The Million Year Machine

In order to build a future able to stretch across millions of years, we may need to be able to build machines able to endure the brutal erosion of deep time.
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Credits:
The Million Year Machine
Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur
Episode 333; March 10, 2022
Produced, Written, and Narrated by Isaac Arthur
Editors:
Jason Burbank
Cover Art:
Jakub Grygier www.artstation...
Graphics:
Darth Biomech
Jeremy Jozwik www.artstation...
Ken York of YD Visual / ydvisual
Legiontech Studios
Sergio Botero www.artstation...
Udo Schroeter
Music by:
Markus Junnikkala markusjunnikka...
Stellardrone: stellardrone.b...

[@standavison328]

Your point is well taken. I was on the decommissioning crew of the USS Nautilus (SSN-571). I was Chief Electrician for the last four years of its service life. The Nautilus was the first nuclear powered submarine in the world. It was built with the best technology of the early 1950’s. She successfully served for 25 years. However, initial construction in the early fifties meant there was no use of solid state electronics or sophisticated reactor core design. Much effort was spent over the years updating her systems to modern technology. In some cases though, it made no sense to update the systems, so they were not replaced. By the time 20 plus years of service rolled around, the old girl still functioned but with greatly reduced capability compared to the modern nuclear fleet. She made it to her 25 year design service life, but with considerable effort on the part of her crew.

[@brucenadams1]

I was the Comm Officer on the USS-Brush (DD-745). She was built in 1943 and decommissioned in 1970. So, 30ish years. When the engineering department measured the tolerances on the main reduction gears, they found that there was very little wear on the gear surfaces and the reduction gear box would probably last another 20 years with normal maintenance. For a "throw away" item, that's not too bad.

[@SphenForTheWin]

@@brucenadams1 loving these details, ty

[@SphenForTheWin]

Ty for these details

[@bdjshwbwhdhh1991]

Stan - kudos. That is very very cool indeed, thanks for the fascinating info.

[@mikehipps1015]

You ain't gotta lie to kick it, homie.

[@barryon8706]

This is so easy. Make the warranty last 1 million and 1 years, make sure it'll run out on a Sunday when the repair shops are closed, and you're set.

[@CYI3ERPUNK]

its so simple XD

[@Pacbandit13]

Big brain

[@ChatGPT1111]

You mean 999,999 years and 364 days so it will break the next day, when the warranty has run out.

[@MrDeanfoster]

Earth years or something else arguably I don't think any warranty specifies the year length or the planet the year is based on 🤔

[@djschultz1970]

My vacuum cleaner has a lifetime warranty. I should expect it to be used on a Generation Ship thousands of years from now. Where tech support is 200 years away and shipping and handling costs more than the ship

[@danbhakta]

I don't think this man has ever once failed to deliver on Thursday for well over half a decade.

[@captainhakob814]

Smart guy makes his videos 3 months in advance. It's extremely beneficial to me, it comes out basically when I wake up on my day off. It's also nice when none of your content is reliant on current events

[@bilbo_gamers6417]

@@garetclaborn he would be great as a communist dictator

[@isaacarthurSFIA]

@@captainhakob814 Just the scripts and recording, the completed videos are only done about 2 weeks out :)

[@Deridus]

@@garetclaborn First Rule of Warfare: Study SFIA's First Rule of Warfare.

[@achtsekundenfurz7876]

Meh, I've seen better. 29:20 "caluclated" 38:20 "annoucement" But the episode proper was well made, a shoddy sponsor doesn't change that much.

[@Zebred2001]

FYI - Philip II of Macedon (382 - 336 BC) had the Filippeios Krini (Philip’s Fountain) in Greece built using an Archimedes screw pump. It is the oldest still-functioning fountain in the world (as of 2022). The mechanism has apparently only been maintenanced but has never been replaced.

[@zhaoliang4217]

Not for nothing: horseshoe crabs are basically the same as they were 450 million years ago. They are a self replicating machine but that is a darn good design.

[@pavel9652]

@@zhaoliang4217 Great and unexpected comment! ;) The problem would be in managing evolution, due to mutations, natural selection and changes in the ecosystem. The whales approx. 50 million years looked more like small deers, but started turning into bus size fish-like creatures ;) Maybe it would be stable enough in the scale of 1 million years, but it is hard to predict the outcome.

[@robert-zg8or]

Damn. Thanks guy. I gotta check it out.

[@kerrspace5435]

I really like how did you explain 'The million year machine'. It is really like preventing an organization from getting cancer. In a short period of time reparing things is easy - you just hold the three keys - redundance, repair and reproduction. Our own body behaves this way. The cells divide, reproduce and then die. There are milllons of different bio-chemistry mechanism out there to prevent this process from mistake and mutation. However when you get older all the trivial and smallest errors accumulate (there is no way to totally cancel all the small error like protein entanglement - this behavior roots in the chaos/quantum nature of microworld). It happens everywhere in your body, even happens in the error preventing monitor program itself, happens in all the immune cells which are supposed to monitor each other. It is like a fucking rain in a forest. All the trees get wet at exact the same time. You cannot expect to use another monitor program to monitor this one because no matter how many layers of recursion you have they are aging at the simultaneously the same time. You also cannot expect the monitoring programs to fix each other - if a mutation happens in one program. How do they know who is the right one without outside authority? This million year machine problem does need a brand new science field to focus on it. This is because the most realistic future of man kind is metaverse aka the dyson sphere + black hole holographic computer virtual reality. We send all the machines to harvest energy from remote stars by building local dyson sphere(stop the most crimial waste behvior in cosmos) and use that to maintain our cyberutopia. The main problem of the future advance civilization is how to maintain this 'machine' to the heat death of the universe. Sorry for my broken English sir I am Chinese but I am really into your video. Currently this planet is obvious on chaos like Geopolitical conflict, skyrocket inflation, International trolling & hatred etc. But your video always remind me of what is really important in the long run. People in 1000 years future won't even remember all the current trivial things just like how people forget warfare between some medieval European countries. We autistic but gifted 'engineers' (it is a ideology and lifestyle) should focus on the real busniess. Keep this incredibale work sir I will attend KZbin via VPN just to check your updates. Thanks sincerely.

