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Engineering The 10,000 Year Clock
- drallison 15y agoI 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 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.
- thebigshane 15y agoDefinitely 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/Long_Now_Foundation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...