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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, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 27 2018, @12:27AM (1 child)
I have written will over a few million lines of code at this point. NONE and I mean NONE of it is in use anymore. Anywhere.
Code is ephemeral. We write it. It is used for awhile and then it is gone. At first I was kind of mad. I had put a ton of work into that stuff. But then I realized with no value the code should go away. It is in the way of new code that can replace my code that no longer holds any value.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Tuesday February 27 2018, @01:09PM
Some of my code has been running continually on large commercial systems for about 30 years. I say continually, as the systems it runs on have been rebooted occasionally, and swapped out for new hardware less frequently. I didn't expect it to be in use that long when I wrote it, but it 'does the job'. and there has never been any pressing need to rewrite it. I suspect there is a fair amount of code like it spread across the world: nothing cutting edge - just 'logical glue' tying other applications together. It's not big, its not important, and any competent programmer could write a replacement very easily. It happens to be written in FORTRAN-77, which is unusual, as most such code is probably written in a COBOL variant. There's probably a fair amount of MUMPS code around, too, and probably JCL, REXX and CICS.