Chimes at Midnight

It’s been an idea for over three decades. How did the clock that will run for 10,000 years become a reality?

by Alec Nevala-Lee

I.

Last year, the media personality Lauren Sánchez — newly engaged at the time to Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos — conducted a tour of her fiancé’s ranch for a profile in Vogue. Accompanied by the journalist Chloe Malle, Sánchez landed a helicopter in the Sierra Diablo, a small mountain range in Texas, and descended a spiral staircase carved directly into the rock. She had been photographed there already by Annie Leibovitz, lounging in a red Dolce & Gabbana dress below the gears of a monumental underground clock designed to run for ten thousand years. As Sánchez explained, “It represents thinking about the future.”

The clock isn’t open to outsiders yet, but an enterprising trespasser could conceivably check it out now, based solely on public information. It’s at 31°26’54”N, 104°54’14”W, about eight miles due west from the Blue Origin landing pad that Bezos once used for a suborbital flight on one of his own rockets. The easiest approach would be to fly into El Paso, rent a car, and head off before sunrise. After driving a couple of hours east on I-10, get on Highway 54 in the nondescript town of Van Horn and continue north for thirty minutes.

As you proceed into the desert, keep an eye out on your left for a white gate leading to a side road. Pull over when you see a notice reading “Private Property — No Trespassing,” next to a sign with the name and number of a local stone supplier. A small red “2” on the gate is the only indication of the owner’s identity. If you like, you could go up the highway to the nearby headquarters of the Figure 2 Ranch, which Bezos bought two decades ago, and ask to see the clock, although you might have better luck striking out on your own.

Once you manage to bypass the gate — which is illegal but not difficult — keep going west along Marvel Road. Instead of driving directly toward the line of mountains straight ahead, take the first right on a narrow dirt path, bearing north, and then turn left on a road little more than a scratch in the dust. Follow it to a trailhead in the limestone hills of Mine Canyon, where the route becomes impassable by car. You’ll cover the rest on foot.

At first, your destination on the peak is visible through binoculars, but it soon disappears from view. The trail is fringed with cacti, thorns, and bear grass, and at one point, you need to slip through a tight slot between two rock walls. Most of your hike occurs on a series of switchbacks surfaced with crushed stone, aided when necessary by chain ladders. As the crow flies, it’s less than two miles from where you parked, but the winding path is over twice as long, gradually rising to almost two thousand feet above the valley floor.

A hard walk of three hours brings you to a sheer cliff facing south. The vertical crags seem unclimbable, but you eventually see a cavelike opening. Although it blends into its surroundings, it’s clearly artificial, leading to a perfectly round entrance framed in wood beams and ending in a weathered mesh gate, like the doorway of a mine. Inside, you turn a crank to switch on a light, revealing a ladder leading down to a natural cavern filled with stalagmites. As you move into the dark, you need to crouch, groping toward a small hole at the rear of the cave.

Squeezing through, you enter a manmade passage terminating in a smooth metal wall. At the center is an oval door, like an airlock, hinged to open upward with a handle at the bottom. Beyond it is an identical door, which opens only after the first one is shut. Heading toward a faint light around the corner of the next tunnel, you emerge near the base of a cylindrical shaft, five hundred feet high and twelve and a half feet in diameter. Along the inner wall, stone stairs spiral upward, the railing at the height of your waist. The temperature is a cool 55 degrees Fahrenheit.

Ascending the steps, you climb toward a spot of light that shines down from somewhere far above. At seventy feet up — assuming that you’re lucky enough to visit after everything has been fully installed — you reach the lowermost part of the clock. Suspended from a rod is the driveweight of the power system, a gigantic concrete oval, edged in bronze, that weighs something like five tons. As you continue onward, you start to get a sense of the clock’s enormous size — the mechanism alone is over two hundred feet high.

