So, I read a few of the other blogs and realized that most of the people would like to be buried with books (which is not surprising given that we're all at school at the moment)... I found the idea interesting, and wondered if it would be adequate for me as well, as I clearly have been spending most of my awake time reading articles, books and others. But, I decided to be more specific than that.
Yeah, grave goods are fun, and might be useful to the ones who believe those objects might accompagny them in the 'after-life', but I'm not like that. I do believe that when I'll be dead, I'll be... well, dead. So, I would choose my grave goods in function of what they could tell a potential digger about me rather than what I feel comfortable with. This is why I thought: USB key!!!
Let's be honest here, if I do have the chance to be dug up and my bones do get published in a high-impact journal, that will probably be in at least a few hundreds if not thousands of years. By that time, the books or pictures I could have brought in my tomb with me will be long disintegrated and thus will not help anyone to understand who I was. This is why I thought I could simply put every important thing on a USB key, which would then be placed in a plastic bag (cause we all know how long those can take before decomposing, which in the occurrence is a good point).
On this important key, I could have scans of the book my mom wrote about me when I was growing up, scans of the shameful diary entries I wrote when I was a teenager (I'm not proud of them, but they do represent me at one point in my life). I would also include scans of my favorite books, the ones I could read over and over again... Scans of the journal entries of when I went backpacking in Europe, copies of the major papers I have written at the University and the ones that have been published (let's hope there are some), and of course: pictures of me, my family and my friends throughout the years.
The story of my life on a plastic USB protected from moisture and decay by a plastic bag... It sounds a bit too 21st century, but that's, in my opinion, the most effective way to do it simply without requiring a tomb the size of a house. Then, I just have to hope that future technologies will be able to retrieve the info. But that shouldn't be too complicated, right?!
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ReplyDeleteJust read the ending of your entry*
ReplyDeleteThat is a very neat idea. I was going to say, I hope the future still has the ability to retrieve information from memory sticks because computer technology changes so rapidly,my computer does not read floppy discs. There will probably be a future archaeologist who is an expert at our ancient computer technologies :)