We still know too little about our past to be able to make a definitive judgment about it. New finds may solve unprecedented mysteries; the reading of ancient narratives is capable of turning whole worlds of realities upside down. Incidentally, it is obvious to me that more old books were destroyed than are preserved. There is supposed to have been a book in South America that contained all the wisdom of antiquity; it is reputed to have been destroyed by the 63rd Inca ruler Pachacuti IV. In the library of Alexandria 500,000 volumes belonging to the learned Ptolemy Soter contained all the traditions of mankind; the library was partly destroyed by the Romans, the rest was burnt on the orders of Caliph Omar centuries later. An incredible thought that invaluable and irreplaceable manuscripts were used to heat the public baths of Alexandria!
What became of the library of the Temple at Jerusalem? What became of the library of Pergamon, which is supposed to have housed 200,000 works? When the Chinese Emperor Chi-Huang ordered the destruction of a mass of historical, astronomical and philosophical books for political reasons in 214 B.C., what treasures and secrets went with them? How many texts did the converted Paul have destroyed at Ephesus? And we cannot even imagine the enormous wealth of literature about all branches of knowledge that has been lost to us owing to religious fanaticism. How many thousands of irretrievable writings did monks and missionaries burn in South America in their blind religious zeal?
That happened hundreds and thousands of years ago. Has mankind learnt anything as a result? Only a few decades ago Hitler had books burnt in the public squares and as recently as 1966 the same thing happened in China during Mao's kindergarten revolution. Thank heavens that today books do not exist in single copies, as in the past.
The texts and fragments still available transmit a great deal of knowledge from the remote past. In all ages the sages of a nation knew that the future would always bring wars and revolutions, blood and fire. Did this knowledge perhaps lead these sages to hide secrets and traditions from the mob in the colossal buildings of their period or to preserve them from possible destruction in a safe place? Have they 'hidden' information or accounts in pyramids, temples or statues, or bequeathed them in the form of ciphers so that they would withstand the ravages of time? We certainly ought to test the idea, for far-seeing contemporaries of our own day have acted in this way—for the future.
In 1965 the Americans buried two time capsules in the soil of New York so constituted that they could withstand the very worst that this earth can offer in the way of calamities for 5,000 years. These time capsules contained news that we want to transmit to posterity, so that some day those who strive to illuminate the darkness surrounding the past of their forefathers will know how we lived. The capsules are made of a metal that is harder than steel; they can even survive an atomic explosion. Apart from 'daily news' the capsules also contain photographs of cities, ships, automobiles, aircraft and rockets; they house samples of metals and plastics, of fabrics, threads and cloths; they hand down to posterity objects in everyday use such as coins, tools and toilet articles; books about mathematics, medicine, physics, biology and astronautics are preserved on microfilm. In order to complete this service for some remote and unknown future race, the capsules also contain a 'key', a book with the help of which all the written material can be translated into the languages of the future.
A group of engineers from Westinghouse Electric had the idea of presenting the time capsules to posterity. John Harrington invented the ingenious decoding system for generations yet unknown. Lunatics? Visionaries? I find the realisation of this project beneficial and reassuring. It's nice to know that there are men today who think 5,000 years ahead! The archaeologists of some remote future age will not find things any easier than we did. For after an atomic conflagration none of the world's libraries will be of any use and all the achievements that make us so proud will not be worth twopence, because they have disappeared, because they have been destroyed, because they have been atomised. It does not even need an atomic conflagration to ravage the earth to justify the New Yorkers' imaginative action. A shifting of the earth's axis by a few degrees would cause inundations on an unprecedented and irresistible scale—in any case they would swallow up every single written word. Who is arrogant enough to assert that the sages of old could not have conceived the same sort of idea as the far-sighted New Yorkers?
Undoubtedly the strategists of an A- and H-bomb war will not direct their weapons against Zulu villages and harmless Eskimos. The will use them against the centres of civilisation. In other words the radioactive chaos will fall on the advanced, most highly developed peoples. Savages and primitive peoples far away from the centres of civilisation will be left. They will not be able to transmit our culture or even give an account of it, because they have never taken part in it. Even intelligent men and visionaries who had tried to preserve an underground library will not have been able to help the future much. 'Normal' libraries will be destroyed in any case and the surviving primitive peoples will know nothing of the hidden secret libraries. Whole regions of the globe will become burning deserts, because radiation lasting for centuries will not allow any plants to grow. The survivors will presumably be mutated and after 2,000 years nothing will be left of the annihilated cities. The unbridled power of nature will eat its way through the ruins; iron and steel will rust and crumble into dust.
And everything would begin again! Man may embark on his adventure a second or even a third time. Perhaps once again he would take so long to re-emerge as a civilised being that the secrets of old traditions and texts would be closed to him. Five thousand years after the catastrophe, archaeologists could claim that twentieth-century man was not yet familiar with iron, because, understandably enough, they would not find any, no matter how hard they dug. Along the Russian frontiers they would find miles of concrete tank traps and they would explain that such finds undoubtedly indicated astronomical lines. If they were to find cassettes with tapes, they would not know what to do with them; they would not even be able to distinguish between played and unplayed tapes. And perhaps those tapes might hold the solution to many, many puzzles! Texts which spoke of gigantic cities with houses several hundred feet high would be pooh-poohed, because such cities could not have existed. Scholars would take the London Tube tunnels for a geometrical curiosity or an astonishingly well-conceived drainage system. And they might keep on coming across reports which described how men flew from continent to continent with giant birds and referred to extraordinary fire-spitting ships which disappeared into the sky. That would also be dismissed as mythology, because such great birds and fire-spitting ships could not have existed.
Things would be made very difficult for the translators in anno 7000. The facts about a world war in the twentieth century that they would discover from fragmentary texts would sound quite incredible. But when the speeches of Marx and Lenin fell into their hands, they would at last be able to make two high priests of this incomprehensible age the centre of a religion. What a piece of luck!
People would be able to explain a great deal, provided sufficient clues were still in existence. Five thousand years is a long time. It is a pure caprice on nature's part that she allows dressed blocks of stone to survive for 5,000 years. She does not deal so carefully with the thickest iron girders.