look on my works, ye mighty, and despair

The Long Now Foundation (http://www.longnow.org/) seems like an interesting project: it’s intention is to promote long-term thinking in the context of the next 10,000 years. To that end it has various projects underway – my favourite is a project to build a monument-sized clock on a mountaintop in Nevada which is designed to be operational for at least 10,000 years. This raises all sorts of interesting design problems:

Longevity

With occasional maintenance, the clock should reasonably be expected to display the correct time for the next 10,000 years.

Maintainability
The clock should be maintainable with bronze-age technology.

Transparency
It should be possible to determine operational principles of the clock by close inspection.

Evolvability
It should be possible to improve the clock with time.

Scalability
It should be possible to build working models of the clock from table-top to monumental size using the same design.

As a civilization we tend to build large objects purely for their functional benefits. For instance, most of our skyscrapers and other large structures are designed to be destroyed and replaced after 100 or so years. So I am attracted to ideas like this, which involve building things intended to stand the test of time for what they mean, rather than simply for what they do.