In the long run, does art trump science?

Lateral communication—sending information from point to point around the world—is so fast and efficient these days that we tend to take it for granted.  But how good are we at passing information forward in time—what you might call longitudinal communication?  If we wanted to send a message to our kids’ kids’ kids, how well would we do?

If it seems a strange question, blame it on the excess of “culture” I was exposed to at last week’s meetings marking the 50th anniversary of C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures Lecture.

Both meetings I attended—one in Cambridge MA and the other at the New York Academy of Science—were marvelously enjoyable and stimulating.  But there was one idea in particular that intrigued me, prompted by a talk by Harvard University’s Peter Galison:  If you wanted to convey something to people living 100, 1000 or even 10,000 years into the future, how would you do it?

Of course it depends on the type of information we’re talking about here—I’ll get to that in a minute.  But let’s focus on the storage media first.  100 years out, information stored on digital media might—just might—survive.  1000 years out, and you begin to fall back on older technologies—writing on durable surfaces for instance.  But 10,000 years out?  Even if you could encode information in a format that would survive that long, how would you ensure the people reading it could understand it?

Think about this for a moment.  You send an email today.  Will it still be round in a year’s time?  Assume it’s archived somewhere—will that archive still be intact 10 years from now?  100 years down the line, there’s a pretty high chance that the media on which the email was stored will have failed—digital storage has a limited lifetime.  What are the chances that someone has faithfully transferred the message to new media on a regular basis?  In 1000 years, the chances of the data and the software to read it still being available are pretty slim.  And in 10,000 years, it’s hard to imagine anything as ephemeral as digital data surviving intact.

Putting aside the irony that the information age could end up leaving a gaping hole in the historic records as digital documents replace more durable written ones, this rather trivial example does illustrate the difficulties in passing meaningful information forward through successive generations.

So back to the original question—if you have something important you want to pass on hundreds or thousands of years into the future, how do you do it?  Sticking with the media for the moment, one partial solution is to use more durable media.  Flash memory lasts a year or so.  DVD’s will last for several years before degrading.  Archival paper lasts tens or even hundreds of years.  Parchment can last even longer.  And stone—if protected—can retain information for millennia.

You can see a pattern emerging here—the more recent the media, the more quickly it fails.  At the rate we’re going, we’ll be loosing information as fast as we generate it in 50 years’ time—leading to Kurzweil-like singularity event that ends up with civilization collapsing rather than emerging into a brave new world.  I’m being facetious, but you can see the problem.

This is only half the issue though.  The flip side is how information is read and interpreted.  We have information etched in stone from millennia ago, but getting a handle on what was intended is not easy.  And understanding the meaning behind the information is harder still.

If information is to be transmitted a long way into the future, it must be accompanied with some means to interpret it.

So what’s the answer here?

The first part of it, I think, is to work out what sort of information we are talking about—what exactly is it we might want people to know 10,000 years down the line?  Let me be bold and suggest that it is stuff like how to stay healthy; how to craft societies that work; how to ensure people have access to food, water, heat and shelter; how to understand what it means to be human.  I don’t think that preserving the blueprints for the latest iPod will be that high on the agenda.

Once the type of information is known, the means to capture that information and pass it on in a durable manner need to be found.

This is exactly the challenge faced by a group of people back in the 1990’s and brings me back to Peter Galison’s talk.  In 1974, the US Atomic Energy Commission chose an ancient salt bed 26 miles east of Carlsbad for exploratory work in the search for an underground radioactive waste repository site—somewhere to dispose of defense-related transuranic radioactive waste.  In 1999 the first shipments of waste arrived at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP for short—the vanguard of a program that is scheduled to continue for some years to come.

As the site was being developed, it was clear that the task of preventing unnecessary exposure to the material being buried would require some imaginative cross-generational communication.  The target point was 10,000 years into the future—a little under half the half-life of plutonium-239.  The challenge: design markers that would warn people of the dangers buried within the site, and deter them from releasing the harmful material, that could transcend changes in environment, culture and technology for the next 10 millennia.

