A Misinformed Herald
1 You cannot build a time machine and attempt to see what the future has in store, maybe in the far-off future they might, but that is for the future to know. We, as people living in the present, cannot know for certain what the future will hold, no matter what we do. We can prepare for that unknown variable, if only we knew it.
2 Humans often see the future without uncertainty. They believe in the certainty that the present gives, and transfer that to the events that have yet to occur. They prepare for the ideal they want to see, the one they choose to follow. But we don’t know the story that will unfold, how our actions nudge that unknown variable.
3 The Ancient Egyptian’s wrote the hieroglyphs in the “God’s Language” to preserve their rituals and history in stone, with monuments built to them and their pharaohs. Not for a moment in their lives did they believe that in the future, people wouldn’t be able to translate these hieroglyphs, that their language would be lost to time. Our only evidence of this truth is the Rosetta stone.
4 The Rosetta stone was discovered by pure chance, and only written due to some unknown figure that decided to write the Pharaoh’s decree in literal stone. They painstakingly rewrote this decree three times in three different languages, as only when all could read would the decree be understood. Fortunately, we had never forgotten Ancient Greek when the stele was rediscovered.
5 The future is something that cannot be accurately predicted but can be prepared for. Either preparing our future selves or preventing a problem from arising.
6 To modern humanity, when looking at the hieroglyphs, we see an owl, a foot, literal pair of squiggly lines. But to those ancient people, that was written language, words spoken to another, thought of when read. A concrete fact, something literally etched in stone to represent their history. But the times change.
7 Professor Jamie Hodgkins from the University of Colorado excellently describes this, “People give symbols meaning, and as cultures change, so do the representations of that culture.” As those who understand something change, the way it is understood also changes.
8 Language itself is something that will change, it is a certain that it will. Hieroglyphs were abandoned for other forms of written communication, meaning that the words and references understood at the time of writing were lost. An entire culture obscured because of our lacking knowledge, the gap in information.
9 English seems like a concrete concept to modernity, a language spoken throughout the world with billions of speakers. Yet a thousand years ago English practically completely unintelligible compared to it is now. The entire language was shifted, rearranged and tweaked to fit the French speaking conquerors. English in the future is to look like how we see English from a thousand years ago, unintelligible.
10 To us, the swastika is a symbol of Naziism, the holocaust, genocide even. Yet to those who lived in the world before Hitler’s rise to power, the swastika represented well-being, even luck. But the actions of those who use that symbol in ways opposite to its meaning change the way that the symbol is perceived. How will humans ten thousand years later see it?
11 Any inhabitants of our future see us as the Egyptians, a culture lost to time. Sure, communicating gravity is simple, everyone can understand that. But you can’t explain the concept of invisible, undetectable danger with simple cave painting or language that could end up like hieroglyphs. A lost form of language.
12 How do you get across an idea to someone who doesn’t know the idea or the process in which you reach that idea? You use concrete facts, evidence. But what would happen if these known facts, this concrete evidence, is somehow lost, or misunderstood? What would happen if our core idea about something changes?
13 We’ve already seen this happen, and it can easily occur. A skull and crossbones could mean pirates, but it could also mean death. A pirate could see an X on a map and correlate that to buried treasure. But to ourselves we see that as a negative, that whatever we are looking for isn’t there. A concept as simple as an X has changed drastically in mere centuries, we wouldn’t think that treasure would be under the X, it would be under the check mark. The treasure will never be found, even though it was intended to be found.
14 Telling ourselves danger is under the mountain might change in the future. Nuclear waste, unseen, undetectable, and dangerous to all could be seen as a hidden power. An invisible killer, a poison so secret it is undetectable by all, or a weapon so strong it ignores any armor. We can’t tell them that it isn’t any of these things, but we can try our best to keep it away from them.
15 To prepare for the future is to prepare for something that can never be known yet is something that we always know is coming, prepared for it or not. It is imperative we prepare so that our modern day will not leave behind a legacy of danger and destruction. The future is the reflection of the actions we take, and we must prepare for a future where we are misunderstood, misinterpreted, yet the core ideas are preserved. Either through deceit, or virtue.
References
https://www.sapiens.org/culture/symbols-shifting-culture/
Counterintuitive Fall 2024 
Brilliant Title, Mongoose! 🙂
I did a search for “you” without the quotation marks and got 27 hits on your essay. That’s 27 times YOU have violated the Comp II Ban on the 2nd Person.
