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Chimes at Midnight (2024)

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

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. 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. 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.

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