Not right now, but you will be eventually, or someplace like it. We all will. What will the future make of us?

Thoughts and dreams emanate from the human race, crashing into rocks and soil above. Rocks and soil that don’t yet exist.

Most disintegrate on impact. Some are caught between layers of sediment, never to be seen. Some wait, like treasures or bombs, and explode into minds and cultures all over again.

Only to be reentombed after the cultures that found them have had their day.

That image popped into my head when I think about archeology. Particularly discoveries like Plimpton 322, a 3,700 year old clay cuneiform tablet that pushes back the discovery of trigonometry by over 1,000 years.

Plimpton 322, the clay tablet that shows the Babylonians invented trigonometry more than a thousand years before the Greeks.

Babylonian trigonometry used base 60 math, as opposed to our base 10. I find that fascinating, because we didn’t have to dig up base 60. We already use it to tell time and map the globe. They passed the baton and when it was our turn, we grabbed it.

At first I wondered if a 60-fingered alien taught the Babylonians to count, but if you use your thumb to count the segments of your fingers, you get 12 per hand. Count 12 on the five fingers of your other hand and you get 60.

How do we project thoughts and ideas and relics “up” into the future? I think of it like a psychic cannon or a big shotgun, but it’s nothing we do intentionally. We’re just living our lives.

The art we make, the towers, the symphonies, the museums and libraries, the ephemera we leave behind. They’re all part of that energy wave telling the universe “this is who we are.”

Consciously or otherwise, the human race tries to push its way through as many layers of future rock as possible. We’re doing it now. Whether we’ll succeed, we can never know.

But I’m pleased we’re still picking up those transmissions. Maybe we’ll find something else we’ve missed that could help us launch our cultures further into the rock.