[@femimark5021]

Easy have the repair network be tested, calibrated and commanded by multiple directors of which 20% are offline and serviced while the rest act as a network themselves with divergence from the majority being an indicator of drift. The problem is more about the cost and technology rather than methodology. It's very unlikely over half the directors drift simultaneously, so the repair process will carry on so far as raw materials and power are provided.

[@MiaHerssens]

You would want an evolving maintenance unit so biological or biological inspired solutions seem logical at this point. The earth's biosphere has been going for a couple of billion years

[@modnarer]

Listen to this channel was reminding me what it's like to have my parents read me a story (when i was a child) that I have no idea what it is about sometimes or even can understand most of the time, but I love listening to that calming information thrown at me

[@ah-rr1lk]

Oh you listen to this and other similar creators before bed too? This is interesting and puts me right to sleep in like five minutes. Sometimes I get a half hour though.

[@Tall_papa]

Speaking of Peter Watts, he wrote a short book called the "Freeze-Frame Revolution", about a crew trying to mutiny on an AI led ship designed to last for hundreds of millions of years, I found it quite entertaining, he had some pretty wild solutions to the Time issue

[@DavidEvans_dle]

Million Year Machine, at the end of it's life span. Repair Technician shows up - "Let me check, to see if it's still in warranty... you're in luck :)"

[@peterb9038]

haha, on the console after a 1m years and 1 day, new message: "error"

[@jdlessl]

And at 1,000,001 years, "I'm calling about your machine's extended warranty".

[@Z4RD4N34]

@@jdlessl Noooooo.....

[@craiggersify]

Are you familiar with the Long Now Foundation’s clock project? The idea was to build a clock, any way they could, that would tell reasonably accurate time for 10,000 years. It’s astounding how much complexity that adds even to engineering problems like the kind of clock gearing that was figured out 500 years ago; suddenly it has to be interdisciplinary because the mechanics intersect with climate, geology, biology- its system has not only to function on its own, but in the face of every system it encounters. They do have a design now though. They’re building it under a mountain in a fairly geologically stable region of the US, I believe. But a million year machine? Each new span of time adds another exponential level of complexty! Truly mind-boggling, especially as our increase in information technology has been increasingly short-term. I think of film preservation- something like 2/3 of silent films are permanently lost to us; the same is true of minor movies of much later periods. The same is true of some early digital technology - as its obsolescence increases it’s unclear how well it will stay accessible. Even some early dvds are starting already to corrode beyond usability, and we’ve started to reach the point where hard drive failure can put archival data in serious jeopardy. To return to film, it’s unclear that the digitizations intended to “preserve” old films will actually outlast the more old fashioned material on which they were originally printed. I think it’s an easy blindspot for us today, to assume that what we have made must be more enduring just because it otherwise has greater capabilities.

[@boobah5643]

Less so when you realize those 'greater' capabilities are often things like 'lighter,' 'less bulky,' and of course 'cheaper.'

[@xXx_Regulus_xXx]

@@boobah5643 miniaturization also makes components more fragile, and guess what the tech industry has been striving for since its inception?

[@captsorghum]

M-Disc technology claims to have a several-hundred year lifetime, in DVD and BD compatible formats. Interestingly, it uses an obsidian-like material in place of dye, so could be considered an example of using stone as a long-lived data storage medium.

[@jiripodivin5409]

Disk failure isn't really much of a problem, provided you have other drives running in a suitable RAID configuration, or other virtualization setup. The only question is if you can replace them over time, obviously. But even without replacements you can effectively create a virtual drive that will function far longer than a single component drive would. You do have to make some trade offs, obviously, especially when it comes to I/O latency and effective density of the drive. But since you are making an archive...

[@xXx_Regulus_xXx]

@First Last technical discussion is the whole point of this channel, go be a chimp somewhere else

[@theOrionsarms]

Atomic clocks don't use radioactive decay to measure time, but spontaneous quantum oscillation of specific atoms, their real name should be quantum clocks.

[@SECONDQUEST]

Yeah, with a little more complexity than just watching something oscillate. The setup highly precise otherwise your clock blows. I disagree about them being called quantum clocks though. It is measuring the atom, not the quantum effects. It is just using quantum effects. A pendulum clock isn't usually called an inertial gravity clock.

[@rommdan2716]

Yeah, but for some reason putting "Quantum" in the name of a machine makes it sounds like magic

[@davidmangle]

I suppose that's why it's not called a "sub-atomic" clock.

[@gisli12]

Atomic block

[@ryanhampson673]

I believe its cesium that's commonly used and its something like 4 million vibrations per second.

[@gregcampwriter]

The machine doesn't have to last a million years. It only has to function--sort of--until the Enterprise shows up.

[@calvingreene90]

The Neshtifan windmills are really old but they might be an actual example of the Ship of Theseus.

[@VenturiLife]

Undoubtedly, they've been operating for 1000 years so would have had parts replaced many times over.

[@calvingreene90]

@@VenturiLife But not necessarily every part.

[@bbirda1287]

Replacement all of the parts is irrelevant, maybe even desirable, as they still function for the original purpose.

