Hacker News Reader

Comment by skariel123 | Hacker News Reader

there are people that do this, and also send spaceships for mars, and then there are people that create some useless clock

View on HN

This is ridiculous.

That "useless clock" is actually a significant engineering challenge: how do we design a system that lasts 10.000 years? Are you sure that no valuable insight came from the project? And before you reply, think of how many valuable insights we got from what some could consider the "useless manned mission to the Moon", in hindsight.

Nitpicking here... making a 10,000 year clock is fairly easy: Take a thermoelectric RPG and attach it to a quartz crystal.

The goal of the project is to build one that can be understood by a primitive society, which has questionable application to modern technology.

There is a major difference between the two projects: we can tell whether a manned mission to the moon has succeeded or failed. There is no way to tell whether the effort you put into making a clock last for 10,000 years had any value; you cannot observe the results unless the clock fails incredibly quickly.

A lot of the mechanisms and designs involved in the clock will be testable from Day 1, for instance the effectiveness of the energy harvesting system, which is designed to power the clock from the beginning without external power inputs.

Additionally, things like corrosion and wear resistance performance will be measurable after just a few years of operation.

There is an entire field of engineering, Reliability Science, based on the fact that we can predict the lifetime of a system based on a combination of accelerated tests and detailed physical models.

Are you saying we should only do those things, the results of which can be determined in a short amount of time?

What is the point of doing something that has no results?

A society grows great when old men plant trees whoseshade they know they shall never sit in.

That's beautiful. Time to go plant some more trees. Thank you.

To 99.99% of people, a rocket to Mars is as about useful a 10,000-year clock. That's not to say both aren't commendable efforts, technological steps forward for humankind, and inspirations to many.

Isn't "useless clock guy" also doing space himself, revolutionizing publishing, building the world's best in-home voice AI thing, a reasonably-sized online retailer and marketplace, a healthcare back-end, the world's biggest cloud computing service, and a few other things?

I voted you back up.

There's famine, there's lack of clean water and toilets, there's lack of potable water, etc, etc, etc...

I'm a defender of "pure science", but there are better engineering projects to challenge yourself with.

I too would love those projects to be tackled. Unfortunately a clock engineer doesn’t make a good sanitation engineer. As much as we wish human ingenuity was interchangeable it isn’t.

Also a lot of the countries with problems have political issues as well as sociatal ones which makes solving the problems hard.

It's funny because the point of the long now and the 10,000 year clock is to encourage long term thinking and planning which leads directly to thinking about these tough long term problems rather than the next election or next quarter.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com