Next is a platform equipped with a horizontal windlass, like a capstan on a ship, with three curved bars at chest level. By walking in a clockwise circle, visitors can wind a rack gear to slowly raise the counterweight over the course of eight hours. For now, you move past the steel and titanium gears to the eighty-foot Geneva drive — a very slow computer with twenty notched wheels — that controls the chimes. At noon, if the clock is wound, ten bells ring in one of 3,628,800 unique patterns, enough for a different sequence nearly every day for ten thousand years.

Arriving at the primary chamber, you see the brass and quartz enclosure that protects the calculation system, the escapement, and a pendulum that completes one swing every seven seconds. The clock face itself is eight feet across. At the center is the black globe of a star field, encircled by movable rings that indicate sunrise, sunset, and the phases of the moon. The outermost ring gives the year, with room for five digits, and a readout for the current time is buried deeper inside. To update the display, which has been paused since the last visit, you rotate a small wheel by hand.

Gazing upward, you discover that the source of light overhead is a cupola with sapphire windows. At noon on the summer solstice, sunlight is focused on a solar synchronizer, activating a trigger that corrects for the drift of the pendulum. Throughout the year, the sun also heats a chamber of air, with the temperature difference between day and night driving the piston that powers the timing system. Even without winding, the clock can run indefinitely.

Before you reach the cupola, however, you find that the staircase is growing narrower. Eventually, the steps taper so much that it’s impossible to keep going. Since you can’t take that route to the top, you realize that the designers want you to rethink your plan. In the words of Danny Hillis, the man who conceived the clock in 1989, long before Bezos became involved: “You have to get away from the idea of direct progress and surrender that kind of control in order to find your way.”

According to Hillis — who originally planned to build the clock himself — some of his friends saw the project as a symptom of “a midlife crisis.” Born in 1956, he had written his thesis at MIT on parallel computing, an innovative architecture based on simultaneous calculations by thousands of ordinary microprocessors, and co-founded a supercomputer startup called Thinking Machines. Its most famous product was the Connection Machine, a black cube with blinking red lights that was so photogenic that Steven Spielberg featured it in Jurassic Park.

In 1994, the company went bankrupt. While the Connection Machine worked well for certain applications, like weather modeling, it was hard to program and had trouble attracting commercial clients. For the breakthroughs that Hillis had in mind, he conceded, parallel processing had to improve “by a factor of a thousand, maybe a million.” Hillis had been on the right track, but a decade too early, so perhaps it was unsurprising that he would quit the race to build faster computers, hoping instead to regain his sense of deep time.

He had been dreaming about the clock for years, but he first set it down in detail in an essay — later published in Wired — dated February 15, 1995. Noting that society had trouble picturing the far future, he proposed a symbolic object to encourage long-term thinking: “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.” It would keep accurate time for ten millennia, or roughly as long as human civilization had already existed. The musician Brian Eno, who later developed the chimes, named it the Clock of the Long Now.

Hillis initially explored the idea in an unlikely setting. He joined a Disney fellowship program, created expressly for him, as a vice president of research and development, although what he really wanted was to work on his clock. The Imagineers made their machine shops and staff available at cost, as long as the company retained the right to build a clock of its own, and he spoke long afterward as though he were designing a theme park attraction: “Time is a ride, and you are on it.”

Independently of Disney, he built two prototypes of the clock, but his efforts to invent a corresponding narrative — or myth — sometimes led to confusion. “A lot of people who hear about the clocks think it is just a story,” Hillis wrote earlier this year. “They are surprised to find out there are actual clocks.” In his Wired essay, he shared a provocative suggestion from the magician Teller: “The important thing is to make a very convincing documentary about building the clock and hiding it. Don’t actually build one. That would spoil the myth if it was ever found.”

A few sentences later, Hillis states that the only clocks that survived over the long run were preserved in stories, “like the water clock of Su Sung, or the giant hourglass of Uqbar.” The first was real, but the second alluded to a work of fiction by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. In “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” — which doesn’t mention an hourglass — Borges describes a secret society, funded by a “reclusive millionaire,” devoted to writing an encyclopedia of an imaginary planet. The result is so persuasive that the real world remakes itself in its illusory image.

