Construction begins on Jeff Bezos' $42 million 10,000-year clock
Installation has finally begun on Jeff Bezos' 10,000-year clock, a project that the Amazon CEO has invested $42 million in (along with a hollowed-out mountain in Texas that Bezos intends for a Blue Origin spaceport), with the goal of building a mechanical clock that will run for 10 millennia.
It's a monumental undertaking that Bezos and the crew of people designing and building the clock repeatedly compare to the Egyptian pyramids. And as with the pharaohs, it takes a certain amount of ego — even hubris — to consider building such a monument. But it's also an unparalleled engineering problem, challenging its makers to think about how to keep a machine intact, operational and accurate over a time span longer than most human-made objects have even existed.
Consider this: 10,000 years ago, our ancestors had barely begun making the transition from hunting and gathering to simple agriculture, and had just figured out how to cultivate gourds to use as bottles. What if those people had built a machine, set it in motion, and it was still running today? Would we understand how to use it? What would it tell us about them?
The actual idea for the clock comes from Danny Hillis, who originally proposed a 10,000-year clock in 1995 in Wired as a way to think about the long-term future of humanity and the planet. That idea grew into the Clock of the Long Now, a project by the Long Now Foundation, which Hillis went on to co-found to build an actual, working version of the proposed clock.
Also at CNBC.
(Score: 2) by archfeld on Monday February 26 2018, @09:57PM (1 child)
Reminds me of an episode of Futurama in which 'Great Pharaoh' Bender has his giant statue constructed. "Remember me"
For the NSA : Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, initiators, main charge, nuclear charge
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 27 2018, @06:02AM
Despite the fact that it's one of the most monumental and mathematically aware structures ever built on the face of the Earth, there is no explicit signature on the Great Pyramid of Egypt; there is only a very hidden and probably faked cartouche stating "Khufu" (a Pharaoh), but otherwise the Great Pyramid is utterly devoid of any sort of inscriptions. Unlike so many of the Ancient Egyptian sites, the inside of the pyramid is bare, providing no hieroglyphs, stories, pictures, names, reliefs, or anything to explain what it is, who built it, why it was built, how it was built, etc. NOTHING.