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Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia

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This book is really two different books connected by a quick segue. The first half of the book sprints through a summary of the different ways that humans have intentionally left evidence of their lives long after their death. It continues to chronicle recent and ongoing efforts to leave evidence of our civilization to future humans and in outer space. I found the discussions of the petty infighting at NASA and the chaotic process of government-sponsored monument design particularly interesting. Benford is quick to note that for the money we spend on a radioactive waste marker that might save 100 lives over 10,000 years, we could save many thousands of lives right now. Comments like these help the reader keep a grounded perspective of the silliness of leaving long-lasting monuments, as well as highlighting the drive that makes us ignore our present concerns in favor of leaving messages for future generations.

The second half of the book is entirely about how future generations will interpret the environmental state of the planet as a monument to our current society and how we can take action to change the state of the planet. This section strays more heavily into the realm of speculative fiction than the first half of the book. Benford argues for "responsible stewardship" of the planet as the only option for sustaining our current level of population and energy. He calls for active efforts to influence the patterns of energy exchange over the planet's surface. While he is almost certainly right, his argument is a bit aggressive. He warns that we must start with extremely limited experiments, but does not stress the fact we do not yet have the mathematical modeling techniques to accurately assess and predict the worldwide effects of our experimentation. My only real criticism of the book is that it implies that we are capable of responsibly taking large scale action today, even though it may still be decades before ecosystems modelers will be able to provide the kinds of analysis that will allow humanity to become responsible stewards of the planet.

This book really gets you thinking in a new way: going beyond your own petty life and petty concerns to think about the far past and the far future. So you think computer disks are so cool? Egyptian pyramids have a better record of surviving down the ages - already some of our data media are disintegrating and we don't have any working equpment to read them! When you call something the "way of the future," Benford points out, you need to think about exactly how far in the future you are looking.

Time capsules? We go to so much trouble to send trivial junk into the future...sometimes for only a few decades. A future archaeologist would probably learn more from mining our landfills, as we do from digging in ancient garbage heaps.

Benford also distinguishes between serious, scientific efforts to send a message to aliens (eg the plaques/records on the Pioneer space probes) and the "Kilroy was here" impulse ("Send your name on a CD-ROM to the stars!") being marketed so heavily. The latter, he notes, amounts to graffiti, worthless in the end except to someone's ego.

Finally, there are sections on saving the environment and biodiversity, to make sure we HAVE a future. Benford strikes a balance between the in situ/ex situ (conservation/zoos) approaches to saving species and the Puritan/technology prophet approaches to solving the greenhouse effect, a balance that is desperately needed when most so-called experts seem to be passionate ideologues one way or the other.

This book draws broadly on numerous disciplines and from a lot of research but leaves you really thinking in the end, and perhaps rethinking some of your assumptions about the future.

I very much enjoyed reflecting on the ideas presented in Benford's discussion. The content and organization of the book are not specifically addressed in previous reviews on this site, so for the reader wondering what the book is about, a road map might be useful.
Deep Time has four sections:
(1) Ten Thousand Years of Solitude describes a project in which the author was involved, which addressed how (or if) society can design safe repositories for nuclear waste with effective means of communicating across millenia to people who will not share our culture, technology, or language, "don't go near this place." Past epic attempts to communicate over the millenia and present attempts to preserve computer data for even a few years do not build confidence that this critical message will speak properly to its unimaginably distant audience.
(2) Vaults in Vacuum is a rather darkly amusing discussion of the etched plates NASA sent out on some space missions intended to communicate with whoever finds them about Earth, Sol, and humans. The unintended humor of the political process surrounding their design communicates more to us about human nature than the disks themselves could ever communicate to aliens! The fate of the diamond disk that was supposed to ride with Cassini-Huygens to Saturn is nothing short of hysterical.
(3) The Library of Life is a depressing description of the potentially Chicxulub-scale loss of biodiversity caused by humans in the last few centuries. It argues almost poignantly, perhaps quixotically, for building cryogenically-preserved DNA libraries to store the basic information on biodiversity, so our far descendants, if we manage to leave any, might be able to resuscitate what we are destroying -- "Jurassic Park" on ice.
(4) Stewards of the Earth: The World as Message is a vaguely postmodern discussion of the earth we're leaving behind us for our descendants as a text and what that text reveals about us. The message is not flattering or hopeful. Should human society with its next-quarter or, at most, decades time frame begin to design and effect centuries-long agendas to assist the planet to support us at a high level of technological civilization, our primate cleverness may yet evolve into wisdom and conscious design of what the earth says about us to our long-distant descendants.

