30 unread messages
Voicemail from your ancestral future
🎼 Organ Variation by Hans Zimmer (from Interstellar)
Close your eyes…
Imagine waking from a nap. Not just any old nap but an unexpectedly Long Nap. Through the bleary-eyed half consciousness you reach first for your phone, as always, to check the time.
An unexpected notification draws your attention instead: 30 unread messages. Thirty.
One for each and every year you’ve slept through your distended hibernation. A lot, yet oh so few.
Of course. It’s all coming back to you through the liminal mist of memory…
In a feat of scientific and engineering genius humankind had finally mastered the time machine, by harnessing the very real physics of relativity. You were eagerly at the front of the queue to swallow the little red pill and the warm coffin-bath that would suitably tranquillise your body and mind on the long journey to the far tomorrow.*
30 unread messages. Imagine that. Some spam and overdue bill reminders no doubt, deleted in advance by NASA so as not to diminish any dramatic effect. But what would your loved ones have shared with you in absence over such a time? What milestones of life would you have missed?
Perhaps your daughter has gotten amazing grades at school. Your son has met a girlfriend he really likes. One or the other, or both, have crashed her first car. Gone to college with the wish for a sizeable withdrawal from the bank of Mum and Dad, inconveniently no longer issuing credit. A dozen marriages. Two dozen heartbreaks. A pregnancy or two. Becoming a grandparent, several times over. Siblings made gravely ill, and changed forever, by the misfortune of accidents, incidents or predetermined genetics. The passing and funerals of grandparents, parents and in-laws.
And you’ve not even looked out of the window yet to see what flavour of punk-iverse has become the new normal.
Life is short and, as yet, we know no way of reversing the entropic flow of time’s arrow. Even the clever mechanics of our speculative time machine cannot overcome this destiny. The essential snapshots and snippets of our individual lives travel so fast as to be gone in the blink of an eye. Not all legacies endure.
So what’s your leave-behind? Your voicemail fragments, or photo album, of a meaningful life, a part well played. What handful of messages would you receive from your prematurely decrepit loved ones? Or, were roles reversed, what handful of messages would you send to their future selves embarking on a similar journey? Would you make the count, count?
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
- Dylan Thomas
A long-now intergenerational futures and imagination workshop warmup exercise by Christopher and Jonathan Nolan, recommended dilation of a minute per decade. Pair with The Long Time Academy — Human Layers practice for maximum effect.
For a three-hour alternative, see also Interstellar.
*Some black holes and astrophysicists may also have been recruited for the task along the way.