You have to walk through a 100 foot gate of granite just to get in. It blows the mind everytime I walk through at the imagination and ambition to build such a thing. And then inside things are even more breathtaking.
It's in daily use for worship and rituals by thousands of people even today. It has seen 8-12 different kingdoms come and go. Not just Hindus but Christians and Muslims administered the area at one time or another.
In addition to Stone what you need is Beauty.
People universally for mysterious reasons recognize Beauty. If it's beautiful it's going to be protected and taken care off. People will happily die to do it.
I guess we are lucky in the UK that the place is thick with ancient stuff of all kinds - most of it generally ignored or unknown.
e.g. The stone works on Ben Griam Beg - are the a hill fort, are they for catching deer (both seem rather odd given its location)
Carving a temple out of solid basalt is a more reliable way of protecting from the elements and all but the most determined humans (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellora_Caves)
…and we destroy those of our enemies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeldenstorm, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_Albanian_herita..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhas_of_Bamyan#2001,_destru...)
If society collapses, there’s a decent risk the ‘owners’ of the long now clock may start to revere it, with the risk of ‘non-owners’, when they (temporarily) become ‘owners’, to destroy it, or take parts of it home for spoils of war.
Alternatively, the ‘owners’ could destroy it themselves for parts.
Add there some mechanism that draws attention and transmits it’s message through radio. Would it be doable to have some primitive electronics that would survive so long?
Selecting a power source is hard as solar cells almost certainly will not last more than a hundred or two years. Nuclear materials with long half-lives don’t provide much power.
Electronics would just have to be big to avoid radiation damage from being a concern.
We could even build an analog device that could store the messages just like a music box cylinder.
https://www.google.com/search?q=simple+radio+transmitter&tbm...
https://www.google.com/search?q=music+box+cylinder&tbm=isch
Also check out Graveyard orbits for decommissioned satellites where they can stay for millions of years and be our monuments from the 21st century.
Maybe just send a sealed capsule capable of re-entry into an orbit that would actually intersect earth in a few hundred thousand years. I doubt we're capable of that sort of precision though..
Until what the symbol represents starts to conflict with political ideology; then, the symbol gets dismantled to cut people off the undesirable heritage.
> Until what the symbol represents starts to conflict with political ideology; then, the symbol gets dismantled to cut people off the undesirable heritage.
Or coopted for use by the new ideology.
Any such project can only use engineering to provide assurance that the result should last that long _if_ no-one destroys it.
I think once something is more than a few hundred years old then humans will automatically try to preserve it unless there's a good reason not to (reuse of scarce resources, ideological issues, etc). The challenge is getting something to last long enough for our innate desire to preserve history to kick in.
This is a very recent development that started circa the 19th century in Europe.
Before that no-one really cared.
Would ISIS's destruction of a few World Heritage Sites, museums, art galleries, etc. fall under "ideological issues"
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/videos/world/2015/08/25/isis-destroy...