To Bezos, who reportedly invested $42 million
in the clock's construction, the timepiece is the
ultimate symbol of long-term
term thinking.To
Danny
nny Hillis, an inventor and computer scientist
who first described the idea for the clock in
Wired magazine in 1995, it's a vision come to
life.
"I want to build a clock that ticks once a
year," Hillis wrote. "The century hand
advances once every 100 years, and the
cuckoo comes out on the millennium.
In 1996, Hillis established The Long Now
Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to building
the 10,000-year
year clock and promoting long
long-term
thinking. On Dec. 31, 1999, he completed an 8 8-
foot-tall (2.4 meters) prototype
ototype of the clock
(currently on display at the London Science
Museum) just in time to ring in the new
millennium.
In 2011, construction began on the first full
full-
scale model, which will be about 200 feet (60
m) tall when it's completed. The venue: a
private, Bezos-owned
owned mountain in Texas,
several hours' drive from the nearest airport and
about 2,000 feet (610 m) above the valley floor.
As you can see in the video Bezos posted, the
clock's construction is well underway. The crew
has already hollowed out a 500-foot
foot-deep (150
m) shaft inside the mountain that will serve as
the clock's case. A long, winding staircase has
been cut directly into the limestone using a
special rock-slicing
slicing robot from Seattle.
At the video's 11-second
second mark, you can see
workers begin to assemble the clock's main
power system, which includes a 10,000
10,000-lb.
Clock
ck of the Long Now -
Installation Begins
https://youtu.be/KzWNHTZqdOs
(4,500 kilograms) weight and a three-pronged
three
winding station that future visitors can rotate to
help keep the clock ticking. Because the clock
may go many days (or possibly centuries)
without being wound, the clock will be able to
power itself using solar energy captured from
the mountaintop on sunny days, according to
The Long Now. Sunlight will also help the clock
stay synchronized with solar noon as the Earth's
axis tilts over the coming
ming centuries.
Above the power station, engineers will
eventually install a cascading tower of 20 huge,
1,000-lb.
lb. (450 kg) gears known as Geneva
wheels. This will be the clock's time generator
— or, as Long Now board member Kevin Kelly
described it, "the world's slowest computer."
Once a day, the gears will turn and interlace an
elaborate system of slots and pins in a different
combination, which determines the precise
order in which the clock's 10 bells will ring.
According to Kelly, the clock will reportedly
report
chime once a day, producing a unique
combination of tones every day for the next
10,000 years.
Further up the shaft, a 300-lb.
300
(136 kg) titanium
pendulum will swing in slow, 10-second
10
cycles.
A nearby display station will show visitors the
current date e and time, as well as the
corresponding positions of the stars and planets.
The clock will always know what time it is,
Kelly wrote, but it will update the display only
once it's wound.
One thing the 10,000-year
10,000
clock cannot tell us:
when it will be ready. At press time, there is no
precise date set for the clock's completion.
Luckily, the team has about 982 years before the
cuckoo's
first
curtain
call.
published on Live Science
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