Preserving human achievement

It’s interesting to note that all things come to an end. Fads and fashions and lives and ideas … everything stands in the time it is allotted and is itself the result of an endless current of events leading back to the presumed beginning of time.

Nothing can stand the withering effects of physics as events march forward and cast judgment on your time by making it the foundation of things yet to happen.

No matter how hard we strive to perpetuate the present, it will disappear and what will take its place is as unpredictable as the past could predict our state of affairs today.

One day we will lose our accumulated knowledge and each speck we’ve gleaned about evolution and star dust and technological advance will disappear and become a useless forgotten collection re-melted by the earth’s core and turned into silicates and iron compounds or leached away into space by the solar wind on a long journey to somewhere in space.

And time has plenty of itself to wait us out before striking the inevitable gong of our demise.

But this is not a discussion about death.
This is a blueprint for human endeavor calling that we preserve our tableaux of accomplishment, and extend our influence as far as possible, because that is what life is: to push against the inevitable forces of physics and make our species and our impressions as real as possible.
This is what the Egyptian pyramids are about, and their work has survive thousands of years and become indistinguishable in modern lexicon. They did what it took to preserve their highest achievements. (although to them their highest achievement might have been seen differently … it is through the lens of change that all things are weighed)

So what will we achieve thousands of years from now?
Will the millions of bridge support columns made of poured concrete be our legacy?
Will the deep foundations of our buildings remain?
Will the carved highway tunnels through granite resist the physical force of moving mountains?

Maybe our treasures buried with the dead will one day sit on museum pedestals in future cultures, just as we’ve done to Egyptian tomb artifacts.
Is it possible that future peoples will be fascinated with un-weathered metal joint replacements and display them as we have done with Neanderthal tools and skulls?

It sounds crude and exploitative of human nature to suggest that future peoples will paw over our dead, but that is what our modern scientific world had done, and therefore should be expected as likely.

So what do we owe the future?
Are we not obligated to ensure our hard work was more than simple survival?

Wasn’t this the motive behind codifying religious movements in the past? You can’t argue it was mere coincidence that religious doctrine was a function of man’s ability to preserve the written word.
Prior to the written word and the ability to preserve it, modern religious movements would have been impossible to sustain due to the argumentative nature of people and their inability to believe any specific fellow man would be great enough to carry the word of the great invisible deity.
Prior to the written word, men were followers of the most magnetic purveyor of belief from that age, but written, preserved tablets evolved into ink and paper and books and made it possible to sustain specific religious beliefs past the tempestuous panicky nature of human beings.

Inventions help man transcend time, because they propel us stronger against nature, and over and again one can see this is the way of people and the way of nature at its very base: that we are compelled by design of the universe to resist the forces of physics.

But what happens if our great manuscripts were to disappear?
What if recorded science disappeared?
What if the shards of meteorite that traveled from Mars to Earth were lost to an erosion of culture?
What if the collection of early-man fossils were destroyed by zealots or forgetfulness?

What if man were to turn its back on scientific method and return to the rituals of superstition and respond only to the latest rumor or fear?
In this slaughter of ideas, how could the evolutionary history of man be recreated without fossils?
And if our existing fossils were destroyed, how could the discovery be found again since some are unique and barely discernable fragments of the fast-disappearing ghost of early man?

What forces could stop our history of achievement from fulfilling its destiny to the future?
The answer is the force of nature forging change in man.

As time passes, we will lose our scientific knowledge.

We will lose the bones of early man …The bones of dinosaurs…. Martian meteors

Although we have only about 30 of these important rocks and all but one are among the youngest rocks on Mars (all less than 1.3 billion years old), they still contain 'high-fidelity' information about the mantle and when it formed

Accelerating this change is the function of culture, which has a primary goal of preserving the species and not the culture … therefore when scientific advances become so complicated and expensive that the culture can no longer afford them, or when medical advances become so expensive that they are impractical for those who need them, or when the medical advances serve only to exacerbate the problem by making more virulent strains of disease, the people will reject science as a social answer and either return to religious chant and ritual or some other newer form of thinking

Since time refuses to stop churning the existing into something else, this is a natural course of events and eventually everything we understand today will be ground under the surface of the planet and re-melted or savaged by solar processes into dust.

Gene Haynes