Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet

The story ends with a chronicler, the last person left on the about to be dead planet, leaving a gravestone-like marker for any passing aliens: “You who have come here from some distant world, to this dry lakeshore and this cairn, and to this cylinder of brass, in which on the last day of all our recorded days I place our final words” (Paragraph 7). After all the “towers of glass,” and “armies, ships and cities” that people created during their history (Paragraph 4), all that remains is a dead lake, a small burial mound, and a metal receptacle with a final message. This time capsule, buried in the hope that someone might at some point find it, is a sad emblem of a people that destroyed itself in the pursuit of greed.

Interestingly, the time capsule is the last way people use metal in the story. In the first age, they craft gods from “shining metals” (Paragraph 1) using paints (often also made of metallic compounds) to depict their mythologies on temple walls. The next use of metals is the creation of money, which is also minted from the same glistening material that people used for their sacred sculptures. Now the long-lasting quality that made metal so attractive for sacred and economic purposes makes it the ideal material for a grave marker—a brass record of extinction that will survive in a desert.