[@calvingreene90]

@@bbirda1287 Research the Ship of Theseus. It is a thought experiment about identity.

[@bbirda1287]

@@calvingreene90 There are still windmills there performing the same task, therefore the original design was successful. The idea that any mechanical object with moving parts would last one million years with original parts is highly unlikely, therefore a renewal scheme would have to be built into the design, making a semantic argument about whether is was the same ship of Theseus despite being all new parts irrelevant.

[@Backwoods-Bob]

A general category of 100 plus year old machines would be typewriters. Many being used that are over the century mark.

[@diracflux]

Some old sewing machines too. And maybe those spinning wheel things used to make balls of wool.

[@egoalter1276]

Numerous steam traction engines too.

[@leonardpearlman4017]

OK, you yokels! Only 999,900 years to go!

[@Dane33781]

The oldest machine I have is a south bend lathe made in 1939. I use it almost every day. It's well used but not worn out . All of it's features still work.

[@kerrspace5435]

Just take good care of it LoL. One day you may feel like it is your old friend. No matter how your life has changed it will always be there for you.

[@Dane33781]

@@kerrspace5435 I plan on rebuilding it in the next few years. It's something I would like to pass on to my son one day.

[@doctormatthattan]

I would like my household appliances to last a million years first to be honest.

[@virtualtools_3021]

Retro appliances repaired with high quality modern parts

[@bbirda1287]

In a video about Edwardian era appliances, they mentioned that electricity at the time was supplied by a bare live wire strung through a window and along the ceiling into the house, you just hung the hook from your toaster onto the wire. Fires were quite common. Safety standards have evolved since then, don't think an Edwardian toaster would be a good investment, but at least it wouldn't offer you toast when you didn't want any.

[@freddyjosereginomontalvo4667]

I love this channel!!! Awesome work as always men!!!

[@Mermaider]

😭😭😭😭 thank you I was browsing your videos to find a single one I didn't listen to more than once then this notification popped up. Thanks Isaac. Can't wait for your books Love u

[@Scrogan]

With any self-replicating or self-repairing piece of machinery, I always come back to the issue of the semiconductors and memory itself. Obviously you’d store spares, but if that isn’t sufficient then the required semiconductor fabrication means incredible complexity and precision. Every probe would not only need to have an ASML-tier lithography machine, but be able to make more ASML lithography machines. I think maybe you’d try to simplify things back to micron-scale lithography and hope that you can get enough programmed into those chips for running all the mineral refinery and diagnostic and assembly protocols. Larger gate sizes also means less prone to cosmic ray bit flips, maybe even going to TTL could be warranted.

[@Milan_Openfeint]

A bacteria can repair itself, replicate itself, and with some effort could be programmed to build a transmitter to call home. It was perfected over billions of years, but I'm pretty sure we can do even better.

[@tobiwonkanogy2975]

a quantum based machine with "transistors" could be build with a hardcoded program based on placement of individual components and then have infinite memory based on those transistors arranged similar to memory. the hard coded program could always start fresh on power up . keeping that memory is tough , maybe inscribing it into long lasting metal instead of storing it as electricity.

[@Scrogan]

A biological solution may be the simplest, but you’d need to reinvent all of the data integrity methods of the digital realm. As for physical ROM, a ceramic disc with gold selectively plated (or etched) from it would probably last a long time and may be tolerably easy to manufacture, and could be read like a CD. If you’re already going all the way for silicon, then you could make an optical disc out of silicon with selectively anodised areas, though at that point I’d just make it digital ROM with fuse bits or even direct wires. Make three or five copies, embed the data with correction algorithms, that’s going to last a million years and can be made with any size process without worrying about cosmic rays. The CPU itself will likely have a higher density, and it and the RAM and registers need to be volatile but not prone to cosmic ray injection. So I suspect CPU tech will always be more challenging than ROM tech.

[@Milan_Openfeint]

@@davidhand9721 I mean, the hard part of making a self-replicating, self-healing machine that lives off anorganic materials, is already done. We can either improve that, or build something completely new, if that is even better. Perhaps the mission would require an ecosystem of 2 or more species of different sizes, but I don't see any obviously impenetrable obstacles.

[@Milan_Openfeint]

@@davidhand9721 If I heard right, the ecosystems around black smokers at the ocean floor is completely independent of the Sun and the sun-powered ecosystem. After all, all the life converted a lot of inorganic materials into organic ones. It's only a question if this can be done by a single species, two, or fifty. Life doesn't build metal shells or semiconductor brains, because there's no need. Carbon-based polymers are quite versatile. And, for pretty much every element, there is a plant or bacteria species that hoards it. All I'm saying is that this can be done. You just need a loooong DNA. Can you do this by nanomachines? I don't see that happening sooner than modified bacteria, but either way, I'm sure that a long-lasting machine of any kind can be built.

[@jimBobuu]

Do you have any idea how hard it is to find good 70s style green shag carpet?! I wish I still had some around. It's great for studios!

[@Reddotzebra]

In the Foundation series he actually managed to do just that, twice. He created a civilization to preserve and perfect technology, and another to control it. In essence pretending to know everything while ensuring that someone was there to change prophecy on the fly to react to unforseen circumstances. That said, I agree. It kind of left a bad taste in my mouth.

[@spaceman081447]

@Reddotzebra Why does the Foundation series leave a bad taste in your mouth? The thing that annoys me about the series is that Asimov's predictive mathematics is called psychohistory. He compares it to thermodynamics, except that its calculations are for masses of humans rather than masses of molecules. Aside from the near impossibility of being able to calculate detailed behavior of human societies far in the future, I simply hate the name psychohistory. It might seem petty, but I feel he should have called his predictive mathematics something like sociodynamics or chronodynamics.

