An archive of 10,000 personal messages engraved on durable plates, intended to survive for 10,000 years. Half of the places would be reserved for people unable to pay, so that the archive would not become merely a monument to wealth and power. Each contributor would write in their own language and script. Identical reverse sides would contain shared mathematical and scientific knowledge, repeated on every plate to provide redundancy and to mark a common origin in time.
10,000 A4-sized stainless steel plates, each engraved with a text written by one of 10,000 individuals. Every participant is invited to record whatever they consider important enough to survive for the next 10,000 years.
Once completed, the entire collection is to be buried in the Atacama Desert, one of the oldest and driest deserts on Earth. The choice of location is deliberate: if any environment can be expected to preserve a message for millennia, it is one that has remained arid for millions of years.
The use of the A4 format is equally intentional. Beyond being one of the most widespread paper standards of our age, it also carries a mathematical message. The proportions of the sheet are based on the ratio 1:√2, which means that folding or dividing it in half produces smaller sheets with exactly the same proportions. Thus, the shape itself encodes a geometric principle and bears witness to a civilization familiar with abstraction, measurement, and standardization.
Even if the languages engraved on the plates should one day become unreadable, the dimensions of the objects themselves would still preserve a fragment of mathematical knowledge. The form, no less than the words, becomes part of the message.
The archive would then be left to the future: 10,000 voices, preserved in steel and entrusted to one of the oldest landscapes on Earth.
Each plate would consist of two parts. The front side would contain the personal message of an individual contributor. The reverse side, identical on all 10,000 plates, would preserve a common body of knowledge and would be repeated deliberately as a form of redundancy.
This shared inscription would include mathematical concepts such as prime numbers and the constants π, e and √2, basic physical and chemical knowledge, the periodic table, and astronomical information intended to serve as a time marker. Rather than relying on culturally specific calendar systems, the archive would encode its age through slowly changing features such as the Earth’s axial precession, the Earth-Moon distance, and the positions of selected pulsars and stars.
The repeated reverse side would not merely provide a key to interpretation. It would also convey that all 10,000 plates originated from the same civilization and the same historical epoch. In this way, every plate would function simultaneously as a personal testimony and as a fragment of a larger, shared memory.
The intention is not only to preserve what we knew, but also to preserve how we thought.
(Quite proud of myself, because i sent this thing as a proposal to some big Players…)
We were billions. Few of us were powerful, and fewer still would be remembered. But we were here, and we had voices.
