A clock to last ten thousand years

Inside a Nevada mountain, they are building The Clock Of The Long Now. You have to hike for a day to get there. It will be powered and kept accurate by the sun. Its face has moon, sun, year and century hands. Its pendulum will tick once every ten seconds. Its chimes will ring once a day, in a never-repeating, ever-evolving melody (thanks to Brian Eno). It is being engineered with ceramic and stone bearings that never need lubricating. Only once a millennium will it ring a special peal. It should last 10,000 years. Jeff Bezos (Amazon owner) is paying for it.

It's very very very cool.

article: http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2011/06/the_clock_in_th.php
project website: http://www.10000yearclock.net/

It is indeed... truly cool.

Cool as fuck, I wonder if the roaches will think so in 9,000 years?

Does the 10,000 alarm going off signal the finding of the Higgs Boson?

There's another project iirc to build a "Warning; Hazardous Area" sign to warn people off dumps of radioactive waste in the far off hazy what-if future. Bearing in mind the very long halflife-spans involved, it's quite an undertaking. Even if you just settled for a giant sad-face thusly:

More money than sense!

9999 years time it will be declared a hoax.

I have a watch that lasts about 48 hours.



It winds itself from the movement of my body.

A flywheel in the back rotates and winds the spring.

As long as I keep moving, it stays wound.

Once my body stops moving, it winds down and also stops!

Environmentally sound, what more could you need.

Whitey's building a clock...

But they might not *have* faces in the future...at least not how we do now...

If being a billionaire isn't enough money to free-up the wallet beyond the daily essentials and start spending into the dreamy-eyed blue sky, then there'd be no sense in becoming rich at all.

ffs.

precisely.

We could actually do a poll on it at this rate....if you were a geek billionaire what would you spend your money on?

A vast magnificent devise at the heart of a mountain with which to count the glorious long aeon's over whose sublime surface great civilizations must surely rise and fall. Also, hookers and blow.

Dunno, it's a bit of a toss up between that and moving to motherfucking mars... I don't need hookers, I guess for me it would be blow and a tit lift when I get old, if I didn't move to Mars and therefore not need one.

Not to say I need hookers mind, they just seem to go with blow. Mind you I don't do blow either.

Who needs moving to Mars, it's a big cold boring desert, you'd have to import everything at immense expense, you can't go out without wearing a cumbersome and uncomfortable 'coat'. and frankly the nightlife is totally dead anyway. A helium-floated sky-palace on the other hand...

I remember this, it's really interesting. Can't find it on google

found a load of stuff on it here http://www.damninteresting.com/this-place-is-not-a-place-of-honor/

primarily concerned with the yucca mountain nuclear waste repository

Loving this. Here's a small snapshot of what was happening in East London, 10,000 years ago:
http://www.molas.org.uk/projects/ELG/history.asp#per2

I'm sure they'll be very impressed 10,000 years from now - early 21st century humanity emptied the oceans, cut down the ancient forests, and warmed the planet, wiping out tens of thousands of species in the process, but at least some merchant left a fancy clock in a hill.

And in 10000 years there will *still* be no flowers in the left hand flower tub at Bermondsey station.

In 50 million years, visiting zoologists from Alpha Centauri will be flummoxed by a barren patch in the jungle.

But that's the thing, it'll still be cool even if the Earth is a wind-blown post-apocalyptic tragedy by then; arguably, more so... in an ancient-abandoned railway system of the Planet of the Dead in Iain Bankses Consider Phlebas kinda way.

In fact... might be an idea to infest the thing with devious traps and killer-robots and a curse and elaborate puzzles that make walls with spikes on them close on you if you get the answer wrong and a tunnel with a big boulder that crushes you if you don't run fast enough or something.

Why? Because the Mysterious Ancients were bastards, that's why.

Been watching a few films and playing a few computer games have we?

but also for the last dozen words.

I like this as an idea. Why not. Bit mad, bit brilliant, bit stupid.

Eh, when we had our kitchen extension built we were going to put a load of stories & photos & info on who we were in a box & bury it in the foundations. But in the end we forgot, or couldn't be arsed, one of the two.

i for one approve


some times humans need to do things just because they are cool and awesome

i think this kind of thing is how i'd like to be mesured as a species. for all our good and bad we can also do things not because we have to or because they are the right thing to do but just because they speak to some thing greater.