The Long Now Foundation, a group formed as a response to the current culture’s obsession with the ephemeral, has designed a what they call The Clock of the Long Now. This timepiece, which looks like something out of an old science fiction movie, keeps ticks along not to seconds or minutes or hours, but to the passing years and is meant to be functional for the next 10,000 years. Amazingly ambitious, considering technology these days is dismissed as obsolete within six months.

The initial Clock of the Long Now prototype.

This large list of technological considerations shows that designing something mechanical that will continue to function through such a unheard of range of time is, obviously , a monumental task.

A shame we’ll all be dead and have no way of knowing if any of these projects worked.