[@richardgreen7225]

One design question with a million-year artifact is whether the original purpose would still be relevant in a million years. - I own several telephones which were designed to be used with land lines. They are looking more and more like buggy-whips every year. - I live in a 130 year-old house. I know from experience that sometimes it is easier to build a system from scratch than it is to repair (or worse yet, restore) an old system.

[@molybdaen11]

Jes but what if you see a catastrophe comming and need to launch a probe way before it reaches you do do anything - like a random star comming your way for example. You could of couse move your own sun but that takes way more effort then just correcting the course of a object far away slightly.

[@kayleigha4132]

Thanks for another great episode Isaac! Made for a great start to my birthday.

[@isaacarthurSFIA]

HAppy Birthday Kayleigh!

[@kayleigha4132]

@@isaacarthurSFIA Thank you!!

[@jeffsadowski]

I think you would need a colony of machines to produce a machine capable of lasting that long. You would need machines that can build and repair other machines. Machines to gather materials. A good model might be like an ant colony except you would want more than one queen at least 3 and other machines created by the queen machines to be able to repair and build a failing or failed queen.

[@samsejavka8600]

In other words you’d need a civilization?

[@jeffsadowski]

@@samsejavka8600 In some fashion yes. Even humans are considered machines to some extent. Although it could be completely made of non organic machines. Not sure which could last longer.

[@Dane33781]

I have a Bridgeport vertical mill and a lathe. I use them to make parts for them fairly often. I always get a kick out of a machine making parts for itself.

[@Darenz-cg9zg]

@@jeffsadowski I think both could last forever, as long as they have a way to collect new energy. Humans will replace themselves over time, machines could do the same, they just need energy.

[@marshallfischer3667]

sound like the replicators on SG-1. bad news.

[@winfehler]

„Oh Deep Thought! We have travelled long... and far. Have you calculated the ultimate question?“ [yawns] „No. I've been watching the TV.“

[@ukaszgrzesik7231]

Blindsight is a great book and Peter Watts is great writer. But if my memory serves me well Blindsight was about intelligence without sentience, not that intelligence was not required for space travel.

[@isaacarthurSFIA]

True, though they engaged in space travel to get to meet our interesting party of explorers.

[@Argyuile3]

I have 2 bookshelves today that I had in my room when I was a child, now about 40 years old and I've taken them everywhere I've every lived. But mother of god are they heavy.

[@Shyssiryxius]

Maybe just me but I thought this was your best episode yet. Really got me thinking about cool things. Thanks Isaac

[@DistractingTest]

Great video! So perverse instantiation is inevitable by any two entities, because being unique consciousnesses, they will produce unique methods to the same systems. They don't necessarily ever "pervert commands to their own ends" rather that any smart AI would always optimize all beneficial factors at once, rather than actively harm any given factor by not improving it. At that point we would be weird for asking that, but that is a common movie plot. The result however, is never explosions but simply acceptance since they also lack our beliefs involving emotional compulsion or pride driven subsystems. Of course, suppression of solutions will also inevitably encourage perverse instantiation, which I also like to call getting the job done.

[@DigitalJedi]

The longest running machine I have is a 1993 Subaru Impreza 1.8L. It's still got most of the original essential parts. I think the only things that have been replaced are the spark plugs and a timing belt. The thing was my grandmother's daily driver for a decade, my uncles for the 15 years, and has been mine since then. It has almost 350,000 miles on the odometer. It still runs like new. Regular maintenance of course happens, but maintenance is a given for most of these machines.

[@malcolmt7883]

Someday we'll land a Subaru on Mars

[@bgbthabun627]

@@malcolmt7883 why?

[@chad_bro_chill]

@@bgbthabun627 Because it's there?

[@matts3414]

Another amazing video, as always! Just a quick correction about Blindsight (although I see others have already pointed it out), it wasn't about intelligence not being necessary, it was about consciousness not being necessary. An absolutely fascinating book that is well worth a read for anyone who hasn't read it, it got me thinking that consciousness itself may be some kind of evolutionary adaptation, and that there's no reason to think it is necessary for intelligence. It makes me think that the first AI we create is probably not going to be conscious or sentient if we haven't specifically cultivated it to be - a completely alien mind right on our doorstep.

[@davidfinley1214]

Planned obsolescence not an option

[@WilliamDye-willdye]

The statement about self-replicating machines at 23:48 is worth highlighting. Drexler's assembler is a theoretical construct, created with the goal of helping us explore a theory. Yes, he used the phrase "universal assembler" in one of his early books, but only as an imprecise section heading (think "universal joint" in a car). He never claimed that a single machine design consisting of a few thousand atoms could do everything that physics allows, but that public image somehow persists, possibly because single-design machines are easier to animate when doing videos about the subject.

[@ruemeese]

Similar considerations are being addressed by the 10,000 year clock: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock_of_the_Long_Now

[@excell211]

One information that could complement the "Million Year Machine" is that it is *theorized* that glass can take up to 1-2 million years to decompose on nature. So, some type of composite material involving glass and/or other materials could be used. But maybe that would be entering too much on the discussion of materials rather than machines themselves.

[@alfredsutton4412]

Improvement in materials technology is often a prerequisite to improving other technologies. I like glass, and glass like materials.

[@toffeeFairy]

Your comment about the carpet, is funny, cause my mother got a few carpets that have been in use for up to 100 years

[@anjkovo2138]

A missed opportunity... we could of put a transmitter on Oumuamua transmitting a constant signal for a million years. I'm sure it would pass other star systems

[@memesfromdeepspace1075]

I like your way thinking. So what power source?. Consider he Will long time from nearest star?🤔🤔🤔.

