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Clock of the Long Now

31°26′54″N 104°54′14″W / 31.44841°N 104.90384°W / 31.44841; -104.90384

The Clock of the Long Now, also called the 10,000-year clock, is a mechanical clock under construction that is designed to keep time for 10,000 years. It is being built by the Long Now Foundation. A two-meter prototype is on display at the Science Museum in London. As of June 2018, two more prototypes are on display at The Long Now Museum & Store at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco.


The project was conceived by Danny Hillis in 1986. The first prototype of the clock began working on December 31, 1999, just in time to display the transition to the year 2000. At midnight on New Year's Eve, the date indicator changed from 01999 to 02000, and the chime struck twice.


The manufacture and site construction of the first full-scale prototype clock is being funded by Jeff Bezos's Bezos Expeditions, with $42 million, and is on land which Bezos owns[1] in the Sierra Diablo mountains in Texas.

Purpose[edit]

In the words of Stewart Brand, a founding board member of the foundation, "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."[2]

(inaccurate over the long term, and requires many ticks, which creates wear)

gravity pendulum

(fewer ticks, but less accurate)

torsion pendulum

(less accurate than pendulum)

balance wheel

(inaccurate)

water flow

(inaccurate)

solid material flow

wear and (very inaccurate)

corrosion

rolling balls (very inaccurate)

(inaccurate)

diffusion

(inaccurate)

tuning fork

cycle (inaccurate)

pressure chamber

(inaccurate)

inertial governor

(opaque, difficult to maintain)

atomic oscillator

(opaque, difficult to maintain)

piezoelectric crystal oscillator

(opaque, difficult to measure precisely)

atomic decay

Inspiration and support[edit]

The project is supported by the Long Now Foundation, which also supports a number of other very-long-term projects, including the Rosetta Project (to preserve the world's languages) and the Long Bet Project.


Neal Stephenson's 2008 novel Anathem was partly inspired by his involvement with the project, to which he contributed three pages of sketches and notes.[7][8] The Long Now Foundation sells a soundtrack for the novel with profits going to the project.[9][10]


Musician Brian Eno gave the Clock of the Long Now its name (and coined the term "Long Now") in an essay;[11] he has collaborated with Hillis on the writing of music for the chimes for a future prototype.

Astronomical clock

Big History

Deep time

Jens Olsen's World Clock

Rasmus Sørnes

Beverly Clock

The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility. Basic Books, 2000, ISBN 0-465-00780-5.

Stewart Brand

(April 5, 2022). "Keeping Time Into The Great Beyond". www.noemamag.com. Archived from the original on February 2, 2023. Retrieved May 31, 2023.

Ialenti, Vincent

Main page for the Clock on the Long Now Foundation website

a talk by Danny Hillis in September 2004 available in mp3 and Vorbis

Progress on the 10,000-year Clock

Wired Magazine article on the clock, May 1998

– 15 August 1998; Edge – the third culture

"The Clock Of The Long Now": A Talk with Stewart Brand

Ted Talk by Stewart Brand describing the project

"The Clock in the Mountain"

Danny Hillis, et al., 2011

Time in the 10,000-year clock

May 19, 2019

Interview with Danny Hillis