Jeff Bezos commissioning a giant clock to last 10,000 years.
10000yearclock.net
10000yearclock.net
It's not a museum in the traditional sense, but interesting.
"The idea for the clock has been around since Danny Hillis first proposed it in WIRED magazine in 1995. Since then, Hillis and others have built prototypes and created a nonprofit, the Long Now Foundation, to work on the clock and promote long-term thinking."
"The father of the Clock is Danny Hillis. He's been thinking about and working on the Clock since 1989."
You hardly think about doing large civilization-type stuff. Or rather, I hardly hear about it so I don't think about it much.
But this is so awesome. Feels like we are in the days of the Roman empire that made statues and told stories of legends from generation-to-generation.
edit: Details found here: http://longnow.org/clock/principles/ ... though I'm a bit disappointed it seems it will require human intervention.
From http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2011/06/the_clock_in_...: So how does the Clock keep going if no one visits it for months, or years, or perhaps decades? If it is let to run down between visits, who would keep resetting it? The Clock is designed to run for 10,000 years even if no one ever visits (although it would not display the correct time till someone visited). If there is no attention for long periods of time the Clock uses the energy captured by changes in the temperature between day and night on the mountain top above to power its time-keeping apparatus. In a place like a top of a mountain, this diurnal difference of tens of degrees in temperature is significant and thus powerful. Thermal power has been used for small mantel clocks before, but it has not been done before at this scale. The differential power is transmitted to the interior of the Clock by long metal rods. As long as the sun shines and night comes, the Clock can keep time itself, without human help. But it can’t ring its chimes for long by itself, or show the time it knows, so it needs human visitors.
The article [1] linked to by nl describes it quite well.
There are three separate energy reserves in the clock. The hands (dials) mechanism requires human winding -- but only to indicate time, which is kept independently. The chime mechanism is to be primarily ran on human winding. The main (timekeeping) mechanism extracts energy from thermal differences between day and night, and may also be wound by humans.
Moreover, if the main mechanism's reserve accumulates enough energy, it is engineered to overflow and wind up the chime mechanism -- thus the chime will ring once in a while even without humans to wind it. Quite cute, if you ask me.
Another cunning contraption uses Sun's thermal energy for adjusting the clock to solar time (apparent time).
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[1] http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2011/06/the_clock_in_...
But a friend of my father an old hacker (reverse engineered apple2 back in the days and is just crazy good at hacking together stuff) build this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jens_Olsen%27s_World_Clock in half the size al in hand.
One of the cogs takes 400 years to rotate around it's own axis.
For example, we refit our house with some (beautiful) CREE LED downlamps that are supposed to last about 25 years. While that's nice to know, is it possible to test that claim, or is it purely theoretical? It's not like they have been keeping the same bulb on since 1986.
It's not perfect, but for a perfect solution you would need something like a time machine, I guess.
edit: this article linked from wiki has nice explanations http://db.usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/schroeder/schroeder_...
But any moving part has a finite lifetime due to wear, and you want to know how long this is. Running lots of them for 1/1000 of the expected lifespan shouldn't produce any at all of this kind of failure.
legal disclaimers and marketing?
The paras around the picture "Testing the longevity of materials in space on the MISSE" are quite informative. Testing materials in space... I think they're taking it quite seriously.
There is an order of avout in Anathem, the Lorites, who are based around that very idea.
I have a few dead domains that I basically registered during a drunken binge; http://widgetsex.com/ is a good example, the dog you'll see is my friend's and his name is widget; if you let it refresh long enough, you should see an easter egg.
If you want real content, I'd probably just put up some links to information about Anathem, the clock, and the Long Now foundation, with maybe a contact form that accepts suggestions that are better than mine :P
we will get back to the stone age between those two things.
(Larry Niven addresses this somewhat in his novel The Mote In God's Eye. I can't really elaborate without spoilers. :P)
Speaking of cyclic history, I also liked "The Peddler's Apprentice".
Plus, you're not going to find coal or oil at a landfill, except in the form of plastic.
Energy and helium are the only resources we're currently consuming. The others are just being reversibly transformed.
Mining landfills is dangerous work, but it can be automated. Mining in general is dangerous work, but I suspect that landfills are even more unpredictable than rocks. Landfills contain smallpox virus, polychlorinated biphenyls, HIV-contaminated hypodermic syringes, and so on.
I think that current landfill mining is limited largely by aesthetic considerations (and the resulting laws), not pure self-interest.
Edit: apologies for light-hearted comment.
Edit2: amazing how quickly you get slow-banned on News.YC. Thanks downvoters.