Messages forward
Seven ways of writing to someone not yet born, each aimed further off than the last: from words that outlast a family’s titles to a cover that must teach its finder how to play the record inside.
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Step 1: 穆叔論不朽 The Three Things That Do Not Decay
大上有立德，其次有立功，其次有立言。Highest is to establish virtue; next, to establish deeds; next, to establish words.
Asked what the old saying about ‘not decaying’ means, a minister from Lu sets aside his host’s long line of family titles and names three things that last, virtue, deeds and words; every later step on this trail is a wager on the third.
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Step 2: A Possession for All Time
I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.
Thucydides tests every report, distrusts even his own impressions and says plainly where he has had to reconstruct a speech, which is why a history written for readers long after still serves them; about a century and a half later, an emperor in India had his words cut into rock.
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Step 3: That It May Long Endure: From the Edicts of Asoka
This scripture of the Law of Piety, wheresoever pillars of stone or tables of stone exist, must there be recorded so that it may long endure.
Asoka had his edicts cut on rock faces and stone pillars so that the teaching ‘may long endure’ and his great-grandsons might carry it on, and he planted banyans and dug wells along the roads for travellers he would never meet; two centuries later Horace claims that a book of poems will outlast stone and bronze.
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Step 4: Carmina III.30 Odes III.30: A Monument More Lasting than Bronze
Exegi monumentum aere perenniusI have finished a monument more lasting than bronze
Horace’s monument is built of metre, proof against gnawing rain and the north wind, and two thousand years of readers have kept his boast for him; Franklin, a printer, tried something more practical.
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Step 5: Codicil to the Will of Benjamin Franklin A Loan Fund for Two Hundred Years
These aids may, therefore, be small at first; but as the capital increases by the accumulated interest, they will be more ample.
Franklin left a thousand pounds each to Boston and Philadelphia, to be lent at five per cent to young tradesmen for two hundred years, a plan that works only if people not yet born keep it running, and they did; LAGEOS looks millions of years further.
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Step 6: Message to the Future LAGEOS: Message to the Future
Whoever is inhabiting Earth in that distant epoch may appreciate a little greeting card from the remote past.
Sealed inside a satellite covered in mirrors, Carl Sagan’s plaque tells the time by the drift of the continents and rounds its numbers so as not to claim more than anyone knew; the last step goes further still, to a stranger who must first be taught how to read it.
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Step 7: The Golden Record Cover The Golden Record Cover: How to Play It
The stylus is in the correct position to play the record from the beginning.
Before it says anything about Earth, the cover shows its finder how to play the record and adds a picture of a circle so that they can check their own decoding: the most careful answer on these shelves to the question of how to write to someone you will never meet.