This article is part of a package in collaboration with Forbes on time capsules, preserving information and communicating with the future. Read more from the report.
After my grandmother died, we had to clean out her condominium. Wall to wall and floor to ceiling, her studio apartment in a Berkeley, Calif., high-rise was filled with books. Every surface was stacked with them except for a couple of chairs, the tiny kitchen counter, the bed and narrow connecting paths like game trails in a forest. The shelves were three books deep and bowed in their middle.
But this wasn’t chaos. Besides being a communist, a labor activist and a speaker of five languages that I knew of (Yiddish, English, German, some Russian and some Spanish, in addition to her ability to read Latin), Grandma had been a lecturer in library science at the University of California, Berkeley. Every shelf and every pile was a subject, placed in proximity to related subjects and alphabetized by author.
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When my wife and I started excavating, we found another organizational layer. Some of the books had whole magazines stuffed into them—the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, Smithsonian—folded open to an article that was relevant to their enveloping tome. Further into the stacks, a whole other classification system surfaced—articles neatly torn or clipped out, with notes stapled to them on which Grandma’s looping cursive noted their subject and bibliographic metadata.
This was more than a library. Sure, it contained books—objects that convey information—but the condo itself was an object that conveyed information. It was what historian of memory Mary Carruthers calls an architectural mnemonic—a map of Grandma’s multivariate, interesting and generally unshakable opinions. Its physical structure at every scale helped her to maintain not just her sources but her ideas and to send them forward in time to when she might need them. “The archive has always been a pledge,” according to a translation of philosopher Jacques Derrida’s book Archive Fever, “and like every pledge, a token of the future.”
Not every pledge gets fulfilled, of course. By the end of her life, my grandmother’s once-pointed mind had become less deft; she couldn’t really understand her own archive anymore. Information theory says that for a message to arrive, both sender and receiver have to agree on its form and timing. And now the receiver was gone. This happens all the time—at the scale of studio apartments and entire societies, on time spans of years or millennia. Even organizations dedicated to creating things and trying to remember them don’t always know how to ensure that those things make it through time. That’s understandable. Nobody really knows how to speak to the future in a way that it will hear.
When we try to unravel information from the past, we’re limited by what archives and nature have preserved. “The technical structure of the archiving archive determines the structure of the archivable content,” as Derrida put it. Take the oldest known piece of human art, a 73,000-year-old drawing of crosshatched red triangles on a chunk of rock. South African archaeologists found it in a cave called Blombos, about 185 miles east of Cape Town. Whether these triangles were a vision of mountains, an econometric chart of the seal harvest or an accident of boredom is lost to time. Maybe humans were constantly going around drawing ochre triangles on fragments of rock, and symbolic thinking was common. Maybe only Paleolithic geniuses did it. Whoever drew that fragment was thinking about something, but no one here in the future can know what.
Even when humans create written language and records, they often fail to send information up the line. Most of what historians know about ancient Greece and Rome is because of a lucky accident—scholars in the Abbasid Caliphate, which extended throughout much of the Middle East, got scrolls from Alexandrian libraries and translated them. But which scrolls never made it? Archaeologists know that a Babylonian copper merchant named Ea-nasir had supply chain problems nearly 4,000 years ago but only because of the fluke survival of clay tablets saying that happened. The shape of the archive of the past limits the knowledge of the future.
Nobody really knows how to speak to the future in a way that it will hear.
The northeastern coast of Japan is dotted with future-message failures—hundreds of “tsunami stones” mark past catastrophes dating back 600 years. One in the village of Aneyoshi denotes the level of a flood in the 1800s and warns people not to build houses any lower along the hillside; others advise people to flee to Nokoriya, the “Valley of Survivors,” or Namiwake, “Waves’ Edge,” the extent of a tsunami in 1611. People mostly ignore them. The Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in 2011 hit that very same coast, swept away a bunch of stones and killed more than 18,000 people.
Another example: In 1850, on the main canal leading from the Merrimack River to the industrial mill town of Lowell, Mass., James Francis built a dam. As the engineer in charge of Lowell’s water-powered textile mills, Francis was convinced that the Merrimack was liable to flood. So he built a 27-foot-wide, 25-foot-tall, 17-inch-thick palisade out of experimental pressure-treated pine. The cost of a project like this “Great Gate” in 2025 would be about $413 million. The gate was so heavy that it had no mechanism to raise or lower it—it just hung over the Pawtucket Canal, suspended by a massive iron chain. Locals called it “Francis’s Folly.”
