Amazon's Jeff Bezos installing 10,000-year clock in Texas mountain

Feb. 21 (UPI) -- Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced that he's enlisted a team to install a 10,000-year clock inside a West Texas mountain.

The 500-foot clock is designed to be "an icon for long-term thinking," Bezos said in a statement. He added that the project won't be finished until "many years into the future."

The "father" of the clock is Danny Hillis, who has been thinking about the clock -- which will keep time for the next 10,000 years -- since 1989.

"I've been helping Danny with the project for the last half dozen years," Bezos said. "As I see it, humans are now technologically advanced enough that we can create not only extraordinary wonders but also civilization-scale problems. We're likely to need more long-term thinking."

The clock, if built with Hillis' vision in mind, will tick once a year. The century hand will advance once every 10 years and the cuckoo will come out on the millennium.

There will be five room-size anniversary chambers carved into the mountain for the one-year, 10-year, 100-year, 1,000-year and 10,000-year anniversaries.

"We aren't planning to build the animations for the 100-, 1,000-, and 10,000-year anniversary chambers, but will instead leave those to future generations," Bezos said. "We are providing a mechanical interface into those chambers that provides those future builders with power and the correct clock triggering events."

Bezos credited organizations including Applied Minds, The Long Now Foundation, Penguin Automated System, Swaggart Brothers and Seattle Solstice and Machinists for assisting in the project.