Jeff Bezos, Who Is Not A Super-Villain, Is Building A Giant Clock Inside A Mountain, Because He's NOT A Super-Villain

So sure, Jeff Bezos has made himself the wealthiest person in the world by building a massive company designed to enter users' everyday lives and then use that market share to systematically disrupt and destroy whole industries. And yeah, he's created a cloud data storage behemoth that now holds an unfathomable amount of digital personal information, purchased a major national newspaper, opened a movie studio, built his own space rockets and transformed his body into a bald, shredded killing machine. But he's not a comic book super-villain come alive, you guys, that's a crazy suggestion! To be an actual real-life super villain, he'd have to go do some bizarre mega-project in some remote part of the world and pretend that he wasn't building his new super-secret lair...

Oh, so what the fuck is this?

Well, Bezos has a blog about it...

We are building a 10,000 Year Clock. It's a special Clock, designed to be a symbol, an icon for long-term thinking. It's of monumental scale inside a mountain in West Texas. The father of the Clock is Danny Hillis. He's been thinking about and working on the Clock since 1989. He wanted to build a Clock that ticks once a year, where the century hand advances once every 100 years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium. The vision was, and still is, to build a Clock that will keep time for the next 10,000 years. I've been helping Danny with the project for the last half dozen years. 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.

Ahh, so it's an arty farty kind of deal? Then no reason to be alarmed. It's not like one can hide an HQ for giant lasers and/or world domination plots inside of a clock...right?

Carved into the mountain are five room-sized anniversary chambers: 1 year, 10 year, 100 year, 1,000 year, and 10,000 year anniversaries. The one year anniversary chamber is a special orrery. In addition to the planets and the Earth's moon, it includes the interplanetary probes launched during the 20th century. The Clock will activate and run the orrery once a year on a pre-determined date at solar noon.

What? This seems totally normal...