Two years later a massive rainstorm flooded the Merrimack. At 3:30 in the morning on April 22, 1852, a worker used a chisel to cut the chain. The gate dropped; the town was saved; Boston newspapers hailed Francis as a hero.
In 1936 there was another storm and an even bigger flood. Lowell was doomed! But someone remembered that really big gate. Workers once again rushed to the gatehouse. No one had a key, so they broke in. Someone shined a light into the decaying shack, which was empty except for a spike stuck through the floor. On the wall hung a sledgehammer. Above it, a sign read, “Take the hammer. Hit the pin.” The men followed the instructions. The spike broke the chain; the gate fell; the town was saved. Francis’s message to the future had been received.
But mine hasn’t. The thing is, I don’t know if all of this really happened. The 1936 flood is real, and the Great Gate really did save Lowell twice. The “take the hammer” part, though? I heard it on a tour there 25 years ago and bottled up, hoping to save it for a story someday. And I can’t find that anecdote in any of my research about Lowell or Francis. I sent a message to myself in the future, yet in the present, I cannot know if it is true.
In 1996 in San Francisco, two groups of nerds steeped in techno-optimism founded organizations aimed at communicating with the future.
One was the Internet Archive. Even then, historians were envisioning a digital catastrophe: “Electronic records are far more numerous already but at much greater risk of loss” than physical records, wrote librarian David Zeidberg in a 1999 paper. The material of the digital archive—hard drives, optical drives, floppy disks—degrades even more quickly than materials such as film or paper. Old bound editions of journals in basement libraries were all but immutable, but digital documents mutate with a single keystroke. So computer engineer and Internet search expert Brewster Kahle took on the mission of preserving digital information. Computer memory was cheap; Kahle set out to simply save everything. The Internet Archive captures a record of the ever changing World Wide Web at various dates, yet it’s stored electronically, in the same fallible medium as the thing it’s trying to preserve.
The other organization was the Long Now Foundation. Its founders took a view that was simultaneously more and less expansive than that of the Internet Archive. They didn’t want to preserve everything, but they did want to preserve some things permanently. Long Nowers such as Stewart Brand, one of the co-founders, looked at what kinds of materials survived the vicissitudes of history and determined to build archives that were expressly aimed at being useful to whoever would be still around in a few thousand years.
The giant, 10,000-year clock that Long Now is building inside a mountain has gotten a lot of attention. That’s deep commitment to the bit. But more interesting is a Rosetta stone–like project that aims to save a bunch of human languages in a permanent, easily readable format. “You can either write things in plaintext on giant stone tablets that last for thousands of years, and as long as someone can decode the language, they can read them,” says Zander Rose, former executive director of Long Now, “or you can go with a method that assumes you rewrite the data onto a new medium, whatever that new medium is, every day or every year or every 10 years.”
The shape of the archive of the past limits the knowledge of the future.
The Internet archivists sometimes sound fringe, but they have a point. Things have gotten every bit as bad as they warned. A 2024 Pew Research report found that more than a third of all webpages that existed just a decade previous were inaccessible. And one in five government webpages had at least one broken link. In a 2021 report Harvard University researchers found that a quarter of the two million hyperlinks in the digital version of the New York Times were broken. And when digital-only journalism outlets take their archives offline, you can’t just go to a downtown library and check those articles out on microfiche. They’re gone. Meanwhile millions of articles and more than 170 open-access journals are absent from major archives, and the U.S. federal government is abandoning critical databases and data-gathering capacity. If culture is defined by what it saves, then 21st-century culture is sick with link rot.
And digital media themselves degrade. Magnetic media in computers and phones last about a decade; optical discs can make it for a century unless they’re afflicted with “laser rot.”
But saving everything isn’t actually sending a clear message to the future, is it? Archivists used to say, “Quod non est in actis, non est in mundo”—a Latin phrase that roughly translates to “That which is not in the files does not exist in the world.” But that’s not true. What’s not there is critical, too. The Internet Archive is profoundly useful—I used it for this article. But “‘let’s just keep it all’ is always wrong,” says Geoffrey Bowker, a researcher at the University of California, Irvine, who studies archives and information history. If you “keep too much of the same stuff, you’ve got too much of the same stuff.” The question for the good archivist is: Which material should be saved, and which should not? “Unfortunately, the Internet Archive has never asked that question,” Bowker says. “Most archivists don’t.”
