by James Gleick
The problem of how to communicate with faraway creatures, physiognomy and language unknown, continues to receive scholarly attention. It arose again when people started sending messages into deep space, in capsules like the Voyager 1 and 2, launched from Cape Canaveral in 1977. These vehicles are space travelers and time travelers, too, their progress measured in light-years. They each bear a copy of the Golden Record, a twelve-inch disk engraved with analog data via the technology, now obsolete, known as “phonograph” (1877–ca. 1987). There are several dozen encoded photographs as well as Sounds of Earth, selected by Carl Sagan and his team and meant to be played at 16⅔ rpm. Just as the Westinghouse time capsule lacked space for a microfilm reader, the Voyager spacecraft could not carry a phonograph record player, but a stylus was thrown in, and the disk is engraved with instructional diagrams. The same conundrum occurs in the context of nuclear-waste disposal: Can we design warning messages to be understood thousands of years hence? Peter C. van Wyck, a communications expert in Canada, described the problem this way: “There is always a kind of tacit assumption that a sign can be made such that it contains instructions for its own interpretation—a film showing how to use a film projector, a map of the mouth to demonstrate pronunciation, recorded instructions for how to assemble and use a stylus and a turntable.” If they can figure it all out—decode the information engraved as microscopic waves in a single long spiral groove on a metal disk a half millimeter thick—they will find diagrams of DNA structure and cell division, photographs of anatomy numbered 1–8 from The World Book Encyclopedia, human sex organs and a diagram of conception, and an Ansel Adams photograph of the Snake River in Wyoming, and they may “hear” greetings spoken in fifty-five languages (“shalom”; “bonjour tout le monde”; “namaste”), sounds of crickets and thunder, a sample of Morse code, and musical selections such as a Bach prelude played by Glenn Gould and a Bulgarian folk song*6 sung by Valya Balkanska. That, anyway, is one message sent to deep space and to the far future.
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WHEN PEOPLE MAKE time capsules, they disregard a vital fact of human history. Over the millennia—slowly at first and then with gathering speed—we have evolved a collective methodology for saving information about our lives and times and transmitting that information into the future. We call it, for short, culture.
First came songs, clay pots, drawings on cave walls. Then tablets and scrolls, paintings and books. Knots in alpaca threads, recording Incan calendar data and tax receipts. These are external memory, extensions of our biological selves. Mental prostheses. Then came repositories for the preservation of these items: libraries, monasteries, museums; also theater troupes and orchestras. They may consider their mission to be entertainment or spiritual practice or the celebration of beauty, but meanwhile they transmit our symbolic memory across the generations. We can recognize these institutions of culture as distributed storage and retrieval systems. The machinery is unreliable—disorganized and discontinuous, prone to failures and omissions. They use code. They require deciphering. Then again, whether made of stone, paper, or silicon, the technology of culture has a durability that the biological originals can only dream of. This is how we tell our descendants who we were. By contrast, the recent smattering of time capsules is an oddball sideshow.
The capsulists consider it naïve to rely on such perilous and transient human institutions as museums and libraries—all the more so in our era of chips and clouds. What good will Wikipedia be when the lights go out, or even the Metropolitan Museum of Art? They believe they are taking the long view. Civilizations rise and fall, with an emphasis on fall. From the Bronze Age cultures of the Minoans and the Mycenaeans to the modern civilization in which we live, there was no direct influence—no continuity and no collective memory. These are islands in the ocean of time. So we rely on arrowheads and bones and broken pots found in burial pits. They built their palaces, painted their frescoes, and vanished into obscurity. The darkness drops again. We dig up their remains, but the bits uncovered by archeologists are the accidental bits. In Pompeii it took a cataclysm to freeze vivid tragic tableaus of daily life for our future appreciation. The makers of time capsules prefer not to wait for the sky to pour down ash and pumice.
With the passing millennia, though, humans have developed into something different from the amnesiac creatures who formed those scattered, preliterate settlements. We are well connected information pack rats. Far more mementoes are preserved in museums than in cornerstones. Still more are looked after by coin collectors and random hoarders. The garages of antique automobile collectors are more effective preservers of old cars than buried concrete vaults. Toys? Bottles of old beer? There are specialty museums just for those.
As for knowledge itself, that is our stock in trade. When the Library of Alexandria burned, it was one of a kind. Now there are hundreds of thousands, and they are crammed to overflowing. We have developed a species memory. We leave our marks everywhere. The apocalypse may come—our complacent technocracy foundering amid pandemic or nuclear holocaust or the self-inflicted blighting of the global ecosystem—and when it does, our ruins will be prodigious.
When people fill time capsules they are trying to stop the clock—take stock, freeze the now, arrest the incessant head-over-heels stampede into the future. The past appears fixed, but memory, the fact of it, or the process, is always in motion. That applies to our prosthetic global memory as well as the biological version. When the Library of Congress promises to archive every tweet, does it create a Borgesian paradox in real time or a giant burial chamber in progress?
