Hoover Dam - Long Term Art
June 20th, 02007 by Alexander Rose
I was reminded the other day by a visitor here at Long Now that the Hoover Dam has one of the more astonishing pieces of long term art embedded into its torrazzo floor. This is one of a very few installations in the world that reference the earth’s ~26,000 year precessional cycle to pre-date a long term artifact. Very cool.
photo by Pinelife
From the Bureau of Land Reclamation’s web page on the work:
“Surrounding the base is a terrazzo floor, inlaid with a star chart, or celestial map. The chart preserves for future generations the date on which President Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated Hoover Dam, September 30, 1935.
The apparent magnitudes of stars on the chart are shown as they would appear to the naked eye at a distance of about 190 trillion miles from earth. In reality, the distance to most of the stars is more than 950 trillion miles.
In this celestial map, the bodies of the solar system are placed so exactly that those versed in astronomy could calculate the precession (progressively earlier occurrence) of the Pole Star for approximately the next 14,000 years. Conversely, future generations could look upon this monument and determine, if no other means were available, the exact date on which Hoover Dam was dedicated.”
June 30th, 2007 at 2:33 pm
While I love the idea of the 10,000 year clock, from an engineering standpoint I’ve had a hard time with it. Not because I don’t think it would work - I do, but because I don’t think it’s really an optimal design for a time telling device meant to last 10,000 years. It seems to me that the design of the clock revolves too much around the designer’s preference for mechanical devices. When I think about a 10,000 year clock, I think about the ancient structures that have already marked time for many thousands of years. What if the 10,000 year library/museum that the clock was supposed to be in was the clock itself? What if it was some kind of uber-stonehenge which precicely marked not only the procession of the equinoxes but the positions of many constellations, the planets, etc? Having no moving parts, and made of super durable materials, this could last for many, many thousands of years and be vastly more intelligible to whoever encountered it.
July 2nd, 2007 at 1:52 pm
I was there not to long ago, really neat place and I was happy to find such a device. Here is a perspective shot: