Human beings have been around for 200,000 to 300,000 years. No one knows exactly how long, but let’s keep that as the ballpark figure of our duration. Let’s assume, also, that we are the same species we were and that we could, given some fictional scenario, reproduce with those ancient ancestors without having to tweak some gene or two. Let’s also assume that they could, as a number of science fiction authors have proposed, figure out how to cross a busy New York street or use a TV remote. So, what do we know about them beyond their similar features and our hypotheses about how they could adapt to our world?
Our understanding acquired from archaeologists’ digging around in rock shelters is a bit sketchy, but we think we can describe lifestyles now long gone. We can only guess about their mental states, of course, but we can know from their tools, diets, and ability to survive that they possessed a practical knowledge of their environments. By comparison, that knowledge could not approach our own broad base of information or our command of details that includes information about chemical and physical processes unknown before the rise of modern science.
Those ancient ancestors had their own kind of “smarts,” however, and they passed on survival skills for many centuries. Unfortunately for me—and maybe for you—their oral tradition had temporal and spatial limitations. Their acquired knowledge was not spread eternally and ubiquitously. I don’t, for example, think I would do well in some of the circumstances that they survived. I don’t eat bugs; I spit them out if they accidently enter my mouth during outside exercise. I don’t know how to find water in a desert unless I see an alluvial fan with greenery arcing along its base. I don’t know how to read the tracks of prey or predator. And, had no one told me the dangers of eating fugu, I would probably have succumbed to death by fish. In short, I have neither the knowledge nor the skills that enabled those long-gone humans to survive. By comparison with the survival skills of people who survived 200,000 years ago, my own survival skills might make me a more “primitive human” than they. Why didn’t they think to record their knowledge for my benefit?
Now, let’s say I want to convey the information that I have acquired to future generations of humans. I know that electronic hardware has a lifetime and that CDs, for example, will eventually lose their information in whole or part in anywhere between 25 years and a couple of centuries. Also, technology will change so that—as is happening now—there will be fewer and fewer CD players. I could certainly bypass that temporal short-lived technology by putting in a time capsule both my CDs and a player, hoping that the wiring and components remain unaffected by physical and chemical processes until some distant descendant uncovers them, figures out what they are, and obtains the information I so desperately want to convey into humanity’s future. The time capsule might contain contents and meanings so foreign to future humans, however, that they might just as well have been placed aboard the Voyager spacecraft with that famous golden record adrift in the vastness of interstellar space.
There’s another problem, one associated with our species’ longevity. How long will humans be around to dig up the information that they might, given the same level of intelligence that we now possess, consider “quaint” or “primitive.” “Was this purposefully left?” they might ask. In contrast, artifacts from 200,000 years ago don’t seem to be part of a purposeful record left for us to find and interpret. We see them as accidental accumulations. Ancient hominins sent no purposeful messages into their distant future and our present.
So, it’s with some doubt that I look on the practicality of sending a message a half million years into our human future. Can we survive for a period longer than we have survived? Would we not undergo some evolutionary change that alters humans so much that they neither have the ability to understand us or the empathy to care? Yet, communicating with our distant descendants half a million years hence is the purpose of a time capsule placed in a bore hole near the Polish Polar Station in Hornsund, Svalbard.* Marek Lewandowski of the Polish Academy of Sciences Institute of Geophysics in Warsaw selected various items for the capsule, including seeds, a radiation detector, a mobile phone, DNA samples from various organisms, and even tardigrades. As Lewandowski explains, “’Our own time capsule is sure to be found one distant day, and its discoverers will be able to grasp the message,’” he says. “’If they look carefully inside — like we did into the Cheops pyramid and the tombs and artefacts [sic.] inside it — they will understand who we were.’” He thinks the capsule could remain buried for 500,000 years.
There’s confidence. Really? Five-hundred thousand years? Twenty thousand generations? Think you differ from ancient humans? Imagine what you will appear to be to your great-to-the-fourth-power descendants. And imagine the chance of discovery of a capsule buried in the Arctic on a tectonically and climatically active planet.
We pride ourselves on our ability to discern the nature of those ancient lives on the bases of the junk of their lives. With billions of tons of plastic and more billions of tons of metals, our own junk is massive by comparison, and it has a wider distribution. There won’t be a shortage of stuff for future archaeologists to examine. That single time capsule is a needle in a haystack that itself is a needle. But it still comes down to this: Will those in the future be as interested in the past as we are? Will they be like us?
