- But is the star map there? This article seems to imply that it got demolished in 2022: https://www.oskarjwhansen.org/news/save-the-star-map
If so that is somewhat ironic. A message intended to communicate a date to thousands of years into the future got demolished a mere 86 years after its creation due to a drainage issue and a contract dispute.
by throw0101a
1 subcomments
- More:
> Due to the precession of the equinoxes (as well as the stars' proper motions), the role of North Star has passed from one star to another in the remote past, and will pass in the remote future. In 3000 BC, the faint star Thuban in the constellation Draco was the North Star, aligning within 0.1° distance from the celestial pole, the closest of any of the visible pole stars.[8][9] However, at magnitude 3.67 (fourth magnitude) it is only one-fifth as bright as Polaris, and today it is invisible in light-polluted urban skies.
> During the 1st millennium BC, Beta Ursae Minoris (Kochab) was the bright star closest to the celestial pole, but it was never close enough to be taken as marking the pole, and the Greek navigator Pytheas in ca. 320 BC described the celestial pole as devoid of stars.[6][10] In the Roman era, the celestial pole was about equally distant between Polaris and Kochab.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pole_star
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_pole
- I have once created a pendant to my friends’ wedding following a similar idea. A silver disk engraved one one side with the position of the planets and major moons at the moment of the ceremony. Fun thing is that the Galilean moons orbit fast enough that you can even read the intended minute. https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIpFTPOIP60/
by breckinloggins
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- I somehow doubt there is any future version of me that regrets joining The Long Now Foundation, and work like this is the main reason why.
If you're in SF you should pay them a visit and buy a coffee at The Interval; I think you'll find it worth the trip.
- This is the kind of stuff I love about ancient architecture. It seems they were full of such clever things (or maybe only the few constructions which survived until today).
Its nice to see that some people still care about creating such thoughtful art for modern constructions. It seems that most building of our time are just optimized for fast and efficient construction.
I hope there are many more out there, so that Earth's Graham Hancock of the year 16000 has something to explore on his/her ayahuasca trip.
by laszlojamf
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- Slightly off topic, but it's interesting to see the same phrase "the long now" pop up in different contexts independently and mean very different things:
https://www.epsilontheory.com/the-long-now/
Both are pretty obscure references for now, but I can easily imagine a world where they both become widely known in separate groups. Like the word "legacy" has hilariously different connotations for software engineers as compared to _everyone else_
by interleave
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- Related: Huge fan of Long Now here.
Asking "How would you build a 10k year clock?" is one of my favorite ways to get to know people, say, at parties.
With a few seconds to mull it over, so far EVERYONE has had at least one strong, novel and leftfield idea that I had not heard or thought of before.
My favorites included: A mirror on the moon, bio-engineered crops and the Pyramids of Gizeh.
- Many Hindus celebrated Malay Sankranti a week ago. It was originally meant to coincide with winter solstice but because the Hindu dates are based on the position of the Sun against the background stars (as viewed from the Earth), precession over the last ~1700 years has driven it out of sync with the tropical calendar.
- Discussed at the time (of the article):
A 26,000-Year Astronomical Monument Hidden in Plain Sight - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19124698 - Feb 2019 (57 comments)
- I think the most likely end fate of the Hoover dam is that humans dismantle it. Eventually, Lake Mead will silt up enough to make the hydro plant useless (it will take centuries to silt up completely but silt will choke the plant long before that). De-silting the reservoir is not a realistic option.
Hopefully, we'll have alternate means of power generation that nullify the dam's economic viability long before then but water supply and flood mitigation are other functions that need consideration. Silt will eventually destroy those functions as well however.
by aaronstreet
1 subcomments
- I’m the author of the original posts on https://oskarjwhansen.org and can confirm that the Star Map restoration project finished near the end of 2025. I’d been planning to get an announcement post up this week but saw the HN attention and wanted to put fears to rest.
by aebtebeten
1 subcomments
- For a hypothesis concerning the precession of the equinoxes and religious pantheons, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38761574
- The star map comes up at the end of Joan Didion's essay "At the Dam":
"""
I walked across the marble star map that traces a sidereal revolution of the equinox and fixes forever, the Reclamation man had told me, for all time and for all people who can read the stars, the date the dam was dedicated. The star map was, he had said, for when we were all gone and the dam was left. I had not though much of it when he said it, but I thought of it then, with the wind whining and the sun dropping behind a mesa with the finality of a sunset in space. Of course that was the image I had seen always, seen it without quite realizing what I saw, a dynamo finally free of man, splendid at last in its absolute isolation, transmitting power and releasing water to a world where no one is.
