When Our Digital World Fades, Will We Too?
Stone and paper are more lasting than a hard drive. Our digital memory is fragile, might we lose a history of our present in the future?
Anthropologists and archeologists who explore humanity’s past are re-writing much of what we believed to be true about how humans evolved and lived. Advances in genetics and other sciences are helping us to understand our history better than ever before. It is wonderful.
But a few thousand years from now, perhaps just several hundred, our current Digital Age, if we might call it thus, may leave a yawning gap that has historians, anthropologists and archeologists wondering what happened.
It remains as expensive and toilsome today to carve words into stone as it did thousands of years ago. It costs nothing to smile into a camera and record a song on our phones. Whatever we do with these technologies, they are wafting, wanless and ephemeral. They are lost to time the moment we hit send or publish.
They might surmise that we entered an era where we stopped writing, reading, perhaps creating much of anything aside from colossal cities, should they dig them up. Some clues may well be found that we did indeed, have literature and art. They will only be mere glances of how we lived, what we loved, learned and sought.
There will be words on pages, here and there. As treasured in several hundred or several thousand years as the Dead Sea Scrolls of today. Ancient scrolls that we are using Artificial Intelligence today, to decipher, with wondrous success. But they too, may be lost again to the sands of time, perhaps never to be recovered.
This article is digital. It is stored on a server, to be recalled in an instant on a phone, tablet or computer screen, to be listened to even. Perhaps, with the advancements in video created by Artificial Intelligence, Medium will enable one to create a prompt that turns an article into a video story as well? That’s quite interesting.
But it all can be gone in an instant. A massive solar flare that wipes out all the hard drives around the world? A computer virus that seeks out every digitally written article and deletes them in an instant.
We write, post, store our photos and videos with wild abandon, never thinking of the fragility of where they are stored. They are created now and that is all that matters to us. We live in the now, tomorrow and a yesterday beyond a few years is not of concern.
We wonder at the ancient scrolls, the Buddhist texts stored in mountain libraries at the ceiling of the world. Marvelling. They are there. Even if very few of us might ever read them. This is not so of most of what we create today. The swipe of a powerful magnet and those zeroes and ones, those bytes, bite the dust of history.
We are enamoured with all that our digital technologies give us. Enthralled in the cold digital embrace of our screens. Yet it is all scant and may be scattered deftly in the swoop of a solar flare. Lost in the aether of the dark matter of the universe.
Perhaps we ought not worry that much? For we may find the bones, teeth and skulls, the odd rune carvings, preserved scrolls and artefacts of our ancestors today, but we do not really know their dalliances, their true desires. We guess, we theorize, we muse.
In the preserved hieroglyphs of the ancient Egyptians and frescos of the Romans and the Greeks, we can tell of rituals, religions and respites, but not much more. We may record with glee on some social media channel that wondrous breakfast we had today, but that will not be there in millennia either.
All that we create digitally is silicon and silicon comes from sand and sand is always shifting, like humanity. Evolving and mutable.
Or perhaps, we may suddenly find that we can keep it all. Horde all that we create in the binary of ones and zeroes. Perhaps, as we are discovering, we will eschew sand, silicone, and we will store it all in DNA. We might encode who we are as humans within our bodies, every human born carrying all that knowledge. Today, to store what it means to be human is expensive and takes much space. What if it didn’t?
Perhaps in a thousand years, our future generations may simply call up a DNA code, a genetic sequence and they may laugh at our silly videos? They may read my words and yours and they may wonder.
Perhaps it will not be what is etched in stone, but rather what is etched in our DNA that helps us to know what it means, what it meant, to be human and perhaps, we will see something ever more wondrous and amazing in looking back so far that we can look ahead so far too?