IF you're interested in saving the world, literally, then this book is required reading. Fascinating inside accounts of various projects to communicate across millenia, archive DNA, and send messages to the stars. Very interesting, at times entertaining, and totally unique. I really recommend this book.

Greg Benford points out an implication of Deep Time that I have never before considered. Thank-you, sir. A new perspective on anything is (sometimes) important, and a new perspective on deep time is... well, lasting. Potentially.

But I submit that there is another aspect of deep time that is equally as important as our legacy to the future. We inhabit the earth through such a brief period in its natural history. Much of the nature that we hold so dear is transient, in deep time. A few thousand years from now, it is likely that the ice caps of the arctic regions will start to stretch across the planet, just as they have done at points over the last 30 million years. A few million years from now, solar eclipses will be a thing of the past. The moon is gradually spiralling out from its present orbit, the result of tidal forces eroding the energy that propels the relative motions of the Earth and the Sun. Once the moon reaches a certain distance from us, it will stop covering the sun.

Oh yeah, right! You say that something as trivial as a lunar eclipse is not such a big deal? Well get a clue, wise guy! It is in fact the sun that holds the most menacing place in the natural (future) history of our planet. Today, the sun emits about 30% more energy than when it was young. This trend will continue, of course; over deep time, it will push the habitable zone (the inner border of which is very much closer to Earth today than it is to Venus) sufficiently far as to put the Earth in very bad shape indeed. You see, the oceans will boil away, and so will we. And not in the unimagineably far future, either. According to estimates I have read, the oceans are dust in as little as 250 million years, as long as a billion years.

Even if it is a billion years, that is only about a quarter of the age of the earth today. In our human terms, the earth, as a life-bearing entity, is at best 55 years old.

At worst, about 70.

So the next time you are walking on the beach, marvelling at just "the way things are", spare some time for a new thought. The way things are is . All of its beauty, all of its precision, all of its physical makeup, is ours and ours alone to experience. Uniquely. Our time.

So brief.

And therefore, so important.

The first third of the book is interesting and enlightening. Benford discusses his work as a consulting scientist on the U.S. government's plans to secure a nuclear waste despository for ten thousand years into the future. There is a lot of unintended humor because it turns out that perhaps the best approach may be to simply leave the site unmarked! But we all know that will never happen because ther's government money to be spent...

The next section describes work he did for a solid diamond marker medallion that was to fly with NASA's Cassini mission to explore Saturn and put a probe on the largest moon, Titan. This section is somewhat silly, and includes a lot of gossip and innuendo about other scientists and the NASA bureacracy. The whole plan falls apart at the last minute, and naturally, the author of _this_ account is not the bad guy. Common sense tells us that casting a 28 mm diameter diamond disk into the methane sea of Titan probably is not the best use of taxpayer dollars.

The last third of the book is largely envrio-paranoia babble from a scientist who should know better. Benford claims we should try to cryogenically preserve thousands or even millions of species so they can be studied in the future. His rationale is they might become extinct before scientists can catalog them. So how do you preserve something that you don't even know about yet? Simple - you go out to the edge of the rain forest (or wherever) and scoop up buckets of junk and - you guessed it - freeze it! Yes, that is the proposal: buckets of mud, sticks, and poop in liquid nitrogen dewars. Never mind the fact that earlier in the book, he comments how our present state of technology and stable civil institutions might be temporary, and we can expect major disruptions in the near future. What happens if some day all of these freezers are "unplugged"?

He redeems himself in the final chapter by admitting that the Human species is at a point where we will soon be able to take charge of our evolution, and that it may be possible to alter global climate through the application of technology and fix problems like excess CO2 production. The afterword is so beautifully written, it makes you pause and wonder, what happened with the rest of the book?

All told, this book presents some valuable ideas and insight into a subject that few people have considered.

This book, by a physicist and science fiction writer, starts off well with a philosophical perspective on Humankind's collective attention span. The desire to convey some essence of ourselves, Benford writes, is the great impulse behind deep time messages. But there also is a desire to shape the future, and to use the idea of the future to shape the present. He describes his personal experience as a member of a group advising the Department of Energy on what kind of markers should be used to warn future humans of an underground radioactive waste depository. He then turns to the design of plaques to be attached to spacecraft that will leave the solar system, unfortunately getting bogged down in bureaucratic and interpersonal battles involving NASA officials. Other subjects addressed are preserving a record of biodiversity in a "Library of Life" and addressing human-caused climate change, leading toward "planetary management." These are all good themes, but Benford's conclusion does not propose an overall approach or a more systematic way of addressing our long-term future.

