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.
Photo by James Martin/CNET
