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.
I think this is a thought-stimulating engineering exercise in terms of evalating durability, accuracy, etc. Two observations;
1) Alan Weis wrote a great book called "The Earth Without Us," describing what would happen to the artifacts of human civilization if we all suddenly disappeared. Geologic, biologic, and meterological forces wipe the slate in a (relatively) short time.
2) I don't want to discourage the project members, but the Stonehenge team is 4,000 years ahead of them in their real-time testing! :)
Larry, I know the B-52 well. My father worked on the design of the bomb bay before I was born (and that was a long time ago).
You bring up a good point, though, that is germain to the current defense budget discussion. There are other systems, such as the KC-135, that are also very old and still working. I am concerned, though, about the rerirement of a number of fourth generation fighters. These could be updated and used going into the future for a fraction of the cost of new planes. We should have the new planes, but we cannot afford the numbers needed. The older planes, with avionics upgrades, could be flying well into the future. This is not quite the same thing as making a device that, itself, should last 10,000 years.
I spent a long day last Febryary wandering around the Pima County Air and Space Museum (unclassified part of the famous Davis-Monthan "boneyard" Air Base) taking pictures. Some of the technology and its longevity are amazing.
Similarly, spent several hours on the USS Missouri in Hawaii in 2010. It also had about five generations of electronics between its construction in the 1940s and decommissioning in the late 1980s. Very easy to see where e.g., new radars were patched on. Sometimes the old system was left in place and the new one added alongside, suggesting that the old system had retained value.
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.
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.
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