The mechanical stability of a drystone wall is amazing, but the political stability of the border it represents is very, very fragile. It won't fall over but someone might knock it down. That's the problem the Long Now clock might have solved - it's been marketed as a symbol of human persistence. People are being persuaded that it's important. We maintain our symbolic icons. That political stability is what might keep it standing for millenia, unless people forget what it means.
You have to walk through a 100 foot gate of granite just to get in. It blows the mind everytime I walk through at the imagination and ambition to build such a thing. And then inside things are even more breathtaking.
It's in daily use for worship and rituals by thousands of people even today. It has seen 8-12 different kingdoms come and go. Not just Hindus but Christians and Muslims administered the area at one time or another.
In addition to Stone what you need is Beauty.
People universally for mysterious reasons recognize Beauty. If it's beautiful it's going to be protected and taken care off. People will happily die to do it.
That's an amazing monument. I live 30s walk from this 1350 year old church - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Peter%27s_Church,_Monkwearm... - it's slightly less ambitious but still a beautiful place, and incredible to think people have been gathering there for that long.
Some beautiful structures have survived through constant maintenance of successive civilizations and faith groups. Others have been abandoned to collapse or razed to the ground to punish the people that built it, to clear space to build something new or simply for useful building material. Even the Parthenon, sufficiently revered by successive civilizations to find itself a Greek temple, Roman temple, church and mosque, was redeployed as a gunpowder store with predictable results.
Carving a temple out of solid basalt is a more reliable way of protecting from the elements and all but the most determined humans (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellora_Caves)
If society collapses, there’s a decent risk the ‘owners’ of the long now clock may start to revere it, with the risk of ‘non-owners’, when they (temporarily) become ‘owners’, to destroy it, or take parts of it home for spoils of war.
Alternatively, the ‘owners’ could destroy it themselves for parts.
It's very possible that human culture in a millennia (or a century) will see very little value in our current symbols. Most of the ancient world was dismantled by people that saw little value in the dead relics of a previous age.
Could you get a space vehicle on a trajectory that brings it close to earth only every 1000 - 10000 years?
Add there some mechanism that draws attention and transmits it’s message through radio. Would it be doable to have some primitive electronics that would survive so long?
Seems it would be possible to have it spin on its axis so that it reflects the light from the sun towards Earth in some kind of pulsing flashing manner. That would attract attention. No need for electronics. Of course encoding a message in the flash would be almost impossible, but it could serve as a beacon for a future civilisation to attempt to go up there and retrieve it.
Maybe facet the mirrors so that the reflections would flicker in some something like Morse code. I imagine it would be very difficult to decipher and could only convey a few bytes though.
Maybe just send a sealed capsule capable of re-entry into an orbit that would actually intersect earth in a few hundred thousand years. I doubt we're capable of that sort of precision though..
That's a brilliant idea. I think the electronics part is doable, a radio transmitter is a very simple thing. Some metal alloy with sufficient robustness would probably do the job.
We could even build an analog device that could store the messages just like a music box cylinder.
Space is a pretty hostile environment over those timescales.
Selecting a power source is hard as solar cells almost certainly will not last more than a hundred or two years. Nuclear materials with long half-lives don’t provide much power.
Electronics would just have to be big to avoid radiation damage from being a concern.
Until what the symbol represents starts to conflict with political ideology; then, the symbol gets dismantled to cut people off the undesirable heritage.
> Until what the symbol represents starts to conflict with political ideology; then, the symbol gets dismantled to cut people off the undesirable heritage.
It's not possible to protect against destruction by human beings over these timescales, irrespective of whether people remember what the artefact means.
Any such project can only use engineering to provide assurance that the result should last that long _if_ no-one destroys it.
It's not possible to protect against destruction by human beings over these timescales, irrespective of whether people remember what the artefact means.
I think once something is more than a few hundred years old then humans will automatically try to preserve it unless there's a good reason not to (reuse of scarce resources, ideological issues, etc). The challenge is getting something to last long enough for our innate desire to preserve history to kick in.
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