The Long Now Foundation creates things that will last “forever”- clocks, libraries… the exercise is fascinating. The purpose statement on their site is great reading by itself; they also have a book, “The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility: The Ideas Behind the World’s Slowest Computer“
Their Clock of the Long Now is designed to tell accurate time for 25,000 years. How would that be possible? The issues involved are staggering. The clock is designed to withstand corrosion and can be re-set using the sun and no knowledge of written language or tools. The clock has been designed to withstand the fall of civilization; it can be fixed with bronze-age tools. No less ambitious is the Rosetta Project (part of the Library project), a series of spherical artifacts intended to make the task of translating all our written languages easer for archaeologists 10,000 years into the future. Making historical artifacts for the future.A real-life application of this same thought exercise: the WIPP, a giant underground repository for nuclear waste. It will be radioactive for the next 25,000 years. How do you warn future generations away from the site? They won’t speak English, they will not have computers, they may not even read.
Fortunately there was a panel studying just this question, and it may be read in Sandia Laboratory‘s publication, Expert Judgment on Inadvertant Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, 1993. I love reading this thing; I should just get a copy somehow. My favorite part is the designs for a purposely inhospitable architecture that will last 20,000 years, and also the 3 panel “See Dick Die” cartoon.
- Here’s an excerpt from that paper
- ABC news article about WIPP
- An excerpt from DEEP TIME by Gregory Benford (Harper-Collins, 2000) called Ten Thousand Years of Solitude
The Clock of the Long Now is designed to tell accurate time for 25,000 years. The clock has been designed to withstand the fall of civilization; it can be fixed with bronze-age tools.