Music in our 'Ark of the Human Experience'

As we fail to meet inter-governmental environmental targets; and climate disaster beckons; and we seek to preserve aspects of human culture for the eyes and ears of our intelligent successors - one of the greatest technological challenges we’ll face is figuring how to keep our music going in preserved spaces for tens of thousands of years. In curating the contents for our Ark of the Human Experience, how can we ensure that future intelligent life or even the descendants of human survivors of climate catastrophe, can experience even partly, the music that has meant so much to our lives? What energy sources can we rely upon?

We feel a strange kind of melancholy when we contemplate the magnificent relics of dead civilizations. It feels a bit like how witnessing a funeral can make us reflect on our own mortality.

Already the modest 1.5 C target for restricting average global temperatures to safer levels by 2030, appears out of reach. At Honest Sustainability, we take the view that given our human natures, we will not make the sacrifices necessary to meet that target or any other target that our governments may come up with.

We are headed for abrupt climate disaster and our aim is to curate content for an Ark of the Human Experience that will be sufficiently robust to preserve the best of human culture for the eyes of our successors.

One of the greatest technological challenges that music curators will face, is figuring how to transmit our favourite sounds in a preserved space for tens of thousands of years. In curating the contents for our Ark of the Human Experience, how can we ensure that future intelligent life or even the descendants of human survivors of climate catastrophe, can experience the music that has meant so much to our lives?

Whether it’s the Sphinx and pyramids, or the urban sprawl of Mohenjo-Daro or the colossal Easter Island statues, we feel a strange kind of melancholy when we contemplate the magnificent relics of dead civilizations. Looking upon these structures enables us to more easily imagine how people with dreams, fears, and passions like our own, had lived and died in the very spots where we stand with cameras raised.

Yet the evocation is never as strong as it should be because even when we visit museums, what we miss is any real sense of the music that the peoples of these dead civilisations enjoyed. Stone images or deciphered text describing their musical instruments may enable us to get a vague impression – but that never feels enough.

For the philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, music was the highest form of art, it was not so much a representation of the world of form but of the higher will itself. The fact that every civilisation irrespective of how isolated, has come up independently with a music culture of its own, speaks of how fundamental music is to humankind.

I believe that as creatures of a DNA pattern and order, we instinctively respond to pattern and order in this world of forms we exist in. And music, which of course is pattern in sound, can bring us a particular kind of comfort and pleasure.

We know that appreciation of the music of other cultures so often serves as the entrée for curiosity and immersion into other aspects of that culture. The recent tendency of space missions such as Project Da Vinci, Elon Musk’s Falcon Heavy Test flight, and Hakuto-R to make extra-terrestrial transmissions of our music is perhaps a demonstration of how fundamental we know music is to our identities as humans. We expect extra-terrestrial beings might also be composed of building blocks of pattern/ And though they may be unable to appreciate our music in exactly the way we do, they may at least respond positively to pattern and order in sound.

In one respect, the question of what energy source we can use to preserve our music along with other artefacts in our Ark of the Human Experience. is circular. Because if we had been able to access such a powerful and sustainable energy source, we would not have had to rely on the carbon-based sources to run our economies.

And yet, given the centrality of music to humanity, finding a way to preserve a sample of these sounds is a goal worthy of pursuit till the very end. To present a picture of the human record without its music would be like offering a print of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa with the eyes cut out.