I once had occasion to eat mincemeat from a Ball jar processed eight years before my birth. The dubiousness with which I approached that experience says volumes about our ability to preserve things. Even preservation has it’s limits, you must agree. A ship, replaced board by board over five hundred years will, at some point not be an exercise in preservation, but change. The slow inevitability of change that causes mountains to fall and entire ecosystems to die.
Our home among the stars has invited us for a short visit. Let us not, in our determination to survive, forget that we are guests. Mind your manners, do unto others, and don’t try too hard to stay alive that you forget to live.