The recommendations of the groups tasked with designing appropriate markers make interesting reading (excerpts can be accessed here).  The design criteria they arrived at included the following:

• The design of the whole site itself is to be a major source of meaning, acting as a framework for other levels of communication, reinforcing and being reinforced by those other levels in a system of communication. The message that we believe can be communicated non-linguistically (through the design of the whole site), using physical form as a “natural language,” … Put into words, it would communicate something like the following:
  • This place is a message… and part of a system of messages… pay attention to it!
  • Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
  • This place is not a place of honor…no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here.
  • What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
  • The danger is in a particular location… it increases toward a center… the center of danger is here… of a particular size and shape, and below us.
  • The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
  • The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
  • The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
  • The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
• All physical site interventions and markings must be understood as communicating a message. It is not enough to know that this is a place of importance and danger…you must know that the place itself is a message, that it contains messages, and is part of a system of messages, and is a system with redundance.
• Redundancy of message communication is important to message survivability. Redundancy should be achieved through: (a) a high frequency of message locations, permitting some to be lost; (b) making direct and physical links among message levels, that is “co-presentation” of messages; and (c) multiple and mutually reinforcing modes of communication…
• While the system of marking should strongly embody the principles of redundancy, at the same time the methods of achieving redundancy should be carefully designed to maintain message clarity. Redundancy should not be achieved at the expense of clarity.
• The method of site-marking must be very powerful to distinguish this place from all other types of places, so that the future must pay attention to this site. The place’s physical structure should strongly suggest enhanced attention to itself and to its sub-elements. To achieve this, the volume of human effort used to make and mark this place must be understood as massive, emphasizing its importance to us. The site’s constructions must be seen as an effort at the scale of a grand and committed culture, far beyond what a group or sect or organization could do.

The resulting proposed markers are intriguing, as can be seen in these two conceptual examples:

Forbidding Blocks, view 2 (concept by Michael Brill and art by Safdar Abidi)

Menacing Earthworks, view 1 (concept and art by Michael Brill)

And with this we arrive at the key point here—to communicate a message across millennia, the group resorted to durable forms that captured and conceptualized what they wanted to convey.

In other words, when it came to the “long shout,” art was considered more important than science or technology in the long run.

Now I don’t want to get too carried away with this.  But I do think there is an important message here that will be blindingly obvious to historians and archeologists—in the long run, the arts, religion, cultural traditions, mythologies and the like provide the more durable route to preserving socially and culturally significant information.

Of course this doesn’t denigrate science and technology in any way.  Science and technology are essential in underpinning future prosperity and quality of life, and there are many powerful synergisms between science and non-science.  But it does stress the importance of looking beyond science and technology if we want to preserve information that is important to society over long timescales.

At this point, anyone with half a brain will be lambasting me for my naivety—this has all been recognized for thousands of years.  But here’s the crux of the issue:  Apart from Peter’s talk, there was little discussion on the importance of non science-based disciplines in last week’s Two Cultures meetings.  On the contrary, there was a sense from many quarters that science is all that matters, and “the arts” are a sometimes useful but otherwise superficial decoration—something to be enjoyed; something to help promote science, but otherwise not that important.

This seems dangerously short-sighted.  OK so science and technology are needed to help maintain and improve a world where there is less disease, where people have access to food, water and shelter, where we have the freedom and tools to better understand what it is to be human.  But in the long run this knowledge will most likely fade, unless we find a way of transmitting the essence of it to future generations.

And the only way we know how to do that at present is through the “arts”—something that probably shouldn’t be forgotten in a science and technology-obsessed world.

End Notes

I dislike posting such a superficial article about such an important and deeply explored subject, but that is the nature of blogging unfortunately.  Suffice to say these are simply my poorly informed musings on a subject that grabbed my attention at an academic workshop.  There are complex questions about how science and technology enable “art” (used in a very broad sense of the word) that aren’t addressed.  Neither is the distinction between cultural transmission of technology as distinct from science explored.  And then there is the whole question of whether today’s society is poised to transcend a dependence on art, tradition, religion etc, or whether we are as deluded as previous great civilizations no doubt were.

These will all have to wait for another day though!