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The Long Now Foundation is building a giant mechanical clock inside a mountain in West Texas, designed to keep time for 10,000 years. It is meant to draw power from the daily swing between warm and cold, and to correct itself by the Sun at noon.

Clock of the Long Now

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The story behind the card

Computer scientist Danny Hillis dreamed up the clock as a symbol of long-term thinking, and the Long Now Foundation, set up in 1996 by Hillis, Stewart Brand and others, took on the project. The full-size clock is being built in a shaft cut into the Sierra Diablo mountains near Van Horn, Texas, on land owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who has put about $42 million into it through his firm Bezos Expeditions. A first working prototype started ticking on 31 December 1999 and is now in London's Science Museum. The musician Brian Eno helped design the chimes, which are meant to ring a different sequence of bells every day. The clock is designed to be understood and repaired with simple tools.

Türkçe oku
Long Now Vakfı, Batı Teksas'ta bir dağın içinde 10.000 yıl boyunca zamanı göstermesi için tasarlanan dev bir mekanik saat inşa ediyor. Saat, gece ile gündüz arasındaki sıcaklık farkından güç alacak ve her gün öğle güneşiyle kendini ayarlayacak.

Saat fikri, uzun vadeli düşünmenin bir simgesi olarak bilgisayar bilimci Danny Hillis'ten çıktı. Hillis, Stewart Brand ve başkalarıyla birlikte 1996'da kurduğu Long Now Vakfı aracılığıyla projeyi üstlendi. Tam boyutlu saat, Teksas'ta Van Horn yakınlarındaki Sierra Diablo dağlarında kayaya açılmış bir tünelin içinde inşa ediliyor. Arazi Amazon'un kurucusu Jeff Bezos'a ait; Bezos, şirketi Bezos Expeditions üzerinden projeye yaklaşık 42 milyon dolar yatırdı. Çalışan ilk prototip 31 Aralık 1999'da işlemeye başladı ve bugün Londra'daki Bilim Müzesi'nde sergileniyor. Müzisyen Brian Eno, her gün farklı bir çan dizisi çalacak şekilde planlanan çanların tasarımına katkıda bulundu. Saat, basit aletlerle anlaşılıp onarılabilecek biçimde tasarlandı.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Clock of the Long Now
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