For his part, Kahle says he’s answering a different question entirely. Back in the mid-1990s, he wrote in this very magazine that his archive could afford to save everything, and so it would. “The Web, since the early days, grew up with a system to preserve its history, as Wikipedia or GitHub do, or just as all libraries keep out-of-print editions of published materials,” Kahle says. “The Web collections now, total, one trillion webpages, which is a testament to the sharing impulse of maybe a billion people.”
The Long Now team took a different approach, determining that it would first save languages—the key to accessing everything else someday. But what medium should be used? “Things like stone, ceramics and glass are generally the most stable over time, but they also have the problem of being brittle,” Rose says. “So you get into metals.” Other materials might also work—laser-etched ultrapure silica glass or silver halide images on polyester ribbons, for example. Long Now decided to etch documents into silicon with machines for prototyping computer circuits and to then cast the result in a high-nickel alloy.
Long Now’s other rule was that the archive had to be readable with an unaided human eye. “Napoleon’s soldiers found the Rosetta stone, looked at it, and said, ‘Okay, this is important,’” Rose says. “If you found a CD 1,000 years from now, it might get used as a necklace.”
Information from Long Now’s Rosetta project—including examples of 7,000 human languages—is part of a library, etched onto nickel, that a rocket carried to the moon in 2024. The library also archived all of Wikipedia, books from the digitization group Project Gutenberg, a curated selection of the arts from the Arch Mission Foundation (which led the library project) and a book revealing the secrets of illusionist David Copperfield. On the weather-free surface of the moon, it’ll be there, effectively, forever.
If culture is defined by what it saves, then 21st-century culture is sick with link rot.
Some scientists have proposed that we save data with nature’s preferred medium for information storage and transfer: DNA. It’s easy enough to translate digital 1’s and 0’s into DNA’s four-base genetic code. In the mid 2010s, researchers theorized that two grams of single-stranded DNA could store nearly a zettabyte, or a million terabytes, of data for thousands of years. Obviously that hasn’t quite come to pass yet. DNA turns out to need an awful lot of error correction, and reliable writing and reading has proven difficult.
Then again, the ultimate DNA archive already exists. It’s us—and every living thing on Earth. Our genetic material already reflects every challenge Earthlings ever faced. The information is inscribed in noncoding DNA, which scientists used to describe as “junk.” It’ll last as long as we do. The message is complete, the medium is rock-solid, and the sender is nature itself. It’s just that nobody knows exactly how to read it yet.
This may be the biggest problem for future-facing archives: metadata. Any message from the past to the future has to be able to tell its recipients how to read it. A sign in a canal gatehouse is easy mode. What about, say, warning people away from nuclear waste dumps 10,000 years from now? In the early 1990s, a team at Sandia National Laboratories proposed marking such sites with fearsome cartoon faces and a plaque with scary words such as “this place is not a place of honor … no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here … nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us.” Today that proposal is just a meme.
The Long Nowers expected as much. “On anything you’re burying for a long time, the worst thing you can do is put a seal on it that says, ‘Please don’t open this; it’s really dangerous,’” Rose says. “Nothing made thieves more sure there was gold on the other side of that door.”
Lately, Rose has been studying the longest-lasting companies on Earth, those with centuries-long continuity. He says that the most successful ones always have a storyteller, a guardian of the company’s history and culture who can pass that legacy along. It might be impossible to send stand-alone epistemic objects to the future, but you can send ideas. Before there was writing, there was the word. It turns out that a message to the future really needs a messenger.
That brings me back to my grandmother’s library. The ideas it contained only made sense when they were attached to one another—and to her. There’s a reason that “text” and “context” share an etymological root with “textile”; a concept only has meaning when it’s woven into a wider fabric.
After a few days of standing in front of her books, I realized that the last message my grandmother sent wasn’t to herself but to me. I saw in her librarianship the obsessive, idiosyncratic way I organize my own archives and try to talk to my own future. I’d learned it from her library. “Oh,” I said to my wife, “this is why I do that.”
She looked up from wiping a rag across a now empty shelf and said, “Duh.”
Like so many messages to the future, this one had gone awry—and had also found a recipient. It was nice to hear from Grandma. I selected some books for myself and started thinking about where to shelve them.