[@anjkovo2138]

@@memesfromdeepspace1075 I don't know. But there must be tech that can do that. Atomic power supply surely

[@Dragrath1]

It greatly depends on what model of origin for Oumuamua you use. Thus far the only model that perfectly matches all data is the Hydrogen iceberg hypothesis which is able to explain the initial frame of reference in the Galactic standard of rest as well as the nongravitational acceleration. In that case the likelihood of Oumuamua reaching another star is basically zero since the only reason we encountered it was because the Sun is moving through the dissipating remains of a molecular cloud complex that has already produced its stars. For all that Avi Loeb raves against the hydrogen iceberg hypothesis because such objects are "short lived" (in order to justify his defunct alien spacecraft model) it needs to be remembered his argument assumes we are average observers in the milky Way, which observations of our galaxy say we are not. We are within the local fluff a interstellar cloud formed on the boundary of two supernovae shells. If hydrogen icebergs exist then the center of the local fluff is exactly where you would expect to find them which was exactly where the Sun was when we encountered Oumuamua. In this model however the Sun will be the first and last star Oumuamua ever encounters excluding the prospects of some evaporated remnant once all the hydrogen is exhausted

[@dsnodgrass4843]

Good luck catching up to it, tho. Went pretty quick, iirc.

[@Soken50]

@@anjkovo2138 If by atomic power you mean RTGs, then they'd give you a few decades to a century, nowhere near enough for a million years, And as far as I know that's the longuest lasting solid state generator technology we have :x

[@kobebarka8633]

Happy Thursday Everyone! Thank you as always Isaac! You have the best content!!

[@MNewton]

Another example of of the trouble with long term colony ships in fiction is in Niven and Pournelle's "Footfall" where in the alien Fithp have a slower than light arc, move into the Sol system, drop an asteroid on Earth to assert dominance and begin the subjugation. However a sizable continent of the Fithp are so call 'star born' and have never lived on a planet and don't really see the need to especially since the planet in question is over run with hostile monkeys meaning sacrificing Fithp lives for what the star born see as no actual gain since they could easily hang about in the outer system where all the resources are and remain unmolested by the primitive monkeys who have no way to effectively stop them from doing whatever they want out there. Seems that most of the leaders are thawed out previous generations and there is some tension between factions but from what I recall it doesn't actually amount to much in the end.

[@petersmythe6462]

We have a table from the mid-2000s that is ridiculously solid and sturdy It's supported by a thick ring of wood laminate with the grain running along the ring. The chairs, however, are very flimsy, held together by glue and tiny pegs, and have all experienced a variety of catastrophic structural failures within a short time (it started within a month). What will likely occur is that if both continue to see use, that table will exist in 50 or 100 years. But the chairs will not exist anywhere near that long.

[@changsangma1915]

A table is not a machine, its a structure. Two very different things. Machine involves rigorous function. A Structural construct is used only under given circumstance here putting plates of food, writing, placing stuff on it. A machine will face a quicker wear down compared to stationary construct.

[@spaceman081447]

@petersmythe6462 If the table and chairs were made by the same company at the same time, then I don't understand the difference in their lifetimes.

[@Mr.Deleterious]

Could you imagine the heart break our far future, distant ancestors would feel when a million-year machine reaches the end of its life cycle? I wonder if giant monuments might be built to honor the millennias worth of work these machines provided during their time in the Sun.

[@BriarLeaf00]

I find this topic to be utterly fascinating. The concept that everything we have built could be gone so quickly, and the challenges of making lasting long term infrastructure raise some pretty serious questions about resource management and what we, today or our children or thiers, want to leave as a lasting legacy. The struggle is convincing people who at best live to 100 years thinking about deep time. I'm just not sure we're really built for it.

[@sbalogh53]

20:21 Mt Titlis in Switzerland. My wife and I went there in 2019. Really cold and windy but spectacular views. Recommended for a visit.

[@matzeselloggs2392]

Havent seen the video, but by the title and intro i can say it is something i was looking for just yesterday! Thank you for your Content Isaac Arthur.

[@lengould9262]

Definitely needed. Earth can no longer handle our discarding every building and machine every 50 to 100 years.

[@shivas3003]

But I am already saved. For the machine is immortal. Even in death, i serve the Omnissiah.

[@shivas3003]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/enmoeGl5r56KhJo

[@tastyfrzz1]

The Bob Lazar sports model supposedly used a thermocouple to extract energy from matter/antimatter reactions. The ships he described sounded as though they were very elegant in design which leads me to believe that they would be very old technology. Possibly thousands of years ahead of us.

[@kobe3576]

According to Cambridge Dictionary, a machine is "a piece of equipment with several moving parts that uses power to do a particular type of work". Stonehenge, the pyramids, etc do not qualify as a machine because they don't have moving parts and they don't use any kind of power to do their work. From that definition, what is a machine is very clear.

[@rileynicholson2322]

Isn't Stonehenge hypothesized to have something to do with the Sun, which provides power and is moving relative to Stonehenge?

[@CapnSnackbeard]

As soneone married to a woodworker, you should learn more about wood and furniture and how its made and how long people keep it when it is made well. Consumerism is a disease. The world has been orchestrated by greedy, wasteful people, it is not natural to discard that which you have made as though it were without value. We did that. We made that world.

[@pyramear5414]

Attempts by companies (such as John Deer) to ban maintaining things you have purchased is in my opinion the most egregious example of this.

