What a Great Use of Lots of Money.

"WILL A CLOCK THAT WORKS FLAWLESSLY FOR 10,000 YEARS BECOME THE GREATEST WONDER OF THE WORLD?"

Everything about this clock is deeply unusual. For example, while nearly every mechanical clock made in the last millennium consists of a series of propelled gears, this one uses a stack of mechanical binary computers capable of singling out one moment in 3.65 million days. Like other clocks, this one can track seconds, hours, days, and years. Unlike any other clock, this one is being constructed to keep track of leap centuries, the orbits of the six innermost planets in our solar system, even the ultraslow wobbles of Earth's axis.

Made of stone and steel, it is more sculpture than machine. And, like all fine timepieces, it is outrageously expensive. No one will reveal even an approximate price tag, but a multibillionaire financed its construction, and it seems likely that shallower pockets would not have sufficed.

So this crazy rich dude, Danny Hillis, who creates supercomputers out of tinker toys for fun, has designed this super-clock that will be 60 feet tall, embedded in a mountain in Nevada and use solely Bronze Age technology, and it will run for 10,000 years. Longer than the pyramids have existed. Longer than humankind has even been around yet. Crafted so you could tell the exact time of day, even if you do not use our current measurements of time, since it tracks the locations and rotation of our neighboring planets.

Pretty fucking crazy.

Pretty fucking amazing.