If you were a Silicon Valley billionaire and had an special $ 42 million drift around your pocket , how would you spend it ? Large - scalevaccination programsto protect child in acquire countries against preventable disease , safari to improvepublic didactics , or investments inrenewable energyto serve save the major planet ?
How about establish a really , really big clock inside a hollowed - out mountain ?
Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos harbinger plans to build “ The 10,000 - Year Clock ” in 2011 . Now , expression has begun and , to celebrate , Bezos divvy up a video onTwitterof the contractors amaze down to work .
So , what do we know about this unbelievable ( if excessive ) piece of engine room so far ? The 152 - meter ( 500 - metrical unit ) grandiloquent timepiece , powered by day and Nox caloric cycles , is wait to keep exact metre for the next 10 millennia . Every daylight , the clock ’s chime author will emit a unique bell ringing sequence , while the clock ’s hired hand will cower forward once a yr .
“ Over the lifetime of this clock , the United States wo n’t be , ” Bezos toldWiredin 2011 . “ Whole refinement will rise and fall . unexampled system of administration will be invented . ”
“ In the class 4000 , you ’ll go see this clock and you ’ll question , ‘ Why on Earth did they build this , ’ ” he added . So , essentially , it ’s theStonehengeof the twenty-first century .
design are to work up five “ day of remembrance chambers ” , the first of which will open after its first year to reveal a mannikin of the Solar System . Ideas for the 10 - year anniversary are still being amass , while the 100 , 1,000 , and 10,000 - day of remembrance chambers will be left to succeeding generations to design .
Then there is the goofball , which will make a brief appearance on the millennium before returning to its sleeping accommodation to hole up for a further 1,000 old age .
The estimation for a “ long - term ” clock was first believe up by the discoverer , entrepreneur , and computer scientist Danny Hillis back in the 1990s . Hillis foundedThe Long Now Foundationin 1996 with the ambition to further more long - term thinking .
“ When I was a child , people used to spill the beans about what would happen by the twelvemonth 02000 . For the next thirty years they keep talking about what would hap by the year 02000 , and now no one mentions a future date at all , ” Hillis explain in a statement on the initiation ’s web site . “ The future tense has been shrinking by one year per year for my intact life history . ”
The year 2000 is long gone , but our “ poor - term linear perspective ” , arguably , is not . With matters ofclimate change , atomic weapons , antibiotic resistance , and possibleArtificial Intelligence Armageddonto deal with , it sure enough would n’t anguish to promote a fiddling more tenacious - terminus cerebration . The literal question , however , is whether a multi - million one dollar bill clock in the middle of a mountain is the best way to go about it .
