Imagine a clock that was designed to keep time long after you were gone. Americans presently live an average of 78.69 years. Jeff Bezos helped fund the construction of a clock that will keep time 10,000 years. Assuming the next one hundred and twenty eight of your descendants live the average human life span, they may see Bezos’ clock tick its last tock.
This past winter, inside a mountain on Jeff Bezos’ sprawling West Texas ranch, Hillis and his colleagues began assembling the device. It is housed in a cylindrical 500-foot shaft cut into solid limestone. Visitors will enter through a jade-paneled door and climb a staircase that spirals around the clock’s gargantuan innards—5-ton counterweights, 8-foot stainless steel gears, a 6-foot titanium pendulum. If they choose to engage the clock’s winding mechanism, they’ll be rewarded with one of 3.65 million unique chimes composed by musician Brian Eno. But the effort is optional; at the top of the stairs is a cupola made of sapphire glass, which will keep the clock fed with thermal energy and sync it up with solar noon. Left unattended, it will mark the millennia on its own. Bezos, who helped pay for the project, told WIRED in 2011 that “whole civilizations will rise and fall” over the life of the clock. That leaves plenty of time to think about what’s beyond the four-zero barrier.
You can learn more about the clock project by spending time here.
Human beings are geared more toward dealing with and facing immediate threats, deciding matters based on what benefits them most in the moment. But by taking the long view, when considering those who will come long after us, our perspective shifts and perhaps the decisions we make today will be less about ourselves and more about those who are to come after us, our posterity.
We’re a mist, a passing shadow, like grass that is renewed in the morning and in the evening fades. 10,000 years is a long time. But I hope to use this short span for good, and to leave something behind for those who will come after; hopefully something better, something good.