Hillis, who saw Borges speak at MIT, was later inspired to write a story of his own, “Keeper of the Clock,” with a series of variations on the clock idea. He was also influenced by Isaac Asimov, whose work he avidly read as a boy, and whom he met through his mentor Marvin Minsky. In the novel Foundation, Asimov depicts a community of scholars on a planet at the periphery of the Galactic Empire, laboring for decades on another vast encyclopedia, as part of a mysterious plan conceived by the enigmatic protagonist Hari Seldon.

Foreseeing the fall of the empire, Seldon uses the encyclopedia project as an excuse to gather thousands of scientists at a strategically crucial location. The encyclopedia itself is merely a pretext, and even the members who have devoted their lives to it are unaware of its true purpose, which is to shorten the dark age that follows the empire’s collapse. As a holographic recording of Seldon informs the startled encyclopedists, “You have now no choice but to proceed on the infinitely more important project that was, and is, our real plan.”

Orrery CAD drawing. Courtesy The Long Now Foundation.

II.

At an early stage of the clock project, the science fiction writer Neal Stephenson contributed three pages of sketches, including a reference to “clock monks” who might live inside the mechanism itself. A decade later, he published Anathem, a huge novel — nearly a thousand pages long — set on a planet with obvious parallels to Earth. Science and mathematics are restricted to monastic communities, framed as “a counterbalance” to secular culture, whose adherents are occasionally summoned to the outside world to advise at times of crisis.

In Stephenson’s fictional society, the liturgy revolves around the winding of an enormous clock. As Hillis once wrote, “While the clock described in the book is not the Clock of the Long Now, it is not entirely unrelated.” Alexander Rose, the former executive director of the Long Now Foundation, which was established in 1996 to develop the clock and associated projects, has said that the novel guided conversations about the site’s caretakers: “We have often referred to the book in the sense of, like, who are going to be the people?”

The foundation itself owes its existence to Hillis’s friend Stewart Brand. Now in his eighties, Brand remains best known for the Whole Earth Catalog, a countercultural guide to books and tools that inspired the founders of Silicon Valley, including Steve Jobs, and played an important part in my own life. In a 1994 book, How Buildings Learn, Brand offered the first description in print of the Clock of the Long Now. A year before Hillis’s essay was published, Brand wrote, “No doubt a monastery of sorts should take care of the clock and its visitors.”

In 1986, Brand had spent three months at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, researching a book that presented it as a sorcerer’s workshop at the intersection between art, technology, and the digital world. It was there that he first met Hillis, who was working a few blocks away at Thinking Machines. “We hit it off immediately,” Hillis recalled, “and became fast friends.”

Brand turned out to be the perfect collaborator for the clock project. In the biography Whole Earth, John Markoff describes how Brand began “to contemplate the apocalypse” in the early nineties: “He felt impatient with both civilization and himself. What would last? What wouldn’t?” When Hillis emailed him about the clock, Brand saw the chance to pursue a longtime dream: “It was Brand who realized that creating an organization capable of serving for ten millennia to maintain the clock was just as thorny an engineering challenge.”

During one of their conversations, Brand recalled an anecdote that he had heard from the anthropologist Gregory Bateson. According to the story, which is probably apocryphal, the beams of a dining hall at Oxford once became riddled with beetles. Wondering if any suitable replacement trees could be found on university property, the council summoned the College Forester, who said that he had been waiting for them to ask. When the college was established, an oak grove was planted to replace the beams when the time came, with instructions passed from one forester to another for four hundred years: “You don’t cut them oaks. Them’s for the college hall.”

For Brand, the appeal of the legend wasn’t in the trees, but in the diligent brotherhood of college foresters. As a first step, he and Hillis decided to establish a conventional nonprofit “to foster long-term thinking,” a task for which Brand was ideally suited. A superb networker, he had played a role in countless events — from Ken Kesey’s Trips Festival to Douglas Engelbart’s Mother of All Demos — that shaped both the counterculture and the emerging tech community. He began discussing the clock online with a circle of influential friends, including Eno and Kevin Kelly of Wired, many of whom ended up on the foundation’s board.

