The Long Now's museum/offices at Fort Mason in San Francisco are well worth the trip, if you ever get the chance. They have all sorts of models of the mechanisms for their 10,000 year clock, as well as copies of the Rosetta disc documenting the world's languages. After reading Anathem, getting to see the binary adder at quarter scale was... almost a religious experience. :)

Anyway, they raise an interesting question here--one that I never considered at such scope. Not sure if I agree with their conjecture about violence creating markets, yet.