Galaxy Magazine (October 1952) by Galaxy

Author:Galaxy
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 1952-10-08T16:00:00+00:00

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ers enclosed documents, contem- completely unimportant philoso-porary coin of the realm and an phical school. After all that labor, occasional chronicle in the foun- it was a sad disappointment.

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dation stones of buildings, and

American builders took over the

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tradition.

Trouble is that in those cases where the contents, were recoverr

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ed and examined, it turned <mt

that the documents told things

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which we already knew from other sources, and that the coins were well known to numismatists

and often not even rare* Still, one wishes that this habit had been established much earlier, say in Greek or at least Roman times*

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But the only Roman example ©f such a Time Vault was not an intentional one. About half a century ago, the learned world

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was startled and excited by the

THE so-called Document Cave not far from the Dead Sea in Palestine, which was found recently, promises better results. At the very least, our knowledge of the history of th£ books of the Old Testament is going to be improved by that discovery. And that Document Cave might ever, have been meant as a kind of Time Vault, for the documents seem to have been hidden there from contemporaries for the future, although the men who did

it may have had only three or

four generations in mind—not sixty or more, as it turned out to

be, ••■ ■ * '

m

;*

TN a somewhat larger sense,

•*♦ every book written is a small time capsule. For while a book is primarily addressed to contemporaries, it is expected or hoped

to last into the future. I can get

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first-hand information about the knowledge and beliefs of Gaius Plinius Secundus (Pliny the Elder) directly from the shelves of my own library. It isn't an original, but it is serviceable. Even originals last a long time, though. If I want to find out what the famous Municipal Physician of Zurich, Dr. Konrad Gesner, thought and knew about fossils

in 1560, my library will serve, too. And this book was not preserved through the centuries in some Time Vault; it survived through the interest and care of generations of people.

The most interesting contents of any Time Capsule would be those portions in which its originators tell the future finders their guesses about the civilization,

habits, etc,, of the finders. But, again, it need not be a specific Time Capsule; it can be simply

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a book which has been preserved. As has been pointed out in GALAXY by L. Sprague de* Camp, we are just beginning to reap that kind of harvest from early examples of science fiction: If we are somewhat flabbergasted at the lack of vision of daring of those writers, and more than a

little astounded by the nonsense which we were supposed to indulge in—not that we don't indulge in different kinds of nonsense of our own designing it should merely prove to us that

we should be more daring in some respects and more careful

in others.

Now let's see if I can apply that advice myself.

As I told my audience of a

hundred years hence, I think lots of printed paper to the con-trary notwithstanding—that cities will not be obsolete.

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