They also brainstormed concepts for an organization that could survive for ten thousand years. Founding it would be vastly more difficult than building a clock — no human institution has lasted that long — but this unimaginable goal was driven by concerns over a specific kind of existential risk. In his essay, Hillis observed that the exponential growth of factors like online connectivity and computer speed were trending in a clear direction: “They all soar up to form an asymptote just beyond the turn of the century: The Singularity. The end of everything we know.”

Brand put it more simply: “What happens if our technology just keeps accelerating?” In the early nineties, this felt like a new idea, and Hillis was uniquely sensitive to the prospect of an artificial superintelligence surpassing the power of the human mind. Under Minsky’s influence, Thinking Machines had famously wanted to build “a machine that will be proud of us,” and Hillis was fascinated by the potential of evolutionary algorithms to generate solutions beyond the understanding of the programmers. When I asked about the Singularity, Hillis said, “We’ve definitely thought of it as a scenario that the clock might need to survive.”

Both Hillis and Brand were also influenced by Across Realtime by Vernor Vinge, the science fiction writer who coined the term “Singularity” for this possibility in the eighties. In the novel, the characters emerge from isolation to find that humanity has vanished, evidently due to an unexplained event caused by technological acceleration. One of the survivors predicted it in advance — “She could see that technology and people were headed into some sort of singularity in the twenty-third century” — and carefully preserved the resources needed to rebuild society.

The First Prototype of the 10,000 Year Clock. Courtesy the Long Now Foundation.

Vinge’s novel, in which he presented the Singularity as less irrevocable than he did in his other writings, encouraged Brand to see it as a temporary disruption. In his 1999 book The Clock of the Long Now, Brand said, “Future dark ages are always possible. The technological Singularity could generate one — what if whatever we transition to doesn’t work out?” He argued that it could be “isolated and absorbed” with the proper precautions: “I assume that we will somehow dodge it or finesse it in reality, and one way to do that is to warn about it early and begin to build in correctives.”

Sensing that time was short — he wrote that the consensus “among some enthusiasts” was that the Singularity would occur by 2035 — Brand saw the clock, according to Markoff, as “a counterbalance” to rapid technological change, paired with a library to “conserve the information needed from time to time for the deep renewals of renaissance.” Rose, the Long Now Foundation’s first hire, made their objectives clear: “The clock is to grab people’s attention and the library is what we do with that attention. It is the saving of our culture.”

One result was the foundation’s Rosetta Project, which imagined an archive with “a collection of the world’s greatest literature, known cures for the diseases that plague humanity, blueprints for recreating major technology.” Its experiments with long-term information storage resulted in another charismatic object, a nickel disk — less than three inches in diameter — microscopically engraved with parallel texts in over a thousand languages. Laura Welcher, the project’s former director, called it “a prototype and facet of the Library of Ages.”

Although hopes of extending this idea to other books were never fulfilled, Brand continued to see the clock and library as a “backup,” an “insurance provider,” and “a transition-managing device.” Its message, which recalled the themes of post-apocalyptic science fiction, was meant to be reassuring: “Fear not. Everything that might need to be remembered is being collected and stashed, easily accessible but out of your way. Innovate as intensely as you want. If we head down a blind alley, or get lost, we can pick up the prior path.”

As for the caretakers, Markoff writes that Hillis once pictured “something akin to a monastery with buildings designed to last for more than a thousand years.” Hillis told me that this was really more of a “scenario” about how the clock might evolve over the millennia, rather than a plan to incorporate such an institution into the site itself: “We’ve certainly done nothing to encourage it.” Bezos — who has presumably made arrangements of his own in case of catastrophe — seems unlikely to include a monastery at the clock on his ranch, or any permanent presence aside from guides, maintenance workers, and security guards.

