How did the 10,000-Year Clock backed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos come to fruition?



Alec Nevala Lee, author of biographies of architect

Buckminster Fuller and film director Steven Soderbergh , summarises how the '10,000 Year Clock,' which has been in the works for over 30 years, came to fruition.

Chimes at Midnight—Asterisk
https://asteriskmag.com/issues/08/chimes-at-midnight



News anchor Lauren Sanchez , who will be engaged to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2023, gave a tour of Bezos' ranch for a feature story in fashion magazine Vogue. Accompanied by journalist Chloe Malle, Sanchez landed by helicopter in the Sierra Diablo, a small mountain range in Texas, and descended a spiral staircase built directly into the rock face to show off a giant clock installed underground that is designed to run for 10,000 years.




The full details of the 10,000-year clock that Bezos is building have not yet been made public at the time of writing, but according to public information, the clock is located at '31°,26',54' north latitude, 104°,54',14' west longitude.' This location is about 8 miles (about 12.9 km) from the landing pad of Blue Origin , Bezos' space development company.

The clock is a 500-foot-tall, 12-foot-diameter cylindrical shaft with a spiral staircase running along its inner wall. It is heated to 55 degrees Fahrenheit and contains the driving weight of the clock's power system, suspended 70 feet above the ground. The weight is a large concrete oval with bronze trim, weighing about five tons.

Other features include a platform with a horizontal winding mechanism, like a capstan - a device that winds up ropes and chains on ships - steel and titanium gears, and an 80-foot Geneva drive, a very slow computer with 20 notched wheels. When the clock is wound at noon, it chimes 10 times out of 3,628,800 unique patterns. The reason for the large number of chiming patterns is to ensure a different chime is chimed almost every day for 10,000 years.

The main part of the 10,000 Year Clock is a brass and quartz case that protects the calculation system, escapement, and pendulum that oscillates once every seven seconds. The clock face itself is about eight feet wide and features a black sphere with the constellations in the center, surrounded by movable rings that indicate sunrise, sunset, and the phases of the moon. The outer ring displays the year, a five-digit number, and a readout of the current time is embedded in the back.




The 10,000 Year Clock is designed to keep running indefinitely without needing to be wound.

The 10,000-year clock was invented by Danny Hillis in 1989. Born in 1956, Hillis published a paper on parallel computing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founded a supercomputer startup called Thinking Machines. The most famous Thinking Machines product is the black cube-shaped Connection Machine with flashing red lights. It looked so good that it even appeared in the movie 'Jurassic Park' . However, Thinking Machines went bankrupt in 1994.

Hillis first publicly explained the 10,000-year clock in an essay published in WIRED on February 15, 1995. Hillis proposed the 10,000-year clock as a symbolic object that encourages long-term thinking, focusing on society's struggle to envision the distant future. Hillis explained the 10,000-year clock, 'I want to make a clock that ticks once a year. The century hand advances once every 100 years, and the cuckoo sounds in the millennium.' The question, 'Why 10,000 years?' is because it is almost the same time that human civilization has existed. Brian Eno, the musician who composed the bells of the 10,000-year clock, calls this clock the 'Clock of the Long Now.'

Initially, Hillis worked as a vice president of research and development at Disney, but apart from his work at Disney, he built two prototypes of the 10,000-Year Clock. 'Many people who heard my story thought it was just a story. They were surprised to learn that the 10,000-Year Clock actually exists,' Hillis said.



The Long Now Foundation, a foundation for developing a 10,000-year clock, was founded by Stewart Brand in 1996. Stewart Brand, a writer who inspired Silicon Valley billionaires including Steve Jobs, first met Hillis in 1986 when he was working at Thinking Machines. Hillis said, 'We hit it off immediately and became best friends.' Brand has spoken enthusiastically about the 10,000-year clock at events held in the technology community, and has succeeded in attracting influential people in the industry to the board of directors of The Long Now Foundation.

The first prototype of the 10,000-Year Clock was completed in time to strike twice in the year 2000. It was funded by $500,000 from Swiss billionaire Jacob E. Safra, who was introduced to Hillis by computer scientist Nicholas Metropolis.



The second prototype, 'Auralee,' was funded by Nathan Myervold, former chief technology officer of Microsoft, who invested more than $1 million (about 150 million yen). After that, Bezos began to sponsor the development project of the 10,000-year clock. The person who introduced Bezos to the 10,000-year clock was Shel Capan, a computer programmer who was Amazon's first employee. In 1998, when Capan's birthday party was held in Maui, Brand and others were invited as guests, and Bezos and Brand hit it off. A few years after meeting Brand, Bezos called Hillis and said, 'Hey, do you know what kind of clock you want to make? I want to help fund it,' and offered to help with the funding.

Bezos initially planned to donate $42 million, but the amount has increased since construction began. According to Lee, Bezos' investment in the clock amounts to about 0.2% of his net worth.

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