I had read the portion you quoted and found it interesting as well. I've always been fascinated by long running processes. I'm sure you might have heard about

I had read the portion you quoted and found it interesting as well. I've always been fascinated by long running processes. I'm sure you might have heard about the Clock of the Long Now [1] (Wikipedia article [2] seems more useful than the official website), which is meant to work for 10000 years. It's under construction, but their strategies to handle adversities over a 10000 year period worth looking into. Related to that, I've read about an attempt by a software engineer presumably named Brandur who, inspired by the aforementioned clock, has attempted to build a software that would send out tweets for the next 10000 years [3]. While I personally feel it probably wouldn't succeed because there's too many things that can go wrong, it was nice to read the considerations that went into the program. Perhaps more than tweeting for the next 10000 years itself, Brandur was really trying to point out that it's difficult to build long lasting software products. Writing software that endures for a long time without too much additional maintenance is something I'd like to do. Another long running — though in comparison to the above much smaller — group of equipments are the space probes Voyager 1 (launched in 1977), Voyager 2 (1977) and New Horizons (2006). Unless I'm mistaken they all continue to function in limited ways and continue to send back data to the earth. Isn't it mind-blowing that something that left Earth about 45 years ago still works?! (Or maybe it's not mind blowing because I guess space doesn't have as much distrubances as the Earth). I also like long running processes in nature. Comets are one of them. Isn't it just so cool that some of them actually (very likely) come from Oort cloud and their orbits can take hundreds or even thousands of years? Halley's Comet — which has an orbital period of 76 years, and whose appearances have been recorded by various people in various places over the past couple of thousand years — will show up again in 2061, nearly 40 years from now. I sincerely hope I can see it then. Infact I have a calendar reminder set up for it in 2061 July. Just in case I forget. (The calendar program I currently use might die first. Or I could be dead). [1] https://longnow.org/clock/ https://longnow.org/clock/ [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_of_the_Long_Now https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_of_the_Long_Now [3] https://brandur.org/10000-years https://brandur.org/10000-years