[@7lllll]

i like this comment, but it's only partially true. wooden furniture is a good example of something that is valuable for as long as it maintains its structure. something like a computer is not because the technology is not yet mature and therefore the quality of new devices are objectively superior to old devices; obsolescence is a genuine reality. where consumerism could be a problem is with things like clothes. clothing is a mature technology and the quality of new clothes are not superior to old ones. they should last as long as possible and few should be thrown away. change of fashion is an illusion, only trends change. do people throw away old clothes unnecessarily? i'm not so sure, people i know only throw away ones that are truly broken beyond repair

[@CapnSnackbeard]

@@7lllll the notion that every human must iterate their technology so frequently is, again, a fabrication of marketing departments. That technology is frequently engineered to have a brief lifespan, the meaningless differentiation, the non-modular designs, and hard-wired batteries. The so-called "value" of obtaining the newest thing is almost always zero anymore. How much better is this phone than your last? I haven't been able to tell the difference in years. On the contrary, i think you will begin to find going forward that the things you buy will be of a lesser quality. Imported, shrinkflated, made by machines, and of cheaper material. They no longer have to innovate to compete, they just have to make more money to compete. There are a lot of ways to make more money.

[@7lllll]

@@CapnSnackbeard the frequency is more than necessary and the improvements are often fake, but the point still stands that a product of an immature technology cannot be of adequate quality for long

[@neonvalkyrie6425]

Can you make a video about techs we might see this century ? Also, love the vids !!

[@veejayroth]

Already did, didn't he.

[@siRrk1337]

from the current trend i predict that in the next two decades consumer appliances will approach an average lifetime of 5 to 10 seconds tops

[@paulwalsh2344]

Frederik Pohl's Heechee Saga was a pretty good example of an alien species visiting our solar system in the geological past and leaving artifacts either in solar-polar orbit or out in the Oort cloud awaiting humanity to reach a certain level of advancement before discovering them. And then the Heechee themselves actually learning how to hide for cosmological time scales in the event horizons of black holes to skirt the problem of entropy.

[@matushonko7223]

"if the mission isn't logically sound, why obey it" emperor's most holy inquisition: *spills their coffee*

[@ilkoderez601]

Great episode. Lots of cool concepts. The speech was _really_ good, and not too fast.

[@Electric_Bagpipes]

Dude, I _Just_ finished Girls last Tour a week ago, please stop reminding me of that cityverse… (Yes, anime and manga. Were all nerds here you really surprised?)

[@lancerhalsey4816]

Did you make friends with hopelessness?

[@Electric_Bagpipes]

@@lancerhalsey4816 we curled up and took a nap together

[@knifetex]

A while back on your live stream, I asked if you’d read “Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia” by Gregory Benford. This is exactly the kind of video I was hoping for. Very thought provoking material. Thanks for another great installment!

[@Roxor128]

The case of "going dim" when there's no crisis was also used in Greg Egan's novel Incandescence. The Splinterites, who live in something akin to an asteroid orbiting inside a black hole's accretion disk, live in a state of being satisfied with the status quo, but when crisis strikes, they "wake up" and start working on things like relativity. The book has two stories told in alternating chapters, with the Splinterites' story in the even chapters and the one in the odd chapters being about some people from a galaxy-spanning civilisation investigating a meterorite, and which is a tad slow to get going. Egan tends to throw you into the deep end of his worlds, so it's probably going to be a couple of chapters of each story before you really get yourself centred in each one, though I found the Splinterites' story the more interesting of the two.

[@bilbo_gamers6417]

A lot of tools used in the machine shop are made of stone. Most notably are granite surface plates. But the problem is that even just a granite slab naturally wears down with time as it's used, to the point where it's no good.

[@joebudden3327]

My brain is just trying to keep up with how your mind works. You described a mutating machine that has cancer risks. WOW 😂. Isaac your mind is special ❤️ love your work my friend

[@antonmeshcheryakov5068]

1. Atomic clocks have nothing to do with radioactive decay. 2. Diffusion will eventually get to the thermocouples. 3. The microstructure of any solid radioactive material will detoriate due to the atoms being kicked off out of their place. Typically it leads to the stuff expanding and becoming fragile.

[@fredashay]

6:47 _"...and honestly, most folks like switching up a house, or at least a room, every so often..."_ Nah! Only women do that. Men (at least most men) set up our house so it's comfy and leave it that way forever unless circumstances force us to. Copulate fashion! We don't like to take a big pile of money and just set it on fire every so often. The only time we change up is when a new Playstation or Xbox model comes out, or the TV wears out and we have to buy a new one with a bigger screen...

[@BigBodyBiggolo]

@C K i can tell you with great certainty i will never spend 300k in my life

[@spanglerimagery]

We have to divest ourselves of the idea of built in obsolescence,.. and disposable. That is killing us,.. Depletion of resources unnecessarily. Thank you and your team for such a wonderful collection of ideas and potential methodology; a thoughtful examination of science, fiction, and fantasy..

[@djschultz1970]

Takes me back to the Generation Ship episode (which I thought was in the Upward Bound playlist, but its not). What do you even build it out of and how do you keep it and its home base on task for potentially thousands or millions of years.

[@massimookissed1023]

"Generation Ships" & "Million Year Ark" are in the "Generation Ships & Interstellar Colonization" playlist. kzbin.info/aero/PLIIOUpOge0LskSp9Jac9nE6xSDfZ83Tgf

[@savagesarethebest7251]

Oxford Electric Bell has been running around since 1840s

[@MnemonicHack]

"How do we keep machines running for geological timescales?" Nanomachines, son.

[@kakerake6018]

Make the machine a sun. Boom bajillion year machine lol.

[@oiiouuu1247]

No. Just Look after it every 4 years, man

[@Arejen03]

I didint knew i needed channel like this for my cosmic imagination

[@jiripodivin5409]

Beyond checksum we have error correcting codes, we've had them since 1950 actually. At a cost of some bits you can ensure that not only is the error detected, but also rectified.

