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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) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday February 27 2018, @03:18AM (4 children)
Why? At any given moment, there is no future yet, and the past is just a way we have of describing states of lesser entropy. None of this is first-order; it's ALL conditioned, ALL contingent. Just be in the now; that's really all there is.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday February 27 2018, @03:51AM (3 children)
While time changes when one observes fundamental particles, it is not possible to determine the direction in which time changes. Time only has a definite direction when one observes particle systems that are large enough to have measurable entropy.
That time increases in the direction of increasing entropy is known as The Arrow Of Time.
When this was discussed in my graduate thermodynamics class, I asked the instructor "We do not yet know whether the Universe is open, flat or closed," - at least we didn't know back when I pointed that out - "Suppose the Universe is closed, and so will eventually collapse back on in itself in The Bug Crunch."
"Will the people who live at that time" - during the collapse - "experience time going forward or backward?"
A classmate quietly said "That's very insightful", then the room fell so quite you could hear a pin dropped.
No one attempted to answer my question.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Tuesday February 27 2018, @06:25AM
Well, the answer is simple: People will experience time as going forward. They still will have memories of lower entropy times, not of higher-entropy times. It's just like people will always find that gravitation points down, no matter whether they are in Europe or Australia.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Funny) by deimtee on Tuesday February 27 2018, @11:59AM
The Bug Crunch. I like that. There are entirely too many nasty bugs here in Oz. The Bug Crunch would be welcomed by most aussies.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 3, Informative) by fritsd on Tuesday February 27 2018, @07:08PM
Ilya Prigogine [wikipedia.org] wrote a book "Order out of Chaos" [goodreads.com] about the Arrow of Time, together with Isabelle Stengers [wikipedia.org]. Their works are mostly popular science, but somewhere between chemistry and philosophy: an unusual field. Very fascinating.
The idea that we, humans, are thermodynamical systems far out of equilibrium, is way cool, I think.
Their books from the '80s were during the time that everybody including Jeff Goldblum became interested in chaos theory; however, their work is not just another popscience handwavy "it's all chaos!" book but a quite deep investigation into why the Arrow of Time is important for living systems such as we.
If I remember correctly (long time ago since I read it even though I have it on the shelf), it covers the Belousov-Zhabotinsky "traffic light" reaction, time reversal, Bénard cells when you boil an egg, and embryology (how does the ovum know what has to become top and tail??).
Enjoy!