Complex Numbers

Preservation

Long one today, but I'll keep this short and try to summarize it at the end, because I don't have a lot of time tonight.

The messages that survived civilisation's collapse  
The Sumerians, Maya and other ancient cultures created texts that have lasted hundreds and even thousands of years. Here's what they can teach us about crafting an immortal message.

BBC link, so British spelling.

More than 2,000 years ago, in a temple in the city of Borsippa in ancient Mesopotamia, in what is now modern-day Iraq, a student was doing his homework. His name was Nabu-kusurshu, and he was training to be a temple brewer.

We need more temple brewers.

These daily tasks, and his devotion to beer, writing and knowledge, made him part of an extraordinarily resilient literary legacy.

Beer, writing, and knowledge, huh? Who else do you know with these interests? Makes me want to believe in reincarnation.

When Sumerian gradually slid out of common use, and was replaced by the more modern Akkadian, scribes cleverly wrote long lists of signs in both languages, essentially creating ancient dictionaries, to make sure the wisdom of the oldest tablets would always be understood.

The modern equivalent would be a Rosetta Stone that translates English to emoji, so your descendants might one day rediscover what English was (in all its spelling variants).

Anyway, like I said, not enough time. The article, which continues for a very long time, is about how to keep writing available indefinitely without necessarily inscribing it on stone or clay (of course, it will all disappear someday; that's how entropy works). So it's worth reading. Like I said, though, I'll sum it up, thus:

In the beginning, humans invented beer. To keep track of the beer, humans invented writing. Some of the oldest surviving writing had to do with beer.

So if you want your words to be immortal, write about beer.