Preserving Text For The Year 5000

My work these days is preserving our civilization’s text on tempered glass tablets, to last for future historians thousands of years from now. I’m doing this through two organizations.

The Ennigaldi Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit which decides what to preserve, purchases tablets, and stores them in vaults. We are accepting donations if you want to support this work.

Ammonite Inscription Company produces tablets for the Ennigaldi Foundation and for anyone else. When I started this project I thought I could just raise money and buy tablets from the tablet guys. But there were no tablet guys who I could find, so I had to become the tablet guy.

It turns out these tablets also make great display pieces, so if you want a thousand-year inscription of your favorite poem or your wedding vows or a (black-and-white) artwork or your family records or anything, then Ammonite can do that. Going forward I also hope to sell to museums and others with an interest in long-term preservation, so they can just make a simple transaction rather than set up a production process from scratch.

In the future I’ll also offer “We make your tablets and store them in our permanent vault” rather than just “I deliver the tablets to you” but that’s a ways away.

My ultimate goal is to preserve the entire corpus of English-language Wikipedia c. 2014. This is more feasible than many people assume but it’s still very far beyond my current production capacity. I’ll be starting small and scaling up geometrically as I go.

You can sign up for the Ennigaldi Foundation’s newsletter to stay updated as the work continues.