Long Now

A multimillennial mechanical monument, the Long Now Foundation's 10,000 Year Clock is a work existing at the intersection of art, science, and engineering, and is a thinker's window into the past, present, and future of humanity itself.

Computer scientist Danny Hillis conceived of the 10,000 Year Clock project as a monument to long-term thinking. The design and development on the clock began in 1997 and has itself been a long-term and time-consuming process, already having generated an array of ideas and prototypes as well as mechanical and design patents. The designers hope that with a longer sense of time will come a more broad and long-term way of thinking, and a greater sense of what is possible in the future.

The Long Now Museum and Store, at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco, is free and open to the public.