Hope springs eternal. Right? Or, at least, Lewandowski is guessing, for half a million years.
*http://www.nature.com/news/time-capsule-buried-to-preserve-science-for-the-ages-1.22657
Our understanding acquired from archaeologists’ digging around in rock shelters is a bit sketchy, but we think we can describe lifestyles now long gone. We can only guess about their mental states, of course, but we can know from their tools, diets, and ability to survive that they possessed a practical knowledge of their environments. By comparison, that knowledge could not approach our own broad base of information or our command of details that includes information about chemical and physical processes unknown before the rise of modern science.
Those ancient ancestors had their own kind of “smarts,” however, and they passed on survival skills for many centuries. Unfortunately for me—and maybe for you—their oral tradition had temporal and spatial limitations. Their acquired knowledge was not spread eternally and ubiquitously. I don’t, for example, think I would do well in some of the circumstances that they survived. I don’t eat bugs; I spit them out if they accidently enter my mouth during outside exercise. I don’t know how to find water in a desert unless I see an alluvial fan with greenery arcing along its base. I don’t know how to read the tracks of prey or predator. And, had no one told me the dangers of eating fugu, I would probably have succumbed to death by fish. In short, I have neither the knowledge nor the skills that enabled those long-gone humans to survive. By comparison with the survival skills of people who survived 200,000 years ago, my own survival skills might make me a more “primitive human” than they. Why didn’t they think to record their knowledge for my benefit?
Now, let’s say I want to convey the information that I have acquired to future generations of humans. I know that electronic hardware has a lifetime and that CDs, for example, will eventually lose their information in whole or part in anywhere between 25 years and a couple of centuries. Also, technology will change so that—as is happening now—there will be fewer and fewer CD players. I could certainly bypass that temporal short-lived technology by putting in a time capsule both my CDs and a player, hoping that the wiring and components remain unaffected by physical and chemical processes until some distant descendant uncovers them, figures out what they are, and obtains the information I so desperately want to convey into humanity’s future. The time capsule might contain contents and meanings so foreign to future humans, however, that they might just as well have been placed aboard the Voyager spacecraft with that famous golden record adrift in the vastness of interstellar space.
There’s another problem, one associated with our species’ longevity. How long will humans be around to dig up the information that they might, given the same level of intelligence that we now possess, consider “quaint” or “primitive.” “Was this purposefully left?” they might ask. In contrast, artifacts from 200,000 years ago don’t seem to be part of a purposeful record left for us to find and interpret. We see them as accidental accumulations. Ancient hominins sent no purposeful messages into their distant future and our present.
So, it’s with some doubt that I look on the practicality of sending a message a half million years into our human future. Can we survive for a period longer than we have survived? Would we not undergo some evolutionary change that alters humans so much that they neither have the ability to understand us or the empathy to care? Yet, communicating with our distant descendants half a million years hence is the purpose of a time capsule placed in a bore hole near the Polish Polar Station in Hornsund, Svalbard.* Marek Lewandowski of the Polish Academy of Sciences Institute of Geophysics in Warsaw selected various items for the capsule, including seeds, a radiation detector, a mobile phone, DNA samples from various organisms, and even tardigrades. As Lewandowski explains, “’Our own time capsule is sure to be found one distant day, and its discoverers will be able to grasp the message,’” he says. “’If they look carefully inside — like we did into the Cheops pyramid and the tombs and artefacts [sic.] inside it — they will understand who we were.’” He thinks the capsule could remain buried for 500,000 years.
There’s confidence. Really? Five-hundred thousand years? Twenty thousand generations? Think you differ from ancient humans? Imagine what you will appear to be to your great-to-the-fourth-power descendants. And imagine the chance of discovery of a capsule buried in the Arctic on a tectonically and climatically active planet.
We pride ourselves on our ability to discern the nature of those ancient lives on the bases of the junk of their lives. With billions of tons of plastic and more billions of tons of metals, our own junk is massive by comparison, and it has a wider distribution. There won’t be a shortage of stuff for future archaeologists to examine. That single time capsule is a needle in a haystack that itself is a needle. But it still comes down to this: Will those in the future be as interested in the past as we are? Will they be like us?
Hope springs eternal. Right? Or, at least, Lewandowski is guessing, for half a million years.
*http://www.nature.com/news/time-capsule-buried-to-preserve-science-for-the-ages-1.22657
RSS Feed