I wrote about The Long Now foundation some time ago.  I think the foundation’s goal—helping us envision the future—is critically important for sustainable thinking since sustainability is necessarily a long-term concept. 

Recently the foundation undertook a new project called the Rosetta Disk.  The Disk attempts to act as a much more exhaustive version of the Rosetta Stone; translation guides to languages are micro-etched into a titanium plate that will hold up for at least 10,000 years.

There are a million places that my brain immediately went with this.  First, I wondered why a translation disk would be useful unless we were betting against ourselves.  Then I realized that civilizations lose knowledge all the time and that in our increasingly digital age, it’s hard to project how much staying power some of the things that we currently call “information” will have.  Then, how does history’s medium of recordation affect history itself?  And on and on…

The point is, I think it’s genius.  The project forces our minds to go where they otherwise seldom do—the future.  And, the more time that we all spend thinking about the future, the better it will turn out to be.