How This Clock Will Last for The Next 10,000 Years

How does the richest man in the world tell time? With a $42 million clock, of course. Jeff Bezos, the CEO and founder of Amazon, in partnership with the Long Foundation, is building a $42 million clock designed to keep accurate time for the next 10,000 years. The clock is currently under construction in the Sierra Diablo mountain range in West Texas and is designed to be an icon for long-term thinking and be monumental in scale. The Long Now Foundation breaks time into the now, which encompasses yesterday, today, and tomorrow, the nowadays, which encompasses the last decade, this decade, and the next decade, and finally, the long now, which encompasses tens of thousands of years. It was just 10,000 years ago that the ice age was coming to a close and agriculture was coming about. As we look into the future and at the next 10,000 years, it is becoming increasingly important that we ask ourselves, are we becoming good ancestors? Visiting the 10,000 year clock is going to take serious commitment. By design, the location of the permanent clock needs to fulfill three important requirements. Number one, the location must be free from moisture to prevent damaging the parts and be minimally subject to corrosion. Number two, the location must be accessible but also remote enough to prevent anyone from intentionally vandalizing the clock. And number three, the location's surrounding landscape must reflect natural life and longevity. After analyzing these requirements, Danny and the team decided on the location to be the Sierra Diablo Mountain Range in West Texas near the city of Van Horn. Although a specific location has yet to be revealed where the construction has commenced, the location is rumored to be near Jeff Bezos' ranch just north of Van Horn, Texas. With the nearest airport several hours away by car and the foot trail extremely rugged, it will require a strenuous hike to reach the clock's hidden entrance tunnel, which will rise nearly 2,000 feet above the desert floor. Like the location, the clock itself has a set of requirements and was set out to be designed and built with five fundamental rules in mind. Number one, the clock needs to run without major maintenance and run accurately for thousands of years. Number two, the clock needs to be based on simple design assuming the possibility that technology might not advance or might even regress in the future. Number three, the clock should not require complicated instructions. Number four, the clock should be able to be improved upon by those who encounter it over the next 10,000 years. And number five, the clock's design should be simple enough to enable the construction of a small-scale model. Leading on from requirement number five, a prototype was built which measures just eight feet in height to test the design of the clock and analyze longevity. This test version was completed in 1999, just in time for the clock to ring in the new millennium and has since been on display at the London Science Museum. As mentioned before, the clock will be located inside a mountain in West Texas. A 12-foot diameter hole 500 feet in depth has been bored to house the main structure of the clock, while the secret entrance will be located in the cliffside behind two steel doors and feature a several hundred foot long tunnel to reach the main compartment where the clock will be located. To design the timing mechanism for the clock, it was extremely important to make it as accurate as possible. Most standard clocks lose accuracy over time and even a 99.9% accurate clock can be off by as much as 90 seconds each day. The timing mechanism used in the 10,000 year clock uses a combination of timing from a pendulum and an additional solar correction component. Located at the bottom of the 500 foot cavity, the pendulum is a three armed torsion pendulum with six foot long arms similar to the one found in an Atmos clock. This pendulum swings at a slow rate of 10 seconds per period giving the clock its primary time source which is then corrected for by the solar correction component. At the top of the chamber sits a large piece of sapphire glass used to synchronize the mechanical timekeeping system with solar noon. Every sunny noon, a beam of light will shine down the shaft where the clock resides to synchronize it to the sun by providing this critical timing input. Despite the solar correction however, there is still a difference between solar time and absolute time that must be accounted for. Since the earth's orbit isn't perfectly round, instead moving in an elliptical fashion, variations in the absolute time kept by the pendulum and the solar time could be as much as plus or minus 15 minutes per day. Over then thousands of years, that's some serious inaccuracy. The equation of time is used to reconcile these differences and to convert solar time to clock time. Notice in the graph how there is an offset of roughly plus or minus 15 minutes based on the day of the year between solar time and clock time. A 10,000 year equation of time needs to take into effect the loss of the earth's rotational speed, which is about one second per century, as well as the cyclical wobble of the earth. In order to solve this problem, a 3D time cam was engineered to accurately convert from solar and absolute time for the next 10,000 years. In addition to the timekeeping components, the clock will contain a huge display that is eight feet in diameter housing six separate dials. These dials, starting from the outermost, will show the Gregorian year in five digits, the position of the sun in the sky over the course of a 24-hour solar day, the location of the moon over the course of a 24-hour solar day, an indication of the horizon, as well as a display of the night sky within the center of the display showing the visible ranges of the night sky. The display is controlled using a mechanical system of serial bit adders causing changes in the dial. The binary mechanical gearing for the clock involves 12 horizontally stacked gears, each one weighing nearly 1,000 pounds. These Geneva drives modulate the time calculation and display as well as initiating the chiming of the clock. 10 bells or chimes will be used in the clock to ring out via the chime generator. The chime generator is a mechanical computer of sorts that rings 10 bells in different orders each day for the next 10,000 years. With over 3.5 million different melody combinations, the clock's chime will never repeat so that each visitor has a truly unique experience. Power for the clock is provided by falling cylindrical weights wound along a threaded rod which rotates as the weight descends transferring power to the mechanism. These weights will require from time to time human intervention to wind the weights and raise them back to the top of the rod. In fact, in order to see the current time from the clock, it will require that the weights are fully wound all the way to the top. No completion date is set yet for the clock, however construction has begun in the West Texas Mountains. It remains to be seen what type of draw this clock will have on visitors near and far. Likely, the biggest problem for the 10,000 year clock will be the effects of its human visitors. Over the span of centuries, valuable stuff tends to be stolen, hacked, or even destroyed. One thing for sure is that it will certainly be a reminder for the importance of having a long view and avoiding the short-sightedness within our lives. Thanks for watching this video. What are your thoughts about the 10,000 year clock? Do you plan on visiting once it is open in the next coming years? Comment below on your opinion and don't forget to share, like, and subscribe.