Preserving “Now” for “Tomorrow”

First, let me ask you a question !!!

If I want to deliver a letter to my grand, grand, grand,... children who will be living after 10,000 years from now, what is the perfect way to deliver my letter?

Let's think together...books, albums, letters...?

No, they will get ruined just in few years even with the perfect storage conditions.

Ok...a CD or a DVD?

No, they may catch a virus, be erased by any magnetic field and also they are not designed to last forever. My own DVDs are ruined without any aid actually, one day I tried to open it and it just didn't work anymore. Besides, how would you know that the future technology might be able to open it....today you can't open any Floppy disks...do you remember Floppy disks...is your computer now equipped with a Floppy drive?

Finally, I can tell you that there are only two ways to preserve history and transfer knowledge to our future generations. First, is very logic "the internet"; there are many websites devoted to history preservation. Ushahidi (http://www.ushahidi.com/) is one of these websites. Ushahidi is a Kenyan website, and the word "Ushahidi" is a Swahili word that means "testimony". In 2011, this Kenyan website received the "Red Webby" award. Ushahidi is devoted to information collection, visualization and interactive mapping. There are other websites that are also devoted to history preservation like:

The internet archive "The Way Back Machine" (http://wayback.archive.org/web/)

The Remembering site (http://www.therememberingsite.org/)

The African Politics web archive (http://webarchives.cdlib.org/a/AfricaWebArchive)

Secondly, is the old fashion way....Carving stones!!!

Yes...ancient civilizations...Egypt, Tassili caves in Algiers and other old civilizations all over Africa and the world....they got it right...carve it in stones. Stones will never go away. We learn of the ancient civilizations only through their buildings and carvings!!!

Do you know that stone carving is one of Africa's famous arts. Do you know that "Zimbabwe" name was derived from Shona language "dzimba dza mabwe" that means "the great stone house"?

Not only in Zimbabwe, but all over Africa, carvings are still done. And these carvings represent the current cultures, thus, collectively these stones represent an ongoing history recordings.

Whatever the way you will choose to convey your message to the future generations, it is okay. Whether it is the Kenyan/ technological way or the Zimbabwean/ the ancient way, both will do just fine... Now we can tell the future generations about our lives now (economically, socially, politically, technologically, medically, ....). Also, I guess we have a very important advice to tell them, we need to tell them that they have to always store what they have reached in all disciplines of life because no one knows if things might go south and end up badly like what happened with many ancient civilizations before.

In my opinion I trust stones more.....So, I guess I should go and carve my letter on a huge stone building, so my future generations can't miss it....What about you, which way is good for you?

Image Credit

Blue Question mark by http://www.onlineuniversities-weblog.com via Wikimedia Commons.

Internet by Jcarranza via Wikimedia Commons.

Temple Luxor Egypt by Crashsystems via Wikimedia Commons.