I have been exchanging sporadic electronic-mail messages with John Cronk for a few years. Yesterday I reminded him of my writings on the World Wide Web, and this morning I found a wonderful message from him. He just wanted to tell me that he was going through my writings of January 2014, and that he was delighted with them. “They are extremely entertaining and enjoyable,” he wrote. “You have to be the most interesting person I’ve ever had any personal contact with.” And then he mentioned that he had an idea as to how to achieve the closest thing to immortality by ensuring that I would be the only one from our civilization to be remembered. “I think it’s just the ticket for your writings,” he wrote.

Here’s what you do. Have an extremely strong and durable sphere constructed of some material like carbon fiber, and put your writings, photos, and so on, inside. No electronic stuff, though. Evacuate the air and fill the sphere with nitrogen or some other inert gas that will preserve the contents and then seal it. Take it to Antarctica and have it placed deep in the ice sheet using technology which is employed to do those core sample holes that they melt to great depths for sampling ancient air bubbles, placing photomultiplier tubes to detect neutrinos, etc. and leave it trapped there as deep as possible. Even with climate change, the ice sheet at the South Pole should remain for tens of thousands of years. When it eventually melts, your sphere will float free and turn up on a distant shore, long after all other signs of our existence have turned to dust. A much better chance of discovery here on a life-generating planet than that of the Chuck Berry song engraved on a plate lost somewhere in the vastness of cold, virtually infinite interstellar space.

An enticing idea, this. I am surely attracted to it. “Be sure to make mention that it was my idea,” John added. “That’ll be my cut.” Now I have to find an investor into his idea. I need someone who would put a few million dollars into making the sphere, printing out everything of mine available on the World Wide Web, stuffing the sphere, sealing it, and placing it deep into the ice. For good measure, ten such spheres could be made and placed in to the polar ice at different depths. That would be my cut on the technology proposed by John. I am not sure exactly how much immortality would cost, but a few million dollars would surely be enough. The name of the investor would appear in my writings, it goes without saying. That would be his or her cut, too. Any takers?