"""
by akshay326
1 subcomments
- > There is an angle for doubt, for sorrow, for hate, for joy, for contemplation, and for devotion.
I’m so intrigued - what was going on inside Hansen's brain?
- The precession circle is 144 arc degrees sin 23.5. In an 80 year lifespan precession would move the rotation pole about .44 arc degrees or the diameter of the full moon. Any long lived astronomical observatory in ancient times would have noticed this.
- That was an excellent rabbit hole to go down while eating lunch :)
- I first heard about this in a Graham Hancock book. Found it a fascinating example of an attempt to encode a date that far distant future generations might understand (provided it survives).
by carlcortright
1 subcomments
- And to think we're all here building b2b SaaS
by NetMageSCW
0 subcomment
- My wife has bought a few of these for significant dates as gifts:
https://thestarposter.com/
by avhception
2 subcomments
- Haha, I clicked without reading the URL. Then I read the "01931" in the text, immediately looked at the URL and of course it was longnow.org. Brought a smile to my face.
- > Marking in the terrazzo floor of Monument Plaza showing the location of Vega, which will be our North Star in roughly 12,000 years. (Photo by Alexander Rose)
I wonder if some content creator 12K years from now will transport to Earth and stream the North Star from this position for likes/views. If that's even a thing then...
- I wonder if you can pin down other cycles in the sky to pinpoint how many years after the big bang? I guess the appearance of galaxies must change.
- > Having this one fixed point in the sky is the foundation of all celestial navigation.
Only in the northern hemisphere.
- I loved this. I wish I had the ability to do the same innocuous deep dive into a easter egg in code - but I fear it would never be discovered at this rate of which AI is generating similar stuff. But much like this article maybe there's a time and place.
by anentropic
1 subcomments
- Could plate tectonics conceivably throw off the alignment of this monument within the ~10ky timescales involved?
- The 26,000-year cycle is also known as the Platonic Year.
by ProllyInfamous
1 subcomments
- During DEF CON XX, I got bored/overwhelmed (it was not my first year attending) — so I decided to rent a car and visit Hoover Dam (this was before the bypass bridge was completed). I drove through the desert 100mph+, in my own little HST jaunt, searching for nothing but concrete's high water mark.
The statues in OP's article are absolutely beautiful examples of Art Deco / 1930s Americana (my local post office was built then, too, and has eaglettes of similar [but smaller] design). I had no idea they were out there until stumbling upon them, and they definitely leave a lasting impression of our forefather's imposing presence. America, fuck yeah!
Wish I had then-known about this "clock," which is definitely hidden in plain sight. Wish we had similarly-lavish federal budgets, today. But worth visiting, both article, statues & dam.
by giraffe_lady
0 subcomment
- In the extremely interesting book about water, cadillac desert, there is a great discussion with a scholar of some kind, I think an archeologist, about the large western US dams and the future. The gist is that the reservoirs will eventually silt up and disappear, but the dams will remain for thousands of years. The silted lakes will preserve clear evidence of their construction in the geologic record of these regions.
We will quite plausibly be known as the dam builder civilization, as these artifacts could very easily outlast the memory of what we call ourselves. It is fitting to embellish them in this way.
- Thanks for this, at one point I tried to google this monument and didn't find much.
- The fact is; this kind of knowledge are mostly pursued by people called "lunatics" and this is taking science held back in fringe cases. But sometimes lunatics are right too
- 3.82
plein d’impressement: a series of cordialities
by ljsprague
1 subcomments
- >It is likely that at least major portions of the Hoover Dam will still be in place hundreds of thousands of years from now.
Kinda sus of this.
- The civilization that created that must have been a wonderful place and probably was taught how to create such things by aliens.
Is sarcasm, but it may as well not be since that America is long dead and gone and has been replaced by an America that really needs to be renamed at this point.
by maximgeorge
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by kazinator
7 subcomments
- [flagged]
- Sounds like it's about the precession of the equinoxes and the new "Age of Aquarius".
- Destruction of art is the only crime I think should receive the death penalty. You’re making the world darker for everyone.
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