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Construction begins on Jeff Bezos' $42 million 10,000-year clock
Installation has finally begun on Jeff Bezos' 10,000-year clock, a project that the Amazon CEO has invested $42 million in (along with a hollowed-out mountain in Texas that Bezos intends for a Blue Origin spaceport), with the goal of building a mechanical clock that will run for 10 millennia.
It's a monumental undertaking that Bezos and the crew of people designing and building the clock repeatedly compare to the Egyptian pyramids. And as with the pharaohs, it takes a certain amount of ego — even hubris — to consider building such a monument. But it's also an unparalleled engineering problem, challenging its makers to think about how to keep a machine intact, operational and accurate over a time span longer than most human-made objects have even existed.
Consider this: 10,000 years ago, our ancestors had barely begun making the transition from hunting and gathering to simple agriculture, and had just figured out how to cultivate gourds to use as bottles. What if those people had built a machine, set it in motion, and it was still running today? Would we understand how to use it? What would it tell us about them?
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.
Also at CNBC.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday February 26 2018, @10:52PM (3 children)
Well, given 10,000 years, that's just $4200 per year. ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Tuesday February 27 2018, @01:07AM (2 children)
If he put $42 million into an annuity, it would pay out a lot more than that. A lot more. More than a lot of people make. I wouldn't want to live on it, for me it would be a serious downgrade, it would be very basic. But a lot of folks would be happy. calculator.net/annuity-payout-calculator.html [calculator.net]
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 27 2018, @06:46AM (1 child)
You are a fraud!!! the Real One would never link to calculator!!
(Score: 1) by realDonaldTrump on Wednesday February 28 2018, @01:35AM
I'm like a very smart person, I can work it out in my head. Or with Pen & Paper. But the cyber is better to share on Social Media.