At 4:31 p.m. Feb. 20, 2018, billionaire Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, posted this Instagram message for his millions of followers: “Installation has begun—500 ft tall, all mechanical, powered by day/night thermal cycles, synchronized at solar noon, a symbol for long-term thinking—the #10,000YearClock is coming together thx to the genius of Danny Hillis, Zander Rose &the whole Clock team!”
Along with the announcement, Bezos posted a video from inside a 12-foot-wide hole descending into darkness from a high point in the Sierra Diablo mountains in West Texas, where construction crews aided by heavy machinery were carefully lowering enormous steel gears into the dimly lit depths.
The social media post and video point to a curious and complex project currently under construction: the Bezos-funded Clock of the Long Now. The clock is an enormous $42 million mechanical timepiece, housed inside a mountain, designed to keep accurate time for the next 10,000 years.
By measuring time in centuries rather than minutes, months, or years, the project hopes to inspire long-term thinking resulting in practical action for a more sustainable and responsible future. The Long Now Foundation was established in 1996 to oversee the clock’s construction. Board member Stewart Brand summarized the project’s goal: “Once you hold these longer timeframes in mind, you start to raise the question of what you do on Monday. Does your behavior start to reflect this larger frame?”
Designed to attract visitors, the clock will accomplish its Monday-morning mission in three unique ways.
First, its remote location will allow people making a pilgrimage to the site time to reflect on personal and communal actions related to sustainable practices. The strenuous journey over rugged terrain will mirror the effort and stamina needed to make the changes necessary for a better future.
Second, carved into the mountain are five anniversary chambers, marking one, 10, 100, 1,000, and 10,000 years. Inside the one-year anniversary chamber, an eight-foot-tall model of the solar system will display the moon, the six planets visible from earth, and the interplanetary probes launched in the 20th century. Ideas for the 10-year chamber are being considered, but the other chambers will be designed by future generations. As benchmarks for progress, the chambers and corresponding dates will draw attention to the clock and generate ongoing conversation.
Third, visitors will be able to interact with the clock’s mechanism by manually winding its main gear. When fully wound, once per day, clock hands will spring to life to display the precise time while a chiming mechanism with 10 bells rings out one of 3.5 million melody combinations. The chime will never repeat so that each day’s visitors will have a truly unique and powerful experience that will echo in their memory for years.
Psalm 90 is clear that heaven and earth measure time in very different ways. In verse 4, the author writes, “A thousand years in your (God’s) sight are like a day that has just gone by.” As the psalm continues, verse after verse pushes and pulls at our imagination, stretching our limited understanding to the breaking point.
In contrast to the way eternity measures time, the psalmist, grasping for metaphors, describes human life as windswept dust, withering grass, and a faint dream. With these striking images, the psalmist highlights the intense brevity of human existence and places every living person in a position of complete and utter dependence on God.
Feeling fragile, the psalmist cries out to God with a series of rapid-fire petitions: Have compassion. Satisfy us. Make us glad. Manifest your power. Show us your favor. Establish the work of our hands. All six petitions are infused with urgency, but only one is repeated: “Establish the work of our hands.” Ending the psalm with this repeated plea emphasizes the sobering reality that sits distressingly at the margins of everything we do—that our work will quickly fade after we die. It would be easy for the psalmist to give up at this point, but instead, the author arrives at the same conclusion as Steward Brand: on Monday morning, we get up and get busy because the future depends on it.
Repeating the petition for God to “establish the work of our hands” reinforces the truth that while we are utterly dependent upon God, each of us has an important part to play in God’s big story of redemption. Because God’s desire is to partner with humanity, our small contributions matter. We work faithfully while trusting in God’s ability to oversee the whole and shape our work toward something positive, lifegiving, and lasting.
For many, the Clock of the Long Now will be an important symbol reminding us to act for a more sustainable future, but for Christians, the call to responsible stewardship has been ringing for thousands of years through the command God gives in the second chapter of Genesis. Immediately after God creates humans, God gives them a good reason to get up on Monday morning: to “work it (the garden) and take care of it” (v. 15). To “work” and “take care” go hand in hand and function as the gas pedal and the brakes. For generations, humanity has diligently worked to develop creation’s potential without much thought to protecting it. The result is polluted air, soil, rivers, and oceans. Some ecosystems are on the brink of collapse. Scientists are sounding the alarm as global temperatures rise, glaciers melt, and weather systems intensify.
Given these immense challenges, the future is uncertain. The Clock of the Long Now team, hoping for the best but realistic about the difficult road ahead, built a contingency plan into the clock’s design. In the event of war, pandemic, environmental catastrophe, or societal collapse that prevents anyone from winding the clock, it can work independently for more than a century by harnessing energy from the naturally occurring heat and cold cycles of the high desert. But to keep the clock ticking for 10,000 years, humanity will need to be healthy and the planet habitable.
Although straining toward a more sustainable and responsible future is critically important, our ultimate hope has never been in the human ability to work hard and engineer better solutions. The opening of Psalm 90 directs our faith: “Lord, you have been our dwelling place throughout all generations. Before the mountains were born or you brought forth the whole world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God.”
With our hope firmly established in God, we repent of our greed, wastefulness, and mindless consumption. Then we faithfully labor at the task of stewarding the earth—working it and watching over it. We do this believing that our world belongs to God and that God is faithful to work God’s resurrection power even in the gravest circumstances.
When completed, the Clock of the Long Now will tick for the next 10,000 years in the remote mountains of West Texas. As it marks centuries and inspires long-term thinking, we get to work on Monday morning, praying the words of Psalm 90:12: “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”
Discussion Questions:
- When was the last time you planned for something “long term”? What was the time frame?
- What “work of your hands” would you want God to establish? Why are they important to you?
- What might change in your view of your work if you view it from God’s eternal perspective?
- Do we see glimpses or small signs of “God’s resurrection power even in the gravest circumstances” in history or our present?
About the Author
Sam Gutierrez is the Associate Director at the Eugene Peterson Center for the Christian Imagination at Western Theological Seminary. More of his creative work can be found at printandpoem.com
