Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia

In his first work of nonfiction, novelist and scientist Gregory Benford offers profound insight into the ways we communicate, not to each other, but to whatever civilization may exist tens of thousands of years from now. Combining a scientist's rigorous research with the lyrical skills of a novelist, he analyzes humanity's conscious attempts to make its culture immortal with structures such as Stonehenge and the Great Pyramids, while confronting the unconscious messages we continue to send through our treatment of the planet. Based on his own experiences working with the United States government to construct time-proof correspondence and warning systems, Deep Time makes for clear, compelling, and exciting reading.

Combining the logical rigor with the lyrical finesse of a novelist , award-winning author Gregory Benford explores these and other fascinating questions in this provocative analysis of humanity's attempts to make its culture immortal.In Deep Time he confronts our growing influence on events hundreds of thousands of years into the future and explores the possible "messeges" we may transmit to our distant descendants in the language of the planet itself, from nuclear waste to global warming to the extinction of species.As we begin our incredible journey down the path of eternity, Gregory Benford masterfully calls forth some of the intriguing, astounding, undreamed-of futures which may await us in deep time.

Gregory Benford is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine. He is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, and was Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University. and in 1995 received the Lord Prize for contributions to sciences. His research encompasses both theory and experiments in the fields of astrophysics and plasma physics. His fiction has won many awards, including the Nebula Award for his novel Timescape. Dr. Benford makes his home in Laguna Beach, California.