Jeff Bezos commissioning a giant clock to last 10,000 years.

http://www.10000yearclock.net/learnmore.html?

by teej • 15 years ago

166 61 15 years ago

10000yearclock.net

erik_nygren2• 15 years ago

Anathem anyone?

klbarry• 15 years ago

Neal Stephenson was inspired by this exact clock for the book.

erik_nygren2• 15 years ago

Aha, figures. Would have been surprised if it had been the other way around, he doesn't seem to have any ideas that are his own. Then again, I guess that's the hypothesis of somethingrather - there are no new ideas.

geuis2• 15 years ago

Yes. I own mathic.org. This clock will need a math...

wmf4• 15 years ago

This location is remote enough that it should survive the sacks (as long as the extras don't build a city around it).

pavel_lishin5• 15 years ago

Would you mind putting something up on it?

biot• 15 years ago

Literally, what makes it tick? Is there some crazy large pendulum powered by tidal forces that triggers the once per year tick?

edit: Details found here: http://longnow.org/clock/principles/ ... though I'm a bit disappointed it seems it will require human intervention.

Robin_Message• 15 years ago

Human intervention to activate the dials and wind the chimes, but the timekeeping is good for 10000 years (they went for daily temperature changes as well as the pendulum.)

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.

dexen• 15 years ago

> ..it seems it will require human intervention.

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).

----

[1] http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2011/06/the_clock_in_...

zimpenfish• 15 years ago

You know people were working on this years before Bezos decided to fund it and donate land?

"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."

rudepeklo• 15 years ago

It's written in the article:

"The father of the Clock is Danny Hillis. He's been thinking about and working on the Clock since 1989."

lo_fye• 15 years ago

Totally. I think using the word "commissioned" in the headline is very misleading. It implies that Bezos paid to have it designed & created, when in fact he's just giving Hillis the money he needs to finally make it a reality.

nl• 15 years ago

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2011/06/the_clock_in_... is a much more detailed article from Kevin Kelly, who is involved in the LongNow foundation.

JacobAldridge2• 15 years ago

And here is the HN discussion on that great article, from last week - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2665380

gwern• 15 years ago

It's such a neat topic that I can't really begrudge reposts, and the homepage seems to include different details.

edw• 15 years ago

If you find yourself in SF between Fisherman's Wharf and the Golden Gate bridge, you should check out the Long Now Museum. It's a charming little tribute to impractical arty earnest nerd idealism.

It's not a museum in the traditional sense, but interesting.

dereg• 15 years ago

How do you measure/test the life of something that's supposed to last for a really long time?

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.

yread• 15 years ago

well you can let 1000 of them run for a year and from the ratio of those that failed calculate (or rather guesstimate) for how many years can more than 500 be still running.

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_...

StrawberryFrog2• 15 years ago

Some failures are at a random distribution - running 1000 for a year will help you estimate that.

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.

dtegart• 15 years ago

Former Reliability Engineer here. Not sure for bulbs, since my experience was automotive, but I imaging it is similar. In general, we tried to determine all the factors that lead to failure - vibration, force, impurities, sunlight etc, then you try to accelerate these. So for sunlight, you might raise the intensity of UV etc. There are settings so X hours of acceleration == to X years normal use. These settings are developed in a variety of ways. After you run the test, you apply some stats analysis and a bit of handwaving and proclaim 25 years.

gcb3• 15 years ago

interesting. are those ever applied all together?

clarkbox• 15 years ago

"..a bit of handwaving..."

legal disclaimers and marketing?

StrawberryFrog2• 15 years ago

The other article given in comments here ( http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2011/06/the_clock_in_... ) has a lot more detail on this.

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.

yarapavan• 15 years ago

Wired Article: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/06/10000-year-clock/all/...

ThomPete• 15 years ago

Not in the same scale at all.

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.

clistctrl• 15 years ago

The purpose of the clock is going to get lost, and eventually there's going to be holo-documentaries on how the 20th century "Americans" predicted the end of the world.

gcb3• 15 years ago

what do you mean hollo documentaries?

we will get back to the stone age between those two things.

jerf• 15 years ago

In 10,000 years, humans could repeatedly cycle between "Stone Age" and "holo documentaries". Civilization as we know it isn't that old, technological civilization even less so.

younata• 15 years ago

I think that, as part of the clock, a sign should be placed near it that states "not predicting the end of the world."

shazow• 15 years ago

I can just see the "not" getting removed at some point in history and hijinks ensue.

pavel_lishin5• 15 years ago

Won't work. "God is testing our faith!"

joeyh• 15 years ago

How does a clock that is designed to run for thousands of years with no set stop date predict the end of the world?

chadgeidel• 15 years ago

You could ask the same question to people who are convinced that the Mayan calendar indicates that 2012 is "the end of the world".

sliverstorm• 15 years ago

The fact that it's dug into a mountain and has multiple large chambers definitely won't help make it seem scientific and not archaic, mysterious and cultish. I swear they are taking cues from novels.

Synthetase• 15 years ago

I think Neal Stephenson is actually part of the Long Now. Looks like they lifted something right from Anathem.

athst• 15 years ago

It definitely reinforces Bezos' long-term view of business that he always talks about. And the subtext here is that he is building Amazon to be a company that is still around 10,000 years from now.

fastfinner• 15 years ago

This is exactly the type of rich person that I love. Contributing to public art and creating cultural value.

rch• 15 years ago

One of the 'guidelines for a long-lived, long-valuable institution' is 'ally with competition'.

-- http://longnow.org/about/

innes• 15 years ago

Look upon my big clock, ye mighty, and despair.

Edit: apologies for light-hearted comment.

Edit2: amazing how quickly you get slow-banned on News.YC. Thanks downvoters.

thucydides• 15 years ago

Not fair: I instantly thought of Ozymandias, too.

kashif• 15 years ago

I mentioned this to someone and they thought it might start a religion (eventually) - I think it just might.

wmf4• 15 years ago

That's covered in Anathem; you should check it out.

alanfalcon2• 15 years ago

Anathem was the first thing I thought about when I read this article. A quick Google Search shows that Neal Stephenson was unsurprisingly inspired by the Long Now Foundation, so the parallels between this project and the novel are not remotely coincidental. (To me that makes it all the more cool).

pgagliardi• 15 years ago

At first glance, I read the headline as giant cock. I mean if you're going to memorialize something for 10k years?

marcamillion• 15 years ago

I love how Bezos chooses to spend his money. When you think of being a billionaire, you (or the common train of thought is) think of consuming stuff or investing in businesses/buying companies.

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.

clutchski• 15 years ago

Alas, how we'll hollow out a mountain that'll stand for ages, so a rich man has a place for his wrist watch.

Apocryphon• 15 years ago

A huge clock is nice, but we need a secret giant archive of humanity's intellectual works to go with it. We need a Foundation to support the clock keepers who will maintain this clock.

superbeefy• 15 years ago

Here is Alex Rose of the long now foundation talking about the engineering behind the 10,000 year clock http://fora.tv/2011/05/22/Alexander_Rose_Engineering_of_the_...

Jeff Bezos commissioning a giant clock to last 10,000 years.

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