Clips of a three-year-old Lego clock video that I'd not seen before just resurfaced, and it's making the rounds across social media. Naturally, I went in search of the full video, but what I found instead impressed me even more: A fully functional galactic-scale Lego clock.
German YouTube channel Brick Technology breaks down, from start to finish, a mechanical Lego clock designed to track time from a single second all the way up to galactic years and everything in between ... fortnights, lifespan, months, you name it.
For those of you keeping score, astronomers think the universe is somewhere around 61 galactic years old, and our Solar System and Sun formed roughly 20 galactic years ago – and we're midway through our 21st orbit around the Milky Way.
What's a galactic year, you say? Also called a cosmic year, it's the time it takes the Sun and our Solar System to complete a full orbit around the center of the Milky Way, which is estimated to be about 225-250 million Earth years.
This wasn't meant to be astronomy or Earth history 101, but it's just so fascinating to see it not only visually laid out, but in Lego form. What's normally a children's toy leads to existential thoughts about something far more magnificent and bigger than I'll ever fully understand.
The clock has a numerical readout for a BILLION years. Long enough for Pangaea to fully form, rift, and form again. A billion years ago, single-celled organisms ruled the repeatedly freezing and thawing planet at the tail end of the "Boring Billion" era before starting to evolve into the complex flora and fauna of today. Dinosaurs came and went in less than a fifth of that time. The Grand Canyon formed only 5-6 million years ago, basically a tiny 1/200th of a tick of a billion years.
Mechanically, it all works very much like a grandfather clock with a weight-driven pendulum on an anchor escapement, ticking one second at a time. A falling weight on a string is automatically rewound by an electric motor when it reaches the end of its line – smartly, might I add, with a differential so as not to interrupt the pendulum during rewind and Z-switch to signal when it's time to reel it back up. A solar panel, also geared to the machine to follow the path of the Sun, powers the batteries, theoretically giving it all the juice it'll ever need. There's much, much more to it, but I don't want to give away all the details.
The math works, but the nerd in me wonders how long the hardware will last. Granted, it's mostly Lego, so replacement parts are easy to come by. Still, my brain defaults to the "what might happen?"
And if you're wondering about the original video I was searching for, it's also a masterpiece from the Akiyuki Brick Channel, known in the Lego community for some pretty crazy GBC (Great Ball Contraption) builds.
It would be offensive to say that "it's only a clock" when compared to Brick Technology's all-encompassing timepiece rig, so I'll refer to it as an absolute work of horological art instead. It really is quite nice to look at.
Akiyuki approaches the build using a mangle rack mechanism – a gear that turns continuous rotation into back-and-forth motion – to accurately dial in seconds, minutes, and hours in a clock that looks more Jacob and Co. than Lego Batman.
One makes me wonder about the meaning of life, the universe, and everything ... while the other looks really, really good while showing what time it is. Both are amazing.
It's a good reminder that, with the right mindset, Lego, like many things, isn't just a children's toy. Its limits are your imagination.
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