Engineering The 10,000 Year Clock | Hacker News Reader

Engineering The 10,000 Year Clock

spectrum.ieee.org

12 pointsArjuna2 comments

I find very idea of the 10,000 year clock fascinating. There are few human artifacts which are older than 10,000 years and none which perform an autonomous function like measuring time. http://www.longnow.org As with Asimov's Foundation Series books, the Long Now Foundation clock has a social component whose function is to fix things when they need attention. Time will tell whether they made the right choices.

Definitely agree. As Bezos says: "It's a challenging engineering problem and so fun in its own right"

Brings a whole new perspective to "UX" design:

   But what if you were the first person to visit the clock
   in centuries, or even millennia? Given the vagaries of 
   human history, it's reasonable to expect that people 
   might one day forget the clock even exists. So for the 
   sake of the wayward traveler who just happens upon the 
   clock by accident, the operation had to be obvious just 
   from looking at it.

But the part that hit me the hardest:

   For all the creative deliberation, hard work, and 
   long-term planning, there's one thought that continues 
   to haunt these engineers. "My biggest fear is that 
   people will destroy it on purpose," Rose says.

EDIT: There is some irony here that the Wikipedia article for The Long Now Foundation is marked for deletion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...

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