While doing some internet browsing, Watchmen showrunner Damon Lindelof stumbled across an article featuring Jeff Bezos current attempt to carve a giant 10,000 year clock into a mountain. As fans of the hit HBO series will know, this project sounds an awful lot like the mysterious Millennium Clock built by Lady Trieu, and clearly, Lindelof couldn’t resist making the connection between Bezos and the fictional tech genius played by Hong Chau in an Instagram post.
Unlike Lady Trieu’s Millennium Clock, which turned out to be a front for nefarious quantum centrifuge device, Bezos’ “Clock of the Long Now” is not a diabolical super weapon (that we know of). In fact, the project has been underway since 2011 and is exactly what it sounds like. A giant clock carved into a mountain. Via Popular Mechanics:
How does the clock work? Well, the longness of the time involved is the big engineering challenge. The clock is designed to tick just once a year and chime once per millennium. Experts are blasting rooms out of the interior of the mountain in order to install steampunky piles of gears and flywheels. According to Bezos, the Amazon founder and richest man on the planet, the clock will be 500 feet tall, “all mechanical, powered by day/night thermal cycles,” and “synchronized at solar noon.”
The $42 million clock, which sits on Texas property owned by Bezos, is supposed to remind people that “the far future not only exists, but will happen to their descendants.” However, good luck seeing it for yourself. According to Popular Mechanics, the project won’t be finished until many years from now and visiting it will “take a commitment.” The mountain is several hours away from the nearest airport, and to even see the clock, visitors will have to hike a rugged trail that goes well over 2,000 feet above the valley floor. Have fun with that.
