SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 3, Insightful) by realDonaldTrump on Tuesday February 27 2018, @01:33AM
Did you ever hear of "Y2K"? You never hear about it. People don't know this, there was something called "Y2K," which is what the computer people called the year 2000. And all the cyber was supposed to go boom. Because they did the years, in cyber, as 98, 99, 00. And 00 in cyber, in the computer, is zero. Which is less than 99. Big problem, right? Only it didn't happen, we were fine. Because the cyber changes so fast. Which is why nobody heard of it, it was a nothing. You wait and see, the year 10,000 will be a nothing too. They say the years will go 9998, 9999, 0000, they won't. Because the cyber will change before it's a problem.
You love to write, so do I. Let me tell you, I wrote a very political book years ago in the year 2000, The America We Deserve, and I said in that book that we better be careful with this guy named Osama bin Laden. I mean I really study this stuff. I really find it very interesting, and even though I’m a businessman I find it, I’ve always found, I’ve always been involved in politics -- I said we better be careful with Osama bin Laden. There’s a guy named Osama bin Laden. Nobody really knew who he was. But he was nasty. He was saying really nasty things about our country and what he wants to do to it. And I wrote in the book, this was 2000, two years before the World Trade Center came down, I talked to you about Osama bin Laden, you better take him out. I said he’s going to crawl under a rock. You better take him out. And now people are seeing that, they’re saying, "You know, Trump predicted Osama bin Laden" -- which actually is true. Believe me. And two years later, a year and a half later he knocked down the World Trade Center. Because we had a President who didn't read my books. He read a picture book about a goat. And he sat reading that book while those HORRIFIC attacks went on. Sad!