WE do not use YOU, or YOUR, or YOURS, or YOURSELF or YOURSELVES in Comp II for a very good reason: those words create a needless gulf of understanding between US and OUR readers. WE want to be on the level with OUR readers, so we don’t treat them like THE OTHERS.
Your first paragraph offers the perfect opportunity to BOND WITH your readers because WE are all humans. So:
WE live in the present. No matter what WE try to do, WE can only live in the present, the now, never the past and never the future. WE cannot build a time machine and attempt to see what the future has in store for US; maybe in the far-off future they might, but that is for the future to know. We, as people living in the present, cannot know for certain what the future will hold, no matter what we do. WE can prepare what the future may have for US by what WE do currently, but it is not set in stone, nor is what WE do accurate for what will come.
Got it? Apply globally.
Mongoose, your work is very thoughtful and well done, so I wanted to respond to each paragraph. For that purpose, I numbered them. You can strip out the numbers as you revise.
1 At every point in time in history, humans have only ever lived in the present. No matter what you try to do, you can only live in the present, the now, never the past and never the future. But to anyone, living in the past is a mentality, the wish for a time that has gone by, yet the future is an unknown, and an inevitability. We are told to never live in the past, to stay focused on the present and look to the future. But the problem lies in the fact that the future is something that has yet to happen so how do we look to the future?
—I don’t see the point, Mongoose.
—These musings about “living in the present” miss the point of your hypothesis completely. Wondering how to communicate with future occupants of this planet has NOTHING to do with our personal commitment to “making the best of every day.” It distracts from your point.
—A better strategy might be to steal an image from science fiction, to which your hypothesis owes MUCH MORE than it does to popular psychology.
This image from the end of the Planet of the Apes movie does a nice job of communicating to the distant future using the iconography of today.
2 You cannot build a time machine and attempt to see what the future has in store for you
—Again, what the future “has in store for me” is beside the point of how I could communicate a current hazard to an unknown future race.
3 Murdering someone doesn’t mean . . .
—You can keep doing this, and I will keep objecting. These are irrelevant musings that cost you words from your budget.
4 Uncertainty will always be present in the future . . .
—If you’re ready to get specific, you can do so by speculating on how our planet and its inhabitants might evolve. That’s the only aspect of the uncertainty of the future that has relevance.
5 The Ancient Egyptian’s wrote the hieroglyphs in the “God’s Language” to preserve their rituals and history in stone, with monuments built to them and their pharaohs. Not for a moment in their lives did they believe that in the future, people wouldn’t be able to translate these hieroglyphs, that their language would be lost to time.
—For me, THIS is where your essay begins. All that has gone before was wasteful “throat-clearing.” Your idea is very captivating once you get to it. Don’t risk losing readers before you can hook them.
5A Yet if this is the case
—If WHAT is the case? That their language WAS lost? or that it WASN’T lost? Your choice is not clear.
how did we translate the hieroglyphs? The Rosetta stone.
6 The Rosetta stone was discovered by pure chance, and only written due to some unknown figure that decided to write the decree in literal stone. Maybe he thought that more people could read it, considering it is in three languages, and that in the future people may want to know what that decree was.
—The Stone is SUCH a perfect physical embodiment of what you’re speculating about. It deserves to be more fully explained here for readers who don’t understand that the carver wrote the SAME decree three times in three languages so that each provides clues about the other, the only clues we have to decipher lost languages.
7 The future is something that cannot be accurately predicted but can be prepared for.
—Here you are permitted to ask a Rhetorical Question if you are prepared to answer it. You could ask, for example, “What could we leave behind to help future readers understand what we mean when we write warnings in English?”
8 To modern humanity, when looking at the hieroglyphs, we see an owl, a foot, literal pair of squiggly lines. But to those ancient people, that was written language. A concrete fact, something literally etched in stone to represent their history. But the times change.
—Well . . . language is BOTH a concrete fact when it’s etched AND a disturbance in the air when it’s spoken AND a psychic phenomenon when it’s thought.
9 Professor Jamie Hodgkins from the University of Colorado excellently describes this, “People give symbols meaning, and as cultures change, so do the representations of that culture.” As those who understand something change, the way it is understood also changes.
—Interesting as all of this is (to some readers), we don’t yet know THE STAKES of this very long introduction. Some readers will bail NOW because you haven’t provided any REASON to care about the shifting nature of language and symbols.