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“BUT IT IS only in ashes that a story endures,” wrote the Genovese poet Eugenio Montale. “Nothing persists except extinguished things.” When the archeologists of the future come to read our legacy in the proverbial ash heap of history, they will not look to the basement crypt at Oglethorpe University or the time capsule buried in the mud of the former Flushing, Queens. Anyway we will be rewriting that legacy till the bitter end. Stanisław Lem imagined this vividly in his postapocalyptic comic novel Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, published in Poland in 1961. The bathtub serves as yet another time capsule. It is marble, “like a sarcophagus,” in an intricate complex of corridors (designed by Kafka, evidently) deep underground.*7 It is buried, more or less apocalyptically, and a millennium or so later it is excavated by archeologists of the future. In it they find a pair of human skeletons and a handwritten manuscript: “a voice speaking to us across the abyss of centuries, a voice belonging to one of the last inhabitants of the lost land of Ammer-Ka.”
A faux-scholarly introduction by these future archeologists (or “histognostors”) explains the situation. Everyone knows about that turning point in Earth’s history called the Great Collapse: “that catastrophic event which in a matter of weeks totally demolished the cultural achievement of centuries.” What triggered this Great Collapse was a chemical chain reaction that caused the near-instantaneous disintegration, worldwide, of the peculiar material—“whitish, flaccid, a derivative of cellulose, rolled out on cylinders and cut into rectangular sheets”—called “papyr.” Papyr was almost the sole means of recording knowledge: “information of all kinds was impressed on it with a dark tint.” Of course nowadays (the histognostors remind their readers) we have metamnestics and data crystallization, but those modern techniques were unknown to this primitive civilization.
True, there were the beginnings of artificial memory; but these were large, bulky machines, troublesome to operate and maintain, and used only in the most limited, narrow way. They were called “electronic brains,” an exaggeration comprehensible only in the historical perspective.
The world’s economic systems depended utterly on papyr for regulation and control. Education, work, travel, and finance—all were thrown into disarray when the papyr turned ash. “Panic hit the cities; people, deprived of their identity, lost their reason.” After the Great Collapse came the long, dark epoch called the Chaotic. Wandering hordes abandoned the cities.
Construction halted (no blueprints). Illiteracy and superstition became universal. “The more complex a civilization,” the archeologists note, “the more vital to its existence is the maintenance of the flow of information; hence the more vulnerable it becomes to any disturbance in that flow.” Now, and for centuries to come, anarchy prevailed.
This far-future cosmic archeological perspective frames the nearer-future narrative, which we are meant to understand was written in the last days of papyr. The narrator himself seems to be a bewildered civilian navigating a paranoid military bureaucracy. We readers, knowing what we know about the sad fate in store for the written word, may smile grimly as clerks stamp index cards “classified,” documents tumble from mail chutes, envelopes shoot through pneumatic tubes, dog-eared folders vanish into metal safes, and paper tape snakes from computers. Of course, we recognize our own world, too.
Rambling deeper and deeper into the labyrinth, the narrator stumbles upon a room full of books: “gray, crumbling” books on dusty, sagging shelves. It is the Library. A balding, shuffling, bespectacled, cross-eyed old man seems to be in charge. He presides over a catalogue of green, pink, and white cards “in no apparent order,” stuffed into “endless rows of drawers, their labels framed in brass.” On one desk the narrator finds an encyclopedia of heavy black volumes, one lying open to “ORIGINAL SIN—the division of the world into Information and Misinformation.” The narrator staggers, dizzy in this darkness broken only by a few naked bulbs. He is overwhelmed by the books’ mildewy stench: “this heavy, nauseating breath of the moldering centuries.” The old librarian keeps offering him dusty volumes: Basic Cryptology; Automated Self-Immolation; “Ah, here is Homo Sapiens As a Corpus Delicti, a splendid work, splendid…” When he finally escapes this paranoid nightmare of a library, he feels as if he has stepped out of a slaughterhouse.
He is aimless and tired. He keeps looking for orders or instructions. They are not forthcoming. “And so my future remained unknown to me,” he muses, “almost as if it hadn’t been written down in any ledger anywhere.” But we know that his terminal bathtub awaits. He is about to become a time capsule.
* * *
*1 So named to preserve the memory of William Randolph Hearst’s mother.
*2 Why 8113? Jacobs performed some numerology. He reckoned that 6,117 years had passed since the first year of recorded history, which he decided was 4241 BC, according to the Egyptian priestly calendar. Setting 1936 as a midpoint, he did the math and got 8113. It is common for time-capsule buriers to imagine themselves at “the midpoint” of history.
*3 1939 + 5,000.
*4 Full title: The Book of Record of the Time Capsule of Cupaloy Deemed Capable of Resisting the Effects of Time for Five Thousand Years; Preserving an Account of Universal Achievements, Embedded in the Grounds of the New York World’s Fair, 1939.
*5 Her odd and grandiose wish was granted: she persuaded the Capitol to put the safe in a storeroom under the east steps, and in 1976 the chief magistrate—Gerald R. Ford—was happy to pose for photographers while receiving Mrs. Diehm’s offering.
