What would you do if you were one of the richest people in the world? Would you, like Elon Musk, send your convertible into space? Would you spend like Bill Gates on charity foundations? Would you compulsively, like Bernard Arnaud, buy art? Would you book seats for the first flight to Mars?
Jeff Bezos, the boss of Amazon, the world's largest fortune according to the Forbes ranking, had another idea. He set out to build a colossal clock that would last at least ten thousand years and lock it in the heart of a mountain in the Texas desert. A way to master time, to mark milestones for future generations or more prosaically to lock time in a pharaonic tomb?
" DWhole civilizations will appear and then disappear, new systems of government will be invented, no one can imagine this future world. But the Clock will be there, through time... ». Prophetic words spoken not on a hilltop, but in an interview given to Wiredby Jeff Bezos.
The Amazon boss always sees the big picture. He has the means and the visionary spirit. For the past ten years or so, he has been interested in the work of computer scientist and engineer Danny Hillis. He has been working for more than 30 years on the project of a clock perpetual mechanics. A clock that would tick every year, whose hand would advance every century and which would ring a carillon every thousand years. A clock of absolute precision, synchronized with the sun, that could run for millennia with almost no human intervention. It would draw its energy from the difference in temperature between day and night.
A clock that can be observed through the ages to come, that can evolve when those who come after us decide to do so.
152 meters high, the Clock is thought " to be a symbol, an icon of long-term thinking. ", commented the billionaire in a tweet on Tuesday, February 20. This monument of future times will be sheltered in the heart of a mountain. Jeff Bezos owns one, in the Texas desert: the Sierra Diablo, the Devil's Mountain. Well, well, well...
Drilling work has already started but no one can say yet when it will be finished and when the clock will be installed. The Pyramid of Cheops was not built in a day, so be patient.
Especially since when it comes to clocks, you have to take your time.
Jeff Bezos, the man who revolutionized the world of commerce in just a few years, who invented inordinate logistics to abolish time... deliveries, is now seeking to imprison time. A project with an inordinate hubris: preserving time to make it last, beyond time. Or to lock up time in order to forget it, to destroy it. A pact with time, under Devil's Mountain?
Some people see this idea as a sign of immense vanity. Others, like the columnist in Fortune Anne Vandermey, see it as an artistic gesture: " It is a conceptual work of art designed to encourage people to be good stewards of humanity's distant future.. »
From this Clock, ten thousand years look down upon us - perhaps our distant descendants will say. Will they understand the folly of the men of those distant times who lived on this planet ten thousand years ago? Will they see this Clock as the representation of a vanished deity? Of a forgotten civilization? Will they only have some notion of time?
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