Well, people in the year 3023 might have the luxury of finding out, thanks to an art/science project called the Millennium Camera, which will take an extremely long-exposure photo of the Arizona desert.

The brainchild of Jonathon Keats, an experimental philosopher at the University of Arizona College of Fine Arts, the Millennium Camera is an intriguing experiment with a noble, if somewhat naive, goal. The device will take the world's slowest photo over a full thousand years, providing future inhabitants of Tucson, Arizona with a time capsule of what's changed and what hasn't.

To project into the future, Keats looked to the past. The Millennium Camera's design is that of a pinhole camera, the very first kind invented – coincidentally, around 1,000 years ago. It's a copper cylinder with a thin sheet of 24-karat gold at one end, in which a tiny hole has been punched. Sunlight seeps through that hole and shines on a light-sensitive surface at the back, which has been coated in multiple thin layers of an oil paint pigment called rose madder.

The whole thing is mounted on a steel pole and pointed out over the desert towards a neighborhood of Tucson. The idea is that the controlled light exposure will slowly fade the pigment to different degrees – darker areas, such as the mountains, will fade slower than brighter areas like the sky. If all goes as planned, the end result will be a millennium-long exposure photo.

Of course, there will be a lot of movement in frame over 10 centuries, so it will invoke some squinting in the future humans (or their alien overlords). But, Keats says, that's part of the charm – the most stable elements, like the scenery, will stand bold, while the changing objects, like buildings, will be partly transparent, based on how long they're there. It's kind of a comment on the impermanence of humanity, really.