Watch This Short Documentary About the Clock Built To Last 10,000 Years

Danny Hillis and a team of engineers at The Long Now Foundation are working on a building a clock that will keep time for 10,000 years. Designed as a symbol of the future, Hillis wants the clock to promote long-term thinking, and encourage people to make the world a better place for future generations. 

In Public Record's short documentary The Clock of the Long Now, filmmakers Jim Goldblum and Adam Weber of Old Friend go behind the scenes with Hillis and his crew as they build the massive clock in a Texas mountainside. The project is breathtaking in both its scale and ambition: Hillis insists on building the clock—which ticks once a year—with only the simplest technologies, so that no matter what happens in the future, people will be able to keep it working. He wants the clock to remind people of the future in the same way the pyramids in Egypt remind them of the past. 

"We've over-exercised the part of our brains that imagines the imminent end of the world, and The Long Now acts to remedy our existential angst,” Goldblum and Weber tell mental_floss. “It's a symbolic reminder to imagine different future possibilities and to take responsibility not just for the here and now, but for the generations to come." Check it out above.

Banner Image Credit: Public Record, Vimeo