Millennium Mountain Clock Ticks For 10,000 Years

Inside a mountain in Van Horn, Texas, a clock is being built which will tick for ten-thousand years. Currently being assembled in California and Seattle, the near 200 ft-tall Clock of the Long Now is the vision of polymath inventor, computer engineer, and designer, Danny Hillis;

I want to build a clock that ticks once a year. The century hand advances once every 100 years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium. I want the cuckoo to come out every millennium for the next 10,000 years.

I cannot imagine the future, but I care about it. I know I am a part of a story that starts long before I can remember and continues long beyond when anyone will remember me. I sense that I am alive at a time of important change, and I feel a responsibility to make sure that the change comes out well. I plant my acorns knowing that I will never live to harvest the oaks.

I have hope for the future.

The clock – the first of many planned around the world – echos the values of the Long Now Foundation – a private organization that attempts to provide an alternative to today’s ‘”faster/cheaper” mindset with “slower/better” thinking. Inspired by virologist Jonas Salk — who once asked: “Are we being good ancestors?”– the clock will act as a beacon of human ingenuity, culture and long-term thinking. Founding board member of the Long Now Foundation Stewart Brand;

Such a clock, if sufficiently impressive and well-engineered, would embody deep time for people. It should be charismatic to visit, interesting to think about, and famous enough to become iconic in the public discourse. Ideally, it would do for thinking about time what the photographs of Earth from space have done for thinking about the environment. Such icons reframe the way people think.

Every millennium the clock will activate a device crafted by music extraordinaire Brian Eno, chiming a completely unique sound to the valley below.

According to the Clock of the Long Now’s website, reaching the location itself is not easy.  It’s ‘slow/better’ philosophy resonating into the journey itself:

It will require a day’s hike to reach its interior gears. Just reaching the entrance tunnel situated 1500 feet above the high scrub desert will leave some visitors out of breath, nicked by thorns, and wondering what they got themselves into.

To see the Clock you need to start at dawn, like any pilgrimage. Once you arrive at its hidden entrance in an opening in the rock face, you will find a jade door rimmed in stainless steel, and then a second steel door beyond it. These act as a kind of crude airlock, keeping out dust and wild animals. You rotate its round handles to let yourself in, and then seal the doors behind you. It is totally black. You head into the darkness of a tunnel a few hundred feet long. At the end there’s the mildest hint of light on the floor. You look up. There is a tiny dot of light far away, at the top of top of a 500 foot long vertical tunnel about 12 feet in diameter. There is stuff hanging in the shaft.

An eastern Nevada mountaintop has been marked for the next clock site.

Clock of the Long Now

[via TheUtopianist & TheTechnium]