Who’s got the time? Amazon CEO and mega-billionaire, Jeff Bezos, has clocked his next big project: The Clock of the Long Now. Funded by Bezos, the project is an immense mechanical clock build inside a mountain in West Texas that will, if successful, accurately tell time for the next 10,000 years.
How did this project come about?
The original idea was incepted by Danny Hillis in 1989. His vision was to construct a timepiece that ticks annually, with the century hand progressing every 100 years, and a cuckoo emerging to mark each millennium. The project, now funded by Jeff Bezos, has been underway for the past six years.
How does it work?
The Clock will measure time through astronomical and calendrical displays, featuring a chime generator collaboratively designed with legendary music producer, Brian Eno. This generator has the capability to generate over 3.5 million distinctive bell chime sequences, representing each day the Clock is visited for the next 10,000 years.
The clock’s movement will be propelled by enormous gears housed 500 feet within a mountain shaft, the space of which took three years to carve out. It will utilize thermal energy derived from the temperature variations linked to the day and night cycle occurring on the mountain’s surface.
The clock will be wound by people, who must make a formidable trek to the reach it.
What is the purpose?
The purpose is to build a clock that will accurately tell time for the next 10,000 years. The Clock creates a unique opportunity to contemplate and design on the timescale of civilizations, serving as a lasting symbol of our individual ties to the distant future.
“If you have a Clock ticking for 10,000 years what kinds of generational-scale questions and projects will it suggest? If a Clock can keep going for ten millennia, shouldn’t we make sure our civilization does as well? If The Clock keeps going after we are personally long dead, why not attempt other projects that require future generations to finish?”
What will it look like?
The clock will be an immense monolithic structure hundreds of feet tall. At the heart of the clock, a celestial display will portray a star field, revealing both the date and the zodiac’s progression.
Surrounding this, the display will indicate the positions of the sun and the moon in the sky, along with the moon’s phase and angle. Extending beyond this, a dual dial will showcase numerical representations of the year based on our Gregorian calendar system.
Where is it?
The Clock of the Long Now is presently being assembled in the Sierra Diablo Mountain Range in West Texas.
When will it start/end?
There is no timeline as to when the clock will be open. For more information on the project, visit the website here.