All the same, this line of thinking raises the question of what it means to provide “a counterbalance” to the Singularity. One possible approach, conducted in full transparency, would aim to offset the disruptive effects of technological change by engaging people in a project with a more expansive timeframe. In The Clock of the Long Now, Brand recommended combining restorative efforts to address inequality and environmental damage with “some positive goals that operate at the same pace,” like the clock, or perhaps “colonizing Mars.”

Another kind of counterbalance could be realized in secret. Hillis has often spoken of supplementing the Internet with “simple backup systems … to protect ourselves when critical systems fail.” A logical next step would be a backup for society itself, allowing humanity to shorten the dark age after a collapse — the Hari Seldon model. Hillis described it to me as a sort of continuity plan: “We would try to make a bridge — something that would last. The best thing we can do is create options for the future that might be useful.” These approaches are distinct, but not necessarily incompatible. In all likelihood, however, the clock in West Texas will reflect neither one.

III.

To understand the milieu that produced the clock, the best place to begin is Brand’s book The Media Lab. On the “demo or die” mentality at MIT that led to groundbreaking prototypes of video calls, touchscreens, and virtual reality, Brand quoted the speech researcher Chris Schmandt: “We’re known for that flash — it’s not an accident. We’re not making a product, we’re making an idea, which can be convincing through its manifestation in a demo. We should be challenging the way people think.”

The clock is the ultimate artifact of a culture that evolved to convince donors from the tech community to underwrite spectacular ideas with no obvious payoff. To develop the clock, the foundation depends on what Rose calls “the Medici model of a single wealthy benefactor,” rather than the membership fees that fund its other programs. In exchange for financing the next design stage, the partners own the prototypes. Hillis told me that he only worked with collaborators with whom he felt a personal connection, stating that he wouldn’t have taken funding, for example, from Elon Musk: “I didn’t know Elon well enough.”

In his book on the clock, Brand quoted Richard Benson of the Yale School of Art on the prospect of housing it in a museum: “It would seem reasonable that those making fortunes with technology would be interested in preserving a record of their achievements.” The first prototype — finished in time to ring twice at the millennium — was sponsored for $500,000 by Jacob E. Safra, a Swiss billionaire who was introduced to Hillis by the computer scientist Nicholas Metropolis. A second prototype, the Orrery, was a model of the solar system funded with over a million dollars from Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer of Microsoft.

This process culminated in Bezos, who scaled up the mutual rewards of such patronage to untold heights. One key intermediary was the computer programmer Shel Kaphan, the first employee of Amazon, who had worked in his teens at a store associated with the Whole Earth Catalog. In 1998, Bezos — whose net worth of $1.6 billion at the time didn’t even make him one of the hundred richest people in America — threw a birthday party for Kaphan in Maui, with cabins on the beach for guests, including Brand. After hitting it off with Brand, Bezos funded Long Bets, a quixotic attempt by the foundation to raise money with a forum for wagers on future trends.

A few years later, Bezos called Hillis, who had met him separately at the annual TED Conference, with an unexpected offer: “Hey, you know that clock you want to build? I want to fund paying for it.” At first, he seemed like the ideal partner. Explaining his reasoning afterward, Bezos said, “We humans are getting awfully sophisticated in technological ways and have a lot of potential to be very dangerous to ourselves, and it seems to me that we as a species will have to start thinking longer term. This is a symbol. I think symbols can be very powerful.”

Before long, however, Bezos was altering the nature of the project itself. The foundation had purchased land near Great Basin National Park, Nevada, but after a visit, Bezos argued that it was impractical. Instead, he offered his gigantic ranch in Texas, which Hillis explored until he found a location that matched his vision. Bezos’s initial commitment was reported at $42 million, and it has only grown since construction began — mostly well out of sight — fifteen years ago.

Although the clock, which Bezos owns through a private company called Clock One LLC, was originally positioned as a prototype for the final version, it seems likely to be the only one, at least at this scale, since another wealthy patron will have little reason to repeat what Bezos has done. Earlier this year, Hillis wrote online, “I still expect the Long Now Foundation will eventually put something at the Nevada site, but it will be something else.”

