What’s Left in the End
I’m a pessimistic optimist — pessimistic in the long run, optimistic in the short.
There is a man, an artist by the name of Hirst, who created an artwork entitled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. He rendered it as a giant dead shark immersed in a tank of formaldehyde.
A recent advance in archiving makes me think ahead not just beyond the shark’s death and my own, but thousands of year ahead. The entire history of the planet, all books ever published, all images and descriptions of cultural artifacts, the entire contents of all libraries, even all Amtrak schedules ever issued, all Macy’s and Sears catalogs, all videos on youtube and all movies ever produced in Hollywood and elsewhere, even Borges’s complete works which includes a short story on an infinite library, and even if we included the contents of all books that were destroyed in the infamous fire of the Library in Alexandria in the year 273 AD, and the two big fires before that, one of which was set by Julius Cesar — all this can be condensed and stored in a box not larger that a shoebox with this new fabulous technology.
All bits of information, basically zeros and ones, are encoded by a sequence of bases on DNA. DNA is just so small that a speck barely visible might be sufficient to take care of the cultural heritage of Romania.
So now this is the scary part: What if in the end, because of the stupidity of the human race, whose trajectory is easy to extrapolate from all the data recently accumulated, there is nothing left but a shoebox full of DNA in a steel safe — buried in Brussels, for instance. It would just be sitting there, waiting for some visitor to open it and figure out how to read it with a sequence analyzer that he would have to custom-build, and then make sense of it with the help of his fellow travelers. The way the sequence analyzer has to be built is included as a README on the DNA.
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