The World Without Us

Even if the primeval Białowieża Puszcza forest spreads anew across Europe, the bronze memorial to its founder, horseback King Jagiełło in New York’s Central Park, will probably outlast it one distant day when the aging sun overheats and life on Earth finally winds down. In their Central Park West studio northwest of his statue, Manhattan art conservators Barbara Appelbaum and Paul Himmelstein coax fine old materials to remain in the high-energy state to which artists have taken them. They are acutely aware of the lasting power of things elemental.

“What we know of ancient textiles in China,” says Himmelstein, “is because silk was used to wrap bronzes.” Long after it disintegrated, the fabric’s texture remained imprinted in the copper salts of the patina. “And all we know of Greek textile is from paintings on fired ceramic vases.”

Ceramics, being minerals, are as close to their lowest energy state as things get, says Appelbaum, who has high-energy dark eyes framed by short-cropped white hair. From a shelf she produces a baby trilobite, mineralized in faithful detail by Permian mud, exquisitely readable 260 million years later. “Unless you smash them, ceramics are virtually indestructible.”

Unfortunately, that happens, and tragically, most of history’s bronze statues are also gone, melted down for weapons. “Ninety-five percent of all artwork ever made doesn’t exist anymore,” says Himmelstein, a knuckle stroking his gray goatee. “We know little of Greek or Roman painting— mainly just what writers like Pliny tell us about it.”

On a masonite table lies a large oil they are repairing for a private collector, a 1920s portrait of a moustachioed Austro-Hungarian noble with a jeweled watch fob. It had sagged and begun to molder after years in some dank hallway. “Unless they’re hanging in 4,000-year-old pyramids with zero moisture, within a few hundred years of neglect, paintings on canvas will be a dead issue.”

Water, the stuff of life, is often the death of art—unless the art is submerged in it.

“If space aliens show up after we’re gone and all the museum roofs have leaked and everything inside has rotted, they should dig up the deserts and dive underwater,” Himmelstein says. If the pH isn’t too acidic, the lack of oxygen can even preserve waterlogged textiles. Removing them from the water can be perilous—even copper that lies for millennia in chemical equilibrium with seawater may develop “bronze disease” outside of it, due to reactions that turn chlorides into hydrochloric acid.

“On the other hand,” says Appelbaum, “we tell people who ask advice about time capsules that good-quality rag paper in an acid-free box should last forever, as long as it never gets wet. Just like Egyptian papyrus.” Immense archives of acid-free paper, including the world’s largest collection of photographs, owned by the stock photo agency Corbis, have been climatically sealed in a former limestone mine in western Pennsylvania, 200 feet below ground. The vault’s dehumidifiers and subzero refrigeration are guaranteed to secure them for at least 5,000 years.

Unless, of course, the power goes off. Despite our best efforts, things do go amiss. “Even in dry Egypt,” notes Himmelstein, “the most valuable library yet assembled—a half-million papyrus scrolls in Alexandria, some of them Aristotle’s—was perfectly preserved until a bishop lit a torch to expel paganism.”

He wipes his hands on his blue pinstriped apron. “At least we know about them. The saddest thing is that we have no idea of what ancient music was like. We have some of the instruments. But not the sounds made on them.”

Neither of these esteemed conservators figures that music as it is recorded today—nor any other information stored on digital media—has much chance to survive, let alone be apprehended by any sentient being that might puzzle over a stack of flimsy plastic disks in the distant future. Some museums now use lasers to etch knowledge microscopically on stable copper—a good idea, assuming the mechanisms to read them survive with them.

And yet, of all human creative expression, it happens that music may have the best chance of all to echo on.

IN 1977, CARL Sagan asked Toronto painter and radio producer Jon Lomberg how an artist might express the essence of human identity to an audience that had never seen humans. With fellow Cornell astrophysicist Frank Drake, Sagan had just been invited by NASA to devise something meaningful about humanity to accompany the twin Voyager spacecrafts, which would visit the outer planets and then continue on through interstellar space, possibly forever.