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The Human Document Project
to preserve
one document about mankind for one million years
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Background |
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Literature, newspapers or science use the internet, paper and written language for
documenting their contents and trading it down to the readers. The time scale
for this is typically a human generation or much less. Technically speaking,
printed paper as such will not necessarily survive very much longer. The
computerized modern world has gotten a boost towards storing and accessing much
more information. However, this hasn’t improved the survival time scale.
Heart beat frequency, body size of the organism and time scales of reaction may
correlate. We have developed a civilization which overcame these biological
hurdles through, e.g., medicine and technology for self-protection. However,
human thinking is mostly limited to short timescales, in its best case to 1-2
generations ahead. Long-term documentation has only occurred related to religion
and the idea of “eternal life”, or purely by accident. Ancient cultures
documented themselves on cave paintings, petroglyphs and rock carvings. Clay
plates and large architectural objects have demonstrated lifetimes of thousands
of years. At least, that is how it appears to be today. We simply have no
evidence of other forms of communication, since most of that has disappeared
with time. We can find that Homo erectus or Homo neandertalensis was able to
prepare fire, because this is documented in inorganic traces. However, perhaps
there was a scientific understanding or expression of art, which may have
vanished over the years. How can we know?
What will remain of today’s efforts of the arts and sciences, not to speak about
the many aspects of everyday life, in say 1,000,000 years?
It may be comparable to the remains we currently have of Homo erectus and his
lifestyle. Computers will have corroded (except a few silicon chips), paper is
all gone, houses disappeared and with it most other items we use in everyday
life. Of course, we can hope for a community which trades down information as
the medieval monasteries did in copying Aristoteles‘ books. However, we have no
guarantee that there will be a smooth transition or continuous development in
Homo sapiens, as we can observe in the last 1 million years. Historians speak of
hundreds of years, archaeologists of 100,000s of years and astronomers or
geologists handle the real time scales, which we currently believe play no role
for Homo sapiens. That might be wrong. In a similar way as there was centuries
of debate about geocentric vs. heliocentric viewpoint for astronomy, there could
be a debate about relevant timescales... We may not have a (very geological)
prehistory of much more than 1 million years, but we may have a future of
intelligent life on this planet of much more! I am not saying that it will be
Homo sapiens, it might as well be another humanoid species, another mammal or
even social insects… Speculation of that kind is to be avoided, but I am sure
you get my point...
(opinion, Andreas Manz, June 2009, updated February 2010)
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