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Hall VI · What we leave behind

What will remainof us?

Every hall before this one holds what others left behind. This one looks forward: what of our time is likely to last, what is likely to vanish, and what you would choose to leave.

15 fragments
-21000 to today

Three horizons

Three future layers.What each may keep.

What follows is an estimate, not a prophecy. It rests on what we know of materials, archives and past losses; each horizon names its sources.

100years

Likely to survive

Stone, fired clay, glass and gold
Books on acid-free paper, kept dry
The two Voyager probes, still travelling, silent

Likely to disappear

Data on drives and servers no one maintains
Magnetic tapes and discs never copied forward
A large part of today's web: 38% of pages online in 2013 could no longer be reached ten years later

Source: Pew Research Center, “When Online Content Disappears”, May 2024.

1,000years

Likely to survive

Stone buildings, as many already have
Fired ceramics, glass, bronze
Film archives kept cold and dry, if makers' estimates hold

Likely to disappear

Concrete and steel left without care
Paper, unless it is kept dry
Many languages spoken today: about 40% are already endangered

Sources: UNESCO, World Atlas of Languages, 2022; Piql, film lifetime estimate (manufacturer figure, not independently verified).

10,000years

Likely to survive

Objects in high orbit and the Voyager records
Ceramic tablets kept deep in rock salt
Warning markers designed for nuclear waste sites
The traces we left in rock layers and in the air

Likely to disappear

Almost everything we wrote that was not carved, fired or launched
The meaning of our symbols, unless someone keeps teaching them

Sources: NASA JPL, “The Golden Record”; US Department of Energy, permanent markers for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (10,000-year design goal).

Real time capsules

They already tried.Messages to the future.

From a record falling between the stars to seeds sealed in the permafrost and a warning meant to outlast our languages: each one is addressed to people who do not exist yet.

A dry landscape under a clear blue sky: pale sand and clay ridges carved by wind and rain into gullies, pinnacles and ribbed slopes, with a few low grey-green shrubs. This is the lunette of Lake Mungo in the Willandra Lakes region, not the footprint site, which is kept covered and unphotographed here.

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c. 23,000 years ago

The footprints of the Willandra Lakes

Willandra Lakes Region World Heritage Area, New South Wales, Australia (exact site not disclosed) · Oceania

Seen from above, four bare human footprints pressed into pale, crusted gypsum ground streaked with rust brown; the toes are clearly marked, the prints differ in size and point in different directions. These prints come from the older layers of the site, not from the child-carrying trackway.

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before 8000 BCE

The footprints of White Sands: a child carried across the mud

White Sands National Park, New Mexico, United States · Americas

A black and white photograph of a long, narrow room with pale enamelled walls and a sloping ceiling, crowded with objects before the sealing: stacks of metal cylinders and film cans, a typewriter, a radio, a set of scales, and glass bell jars sheltering dolls in long dresses; a sign on the left wall reads This section of the Crypt of Civilization fabricated and enameled by Chicago Vitreous Enamel Product Co.

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1940

The Crypt of Civilization

Oglethorpe University, Brookhaven, Georgia, United States · Americas

Black and white close view of grey lunar soil, fine as powder and scattered with small stones: in the lower right, a single boot print with deep parallel ridges from the sole, its edges sharp; small black crosses from the camera's reference grid are spaced evenly across the image.

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1969

The first footprints on the Moon

Tranquility Base, Sea of Tranquility, the Moon · Americas

A low, square monument of polished grey stone in a park: its sloping sides rise to a flat top from which a shining steel dome swells like a half buried sphere, engraved with the words Time Capsule. Bare winter trees, benches and strolling visitors stand behind it.

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1970 to 1971

The Expo '70 time capsules

Osaka Castle Park, Osaka, Japan · Asia

A photograph of the engraved plaque on a pale golden ground. On the right, a naked man with his right hand raised and a naked woman stand in front of the outline of the spacecraft; on the left, fine lines radiating from a single point map the pulsars; along the bottom, a row of circles stands for the Sun and its planets, with a curved arrow leaving the third one; at top left, two small circles joined by a line depict the hydrogen atom.

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1972 to 1973

The Pioneer plaque

Pioneer 10 · Pioneer 11 · Americas

A gold coloured disc engraved with fine white line diagrams: a record and stylus seen from above and from the side, wave forms and a frame showing how to build an image, a starburst of lines mapping pulsars, and two small circles for the hydrogen atom.

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1977

The Golden Record

Voyager 1 · Voyager 2 · Americas

A black and white technical drawing of a tall stone marker, seen from the side and from above: a 25 foot upper pillar set into a tapering lower block buried in the ground, with grey panels labelled Engraved Messages near the top and on the buried part, and notes marking the ground surface, the surface deposits and a hard layer of caliche.

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1993

“This place is not a place of honor”

Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, near Carlsbad, New Mexico, United States · Americas

The whole Earth seen from space against black: a blue sphere swirled with white clouds, Africa and the Arabian Peninsula in brown and ochre near the centre, and the white ice of Antarctica at the bottom. An illustration: no image of KEO itself is shown.

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1994 to 2025

KEO, the satellite that never left

France · Europe

The International Space Station seen whole against the black of space: a long horizontal truss carries, at each end, four great wings of copper-brown solar panels, with pale radiator panels below them; at the centre, a cluster of white cylindrical modules and a round Japanese laboratory, and a vertical string of modules hanging downwards, with smaller blue-grey solar panels and a docked spacecraft at its lower end.

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after 1998

The International Space Station, a wreck to come

Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan · Asia

Inside a glass dome on a wooden base, a pale metal disk the size of a palm stands upright in a gilded brass stand, tiny lettering circling its rim. Behind it, a card shows enlarged views of both faces of the disk, and on the left a dark glass plate glitters with rows of minute coloured dots.

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2002 to 2008

The Rosetta Disk

San Francisco, California, United States · Americas

A narrow wedge of grey concrete juts out of a snow covered slope under a deep blue sky; its tall front face carries a panel of angular, reflective shards above a louvred vent and a small door, reached by a metal footbridge across the snow.

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2008

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault

Longyearbyen, Svalbard, Norway · Europe

Stacked boxes of pale, unglazed ceramic, stamped with the letters M O M around a circle, stand against a rough rock wall; the open boxes are packed tight with thin square tablets printed with text, diagrams and small photographs.

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after 2012

Memory of Mankind

Hallstatt, Upper Austria, Austria · Europe

A long, low slab lies in a lit glass display case: a grey, gritty crust of sand and small stones, into which are fused tangles of rope and fishing net in green, blue, yellow, orange and white; frayed white fibres spring up from one end, and fragments of hard plastic show through the surface.

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before 2014

Plastiglomerate from Kamilo Beach: a stone of our own making

Kamilo Beach, Hawai'i Island, Hawaii, United States · Oceania

A close view of a strip of pale archival film with square perforations along its edges: at its centre a small printed map of the world in grey and olive, flanked by two dense grey rectangles of encoded data.

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2020

The Arctic Code Vault

Longyearbyen, Svalbard, Norway · Europe

The last fragment is yours

What would you leave behind?

One sentence for someone who finds it in a hundred years, or in ten thousand. Write it as if no one there knows us.

Hall VI · What we leave behind

The form opens with the rest of this hall. Your words will be welcome soon.

The wall of messages

What otherswould leave.

Each one read by a person

Opening the wall…

Engraved in the archive

The founding patrons

The plaque is still blank. The first names will be engraved here, only with their owners' consent.

A name appears only with its owner's consent. Support the archive