Somewhere inside a mountain in the West Texas desert, a clock is being built to keep time for ten thousand years. All mechanical. Wound by whoever makes the day-long hike to reach it. Designed so it´s chimes never ring the same sequence twice.
Zander Rose has spent nearly thirty years building it.
He grew up in a junkyard on the Sausalito waterfront – boat builders, artists, an activist mother who went on to become mayor, and a flea market every Sunday where he and his father took machines apart to see how they worked. Before the clock he was making combat robots that won six world titles, fast machines built to win in seconds. Then he gave half his working life to the slowest object on earth.
What he’s really after isn’t the engineering. It’s a question I keep coming back to: Are we being good ancestors – and what would we build differently if we believed the future was watching?
