Petroglyphs and Security

The computer and software industry is increasingly turning its attention to security issues. Michael Chertoff, Homeland Security Secretary, recently said that "The potential consequences of a cyber attack are very real and every bit as concerning as the potential of a physical attack on the order of what we saw on September 11". Redmond Developer May 1, 2008

Awareness of this reality has called my mind to the security issues that were faced by those artisans who did the petroglyph's thousands of year ago. Animals, infections, weather, climate, stupity, and angry people would seem have been among the real threats. Strange as it may seem, apparently there was no threat to the messages they were inscribing on the rock. Even more remarkable is the obvious conclusion that over thousands of years no one has gone to the trouble of destroying the rock surface. Either it was just too much work or the point of doing the destruction was not in vogue.

Today business ventures, governments, media, religions, the military and the arts depend on electronic communication using the silicon in computer chips. The silicon has been mined from the earth surface and formed into machines that work using electricity to manipulate numbers and symbols in order to transmit meaning. Rock has been fabricated to enable meaning to fly through space. In earlier times the earth bound rock could not be poached or stolen by enemies so the messages were quite secure.

I believe this fact of life makes it all the more urgent to translate the meaning of petroglyph symbols. We may urgently need ideas that our ancestors had discovered and carved into the quartzite rock for the benefit of coming generations.