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posted by janrinok on Monday February 26 2018, @09:05PM   Printer-friendly
from the tick.......tock dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by fritsd on Tuesday February 27 2018, @08:53PM

    by fritsd (4586) on Tuesday February 27 2018, @08:53PM (#644792) Journal

    It makes sense to me, that they built this "Clock of the Long Now".

    The Pyramids have inspired people for millennia: who were the people who built that thing, what is it for, nobody knows anymore, etc.

    Similarly, even though this clock is hidden inside a mountain, the concept that it exists will inspire generations that, as well as the clock, a period of 10 000 years is something that exists.

    - 10 000 first cities like Jericho, *before* the Stone Age in Europe, last stragglers cross the Bering Strait land bridge to America before it gets underwater, Doggerland teeming with woolly mammoths

    - 04500 Stone field of Carnac (Obélix??)

    - 03000 Babylon, Ur, Damascus, Nineveh, Jerusalem, Beirut, etc.

    - 02500 Pyramid of Giza

    - 02300 Stonehenge

    - 01750 Hammurabi Code

    - 00700 Iliad and Odyssey

    0 Life of Brian

    00500 Romulus Augustulus kicked out by Odoacer

    01000 Icelandic parliament decided they should become Christians; Middle Ages in Europe; Maya civilization going downhill, Avicenna wrote the Kitāb al-Šifā in what is now Uzbekistan, somebody finally bothered to write the Chanson De Roland down. Saint Hildegard of Bingen re-invented beer with hops!

    01350 The Black Death in Europe

    01480 Sandro Botticelli paints the Primavera

    01500 Montezuma II's Aztec empire attacked by the Spanish

    01650 The café was invented

    01748 Denis Diderot writes book about a talking vagina and doesn't get burned at the stake. And a (much less popular) encyclopedia

    01789 French Revolution

    01850 Semmelweiss invents washing your hands with soap, but doesn't know why it works

    01885 Louis Pasteur, after having discovered that germs exist, sticks a needle with dead rabid rabbit stuff in a 9 year old boy, and doesn't get sued

    01896 Svante Arrhenius writes a popular book about Global Warming

    01914 First World War

    01920 The Spanish Flu, where my granny lost several of her cousins IIRC

    01940 Second World War, my granny said she saw a pretty young Nazi soldier shot dead out of our cherry tree where he was hiding. IIRC.

    01949 George Orwell writes 1984

    01962 Pope Johannes XXIII organizes the Second Vatican Council

    01964 Stanley Kubrick directs "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb"

    01968 Paris Social Revolution
    01969 Woodstock. Apollo 11. My grandfather asked my parents if I could please stay up and watch it with them on TV (I was 1). The old people of the village were worried that the Man in the Moon would get pissed off.

    01976 Sex Pistols (we traded cards of them in the school yard). No Future.
    01977 Voyager 1 and 2. Carl Sagan. The future is bright (maybe not for punks or people looking for work).

    01980 I owned a radio cassette player so I could listen to the radio while doing my homework, *and* I could tape songs from the top 40.

    01999 Michael Mann discovers our possible nemesis, the hockey stick

    02000 I earned quite a decent wage with helping a multinational with their Y2K problem, whatever theRealDonaldTrump says!

    02016 Randall Munroe wrote his cartoon # 1732, "Earth Temperature Timeline", which is much nicer than this weird Soylentnews comment of mine today

    02018 Falcon Heavy, US president Donald Trump
    02019 US president Lisa Simpson?
    02020 George Orwell's "1984" (from 1948) becomes Public Domain?

    02400? Futurama

    02500 Buck Rogers

    10000?

    20000??

    30000 The Plutonium waste in the Hanford Site is only half as dangerous as now

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