NY Times Report: “News That Can Last a Million Years”

From The New York Times:

Inside an ancient salt mine, on the edge of a small Alpine lake in Austria, Martin Kunze is preparing for the end times.

He is not a doomsayer or a conspiracy theorist. A ceramist, Mr. Kunze simply inhabits a longer view of history, one in which humans are the dinosaurs, facing down a probable extinction. He knows we’re poised to leave our foam cups, shattered Ikea bowls and slowly decomposing trash islands for a future species to decipher. Still, he’s holding out hope that a few more meaningful items will manage to survive, too — including the work of The New York Times.

Mr. Kunze is an artist and researcher based in Hallstatt, Austria, who founded the Memory for Mankind (or MOM) project in 2012.

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Mr. Kunze is filling the capsule with ceramic tablets microscopically imprinted with a history of our species. Stored deep inside a mine, the tablets contain entire books, archives and blogs — with one tablet able to hold up to 1,000 book pages. But with so many versions of history that could be told, Mr. Kunze is faced with a daunting task of curation. In the process, he has turned to The Times’s journalism for help.

Read the Complete Article (about 1050 words)

Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, News