10K

Clock of the Long Now - Installation Begins from The Long Now Foundation on Vimeo.

10K or the Long Now is, in essence, the building of a clock designed to last 10,000 years, a project finally coming together as seen by the video above. The clock itself is pretty amazing but the most interesting aspect of this enterprise is the time frame of looking 10K into the future using a clock to make it happen. Think about this. What will the world be like? Will man survive,? Will the stars beckon for us to go there? Interesting questions apply here without question. In any event, earth will be around as she doesn't need us and ... 10K is but an eye blink in the multiverse of forever. 

Another initiative of the foundation is the Rosetta Project, a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to build a publicly accessible digital library of human languages permanently etched into a disk intended to last for millennia as per the clock of the Long Now.

The Rosetta Disk fits in the palm of your hand, yet it contains over 13,000 pages of information on over 1,500 human languages. The pages are microscopically etched and then electroformed in solid nickel, a process that raises the text very slightly - about 100 nanometers - off of the surface of the disk. Each page is only 400 microns across - about the width of 5 human hairs - and can be read through a microscope at 650X as clearly as you would from print in a book. Individual pages are visible at a much lower magnification of 100X. The outer ring of text reads "Languages of the World" in eight major world languages.

Ozymandias 

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY