I agree, the article doesn't feel genuine. But the point it make is relevant: thinking for 10k years, is a good excuse for rich people to not give a fuck about today. The Long Now released a (pretty lame) podcast a few hours ago: http://podcast.longnow.org/salt/salt-020200115-venkataraman-podcast.mp3 Where they totally acknowledge that their 10k year view, is just a rich man problem (and they even address how they can "incite" the poors to think on the same timescale... yeah it's mostly a bad podcast) About the clock??? Yeah the guy building it should have stay on his cancer research job, for the long term good of humanity. But I guess cancer research bring less immediate fame than a cool unique clock
I was digging around last night because I was kinda curious what sort of escapement you put on a clock that's supposed to measure years. I was disturbed and annoyed to discover that it's got an archetypal anchor escapement, they just double-weighted the pendulum to give it piss-poor impulse and a ten-second period. But they were nice enough to put their CAD drawings and their proposal online, which is where I saw that Ludwig Oechslin did their gear analysis in 2000. Which is odd because they built and displayed their prototype in 1999 so it kinda looks like they built a clock and then asked a clockmaker to tell them if it worked. But then, regulators almost never come with a striking train because they're bad for accuracy so the whole project is kinda curious to me. I dunno. Now I'm kinda feelin' like building a model of it.
Speaking as someone with an outsized love for stupid clocks, I'm of a few minds. That's the Turler clock. It lives at Turler Jewelry and Watches in Zurich and it accurately displays the orbit of Pluto, among other things. It was designed by Ludwig Oechslin, who was an archeologist hired to restore the Farnese clock at the Vatican and did such a good job documenting it that he got a Ph.D in philosophy out of it (yeah I'm fuzzy on that, too). The Farnese clock, for what it's worth, was commissioned in 1700 or so and was gifted to the Vatican in like 1800-something. It's all monuments to excess and I love them dearly. The thing is? It'd all be dust in a hundred years if there weren't humans tending to their care and feeding. So while I can appreciate the engineering challenge of making a timekeeping mechanism that'll last ten thousand years it seems kinda pointless to not just, I dunno, engrave the maintenance routine on a brass plate or something. I mean, you have to assume some sort of semi-continuous cultural heritage in order for anyone to give a shit.
There is one interesting line way the fuck down in the article about the clock that says: And I thought, hey, if they make it an interesting enough tourist attraction, it doesn't need to be a perpetual motion machine... just let the visitors wind it up. All you need to do is have a couple visitors a year, and it runs forever. (Assuming there are still people to visit it, of course. And if there aren't, well ... problem solved.) "... Visitors enter through jade-paneled doors, climb a massive staircase to reach a cupola made of sapphire glass. There they can wind the clock mechanism ..."
Yeah the timekeeping mechanism and the time-displaying mechanism are separate. You show up and "wind" the motion works to the point where they hit the stops. We call that a remontoire in horology.