The film, like the clock itself, celebrates the power of long-term thinking and mankind’s insatiable thirst to solve life’s biggest problems. The Clock of the Long Now is a portrait of Danny Hillis and his brilliant team of inventors, futurists, and engineers as they build The 10,000 Year Clock - a grand, Stone Henge-like monolith, being constructed in a mountain in West Texas. Other notable partners include Jeff Bezos of Amazon, who has sponsored the project and on whose property the clock is being built. The 10,000-year clock is the brainchild of Danny Hillis, a computer scientist and founder of the multidisciplinary firm Applied Invention and the nonprofit Long Now Foundation, cochaired by Hillis and Global Business Network’s Stewart Brand. The idea is to invest in something far bigger than a single lifetime and to show how to plan and build for longevity - an intriguing concept in this attention-scattered age. Yet this is what scientists, engineers, designers, and thinkers have been doing for more than 20 years - designing and planning a mammoth 10,000-year clock that’s now under construction deep inside a mountain in west Texas.(1)Ĭalled the Clock of the Long Now, this nearly 200-foot-tall mechanical clock is designed to tick once a year for 10,000 years as a way to help the human race reframe how it thinks about time and its place in the lifecycle of the planet. But thinking beyond one’s lifetime is difficult, and envisioning 10,000 years into the future is even harder. Although the first prototype of the clock doesn't have a cuckoo per se (it made a 'bong' sound), it was up and running for the millennium transition in 2000. Maybe a glance forward ponders how to pay kids’ college tuitions or fund retirements for a long, healthy life. Most weeks, concerns with professional and personal to-do lists and weekend plans dominate. Courtesy Rolfe Horn/The Long Now Foundation Each hour the clock performs a visible calculation to update the dial display.A dial on the 10,000-year Clock of the Long Now uses a five-digit year format, part of the overall intention to expand the conventional conception of time. This also drives the display on the face of the clock, which shows the changing pattern of the night sky continuously throughout the life of the clock. The stack of discs in the lower part of the clock is a train of adding wheels - a binary mechanical computer that counts the hours, the calendar and solar years, the centuries, and the phases of the Moon and the zodiac. Any drift in the clock's rate will be corrected by a mechanism sensing the Sun passing overhead at noon. The full-size example would be powered by the energy from the footfalls of visitors or by changes in temperature. It is driven by falling weights which are rewound regularly. To reduce wear the clock uses a torsional pendulum that rotates slowly and the clock ticks only once every 30 seconds. It is intended that this clock will be installed near a national park in eastern Nevada in a chamber hollowed out of a limestone cliff. Mechanical clocks were first invented for monasteries in the late. The final version would be an enormously enlarged version of the clock shown here - a vast mechanism of architectural scale, big enough for visitors to walk through. Enos Long Now places us where we belong, neither at the end of history nor at the. This first prototype, designed by Danny Hillis, was built by the Long Now Foundation to explore the mechanism for a clock intended to keep time for 10,000 years.
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