Construction has only just begun but when it’s ready the Clock of the Long Now should last for 10,000 years.

by James Buttery

It?s got all the ingredients of a Connery-era Bond film. A billionaire industrialist hollowing out a privately-owned mountain and building a mysterious device at its centre.
The truth (although writing this piece has felt like being caught up in some epic April Fool?s joke) is somewhat less nefarious, although still completely unexpected.
The billionaire in question is the world?s richest person, Amazon-founder Jeff Bezos, and the device is question is a high concept, mechanical clock.

Bezos is spending around £30m (or 0.033% of his colossal $126 billion fortune) making the dreams of Danny Hillis come true. Hillis co-founded The Long Now Foundation (christened by none other than Brian Eno) in 1996 after an email to colleagues setting out his thoughts on the benefits of responsible long-term societal thinking, an arc spanning ten millennia rather than the kind of five or ten year projects he was accustomed to seeing. Hillis has been working on a clock to illustrate this vastly expanded timeframe since then, having completed a prototype on New Year?s Eve 1999, which struck twice at midnight and now sits in London?s Science Museum.

One clear and obvious caveat to mention before you read on is that the Clock of the Long Now is still very much a work in progress, work has only recently begun in western Texas and no completion date has...