How to Send a Message the Future Will Understand

This article is part of a package in collaboration with Forbes on time capsules, preserving information and communicating with the future.

An Archive in a Berkeley Studio

After my grandmother died, my wife and I emptied her studio condominium in Berkeley, California. Books covered nearly every surface—chairs, counters, the bed—leaving only narrow walking paths. At first glance it looked like hoarding, but the arrangement was deliberate. A former librarian and library-science lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, she had organized everything by subject and author. She spoke several languages and could read Latin; her apartment was an externalized memory of a lifetime.

As we sorted, another layer of order appeared. Magazines—The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, Smithsonian—were folded and tucked into books where articles matched the subject. Elsewhere, articles were clipped, stapled, and annotated in her looping cursive with bibliographic notes. The condo was more than a collection of books; it was an architectural mnemonic, a physical map of her ideas that let her preserve and retrieve knowledge.

“The archive has always been a pledge, and like every pledge, a token of the future.” — Jacques Derrida (translation)

When Messages Fail

Pledges don’t always arrive. By the end of her life, my grandmother’s mind had dulled and she could not always interpret her own archive. Information theory reminds us that successful communication requires sender and receiver to agree on form and timing. When the intended recipient is gone, the message can fail. This breakdown plays out at many scales—from a studio apartment to whole civilizations across centuries.

Even when something survives, its meaning can be lost. Consider the oldest known human artwork: a 73,000-year-old pattern of crosshatched red triangles found in Blombos Cave, South Africa. The mark-maker was thinking of something—mountains, a tally, a pattern—but that intent is irrecoverable. The physical survival of an object does not guarantee that the information it carried will be understood.

Examples of Success and Failure

History is full of both missed and successful transmissions. On Japan’s northeastern coast, hundreds of “tsunami stones” record past flood heights and advise where not to build. Many were ignored; the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami swept away stones and took more than 18,000 lives.

Lowell, Massachusetts, offers a rare example of an intentional, successful message across time. In 1850 engineer James Francis built a massive wooden gate—the “Great Gate”—to protect the town from Merrimack River floods. It saved Lowell in 1852 and again during a much larger flood in 1936. The 1936 workers discovered a simple instruction in the gatehouse—"Take the hammer. Hit the pin."—and followed it, releasing the gate. I first heard that colorful detail on a tour and could not locate documentary proof, which is a reminder that memory itself can be fallible even when the material record survives.

Two Approaches: Save Everything vs. Save What Lasts

In 1996 two San Francisco projects embodied different answers to the problem of preserving information for the future. Brewster Kahle founded the Internet Archive to capture huge swaths of the web, reasoning that digital material—though fragile and mutable—should be saved en masse. The archive now stores snapshots of billions of webpages, aiming to preserve the ephemeral history of the web.

The Long Now Foundation took a different tack. Its founders decided not to save everything but to preserve carefully chosen materials in formats designed to endure. Their projects include a 10,000-year clock and a Rosetta-stone–style library: language primers and cultural records etched into long-lasting materials and, in 2024, a nickel-etched library that traveled to the Moon. Long Now’s principle: make some records durable and human-readable without relying on continuous technological maintenance.

The Problem of Digital Decay and Selection

Digital preservation warnings from the 1990s proved prescient. A 2024 Pew Research report found that more than a third of webpages from a decade earlier are now inaccessible; one in five government pages has at least one broken link. Harvard researchers reported in 2021 that a quarter of the two million hyperlinks in the New York Times’ digital archive were broken. When digital-only outlets remove archives, the content can disappear entirely.

Storage media also decay: magnetic drives often survive only a decade, optical discs maybe a century if not afflicted by "laser rot." Yet saving everything is not the same as sending a clear, interpretable message forward. Geoffrey Bowker of the University of California, Irvine, observes that hoarding indiscriminately yields "too much of the same stuff." Curators must decide what to preserve and why.

Materials, Metadata, and Messengers

Long-term preservation raises three core questions: What medium will last? How will future readers decode the content? And who will carry the context? Stone, ceramics, glass, and certain metals endure, but they are brittle or may be misinterpreted. Modern techniques—laser-etched silica, high-nickel alloys—offer durability, while DNA data storage promises extraordinary density but currently requires heavy error correction and specialized reading tools.

Metadata—the instructions that teach a future reader how to decode a message—is often the weakest link. Sandia National Laboratories once proposed marking nuclear waste sites with terrifying pictograms and stern text to deter curious future visitors; that proposal later became a controversial meme because any explicit "do not open" mark might instead signal treasure. The Long Now team emphasizes readability: if Napoleon’s soldiers could recognize the Rosetta Stone as important, a future finder should immediately understand these archives’ significance.

Finally, an archive benefits from a living chain of custodians. Zander Rose and others note that the longest-lived institutions often have storytellers or guardians who transmit context across generations. Ideas travel best when attached to people who carry and explain them.

A Personal Transmission

Back in my grandmother’s apartment, I realized that her last message was not to some anonymous future reader but to me. Her method of organizing and annotating became my inheritance: not only volumes but a way of thinking about memory and retrieval. A concept only has meaning when woven into a wider fabric of context—so text, context, and textile share a root for a reason.

In the end, many messages to the future fail in some ways and succeed in others. My grandmother’s archive faltered as a message to her future self, but it succeeded in reaching her grandson. That kind of human continuity—stories, guardians, and practical metadata—may be the best insurance for keeping knowledge alive across generations.