Imagine a clock as tall as a building. It ticks once a year, chimes once a millennium and keeps time for 10,000 years.
How can a 10,000-year clock make a difference in our world? What is its purpose? The Long Now Foundation, creators of the 10,000 year clock, intend it to be a mythic type image that embodies the concept of deep time.
According to Stewart Brand, one of the leaders (along with Brian Eno and others),
“Such a clock, if sufficiently impressive and well engineered, would embody deep time for people. It should be charismatic to visit, interesting to think about, and famous enough to become iconic in the public discourse. Ideally, it would do for thinking about time what the photographs of Earth from space have done for thinking about the environment. Such icons reframe the way people think.”