What would billionaires be without their eccentricities?

They would still be billionaires, duh, but apparently that’s just not enough.

Elon Musk just sent a Tesla Roadster to travel through space, and now we have Amazon’s Jeff Bezos doing something just as random.

According to The Verge, installation has finally begun on Bezos’ Clock of the Long Now, also known as the 10 000-year clock. He has now invested $42 million (R495 million) into the project that began back in 2009.

The goal? To build a clock that will run for, wait for it, 10 millennia. Yes, that’s 10 000 years.

But why? Well, according to Wide Open Country:

The idea behind the Long Now Foundation is to get people to start looking to the future, to plan for the lives of our far future ancestors, who may never know our names. In a society that is obsessed with the current, it’s difficult to visualize [sic] a society that exists thousands of years in the future.

The clock is being installed in a section of a hollowed-out mountain in Texas, but it wasn’t Bezos’ idea to begin with:

The actual idea for the clock comes from Danny Hillis, who originally proposed a 10,000-year clock in 1995 in Wired as a way to think about the long-term future of humanity and the planet. That idea grew into the Clock of the Long Now, a project by the Long Now Foundation, which Hillis went on to co-found to build an actual, working version of the proposed clock.

The group built a couple of prototypes, but Bezos’ clock — which Hillis is designing — will be the first to function on a full scale. The team has spent the last few years machining parts for the clock and drilling through the mountain to store the components. Bezos announced today in a tweet that installation of the machinery has begun on the 500-foot-tall mechanism.

Exciting? For those involved, I’m sure:

Installation has begun—500 ft tall, all mechanical, powered by day/night thermal cycles, synchronized at solar noon, a symbol for long-term thinking—the #10000YearClock is coming together thx to the genius of Danny Hillis, Zander Rose & the whole Clock team! Enjoy the video. pic.twitter.com/FYIyaUIbdJ

— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) February 20, 2018

The Texan mountain, below, in which the timepiece sits:

So how does it work? Well, that’s where it gets interesting:

Rather than measuring time in minutes and seconds, the clock measures time in centuries and millennia. The clock has a century hand, and includes a cuckoo that will sound every thousand years at each new millennium. The clock also is programmed to chime from time to time, and each time it chimes it is a unique sound that will never be repeated.

 

For the rest of us, full viewing of the timepiece will be possible, although it will be a rough trip to get there.

The website notes that the “nearest airport is several hours away by car”, and there’s a “rugged foot trail that rises almost 2 000 feet above the valley floor”.

Keen? You have enough time to plan your trip to see it.

[source:theverge&wideopencountry]