[@elliotyoder6976]

This video made me think of something. If black holes can preserve information, could a civilization turn one into a time capsule? How long could it last? I imagine a civilization turning a galaxy into a massive ship that they force to merge with other galaxies in order to feed their black hole. How big could they get it?

[@isaacarthurSFIA]

Now that is an interesting notion, I need to think on that

[@wolvenar]

As I have gotten older, I no longer want to keep replacing everything every couple/few years. So I have switched to the buy once cry once idea. Where I can't find anything decent or up to my expectations I have building my own long term well built.. well everything. I this pretty much with everything in my life from furniture to the house and buildings around it. I sure wish I could have learned this when I was much younger. But I realize not everyone has the same stable situation I have had.

[@birkett83]

"Checksum" is not a specific algorithm. There's a wide variety of checksum algorithms, from simple parity bits to cryptographic hash functions.

[@snewsom2997]

You can reupholster a sturdy couch from 1950, for a fraction of the same couches cost today. Best other examples I can think of, is the T-6 Texan used to train Airforce pilots, that's been flying since the 1940's. Certain things have benefits to building sturdy, Appliances, Some Consumer electronics, Personal Computers, Home Stereo Equipment, Automobiles, (people convert ICE to Nat Gas and Electric all the time), Certain things don't Walkman's, Video Games, things whose technology is in the active growth stage.

[@TheMew35]

In the game Genshin Impact the God of Eternity sealed herself away and gave all her duties to a preprogrammed sentient android to not be changed by time. After 500 Years she wants to change a part of the program but she had made the android specially so it couldn’t be changed easily even by her. In the end she had to literally fight the android (which was made stronger than her) for another 500 years to change the program.

[@sophiathekitty]

Self labotomy or rather going back to sleep could be a viable strategy for an immortal mind to deal with eternity. Like once the issue you woke up to solve is fixed why wouldn't you go back to sleep while there's nothing you care to do that requires that level of activation? Like I have a game idea that kinda uses this sort of logic.... Inspired by the Dyson sphere program, satisfactory/Subnautica, and this channel... Where there's the first person crafting and survival stuff.... And then you can unlock the megastructure building modes.... That start adding in time scale changes... Like you abandon your first person body and are now in a body that is experiencing time at a tick rate that would allow for interstellar communication to feel realtime. (And then let you do stuff like print out a fist person body that runs at normal time rates to run around the interior of the megastructures and whatnot...

[@Milan_Openfeint]

You'll always want to build bigger telescopes to see any incoming invasion as soon as possible, and to do that, you need maximum thinking speed. Since the universe is, at least in practice, infinite, there is always a risk of near-lightspeed invasion fleet. Actually, you want to build that fleet yourself.

[@gcl2783]

Supporting legacy equipment and software is especially profitable when the original was not built with longevity and extensibility in mind. Still, the stuff is around and we pay to maintain it. Furthermore, we have a legacy of paying to make legacy equipment do things it was never designed to do and operate in environments that could not be imagined at time of building.

[@KilgoreTroutAsf]

Lots of Roman roads are still in use. One Barcelona´s main roads, Via Augusta, was built over 2000 years ago by the Romans, and spans 1500+ km to the north and south under different names.

[@ellenmcgowen]

A million-year "machine" would have to be a technological ecosystem of smaller machines handing repair, mining, manufacture, energy production and supply, assembly... in essence, it would be a swarm of artificial life carrying out analogues of biological assimilation, metabolism, reproduction, and dispersal. For models, we might look to bacterial ecosystems that live in hydrothermal ocean vents.

[@jeremypace249]

Issac and team: a common sci-fi/fantasy/historical theme or idea is that of "Ages". The Earth/civilization is going through ages, which turn out to be a never-ending circle. Stone tablets become paper/papyrus, which become books, which turn into electronic storage, along with civilization. Some postulate that telepathy or exotic storage succeeds all other known storage mediums, until a solar event wipes out everything and we have to start from stone tablets again. The Million-Year Machine is like that, useful when started, but incomprehensible in just a dozen generations, either more or less advanced than the beginning civilization. Is this worthy of its' own KZbin event?

[@hallamhal]

How do you get a machine to work for one million years? One year at a time

[@PaulBrunt]

There are older things running on electricity that are still going ;-) Checkout the Oxford Electric Bell, that's been going since 1840.

[@wolvenar]

Did you happen to consider of the requirements and output of each isotope vs energy output. Some isotopes might last a long time, but require insane amounts of isotope for the same energy. Plus the surrounding support equipment are the limiting factor more than the isotope in almost every RTG I can think of.

[@procactus9109]

No, this episode is brought to me by the internet... Huge difference

[@rhuiah]

Great episode. Perhaps a machine's shelf-life could be extended via black hole time-altering shenanigans. The machine (i.e. a fancy broadcasting beacon) experiences a day while the universe experiences a thousand years.

[@thepeff]

That lightbulb is still going? I call shenanigans

[@ephennell4ever]

No, actually there have been a few of those old carbon-filament bulbs that lasted for incredible spans. For a long time, there was one at Edison's labs (since turned into a museum), that had been lit continuously since some date in the 1870s. It finally 'went' after a power-outage (I think several years ago); when the power came back, the bulb burnt out when coming back on. (Bulbs are the most-stressed when being switched on and/or off, due to dynamic thermal stresses.) The bulb had been on virtually continuously since being initially turned on. That bulb in the firehouse has probably, similarly, been on virtually continuously since being turned on.

[@JohnS706]

May we also not forget about the thousands of muskets made in the 18th century that are still actually being used by collectors today. The only gunpowder they can use is incredibly corrosive, and they made it 250 years with good maintenance.

