many years can more than 500 be still running. It's not perfect, but for a perfect solution you would need something like a time machine, I guess. edit: this article linked from wiki has nice explanations http://db.usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/schroeder/schroeder_html/index.html http://db.usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/schroeder/schroeder_...
- StrawberryFrog 15y agoSome failures are at a random distribution - running 1000 for a year will help you estimate that. But any moving part has a finite lifetime due to wear, and you want to know how long this is. Running lots of them for 1/1000 of the expected lifespan shouldn't produce any at all of this kind of failure.
- wmf 15y agoThe normal speed of the clock is very slow, so it should be easy to run it at an accelerated rate to test wear. (There are limits, though; apparently the Difference Engine jams frequently if you overclock it.)
- dtegart 15y agoFormer 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.
- yarapavan 15y agoWired Article: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/06/10000-year-clock/all/1 http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/06/10000-year-clock/all/...
- brad22 15y agoi read that as cock. 11
- ThomPete 15y agoNot 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 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.
- clistctrl 15y agoThe 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.
- gcb 15y agowhat do you mean hollo documentaries? we will get back to the stone age between those two things.
- jerf 15y agoIn 10,000 years, humans could repeatedly cycle between "Stone Age" and "holo documentaries". Civilization as we know it isn't that old, technological civilization even less so.
- pavel_lishin 15y agoI don't have a citation, but I've read that if we fall, we won't get back up. The easily mineable metals, minerals and fuel sources have been used up - starting again from scratch would be incredibly difficult. (Larry Niven addresses this somewhat in his novel The Mote In God's Eye. I can't really elaborate without spoilers. :P)
- wmf 15y agoOTOH, people could mine already-manufactured stuff from landfills; see World Made by Hand. Speaking of cyclic history, I also liked "The Peddler's Apprentice".
- pavel_lishin 15y agoI wonder how viable that is. In a world where we're considering sucking oil out of sand and stealing air conditioners for $2 worth of copper, I'm surprised there aren't more landfill reclamation projects - so maybe that's strong evidence that landfills don't contain as many goodies as we think. Plus, you're not going to find coal or oil at a landfill, except in the form of plastic.
- athst 15y agoIt 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.
- fastfinner 15y agoThis is exactly the type of rich person that I love. Contributing to public art and creating cultural value.
- rch 15y agoOne of the 'guidelines for a long-lived, long-valuable institution' is 'ally with competition'. -- http://longnow.org/about/ http://longnow.org/about/
- innes 15y agoLook 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 15y agoNot fair: I instantly thought of Ozymandias, too.
- kashif 15y agoI mentioned this to someone and they thought it might start a religion (eventually) - I think it just might.
- wmf 15y agoThat's covered in Anathem; you should check it out.
- alanfalcon 15y agoAnathem 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).
- pgagliardi 15y agoAt first glance, I read the headline as giant cock. I mean if you're going to memorialize something for 10k years?
- dolvlo 15y agoWho DIDN'T read this as a GIANT COCK?
- marcamillion 15y agoI 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.
- clutchski 15y agoAlas, how we'll hollow out a mountain that'll stand for ages, so a rich man has a place for his wrist watch.
- Apocryphon 15y agoA 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.
- superbeefy 15y agoHere 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_10000_Year_Clock http://fora.tv/2011/05/22/Alexander_Rose_Engineering_of_the_...