We Were Never Supposed To Find Any Of This.

Get a FREE Audible Trial here: https://amzn.to/3SY3JT3 In 1981 the US Department of Energy realized it had a problem. Nuclear waste that would remain deadly for 10,000 years. Buried underground in New Mexico. And no reliable way to warn future civilizations not to dig there. So they commissioned a study. Linguists. Anthropologists. Physicists. Science fiction writers. The best minds available for the specific problem of communicating across deep time to an unknown future. Their conclusion after years of work was quietly devastating. There is no reliable way to do it. Every symbol is culturally contingent. Every language will evolve beyond recognition. Every warning marker risks being interpreted as a sacred site and attracting exactly the intrusion it was meant to prevent. We cannot leave a message for our own future civilization. Not reliably. Not across 10,000 years. Now here is the question I can't stop thinking about. If we, with full knowledge that we are trying to communicate across time, with every modern tool available to us, can't solve this problem... What exactly are we reading when we study the ancient world?