[vertexFarm]

"Mr Siedentopf says he hopes the song will play for another 55 million years."

I think I can hear the engineers over at the Long Now foundation pissing their pants with laughter: http://longnow.org/clock/

They are only aiming for 10,000 years. A walk in the park compared to this apparently godlike and immutable mp3 player atop a painted plywood box. Has this guy even heard of atomic diffusion? Not like it'll last long enough for that to even come close to becoming a relevant factor.

Where do people get this idea that machines are eternal? It's outrageously rare to find a machine more complex than an adjustable wrench that lasts half a lifetime, let alone surpasses generations, but in nearly all of fiction machines are portrayed as ageless things that dwarf our puny lifespans as fragile meat-beings. It's simply not true.

This is a weird tangent, sorry for derailing.

[jpindar]

It's not rare to find a 50 year old car or motorcycle. Did you mean something that functions for that long without maintenance?

[vertexFarm]

It's pretty rare if you consider it percentage wise, as in proportion to all the vehicles on the road. Because there's so many hundreds of cars we encounter every single commute, even small percentages are reliably represented which makes rare things seem commonplace--after all, you see them every day. But the percentage of cars and motorcycles on the road that are older than fifty is still pretty dang low. Rare isn't the same as nonexistent, after all. I believe the average age of a vehicle on the road in the US is around eleven years, which is a record high.

My BMW R50/5 just turned 47, getting real close to that over-the-hill party. I'm planning to buy it a cake in a few years, plus I've got the parts for a top-end reseal. Going to be real classy. Definitely looking forward to it.