The Ark Builders Edition

On deep time, global hiding places, and the case for forgetting.

Katie Dreke (KLD) is the founder of DRKE, a global strategy collective working at the intersection of brand strategy, systems innovation, and story-craft. She is a collaborator with The Long Now Foundation, an advisor to The Ocean Plastics Recovery Project, and thinks professionally about what it means to be a good ancestor.

Interior of The Future Library in Oslo, Norway, via Katie Paterson

Katie here. In 2014, Margaret Atwood wrote a manuscript, and immediately sealed it in an envelope. She will never know who reads it. In fact, the plan is that nobody will until a century from now.

The Future Library is a 100-year art project created to expand people’s sense of time, and their perspective on posterity. For twelve years, the Scottish artist Katie Paterson (along with her Norwegian counterpart Anne Beate Hovind and a group of trustees) has invited a prominent writer to submit a manuscript. In 2114, a century after the project began, they will all finally be published.

To supply the paper for this growing anthology of locked stories, a new forest was even planted in 2014, to be harvested in 2114. David Mitchell, Han Kang, Ocean Vuong, and a growing roster of writers have each made the same wager: that the world will still be here, and that people will still want to read.

Why is this interesting?

The Future Library is not a novelty. It’s one node in a quiet, distributed network of people building arks for deep time — an effort so diverse and beautiful and strange that it serves as hope-filled ballast amidst the drama and chaos of our current moment.

The Ice Memory Foundation is drilling ice cores from dying glaciers, collecting columns of ancient atmosphere extracted from the Andes and the Alps before the ice melts and the record is lost, and then sealing them beneath the Antarctic surface at -50°C, preserved for scientists who don’t yet exist, to answer questions not yet asked.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, 1,300 kilometers beyond the Arctic Circle, holds seeds from nearly every food crop on earth against an unspecified future agricultural emergency. 1,385,898 unique seed samples, from 132 depositors, securing 6,536 different species, for untold meals on tables of generations yet unborn.

The Rosetta Project, an effort from The Long Now Foundation, has etched over 13,000 pages documenting more than 1,500 human languages onto a disk the size of a palm, the text raised just 100 nanometers off the nickel surface, readable through a microscope by any future civilization that develops one.

The Frozen Zoo has been banking living cells since 1975. It holds over 11,500 cell lines from more than 1,300 species, many now endangered or gone. In 2020, they cloned a Przewalski’s horse foal from cells frozen in 1980. An animal extinct in the wild for decades, alive again because someone saved the material forty years before the tools to use it existed.

Each of these is, in its own way, a message addressed to someone who doesn’t exist yet. No living connection to the audience. No guarantee of delivery. Just the materials, the intention, and a faith that the future will receive this effort and pass it forward again.

Here is where it gets even more interesting.

On an island off the southwest coast of Finland, workers are currently boring 42 kilometers of tunnels into granite bedrock that is nearly two billion years old. The project is called Onkalo. In Finnish, the word means “cavity” or “hiding place.”

What will go into this Onkalo is spent nuclear fuel, sealed in copper canisters and surrounded by bentonite clay, placed 450 meters underground, beginning this year. The waste will remain dangerously radioactive for 100,000 years, a span ten times longer than all of recorded human history. When the tunnels are full, sometime around 2120, they will be backfilled and sealed with concrete. Forever.

The question Posiva, the company managing the site, is still actively debating: should they mark it? Warning signs, monuments, instructions. Or, should they erase every visible trace of it, landscape the island as if nothing happened, and hope that future humans will simply never drill deeply in this location?

The case for forgetting is not cynical. It’s strategically practical. Every ancient tomb humans have ever marked has been opened. Curiosity is a more durable human trait than caution. A warning might be an unintended invitation.

So here, in the same era as the Future Library, we have its shadow twin: an ark whose builders are considering whether the most responsible act is to disappear without a trace. One says: remember us. The other says: forget we were here. Both are addressed to strangers. Both are, in their way, acts of great affection and care.

I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking about ‘long time’, and works premised on the idea that civilization needs to get better at thinking across centuries, not quarters. What the ark builders have in common — the ice corers and the seed vaulters, the writers and the biologists and the nuclear engineers — is that they have each made an investment in the present in exchange for a benefit they personally will never collect. No feedback loop. Just the work, and an unwavering belief that serving the future matters.

The phrase or concept for that kind of action is uncomplicated and accessible to everyone, it’s simply about being a good ancestor.

The trees planted for The Future Library in Norway are now twelve years old. The copper canisters will go in the ground next year. Seeds are waiting in their cold vault. Extinct animals are preparing to roam again. Somewhere in Oslo, Margaret Atwood’s manuscript patiently awaits its first reader. (KLD)