10,000 Year Clocks

Will this last 10,000 years?

Jeff Bezos, billionaire founder of Amazon.com, is working with Danny Hillis, of Connection Machine fame, to build a clock that will run for ten thousand years.

They've been working on this for some time and figures it will cost at least $42 million dollars.

While I suppose this is a laudable effort in terms of technology and ego it does not seem to me to have a good chance of success.  Typical of most modern thinkers the focus us in various technologies: elaborate drilling technologies to drill tunnels and shafts into mountains, complex escapement mechanisms, exotic materials for bearings, and so on.

The oldest living things on earth vary quite a bit: bacteria from bees encased in amber that are millions of years old, ancient creosote bushes, and the venerable 5,000 year old bristle cone pine.  These "technologies" (bacteria, plants) have been around for tens or hundreds of millions of years and have been subjected to much that the world can offer in terms of oppositions: extensions, meteor strikes, tectonic plate shifts and earthquakes.

It is less clear what the "oldest man-made structure" on earth is.  See this, for example, and this about the Yonaguni structures.

The oldest clock-work machinery (made of metal) I know of is the Antikythera mechansim I wrote about in "Death of Imagination".  The only problem is that it does not work and no one is quite sure what it did (and it is not complete, either).

Ten thousand years ago the last ice age was just ending - the seas were much shallower (as the water was tied up in glaciers).  I am sure the weather was different too.

In the last fifty thousand years there have been meteor strikes (Arizona), the Tunguska "event", earthquakes such as Krakatoa, and all manner of other events.

Today we cannot duplicate the engineering efforts used to build the pyramids, or to raise obelisks such as those used in Egypt.

However, things like the pyramid, as well as objects that are part of "Adam's Clock" are in fact time keeping devices.  The shadows they cast and their alignment with the starts work just as well as any mechanical clock to tell time.  And these devices were built by people we have no clear or accurate recollections of.

On the other hand complex devices, made of exotic materials, technologies and techniques, invite exotic problems.  And since these technologies are new, there is no depth of experience associated with them. 

Drilling holes in mountains, as any miner will tell you, is not an "exact science". 

Stone Hinge - which is arguably a "clock" - has had its parts carried away by humans of later generations - so vandalism is as likely a potential problem as anything else.  Similarly Napoleon dynamited the Great Pyramid to access the "treasure" inside - looting may also be a problem.

Don't get me wrong, if I had a spare $42 million I might be tempted to engage in such an exercise just for the hell of it.

Personally I think that building things to last 10,000 years (which is longer than any civilization, religion, oral or written human history) is mostly a waste of, ironically, time and money.

I do not thing "greatness" (whether its "technical prowess" or "fame" or whatever) comes from purposefully doing this type of thing.  Stone Hinge or the Great Pyramids were not built for fame or fortune I would suspect - but for religious glory or other, more ethereal, purposes - though no doubt a great ego (as well, perhaps, a great force) was necessary to catalyze the process and keep it going.

If all were to go according to plan, the clock will tick away in an inaccessible mountain for ten millennia unseen and unnoticed by humanity - so, like a tree falling in a forest with no one around, does it still make noise?  If people do access it over any serious length of time, it will more than likely be vandalized or looted for parts and materials, I think.

Oh well - perhaps Bezos should read "Titan" by Ron Chernow about the life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., the founder of Standard Oil.  Much of the book discusses how Rockefellers son, who did not follow in his father's business footsteps, spent much of his life working on giving away his fathers millions in some form or other of charity - hospitals, research, and so on - much of that charity still exists in some form today.

Hey Jeff - they sell "Titan" on Amazon...