Making A Solar-Powered Billion-Year Lego Clock
Ok this is kind of incredible: Brick Technology built a solar-powered Lego clock that will keep time for a billion years. It’s got various displays in the style of an astronomical clock so you can keep track of seconds, hours, months, centuries, and even galactical years (the amount of time the Sun takes to orbit the center of the galaxy). The clock is powered by solar energy, and the solar cell is connected to the clock so that it tilts throughout the day to keep facing the sun.
This is a) an extremely accessible explanation of how clocks work, b) the nerdiest thing ever, and c) I love it so much. Even if you’re not a Lego fan, you should watch this. (For more on how clocks work, check out Bartosz Ciechanowski’s excellent explainer on mechanical watches.)
The obvious thing that sprung to mind watching this was The Clock of the Long Now, a 10,000-year clock being constructed inside a mountain in West Texas. But I also thought of Arthur Ganson’s Machine With Concrete, which utilizes extreme gear ratios to turn an input of 200 rpm into a gear that turns only once every 2 trillion years. That’s slow enough that the final gear is actually embedded in concrete and it doesn’t affect the operation of the machine at all.
See also Here’s What a Googol-to-One Gear Ratio Looks Like, 20 Mechanical Principles Combined in a Useless Lego Machine, and A Lego 5-Speed Manual Transmission.
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