Inside the mountain, a 16-tonne diamond-chainsaw robot has carved a spiral rock staircase, which will snake around the metal cogs and gears of the clock in a central cavity hundreds of feet deep. Engineers recently installed a manual winding mechanism to power the bells and display dials – but the clock itself will be kept running by the temperature difference from day to night. Air within a tank and bellows at the cavern’s top will expand during the day, providing just enough energy to keep a pendulum ticking for centuries.

WATCH: Timelapse of the first steps of the 10,000 Year Clock's installation

As the centuries pass, a new, different sequence of bells will play every so often. You can get a sense of what future generations might hear on one of Eno’s albums, inspired by the clock. The first track features the sequence of bells that will play 5,000 years from the year he composed it – in the year 07003.

The clock is designed to provoke its visitors to reflect on their place in time. While rationally we can conceive of the deeper future and how our acts affect tomorrow, its creators believe that it will be a wholly different experience to stand inside an ancient cavern looking at a clock that will tick for hundreds of lifetimes.

It's not outlandish to believe that works of art or installations such as the clock can influence people’s views and actions in ways that rational, empirical arguments cannot. For example, BBC Future recently explored how the style of imagery deployed to depict climate change can influence the viewer’s sense of agency, empathy and willingness to change their behaviour. Similarly, researchers have found that people are more likely to alter their environmental habits if they are asked to engage with climate change through their personal values and experiences rather than hearing scientific arguments from experts.

A small prototype version of the clock can be found at the Science Museum in London (Credit: Jeff Easter/Flickr/CC BY 2.0)

Myself, I have mixed feelings about the clock. I wonder what future generations will make it of it, looking back at the period and the place in which it was conceived. It will cost tens of millions of dollars and has developed amidst the dizzying growth of Silicon Valley – and the fortunes and controversies that followed.

The project may come to be associated with its main funder Bezos and his company Amazon, which has become notorious for pushing its workers to meet deliveries on ever-shorter timeframes. And a cynic might argue that the riches of a corporation notorious for paying low taxes might be better spent on long-term infrastructure, catastrophe prevention or social programmes that benefit future generations.

Still, I hope that the clock will be seen as its makers intended, a symbol that changes minds about short-term thinking rather than Silicon Valley largesse.

Over 10,000 years, perhaps all of these details will be forgotten anyway. Maybe the clock will mean something entirely different to our descendants, revealing a truth of our age that we can't yet imagine. Like time capsules, often when humanity erects monuments that reach for posterity, these symbols go on to say more about what we value and who we are today than we will ever know ourselves. If the 10,000 Year Clock does hold a hidden truth about us that only our descendants will see, I suppose it would be an appropriate legacy for the long-forgotten billionaire and foundation that placed it inside a mountain.

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I understand the dangers of short-termism. I can both rationalise the argument, and feel the need to care more about future generations. But I confess I still struggle with how to translate that to action as an individual. Some days I wonder if I should be eating more ethically. The next I consider sacrificing a trip abroad to reduce my carbon emissions.

It is daunting to contemplate how we as individuals might act with kindness and foresight for unborn people. To realise that we are just one in a chain of generations, and accept that while we will one day be forgotten, we owe an ethical obligation to our descendants to leave a better world than the one we inherited ourselves. I find it is difficult enough extrapolating how my small acts as an individual might affect the wider world and its population today, let alone hundreds of years into the future.

I experienced a brief moment of clarity, though, when sitting with my daughter at breakfast recently. As five-year-olds do, she often asks questions. We got talking about what I had been writing.

“Do you know what the future is?” I asked.

She paused. “No, not really.”

“Well you know history, and the past? This is the opposite.”

She chewed her cereal.

“What’s the furthest in the future you can imagine?” I asked.

“Um... when I am 10.”

“Can you imagine further? Being a grown-up?”

“No. When I am 10.”

She picked up her bowl and wandered out to the kitchen.

And so, I thought, this is where I can start: as a parent. As my daughter grows up, what I am sure I can do is try my hardest to widen the horizons, empathy and potential of a little girl who can’t yet imagine a world beyond life as a 10-year-old. A girl who will become a teenager, an adult, a grandmother, my closest descendant in a chain of generations, who, just maybe, will live long enough to watch the start of the 22nd Century unfold.

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Richard Fisher is the managing editor of the BBC.com features sites (UK & RoW), and tweets at @rifish.

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