Voyager 1, Pompeii, and the Truth About Documenting Our Lives
A few days ago, I read a news update that made me think deeply about how we go about documenting our lives: the Voyager 1 spacecraft sent back readable data to Earth again after a long glitch. It’s been traveling through deep space since 1977, carrying a golden record filled with our music, languages, and photos — a physical time capsule drifting in total silence, billions of miles away, hoping someone remembers we are here.
We have always been terrified of vanishing. When the ash settled over Pompeii, the grand marble statues fell apart, but the charcoal graffiti written on tavern walls by ordinary people stayed perfectly intact. They didn’t think they were writing history; they were just talking to each other.
Today, we try to fight this same fleeting phantom by locking our lives inside digital clouds. We take millions of digital photos, assuming we are anchoring time. But a digital file never ages. It doesn’t collect dust, it doesn’t crinkle at the corners, and it can disappear forever with a single server error.
Real memory has a weight, and time doesn’t wait for us to notice it’s moving. It sprints forward, leaving us to look at old physical objects and wonder how a chunk of our lives went by so fast.
This reflection is part of a larger exploration on time. You can read the full, original essay — featuring the stories of Da Vinci’s changing paint and the romance of old letters — directly on Medium. To explore my wider collection of thoughts, visit my Medium Profile, or return to my archive on this Writer Profile.
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