[@ephennell4ever]

"Used by collectors today." As 'demonstrators', not as weapons; military guns from that time were typically .58 caliber (if British). I can virtually guarantee that the bore today on those guns is more like .60 caliber ... which means that a supply of musket-balls made for it when it was in it's 1st decade would be so under-bore in size as to be next to useless now! Between the erosion caused by hundreds of musket-balls scraping their way down the barrel, and the chemical erosive corrosion of the burning powder (and the possible/likely interaction of the two effects) ... accuracy would be lousy (even if superb, initially), and so much of the gasses would be blowing past around the musket ball ... _severe_ reduction in muzzle velocity is guaranteed!

[@Mastervitro]

A black satellite? Reminds me of the enigmatic Black Knight satellite

[@r.connor9280]

A million defunct but intact examples of a specific technology would by its very nature act as effective archive. Think of it a million Gameboys buried in the trash leading to the tech ascendancy of some long lost world because they had enough examples to understand circuit planning and data storage

[@darkguardian1314]

Other than anvils, I would say the old tall ships like USS Constitution and San Diego’s Star of India could be the best machines humans came up with. In space, Voyager probes and a few zombie satellites is as close as we’ve come.

[@alvarohernani6645]

If we were to send a ship for a 10.000 years long journey, couldn't it be that in that time we develop faster technology, send a new ship to the same destination and this second ship arriving first?

[@sparkeyjames]

Imagine a machine that attains all knowledge. Then shuts itself off due to boredom. A concept imagined by Larry Niven.

[@christianames4669]

I just discovered your channel, thank you so so much Isaac!

[@karenboomer9667]

wait, existential crises triggered by prolonged existence and tied to completion of a task. that's mr. meseeks, look at me

[@dannygjk]

Holy Christ I almost had a heart attack when the video started.

[@Cythil]

The biggest reason I see for building the Million-year machine is that I simply do not want to change the lightbulb every millennium. Of course, it all down to perspective. Most people to not expect to live a millennium or even a century. So a light bulb that last extremely long is no use for them. But I do buy quality stuff just to not have to change it. I do think that building something meant to last a hecking lot of time is a bit silly. Generally done by people just because they think that everyone will be behind that. But then again I also like how our world is littered with the objects handed down for generations even if their purpose is no longer what they once were. One can always recycle or reappropriate old stuff, after all. I am sure a lot of non-religious people still like old churches build to last for a thousand years. (I mean, I do. But I am a weirdo) Or something like the Colosseum which now is just a ruin still holds value to many of us even if it (Thankfully) is not used for its original propose.

[@7lllll]

the problem is that there are things like food that are literally consumed and must be replaced no matter what. what difference does it make if every millennium you have to add lightbulbs to the shopping list that is never empty?

[@Cythil]

@@7lllll Like I said. Perspective. Some do not mind changing the light bulb once a year or even more often. I am always Lazy or busy (yeah. I know that is a contradiction). And I feel I do not want to spend my time fixing the lights. So I rather buy a light bulb that can last for 10 years then one that last for 1. Even if it 10 times as expensive. (Now normally it often turns out that it cheaper to have a long-lasting product anyway in the long run. Normally the light bulb that last 10 times as long only cost like twice as much as the short lasting one or something like that. Not always the case. But often. This is just a added reason however but at some point you do not of course benefit from having a more expensive item that last for longer. Like those Churches that last for many generations. The original builders never benefited directly from having future generations benefit from that church. But of course, people like to leave a legacy. Also, this become complex in that if everyone pays forward, then society as a whole might benefit for long term projects. Thanks to my great great great great grandfather I did not need to build a church, and my great great decadence might appreciate the bridge I left behind.)

[@RamismTamoid]

That a 3D printer can produce everything but itself makes me think of Goedel’s Incompleteness Theorems, Turing’s Halting Problem, Chaitin’s AIT (Algorithmic Info Theory); since we have the rudiments of quantum compute we surely are capable of 4D printing.

[@Dragrath1]

Regarding remote islands or mountains on Earth it is probably worth mentioning they might not last a million years especially in the case of islands as a lot of small islands only last briefly some lasting shorter than a human generation as they were composed of lose unconsolidated material that washes away. many more islands last no more than hundreds to thousands of years often because they are volcanic and on long timescales unstable to landslides or outright volcanic eruptions. From the channel Geology hub discussing volcanic systems histories it has become apparent just how many volcanic islands are locked in a cycle of growth and destruction that repeats as the island rebuilds only to destroy itself again. Nisyros, Santorini, Krakatau, Hunga Tonga Hunga Haiappi all fall into the category of self annihilating volcanic islands on geologic timescales. Virtually no mountain is more than a few million years if you count its surface tall mountains only stay tall so long as uplift continues the same applies to canyons and ravines at least on the very active surface of Earth. The Grand Canyon started to form 6 million years ago on a continent that is more than 3 billion years old.

[@anon6000]

Minor correction: the aliens in Blindsight are very, very intelligent, they're just not sentient.

[@DracoDelirious]

Love your videos brother ‼️

[@seanbrazell7095]

Hey man, even the Golden Throne is falling apart...

[@anteeko]

"old object were build to last" is likely confirmation biais, low quality stuff broke down quickly so we only witness whatever remain -the strongest, most reliable build- yet it does really give us any clue if it is true.

[@kinngrimm]

In the continuation of Assimovs work, he imagined a second foundation of psychic individuals that would improve the plan continously. In that sense it is not the old man from milenias ago still ordering what to do but the continously improved plan does.

[@KEYWESTDAVE]

Barry Kripke, Great nawation!