—Find a way in the first two paragraphs to float the notion that OUR LIVES depend on deciphering a message from the past. THAT will be the dilemma of the “people” you’re worried about in your Hypothesis. You can only keep readers intrigued if they have some idea what’s to be lost or gained.
10 Language itself is something that will change, it is a certain that it will. Hieroglyphs have been abandoned for other forms of written communication, meaning that the words and references understood at the time of writing were lost.
—True, but not Grounded in a Problem.
11 English seems like a concrete concept to modernity, a language spoken throughout the world with billions of speakers. Yet a thousand years ago English practically completely unintelligible compared to it is now. The entire language was shifted, rearranged and tweaked to fit the French speaking conquerors. An unpredictable event that most likely was never considered to those speaking English prior.
—Grounding at this stage is a simple matter of following through: Similarly, we have no way to predict how unintelligible Today’s English will be thousands of years from now.
12 To us, the swastika is a symbol of Naziism, the holocaust, genocide even. Yet to those who lived in the world before Hitler’s rise to power, the swastika represented well-being, even luck. But the actions of those who use that symbol in ways opposite to its meaning change the way that the symbol is perceived.
—Very nice. What will this mean in 10,000 years?
13 If you bring a scholar from the past and show them what we have now, they would either be blown away by the amount of information we have, or completely confused on why certain things happen, or exist. You can easily get across the idea of gravity, that things fall to the ground, no matter who you are talking to, you could drop a rock as proof. But you can’t explain the concept of rocket science to someone from before the premodern era.
—You may be heading the wrong way down this street, Mongoose.
—We don’t need to communicate anything to the prehistoric visitor.
—We ARE the Prehistorics in YOUR hypothesis. We have to draw the perfect CAVE PAINTINGS that will communicate to the Future.
14 How do you get across an idea to someone who doesn’t know the idea or the process in which you reach that idea? You use concrete facts, evidence. But what would happen if these known facts, this concrete evidence, is somehow lost, or misunderstood? What would happen if our core idea about something changes?
15 We’ve already seen this happen, and it can easily occur. A skull and crossbones could mean pirates, but it could also mean death. To those sailors in the 17th century, seeing a skull and crossbones would cause fear, but now it could illicit joy. It might even have some consider it to be treasure, because as many believe, pirates bury their treasure. So now instead of fear being related to the skull and crossbones, they correlate treasure to it, even if the meaning is not treasure, and is supposed to be fear.
—I think the more useful IMAGE from piracy for YOU is the “X” on the map that marks the spot where the treasure is buried. Our Xs more often mean a negation, a cancellation than a hidden bounty.
—We wouldn’t think of digging for treasure under THAT X.
16 To prepare for the future is to prepare for something that can never be known yet is something that we always know is coming and will arrive whether we are prepared for it or not. It is imperative we prepare so that the modern day will not leave behind a legacy of danger and destruction. The future is the reflection of the actions we take, and we must prepare for a future where we are misunderstood, misinterpreted, yet the core ideas are preserved.
—I think you made a deliberate choice to hold off on naming your Hypothesis until you had a 1000 words to begin to PREPARE your reader for understanding the gravity of the situation. I respect that choice. But I wouldn’t read your 1000 words without having an idea that the investment would pay off.
—You’d lose this reader. And I wouldn’t be alone.
—This story is too good to waste on that sort of chance. Bring your readers in to the drama. Early. Let them feel the gravity of these ruminations. You’re more than capable of sharing brilliant ideas.
SPEED FEED DAY: I’ve given myself a 15-minute deadline for feedback today in an effort to get through at least a “first pass” at more than 30 feedback requests in one day. Of course you may still receive additional feedback but only following significant (as judged by me) improvements.
11:00 Start
First I opened your work in Edit to review the Revision history the best I could. That took quite awhile. Now I’ll scan the entire essay to see if it would command my attention from the start, which was a primary objection I raised in my first exhausting round of feedback.
I see improvements throughout, many of which are directly responsive to feedback. For this reader, you still “bury the lede” or “bury the lead” in the modern version deep into paragraph 5 or so. But I’m stubborn, too, so I respect that you didn’t want to “give it all” on the first pass. You’re wrong to ignore me, of course, ( 🙂 ) as you will discover later in life. But I will “upgrade” you out of respect for your obvious intelligence, your writing ability, and your willingness to engage fruitfully in the revision process.