Mar 07
Want to live forever?
As long as recorded history, humans have used various media to record the world around them. It may have started with simple paintings on the walls of caves, but over the millennia, we’ve become better artists, learning how to paint, sculpt and more recently, take photographs.
But until recent history, all of the media we used had an expiration date. Sure, we’ve found some of these cave paintings, but they won’t last forever. Paintings crack, burn in fires or fade. Even photographs (the old-fashioned kind) deteriorate and will someday disintegrate into nothing.
But finally, in the Digital Age, we’ve found the first immortal medium: ones and zeros. The media we store our digital memories on right now – hard drives, flash drives, CDs – won’t last forever. But the bits and bytes on them just might. You see, even as technology marches on, there will always be an instinct to preserve a part of the past if we can. I still have a folder of documents and pictures from my first computer, way back in the 1990s (I know, ancient history, right?). It will be insanely easy to transfer these digital memories to new media as they are invented. For the first time, we may actually have found a way to preserve ourselves forever. Well, maybe not forever, as the sun will gobble up the Earth one day. But maybe by then (7.6 billion years), we’ll be all over the Universe and our memories will be digitally stored in some supercomputer on a different blue planet in some other solar system.
What’s the next step? Well, some people think we may even be able to download our minds into machines. But that’s kind of scary, and I’d prefer not to think about it. I think I’ll focus instead on preserving the picture of me sitting on a wooden bull with my Aunt Shirley at my 32nd birthday party at Longhorn Steakhouse. It’s a classic.
written by admin
