Why Jeff Bezos is building giant clock that’ll tick for 10,000 years

Founder of online e-commerce behemoth Amazon and space company Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos' unique side project, named ‘10,000 Years Clock’ -- is going on in full swing, and the mega-billionaire has earmarked around $42 million (roughly ₹350 crore) for building the 500-ft clock, which is being designed, literally, to keep ticking for 10,000 years.

The incredibly sophisticated and mammoth timepiece is the brainchild of U.S.-based genius computer scientist and inventor Danny Hillis. He's also the co-founder of Applied Invention, an interdisciplinary group of engineers, scientists and artists that develop technology solutions with leading companies and entrepreneurs. He also founded Thinking Machines Corporation, a company credited with inventing supercomputers in the 1980s and 1990s. Hillis envisions the 10,000-Year Clock to keep showing time for the next 10,000 years.

The 10,000-Year Clock Project

The project took birth way back in 1995 when Hillis proposed to build a clock for the long-term future of humanity. The idea was later adopted as a key project by the Long Now Foundation where Hillis is the co-founder & co-chair, and he's also the main designer of the 10,000-year mechanical clock.

The project envisions a monument-scale mechanical clock, built inside a mountain, designed to keep showing accurate time for the next ten millennia. The clock is hundreds of feet tall, engineered to require minimal maintenance, and is powered by mechanical energy harvested from sunlight as well as the people who visit it.

How will the giant clock work?

The clock will mark time with "astronomic and calendric displays" and a chime generator, which can produce over 3.5 million unique bell chime sequences — one for every day the clock is visited for the next 10,000 years. The clock is still being assembled and works on five core principles -- longevity, maintainability, transparency, evolvability and scalability.

The entirely mechanical clock is made of long-lasting materials, including titanium, ceramics, quartz, sapphire, and 316 stainless steel. "The Clock counts oscillations of the pendulum for day to day time, sunlight falling on the solar synchroniser to account for long-term drift, and a precomputed correction to solar time to accommodate for the orbital and rotational changes of Earth (rendered by the iconic Equation of Time Cam). Outputs include a depiction of the sky in the form of an orrery, a display of the Gregorian calendar date, and the chimes," says the Long Now Foundation.

'Symbol for long-term thinking': Bezos

Bezos, who has been helping Danny Hillis with the ‘10,000 Years Clock’ project for several years now, terms it "a symbol for long-term thinking". During a recently aired podcast with MIT computer scientist Lex Fridman, Bezos described the physical clock as "an art project", a symbol to influence "people to think longer term".

Bezos says the 500-ft tall clock, being built on a mountain in West Texas, will expand humans’ long-term thinking. "And you can kind of just very conceptually think of the 10,000-Year Clock as it ticks once a year, it chimes once every a hundred years, and the cuckoo comes out once every a thousand years," says Bezos, adding the clock is designed to last 10,000 years with “no human intervention”.

The mega-billionaire says the idea behind the clock project is that over time, it will take on the patina of age and then it'll become a symbol for long-term thinking.

"We’re affecting the planet now. We’re affecting each other. We have weapons of mass destruction. We have all kinds of things where we can hurt ourselves and the problems we create can be so large," says the billionaire, adding that since 10,000 years is a long time, many civilisation, including the US, will rise and fall during those periods.