With $42 million in funding from Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, the Long Now Foundation can afford to take the long view about a massive clock designed to run for 10,000 years — but it’s also open to hosting visitors in the nearer term.
After carving out a network of tunnels and chambers amid mountainous terrain that was bought by Bezos, the 10,000 Year Clock team is putting the steampunk-style works into place, module by module. The components for the clock are machined in Seattle and the San Francisco Bay Area, and then shipped to Texas. Rose said that the dedicated “clock team” has about 10 engineers and 10 fabricators, with as many as 40 people working on the site at a given time.
When it’s finished, the 80-foot-tall clock’s dials will reflect astronomical data such as the positions of the moon and the sun, and there’ll be a counter showing the current date on the Gregorian calendar. A chime will sound a series of 10 notes in a different sequence each day for roughly 10,000 years, assuming that visitors keep the chime mechanism wound up, Rose said.
https://www.geekwire.com/2018/bezos-backed-10000-year-clock-visitors/