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‘daily news' the capsules also contain photographs of cities, ships, automobiles, aircraft and rockets; they house samples of metals and plastics, of fabrics, threads and cloths; they hand down to posterity objects in everyday use such as coins, tools and toilet articles; books about mathematics, medicine, physics, biology and astronautics are preserved on microfilm. In order to complete this service for some remote and unknown future race, the capsules also contain a ‘key’, a book with the help of which all the written material can be translated into the languages of the future. A group of engineers from Westinghouse Electric had the idea of presenting the time capsules to posterity. John Harrington invented the ingenious decoding system for generations yet unknown. Lunatics? Visionaries? I find the realisation of this project beneficial and reassuring. It's nice to know that there are men today who think 5,000 years ahead! The archaeologists of some remote future age will not find things any easier than we did. For after an atomic conflagration none of the world's libraries will be of any use and all the achievements that make us so proud will not be worth twopence, because they have disappeared, because they have been destroyed, because they have been atomised. It does not even need an atomic conflagration to ravage the earth to justify the New Yorkers' imaginative action. A shifting of the earth's axis by a few degrees would cause inundations on an unprecedented and irresistible scale—in any case they would swallow up every single written word. Who is arrogant enough to assert that the sages of old could not have conceived the same sort of idea as the far-sighted New Yorkers? Undoubtedly the strategists of an A- and H-bomb war will not direct their weapons against Zulu villages and harmless Eskimos. The will use them against the centres of civilisation. In other words the radioactive chaos will fall on the advanced, most highly developed peoples. Savages and primitive peoples far away from the centres of civilisation will be left. They will not be able to transmit our culture or even give an account of it, because they have never taken part in it. Even intelligent men and visionaries who had tried to preserve an underground library will not have been able to help the future much. 'Normal' libraries will be destroyed in any case and the surviving primitive peoples will know nothing of the hidden secret libraries. Whole regions of the globe will become burning deserts, because radiation lasting for centuries will not allow any plants to grow. The survivors will presumably be mutated and after 2,000 years nothing will be left of the annihilated cities. The unbridled power of nature will eat its way through the ruins; iron and steel will rust and crumble into dust. And everything would begin again! Man may embark on his adventure a second or even a third time. Perhaps once again he would take so long to re-emerge as a civilised being that the secrets of old traditions and texts would be closed to him. Five thousand years after the catastrophe, archaeologists could claim that twentieth-century man was not yet familiar with iron, because, understandably enough, they would not find any, no matter how hard they dug. Along the Russian frontiers they would find miles of concrete tank traps and they would explain that such finds undoubtedly indicated astronomical lines. If they were to find cassettes with tapes, they would not know what to do with them; they would not even be able to distinguish between played and unplayed tapes. And perhaps those tapes might hold the solution to many, many puzzles! Texts which spoke of gigantic cities with houses several hundred feet high would be pooh-poohed, because such cities could not have existed. Scholars would take the London Tube tunnels for a geometrical curiosity or an astonishingly well- conceived drainage system. And they might keep on coming across reports which described how men flew from continent to continent with giant birds and referred to extraordinary fire-spitting ships which disappeared into the sky. That would also be dismissed as mythology, because such great birds and fire-