I have boxes of old 78 RPM records that belonged to my parents, and before that, to their parents. My sibs and I used to listen to them on rainy days. Now I've ripped all 350 of them, complete with their scratches, pops, and clicks. As I listen to the ballads and marches, the jazz and the pop, the Christmas songs and the comedy bits, I wonder how this particular collection of music was formed. Which were gifts of love? Which were impulsive fad purchases? Many are badly worn. They are records in a double sense- records of the music my fams listened to and also, because of the wear, records of the number of times they were played. What does it mean that certain waltzes are worn to almost nothing? My German grandparents must have danced to those records at their summer camp on the Ottawa River in their adopted Canada. I can hold in meinen Händen the very record that my grandfather set on a wind-up gramaphone and danced to with my grandmother, remembering the old country. The record is there for anyone who cares to read it. This particular record is meaningful to me personally, but there are records with a much broader meaning. Monumental records such as them Pyramids and Roman ruins remind us that ages ago there were people on earth like us. Buried treasures in the form of jewelry and pottery and cave art survive to give us a clue that thinking creatures- "people"- existed tens of thousands of years ago. Now think of the distant future. We would like to believe that our society will progress to an ever better future but history shows that this is unlikely. Chances are good that society will regress, that knowledge will be lost, and that more primative times will return. It's just the way we are. In fact, things may go very badly for us. "People" may become extinct. Don't get me wrong- I wish the very best for humanity- but I have concerns that we won't survive ourselves. Which is not to say that something that we would call intelligent life won't come after us. It might even be some variation of human beings, I don't know. If this is so, what record of ourselves can we leave to them? Wouldn't it be worthwhile to let them know that we were here after every trace of our buildings and interstates and banking systems have turned to dust? What should we leave to them? A good recipe for catfish? Our buried trash? I'd like to leave something behind that will appeal to their sense of wonder (if they inherit a sense of wonder. if they don't then I don't really care much about them). What could we create intentionally, like the Pyramids, to let them know that we, also, once had pretentions to greatness? I propose this- that we create some symbol on the moon, visible from earth. A simple X will do. Its presence there on that extra-terrestrial body will be more impressive than any old pile of stones. It will say we made it this far. I hope it bugs the hell out of them, night after night, century after century, hanging over their heads until they manage to go there themselves and discover the treasures we will leave for them in that timeless, changeless moonseum. A good recipe for catfish for one thing, and the DNA for them, and instructions on how to raise them... It's the least we can do.