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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.

3 fragments
1969 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.

More capsules are being prepared for this hall: the Crypt of Civilization, Memory of Mankind, the Arctic World Archive, the Lunar Library and the Rosetta Project.

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.Image not loaded · data saverThe image could not be loaded.Image not saved on this deviceRH-0054

1969

The first footprints on the Moon

Tranquility Base, Sea of Tranquility, the Moon · 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.Image not loaded · data saverThe image could not be loaded.Image not saved on this deviceRH-0012

1977

The Golden Record

Voyager 1 · Voyager 2 · Americas

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.Image not loaded · data saverThe image could not be loaded.Image not saved on this deviceRH-0047

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…

    Report this message

    A person reads every report. The message stays on the wall until a decision is made, unless it must be removed at once.

    Reason (required)
    Deleted 30 days after the report is closed.

    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

    The archive letter

    One letter a month.New fragments, no noise.

    Used only to send the letter. Never shared, never sold.
    Language of the letter

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