Time Travel. A History

The Westinghouse authors also imagined that librarians could continually retranslate the book to keep up with linguistic evolution. And why not? We still read Beowulf. They beseeched whomsoever: “We pray you therefore, whoever reads this book, to cherish and preserve it through the ages, and translate it from time to time into new languages that may arise after us, in order that knowledge of the Time Capsule of Cupaloy may be handed down to those for whom it is intended.” They would be glad to know that already, as of the twenty-first century, the book is back in print, copyright having been waived: available for around ten dollars from print-on-demand publishers, for ninety-nine cents in an Amazon Kindle version, and widely free online. On the other hand, libraries, short of space, have been “deaccessioning” their copies. Mine once belonged to Columbia University; later it made its way to a used-book dealer in Cleveland, Ohio. Are the librarians forsaking their duty to the future? No, they are fulfilling it, by continually choosing what to keep and what to let go. “We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms,” says Septimus in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, “and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language.”

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.

—

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.