THE FULLNESS OF TIME

THE CLOCK OF THE LONG NOW IS BUILT TO TICK FOR 10,000 YEARS, AND TO MAKE US THINK ABOUT WHAT IT ALL MEANS

- DAMIEN MARTIN

How many seconds are there in 10,000 years? While there is an easily calculable answer - 3.1536e+11, give or take the question is designed to make you stop and think about the enormity of time and take a long view of humanity. That's the impetus behind the Clock of the Long Now, a 10,000-year clock that is the main project of The Long Now Foundation. The project, or at least the idea, is itself nearly 30 years old. Foundation co-founder Danny Hillis, an inventor and computer scientist, first laid out his desire to build the clock in a 1995 Wired essay.

THE CLOCK WON'T ACTUALLY COUNT THE SECONDS, IT SEEMS, BUT MEASURE TIME ON A LONGER SCALE.

“I want to build a clock that ticks once a year. The century hand advances once every one hundred years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium. I want the cuckoo to come out every millennium for the next 10,000 years,” he wrote. “Ten thousand years — the life span I hope for the clock — is about as long as the history of human technology.”

‘Whole Civilizations Will Rise and Fall’ Hillis originally expressed hope that he might see the cuckoo come out at the turn of the millennium, but it’s not up and running yet. The project itself has proved to be an exercise in patience and endurance. The clock won’t actually count the seconds, it seems, but measure time on a longer scale. It’s being built in the Sierra Diablo mountains in West Texas, on land owned by Hillis’ friend Jeff Bezos. In 2011, Bezos told Wired he was committing $42 million to the project. Figures have not been publicly updated since. In answering FAQs in February of this year, Hillis said only, “a lot more than I originally guessed!” in response to the question, “How much did this clock cost?”