Benford's non-fiction is as good as his best science-fiction. His interest and knowledge on archaeology and biology is amazing for a physicits. The way he plays around the deep time subject using two real cases in the first half of the book is brilliant. Sagan's fans be aware. As is usual in his best Si-Fi, the two cases show in detail how real science is done and muddled by personal interests and pride.

Be a little patitient with "The Libray of Life", because the wait for the fourth part is worthwhile. The last part is a very interesting "state-of-the-art" briefing on global warming. Now I buy it! Sagan's fans, we may have already a worthy successor.

If you found this book interesting and you enjoy hard Si-Fi, I recommend you take a look at these Benford's novels: Cosm, Timescape and Artifact. The fun continues there (in fact these novels were first)

Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia is Gregory Benford's four-part meditation on lengthy periods that are essentially unimaginable for humans. But "meditation" may not be the right word. Benford has encountered deep time in his professional life as a scientist; each of the four parts of his book describes one of those encounters. The ideas in the book should probably induce a meditative consideration of our place in the universe, but Benford writes more journalistically than analytically, searchingly, or meditatively.

The first part is a relatively open-ended exploration of how to communicate danger to people in the far future who are unfortunate enough to find the places where we have buried radioactive materials. Benford writes about his time as one of several experts, appointed by the government, to work on this problem. It sounds like they enjoyed the opportunity to play with farfetched ideas. But since none of them had been implemented when Benford wrote his book (and to my knowledge remain unused), the main effect of this part is to tickle the mind of the reader with a perspective shift. "Deep time" not only starts to mean something, but inspires by suggesting, if only by implication, that humanity is on the cusp of an epic adventure across generations.

In part two, Benford heads for outer space. Once again, he finds himself on a panel of experts, this time trying to communicate not just across deep time, but with unknown extraterrestrials--through a disc that was intended to fly on the Cassini spacecraft. Like the first part, the subject here is evocative. There are problems at both ends of this communication: what should we say? and who are we saying it to, anyway? They're good questions, which deserve a book of their own. Unfortunately, the story bogs down in politics and begins to read like little more than a revenge against Carolyn Porco, whose antics (according to Benford) made all their efforts for naught.

Part three stays in deep time, but only marginally, and leaves behind the problem of communication. Worse, Benford appears to be continuing the sour-grapes theme that ruined part two. Now he is reviving a proposal he wrote in 1992, for the cryogenic preservation of life in the face of decreasing biodiversity. He twice observes that two major journals rejected his paper and admits that his views are unpopular and idiosyncratic. But that makes a bad impression in this book. It feels as though, needing more material on the "deep time" issue, he is just padding the book with a popularization of his old proposal. When he suggests that there is no reason to worry about actually retrieving information from the cryogenic storage system he proposes, since humans of the future will likely have better technology than we have, one is compelled to question the whole enterprise. If human development and progress will continue to hum along invariably, providing fantastic new technological tools for studying life, even as biodiversity plummets, then cryogenic storage of lifeforms, just for the sake of biodiversity itself, seems more than a little pointless. Using cryogenic storage as a method for "communication" across "deep time" suggests a societal discontinuity, caused in part by the ecological crisis of losing biodiversity; but if the method only works by assuming not just continuity, but technological progress, something does not add up.

The final part of the book is an improvement over the middle parts. Here Benford addresses climate change and suggests, though without using the word (since it probably hadn't been invented yet), that we have entered an anthropocene age. Our activities here will change the earth for a long, long time--maybe forever. Here the "communication" theme is only half-revived. Benford suggests that our most obvious "communication" to the future will be these permanent, or quasi-permanent changes, which are mostly inadvertent. He gets into geoengineering a little, which might suggest "communication" across "deep time," but not really; if we only use geoengineering to preserve the climate that we like, it seems unlikely that the "message" in the deep future will mean much. Moreover, if knowledge about the past is based on examining artifacts of change in the environment, it seems disingenuous to say that knowledge was the result of "communication," especially when the environmental artifacts are the result of our dunderheaded inadvertence. Even so, the chapter includes some interesting ideas about mitigating carbon emissions, few of which seem likely to be used, since human political systems have a hard time addressing anything but human conflicts.

Deep Time is not a bad book, but it could have been much better, mostly by leaving out the second half, removing the muckraking from part two, and greatly expanding the ideas explored in the first half. But since those other parts are there, one might improve the experience offered by this book by reading it in conjunction with Nicholas Basbanes' A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World and Alan Weisman's The World Without Us. Basbanes focuses on the problem of communication over long time periods, while Weisman gets into the ways that humans have changed the earth.

Tis is an extraordinary view of humanity in a long dimension of time--beautifully written, based on real experience, but not pontifical. It's a treat for anybody who likes to think deeply!