Our video this week comes courtesy of the Long Now Foundation, which has just begun installing a mechanical clock in a West Texas mountain that will keep time for 10,000 years.
Conceived by US engineer and entrepreneur Danny Hillis, the Clock of the Long Now aims to shift humanity’s thinking away from the immediate, inspiring a more long-term view of the world and our place in it. The mechanism is made primarily from special grades of stainless steel, titanium and dry running ceramic ball bearings. It has been designed to run with minimum intervention or maintenance, harvesting energy from temperature fluctuations between day and night.
The clock will tick just once a year, with a century hand marking every 100 years, and a cuckoo making an appearance every millennium. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos – a supporter of the project who has pumped $42m into it – has encouraged people to visit the temporal monument, but warned them that doing so will take ‘commitment’. The nearest airport is several hours away by car, and the foot trail to the clock rises about 2,000 ft above a valley.
Magnificent folly
About as much use as HS2, but much better engineered!
If I had pumped $42million into a cuckoo clock I would hope to live to see the cuckoo! Or maybe he does?
Well as headstones go, if you are going to spend $42 million on one, it might as well be in the middle of nowhere…
Does it work, or has the prime contractor pocketed $41.9M and built a static replica?
The model of it in the Science Museum certainly works!
We won’t know for a hundred years. Unless you put your ear against it every birthday….
We won’t know if it works for another 82 years.
And the reason is????
Answers on a post card! 🙂
Because they can and it’s not hurting anyone?
it’s obvious P.G.!! Millionaires don’t need reasons-no different to us peasants splashing out on a holiday in the sun—-“because we wanted to, it gives us pleasure…………. and we can afford it…………..”. Don’t be a misery………….
…..also. perhaps he might tell us just how it works?
Is it tax deductible?
Very interesting, but we have an eternal clock – didn’t God spin the Earth to give us 24 hours a day?
The Earth doesn’t have hands.
Won’t last as long as the DFS sale then
Nothing last as long as the DFS sale. Not even diamonds.
Complete and utter waste of money.
Why is this even taking up space in TheEngineer, the article appears to have no serious engineering content!
There is plenty of engineering. How do you make a mechanical device last 1000 years and remain accurate, have it be powered for that long, and have a underlying mechanisism that is clearly understandable without the need to dismantle anything? Lots of engineering problems here that can be transferred to other areas.
Have a read of the wikipedia entry.
Cynical thought — must be a tax scam, as I can see no other valid reason for burying $42-million.
It’s certainly cynical.
What have “we” learned with this project? will it help future generations of intelligent mutant reptiles?
It can’t hurt them.
The purpose of the clock is to help people think about the future. Most people think of the future as some abstract thing, disconnected from themselves and everyone and everything they know. This clock is a real machine that stretches from today to the distant future. We can see pictures and videos of it. We can visit it and see it with our own eyes. Its existence helps people to think about the World and the interval between now and that future time. By helping people think thoughts they have never thought before, the clock becomes art.
$42M is 0.03% of Jeff Bezos’s net worth. That’s equivalent to $23 for a regular American. I would spend $23 to make something like that.
Bravo!
Cool! For all those who miss the concept it’s to bring awareness that what we do echos through time and has consequences far past our short lifetimes. Humanity would be much better off if instead of worrying about some mythical afterlife we instead worry about the state of the world we leave to our children. That’s what this clock is for.
$42m on a clock? I’m all for letting people spend their money however they want. This seems a tad, uh, well it could have been better spent given the things going on in the world.
Good god, reading all these comments has forever damaged my opinion of engineers…
Personally, I would like to hear more comments from either billionaires or other engineers that have designed and built a project expected to last 10 000 years…
pointless waste of effort… but cute!
Bezos can spend $1 million per day for 250 years and still have money left. He can do this just because its cool. And somebody got paid to build it – employees, contractors, and engineers.
100 years . . . Must have a mighty long pendulum
As I stated earlier better than HS2, I was not being derogatory to the clock. as others have said any machine that can run for 10,000 years without human interaction is really an engineering marvel. HS2 on the other hand will cost many times more than the clock and more than likely break down on day one!