A group of design engineers in Los Angeles are working on creating a 300-foot-tall clock built into the side of a mountain in West Texas. A giant, 9-foot-tall pendulum will swing back and forth with slow ticks and tocks, and at noon each day, the clock will chime, each time with a unique string of notes.
The 10,000-year clock is a project directed by the Long Now Foundation, a San Francisco-based group that is devoted to fostering long-term thinking. Plans include clocks and library projects. "This is a project designed to foster long-term thinking -- to make us look many years into the future," Jascha Little, mechanical engineer with the Long Now Foundation, said in an interview.
The power design for the clock.
Given the long-term view, a clock that needs to last 10,000 years is quite a bit different from most design engineering projects. "This is a big change in the engineering mindset," Luke Khanlian, a design engineer with the Long Now Foundation, told us. "I’m used to building things that work for weeks or months. This is supposed to work for a very long time."
A clock that will tick and tock consistently, across thousands of years, will need a very reliable power source. The clock will be powered in a couple ways. "The energy is stored in a mass that is lifted -- a large stone that is lifted by drives the gears. Someone has to wind it up," said Little. "One of the more ambitious tasks is to design it to harvest energy from the change in temperature from day to night. There is not a lot of energy in that, but clocks don’t need that much energy."
The initial dollars behind the project came from the Long Now Foundation. Over time, however, the group found funding directly for the clock project. "Initially, it was funded by contributions from the Long Now Foundation," said Khanlian. "Then Jeff Bezos (CEO of Amazon.com) got interested. Now he’s funding the building of the early prototype."
The group sees the Texas clock as the first in a series of long-term clocks. "We’re not building just one clock. We hope there will be more clocks," said Khanlian. "The board at the Long Now Foundation would like to see more than one clock. There is also a site near Nevada."
The clock will have more duties than just showing the time of day. "There are a couple ways to read the clock," said Little. “There’s a calendar. You can take a rubbing off of it. It shows the orientation of the sun, the moon, and the planets. It also shows the phase of the moon."
In designing the clock, the team uses PTC Mathcad Prime and PTC Creo in their day-to-day work to create transparent engineering calculations and transparent design. For example, PTC Mathcad, PTC software for engineering calculations keeps track of units and enables the team to quickly test and update engineering calculations. PTC Creo (PTC CAD software), enables the team to quickly share progress and design updates with other team members. The team indicated that Mathcad to Creo makes it easy to pass data.
The engineering team expects to finish the construction of the clock in the next five years.
Good points, Tool_maker. One of my favorite quotes about computers is attrubuted to a Popular Mechanics article in 1949: "Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons."
I can just imagine that 9,995 years after the completion of this project someone will postulate that this was the "Doomsday clock" and when it stops the world would end.....
@naperlou: When ever I see these "Long Term Plans", I am reminded of a satirical article I read 20 or so years ago where a computer made future projections based solely on the data available at the end of the civil war. It got numerous things right, ie population growth and westward expansion, but failed miserably in others.
The most humorous things I recall were what the two biggest problems would be. One: at the close of the civil war there were X number of horses per person and the population explosion would cause a similar growth in horses leading to the problem of growing enough grass to feed all of the horses required. The author had inventive ways in which to accomplish this, but problem #two was to be the biggest: What were we to do with all of the manure these horses would generate? I think he suggested huge quantities be shipped to Washington DC, but saw that even that would soon be full.
In short, future technologies may render all long term plans equally irrelevant and foolish appearing.
As I was reading through the posts. I kept thinking - how about just making a sundial. There are already a vast assortment of sundial arrangements which are easily adjustable for variations over the course of many, many years and then Stonehenge popped up in the thread. Of course! Not sure that a special 10,000 year clock gives us any more techology than Stonehenge does. Sounds like a vanity project to me!
Making a clock to run for any great length of time without maintenance would be quite an achievement, given the multiple concerns of wear, dirt accumulation, and weathering. And if there is a chime system intended to sound daily, that means a lot more power will be needed. The challenge is that the weather will deliver an accumulation of dirt, and the dirt will get in the way of moving parts as it fills the motion clearances. Of course it is possible that the clock is being built in an exceptionally clean part of Texas, some area that has no dust or wind, but I sort of doubt that. It will be interesting to see if it even runs for one year. How about a more detailed report on the clock after it is finished, possibly including drawings or pictures describing how it captures energy, and how it moves.
You got that right about Stonehenge! Assuming it's not destroyed in an earthquake or other natural disaster, over that period of time the clock will have to accommodate several changes in the length of various time periods--the day, for example--as well as shifts in the declination of various planets and the Moon. I wonder if all that's being considered.
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