Andrew

Should say “some imaginative…” not “come imaginative…”. Hope this helps.

I was quite startled to have an aboriginal friend talk to me about the ‘coincidence’ of native spiritual and Catholic belief systems – that had truly not occurred to me, given the radically different notions of deities between those particular expressions of faith.

As for the nuclear waste issue – very interesting indeed. One of the things I have often puzzled over is the inappropriateness of some 20th Century iconography. I scratch my head as someone who lived in that century at some pictograms and have to ask what they’re supposed to mean (remember the days before male/female washroom pictograms being almost universally adopted?). The trefoil symbol used to indicate areas of high radioactivity has always struck me as particularly absurd. Someone not indoctrinated in its meaning could, I think, be forgiven for thinking it meant you’re about to come upon a wind farm.

The question of information transmission through reproduction is an interesting one, and one that I don’t really do any justice to whatsoever! Where information needs to be duplicated to survive, you always have a dangerously weak link in the chain. The question them it seems, is what determines which information is passed on, and the accuracy with which the information is transmitted. I suspect – but with little evidence to hand – that it is cultural/religious values that keep the chain intact.

Which raises a really controversial question – does science need religion to survive?! Definitely one for another day.

Much of what you talk about, thinking long term, is discussed my a group called the Long Now Foundation. They encourage discussion of long-term thinking and fostering responsibility for preserving knowledge. I find their site and lectures very interesting. http://www.longnow.org

It seems that Important ideas last, not because of the media that they are written to, but because of the intrinsic value of the idea itself. The Magna Carta was written onto organic materials, as was the Bible. The I Ching, the Papyrus Ebers, Epic of Gilgamesh; all date back at least 1500 years or longer. Many of these did not last on their own, but we renewed and passed on because of their importance to the culture.

Sometimes I feel as though there is a limit to the amount of knowledge that can be retained. Important knowledge persists, less important ideas fade, and it isn’t the author that gets to decide that. Maybe the reason that current media of storage has a shorter life, is because of the increase in the amount of information that is being generated.

Maybe we don’t put value on the longevity of information because we have increased the value temporary, disposable items and activities. Shakespeare’s works are propagated and live on, I hope that reproductions of the Jerry Springer show are not around for my descendants 500 yrs from now.

For me the implications of what you are saying is not simply that we need to find ways of creating the ‘long shout’ today to share our own precious knowledge with deserving descendants but also need to be listening out for the culturally embedded knowledge of yesteryear from the long shouts emitted by our (and others) ancestors.

I don’t see any good evidence that human beings have got any smarter in how they handle and analyse the natural world yet modern science has a maddening tendency to arrogantly dismiss traditional cultural knowledge and received wisdoms as ‘superstition’, prioritising the latest journal findings over preserved cultural knowledge. Indigenous cultures run into this ahistorical narcissism of the science establishment all the time and even when scientists begrudgingly later admit that traditional cultures knew something all along its usualy belittled because its was not appropriately expressed in scientific terms.. yet as your piece nicely shows – preserving important knowledge for the long haul needs more robust carriers (think story, myth, belief systems) than peer reviewed journals, mathmatical models and standard nomenclature.

I’ve always been of two minds, both art and science but I never thought of it quite this way. The spent nuclear waste being a prime example of how technology might fail us in the near future so we rely on symbolism ingrained into our deepest psyche to transmit knowledge to far off generations further than we can imagine we’d ever have to preserve that information for. It reminds me of the Voyager spacecrafts with their grooved, gold-plated disks and etched symbols to show some alien race how to operate the player. (I guess they won’t be sending an iPod on the next interstellar space vehicle, huh?)

I always had this sense that digital information was somehow preserved in a more permanent form than say film or paper but now I realize that the ability to extract that information (if the information even does survive on data disks) might be lost too.

So I guess with all this information we’re amassing, it can be all destroyed in an instant and like you said, leaving a whole in our historical record—a sort of informational dark age. I wonder what people think may be left for future scientists to discover and what it will say about us if the data we are so busily amassing one day disappears?