Brand, who has always described himself as a pragmatist, might see this as a reasonable compromise that allowed the clock to exist. As Ken Kesey once said bluntly, “Stewart recognizes power. And cleaves to it.” Yet his objective has always been to influence his patrons in tangible ways. An early clock proposal was presented at the World Economic Forum in Davos, which Brand called “the perfect place to get world leaders and corporate leaders thinking in 10,000-year terms.” According to Markoff, Brand once pitched a book based on interviews with his wealthy friends, including Safra, Myhrvold, and Bezos, arguing that “the rich could be far more of a boon to society if nudged in the right direction.”

In The Clock of the Long Now, Brand wrote, “Any organization confidently thinking twenty years ahead is compelled to grapple with long-term needs, such as an educated workforce and a sustainable regional economy.” This bears minimal resemblance to the path taken by Amazon. Bezos’s investment in the clock amounts to around two hundredths of one percent of his net worth, and it probably occupies about as much of his mental real estate. As the environmentalist Michelle Bastian has noted, his empire is built on “the desire to decrease the amount of patience asked of those who use its services.” Lauren Sánchez, his fiancée, reached the clock by helicopter, not a pilgrimage through the desert.

Rather than changing Bezos — who has transformed over the decades from an affable nerd into the embodiment of unchecked capitalism — the partnership has undermined the clock’s message. Hillis told me that the myth of the clock, like Borges’s encyclopedia of Tlön, might be more powerful than any physical manifestation: “Maybe that thing in the mountain is just a distraction.” Once he took ownership of the clock, however, Bezos owned its story, too. A source familiar with the situation told me that discussions were held at the Long Now Foundation over the possible fallout from the Vogue article. Press coverage often refers merely to “Bezos’s clock,” framing it as an expression of his ego and personality.

While the Clock of the Long Now remains a beautiful idea, the compromises required to build it within the existing system are equally revealing. “To actually try to realize this thing was part of the message,” Eno said in 2014. “To try to actually make it become real and to be faced with all the difficulties of doing that.” Brand has expressed similar sentiments: “The ultimate reason for initiating something ambitious is not to fulfill certain notions but to find out what surprises might emerge.” And for projects that rely on startup founders whose reputations can change radically over time, one surprise can be the nature of one’s patron.

In constructing the myth of the clock, Hillis had a specific audience in mind: “It’ll be worth building the clock if I can inspire ten percent of the engineers in Silicon Valley to spend ten percent of their time thinking about problems whose solution is more than ten years out into the future.” He once told Michael Lewis, “In some sense, in the world we’ve created today, technologists are the only ones that can think about the future.” In our interview, Hillis clarified, “I wouldn’t say that they are the only ones who can think about it, but I don’t think you can think about the future without thinking about technology. I think it’s the driving force of this transition.”

Now that the clock is nearly complete, the Long Now Foundation faces a transition of its own, as it turns to what Rose describes as the problem of “how to create a very long-lived organization.” From the beginning, its board has resembled the demographic of its sponsors. Its twenty current or former members are largely drawn from the tech industry, and the entrepreneur Ping Fu is the only person of color. Ideally, its next phase will include representatives from other groups that also have a stake in the future. Transparency is a core principle of the clock, which is designed to be understandable, and the foundation could take the same approach in sharing its story.

The clock itself implies that a change in direction is always possible. Before you arrive at the cupola at the top of the staircase, the narrowing steps force you to find another path. Looking for a way out, you see five anniversary chambers, respectively set to activate every year, decade, century, millennium, and ten thousand years. The first niche contains a mechanical model of the planets; the second will be “a surprise”; and the rest will be filled by later generations.

At last, you notice an exit that leads out of the mountain to an expansive view of the desert below. Walking along the steeply inclined corridor, you see sunlight through the opening ahead. Before you return to the outside world, you pause to remember Brand’s words: “Judge architects by what their buildings may become. Judge organizations in part by what their building is becoming.”