*6 “Izlel je Delyo Haydutin,” or “Delyo the Hajduk Has Gone Outside.”
*7 “Once again I was walking alone down endless corridors, corridors that continually branched out and converged, corridors with dazzling walls and rows of white, gleaming doors….An endless white labyrinth lay in wait out there, I knew, and an equally endless wandering. The net of corridors, halls and soundproof rooms, each ready to swallow me up…the thought made me break out in a cold sweat.”
TEN
* * *
Backward
There are no compasses for journeying in time. As far as our sense of direction in this unchartable dimension is concerned, we are like lost travellers in a desert.
—Graham Swift (1983)
IF YOU COULD take one ride in a time machine, which way would you go?
The future or the past? Sally forth or turn back? (“Right then, Rose Tyler, you tell me,” says the Doctor. “Where do you want to go? backwards or forwards in time. It’s your choice. What’s it going to be?”) Do you prefer the costumed pageant of history or the technomarvels to come? It seems there are two kinds of people. Both camps have their optimists as well as their pessimists. Disease is a worry. Time traveling while black or female poses special hazards. Then again, some people see ways to make money at lotteries, stock markets, and racetracks. Some just want to relive past loves. Many back travelers are driven by regret—mistakes made, opportunities lost.
You may wonder about the rules of this game. Is safety guaranteed? Can you take anything with you?*1 At the very least, presumably, you carry your awareness and your memories, if not a change of clothing. Will you be a passive observer or can you change the course of history? If you change history, does that change you, in turn? “History makes you what you are,” says an armchair philosopher in Dexter Palmer’s 2016 novel, Version Control. “And if you traveled back in time you wouldn’t get to be you anymore. You would have a different history, and you would become someone else.” The rules keep changing, it seems.
Wells, though he later published not one but two histories of the world, had no interest in sending his Time Traveller backward. He plunged forward, then forward again, on to the end of time. But it didn’t take long for other writers to see other possibilities. Edith Nesbit, a friend of Wells’s, was a forward-looking, free-thinking fellow socialist, but when she got her chance, the past was the place for her. Writing under the gender-free name of E. Nesbit, she was commonly said to be an author of children’s books. Generations later, Gore Vidal took issue with that categorization: he said children were the heroes of her books, but don’t be fooled, they are not her ideal readers. He compared her to Lewis Carroll: “Like Carroll, she was able to create a world of magic and inverted logic that was entirely her own.” He thought she should be more famous.
Credit 10.1
Wells often visited the household over which she presided with her husband, Hubert Bland. “The quicksilver wife” is how he perceived her, alongside “the more commonplace, argumentative cast-iron husband.” He thought Hubert was something of a fraud, not as bright as Edith, unable to support the family (she did that, with her writing), and a “Seducer”: “The astonished visitor came to realize that most of the children of the household were not E. Nesbit’s but the results of Bland’s conquests…”*2 E. Nesbit became one of the first English writers to explore the new possibilities of time travel. She did not bother with science. There is no machinery, only magic. And where Wells looked forward, she looked back.
Her strange tale The Story of the Amulet, written in 1906, begins with four children—Cyril, Robert, Anthea, and Jane—moping through a long summer holiday. They have been left alone in London with old Nurse. Father is in Manchuria and mother in Madeira. They are deprived of liberty and primed for adventure.
Their house is in Bloomsbury, “happily situated between a sandpit and a chalk pit,” which means they can walk to the British Museum.*3 In turn-of-the-century London, this was an institution like none other in the world: a treasure house of antiquities from everywhere England had sent its seaborne colonizers and plunderers. It had the Elgin Marbles, named for the Scottish earl who made off with them from the Acropolis of Athens. It had the only surviving original of Beowulf. Visitors could walk into a gallery and examine the Rosetta Stone on a plinth. The museum was a portal to the past, a time gate through which ancient artifacts poked their age-worn surfaces into modernity: a bronze head from Smyrna, mummy cases from Egypt, winged sphinxes of sandstone, drinking vessels looted from Assyrian tombs, and hieroglyphs preserving secrets in a lost language.
If Cyril, Robert, Anthea, and Jane were getting an education in the perplexities of time—past and present jumbled together in odd ways, cultures misunderstanding one another across a gulf of ages—so were England’s adults. Besides museums there were shops trading in relics of the past—“curiosities” and “antiquities”—especially on Wardour
Street, Monmouth Street, and Old Bond and New Bond Streets. These physical objects, worn or broken by the years, were like bottles containing messages written by our ancestors, to tell us who they were. “Antiquities are Historie defaced, or some remnants of History, which have casually escaped the shipwrack of time,” Roger Bacon had said. By 1900, London had surpassed Paris, Rome, Venice, and Amsterdam as the world’s center of trade in antiquities. Nesbit’s band of children walk past a curiosity shop near Charing Cross and there discover a small red charm, an amulet of shiny stone. It is trying to tell them something. It has magic powers. Before they know it, they’re on their way to that other country, the Past.
