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The idea captivated the group, and Hillis began to consider more seriously how his clock might actually get built. He took his idea to a private mailing list that included future-minded thinkers such as Stewart Brand, founder of the WELL (the Whole Earth ' Lectronic Link) online community, and electronic musician Brian Eno. Building an ageless clock, Hillis suggested, was a way to bring really long-term thinking back. 'Why bother making plans when everything will change?' he wrote in a 1995 manifesto. Living in an increasingly accelerated culture, he thought, was eroding our ability to think concretely about the future. The purpose was to have wood that could be used to replace the oak beams of the college's great dining hall hundreds of years in the future.įor an engineer who had built his career on making fast machines, Hillis found this story of forethought striking. According to the myth, back in 1386, the builder of the University of Oxford's New College planted some oak trees. One inspiration came from a possibly apocryphal tale of a forward-looking architect. I picture those future hikers deep inside the mountain, waking up to the sound of bells.īut what's the point of building something to last 10 000 years? Hillis says he chose that time span because that's about how long human technology has been around. 'Baptism by fire.' He flips a switch, and he and I watch the giant stainless-steel gears spin silently. 'I haven't seen it turn on yet,' says Rose, tall and chrome-domed, dressed in a black polo shirt and khaki pants.

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Over the lifetime of the clock, the chime generator will ring a series of 10 bells in a different arrangement each time. On a bright blue morning in February, I drove to the San Rafael shop with Rose to see the first assembled piece of the clock in action: several 2.4-meter-wide gears for the chime generator, one of the largest and most complex parts of the clock. 'Building a big physical thing is just cool,' Rose says. He and Alexander Rose (left) are now leading the clock's design and engineering team. Timekeepers: Parallel computing pioneer Danny Hillis (right) dreamed up the 10 000-Year Clock as a way to encourage long-range thinking. A clock that's meant to last for 10 000 years poses a fundamental challenge for a speed-obsessed age: How do you engineer something for the very distant future and get people to care about it today? Still, the designers believe there's much more to the project than just geek chic. 'And building a big physical thing is just cool.' 'This is a project of a bunch of engineers,' says Rose. In Washington state, engineers at Seattle Solstice are refining a giant stonecutting robot that will eventually be shipped to Texas and deployed inside the mountain, to etch the spiral staircase directly into the rock.

Meanwhile, a construction crew in Texas has been blasting and digging through limestone to create the tunnel.

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With funding from Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of, three teams of engineers in San Francisco, Seattle, and Texas have been working through the complexities of the design, including how to keep the clock ticking and how to ensure that its components will hold up through the millennia. Think of it as 'the slowest computer in the world,' says project manager Alexander Rose. And it will do so entirely without electricity. Over the course of its 10 000-year life span, it will be able to power itself enough to keep time, synchronize that timekeeping with the sun, and randomly generate unique melodies on its chimes so that visitors will never hear the same tune twice.

This clock, the flagship project of Hillis's Long Now Foundation, is a wonder of mechanical engineering.

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