Dear Future Earthlings
A message in a bottle won’t be enough to communicate with distant generations
By Sid Perkins
When Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales, he probably didn’t think much about the students who would painstakingly slog through the text hundreds of years later. This literary classic is loaded with references and expressions specific to its author’s time — part of what makes it so difficult to read, even with CliffsNotes to serve as a decoder ring.
Likewise, people of the future will no doubt face tremendous challenges interpreting the texts of today. Far enough forward in time, it won’t just be an issue of literary style. To be understandable tens of thousands of years from now, ideas must be expressed in a language that lasts and stored in a form that can survive millennia.
Storytellers may be willing to take their chances. But for others, leaving notes for the future is a task of great concern. Whether passing along a basic understanding of biology, documenting historical events or clueing future generations in to potential hazards, scholars believe some messages are imperative to convey. These forward thinkers have long been interested in designing messages that can be read and understood by people as unknowable to present-day generations as present-day generations would have been to Chaucer, or even the Neandertals.