This clock by Amazon's Jeff will run for 10,000 years
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has announced that construction has started on the #10000YearClock project that aims to build a clock that will run for 10,000 years. Bezos has invested $42 million in this goal of building a mechanical clock that will run for 10 millennia. The clock will be installed on a plot of land he owns in Texas. Here is more on it.
The sheer engineering genius of a clock like this!
Idea of such a clock was first proposed in 1995
The idea of the clock was first proposed by American inventor Danny Hillis in 1995. Since then, he and his team have built prototypes of such a clock, but only after Bezos decided to fund the project did the idea begin taking concrete shape. The clock, which Hillis is designing, will be the first of its kind to function on a full scale.
The 10,000-year clock will foster long-term thinking
For both Bezos and Hillis, the clock is a symbol of the power of long-term thinking. "Over the lifetime of this clock...whole civilizations will rise and fall. No one can imagine the world that we're trying to get this clock to pass through. In the year 4000, you'll go see this clock and you'll wonder, 'Why on Earth did they build this?'," Bezos said.
It will tick once a year, advance once a century
The clock will measure time in years and centuries instead of minutes and seconds. It will tick once a year and one of its hands will advance once a century. Consequentially, the cuckoo will emerge once a millennium. The idea of the project is to make people think profoundly about the distant future and to remind them of the long-term effects of their actions.
The clock will be installed 500 feet into the ground
Excavation has already begun on the Texas desert site where the clock will be installed 500 feet into the ground. It will feature massive metal gears, a huge stone weight, and a precise, titanium escapement. Meanwhile, computers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory are calculating the sun's position at noon every day for the next 10,000 years for keeping the clock accurate.
