Amazon.com: Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia: Gregory Benford: Books

Amazon.com
Physicist and science fiction author Gregory Benford says there are two main impulses behind human efforts to communicate with future societies. The first, "High Church," shouts beauty, ego, and awe across the millennia: See how amazing our pyramid-building skills were? The Seven Wonders of the World would fall into this category--if they had lasted. Monuments, cathedrals, tombs, anything that says, "This great object meant something to us." On a much more mundane (and human) level is the "Kilroy" impulse: I lived! You needn't look hard to find evidence of this temporal communication: graffiti is as old as humanity, and latter-day taggers are following in the footsteps of Greek mercenaries (who left their names all over Egyptian monuments, Lord Byron (who carved his name into the Temple of Poseidon), and legions of anonymous ancient scribblers.

So, humans want and are able to communicate (wordlessly and otherwise) over thousands of years. But, asks Benford, can we accurately convey information over millions of years, or longer? We may need to do just that in order to responsibly protect future beings from our current, long-reaching messages--nuclear waste, climate change, extinction of species. Benford was part of a team of artists and scientists trying to come up with ways of saying "WARNING" to humans (or other beings) in the distant future. Deep Time is a fascinating look at the nature of communication and the future implications of things we do today. It's a terrifically intelligent, detailed, and comprehensive long view, with a message sorely needed by short-lived, but brainy, humans. --Therese Littleton

From Publishers Weekly
In his first foray into book-length nonfiction, acclaimed science fiction writer and physics professor Benford (Timescape, Cosm etc.) combines a scientist's perspective and a novelist's imagination to produce a provocative and disturbing look into "deep time," the far future that may be beyond the limits of our civilization and our species, but not beyond the reach of our technology. He begins with tales of the messages we have purposefully left for the intelligent beings who may exist thousands or millions of years in the future. Benford draws these stories from his experiences as a member of the teams that designed the message placed aboard the 1998 Cassini mission to Saturn and that defined the characteristics of warning markers for the radioactive waste storage sites that will still be dangerous 10 millennia hence. He ends with a look at the messages that we are inadvertently sending into deep time, messages written not in media but on Earth itself and the life it supports. Here, Benford deliberately provokes controversy by arguing that humans must take on the task of geoengineering?controlling the evolution of both life and climate?if we wish to survive. That message and his mind-stretching book leave readers with a frightening question: Where will we find scientifically knowledgeable, technologically enlightened political leaders to guide us to the right choices? Illustrations throughout.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia (Hardcover)

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