Jeff Bezos Builds a 10,000-year Giant Clock Inside Mountain

VIVA – The CEO of Amazon Jeff Bezos is working together with Engineers and contractors to build a massive multi-room giant clock inside a mountain in West Texas. This clock will show the time for the next 10,000 years and cost around $42 billion or IDR 600 trillion.

There are a lot of surprises in the story of the Clock of the Long Now – Its name. It’s the brainchild of Danny Hillis, a computer scientist and entrepreneur who first imagined the 10,000-year clock in 1986.

Now, he’s a visiting professor at MIT Media Lab with a reputation for building supercomputers, autonomous dinosaur robots, and Disney theme park rides. He is the kind of guy who decides he wants to build a huge clock in a mountain.

Well, how does the clockwork?

So, the longness of time involved is a big engineering challenge. The clock is designed to tick just once a year and chime once per millennium. Experts are blasting rooms out of the interior of the mountain to install steam-punky piles of gears and flywheels.

According to Bezos, the Amazon founder and richest man on the planet, the clock will be 500 feet tall, "all mechanical, powered by day/night thermal cycles," and "synchronized at solar noon."

It’s like the chambers inside the Great Pyramid at Giza were filled with parts envisioned by H.G. Wells. The website doesn’t list a timeline of any kind, but has a sign-up for a mailing list for when it's finished, “many years into the future.”

Hillis started the Long Now Foundation in 1996 to act as an administrative support for his 10,000-year clock. The first working version went online in 1999. Wired reported in depth on the clock and the longtime friendship between Hillis and Bezos, in 2011: “Around 2005, the pair got serious and started making plans to build a clock on Bezos’ property” in the Sierra Diablo Mountain Range.

Bezos also informed the clock as a way to remind people that the far future not only exists but will happen to their descendants.