I've written about this before, but the idea of storing human-made data for longer than the lifetime of the individual is quite interesting and it's been mulling around my head for many years now. Of course it's extremely egotistic to want one's information to perpetuate after one's death, but this isn't a new phenomenon - the Great Pyramid at Giza is a fine example of this. I can't get away from the idea, though, that I'd like information about me to be available after I die. It's a kind of foresight that many people don't seem interested in. I've said before that I'd like my great-grandchildren to be able to read my blog or see pictures of me. I imagine this will happen whether I like it or not, but if I can somehow control the storage of my data for perpetuity it would be pleasing.
This is very difficult to achieve due to the requirements of data storage as we know it. Imagine I wanted to keep electronic information safe. It would need some kind of device that takes electrical power. Any storage mechanisms we know that are non-power based don't last very long.
So where is the electricity going to come from in 100 years to power this computer? Can I leave an amount of money in the bank that will earn interest to keep it going? What happens if, at some point, humanity develops free energy or wipes itself out in a viral pandemic? How will the computer survive?
Why would I want it to survive? What's special about me? Well not much except that I'm conceiving the idea so perhaps I warrant the idea to be saved. Or similar ones.
What about other people's ideas? What if our society does die out in the next few hundred years. Would we want our species' ideas to be saved for future ET wandering the galaxy in search of the best ideas from creatures around the universe. In the galactic museum of the future would we want the best of humanity to sit next to other beings' exemplars? I think we would.
How, then, do we preserve data over much longer spans of time? We could put a solar powered device on the moon and upload via lasers from Earth. It's out of reach of pesky humans at the moment, but for how long? How about Mars (newly being explored as I write)? We could blast hard disks out into the void, but in reality it's quite hard to make things that can escape the sun let alone Jupiter or any of the other local solar systems.
These aren't really long-term solutions. Instead of thinking in human limits we could start to think outside the constraints of our planet and homely corner of the galaxy.
I was looking forward very much to the recent movie Prometheus. I haven't been to the cinema for about 10 years since acquiring an aversion to the ghastly experience people seem to love these days: crappy food seems more important that the experience of seeing the film; people's individual right to crinkle packets through the movie outweighs the cinematic experience that I relished when I was young. It's a shame and thankfully I'm not the only one to notice this (Mark Kermode recently started a campaign).
Anyway the point is that I wanted to see this movie so much I actually booked tickets to the local flicks! It was a slightly disappointing film although still very enjoyable. My favourite scene is the very first one - the humanoid destroying himself to spill the DNA-seed onto the planet and thereby create the Earth we know today - teeming with life. This is, in particular, a highly implausible concept since it does away with the idea of evolution and doesn't quite work scientifically, however the idea is wonderful and not new at all. Scott Adams had a lovely theory about a distant alien child's science project being the creation of a molecule that could replicate and evolve; this therefore being the origins of our species and an interesting take on the God idea. To take it further why couldn't the child's project be the creation of an entire universe populated with particularly weird particles and energy that interacts in a certain way that ends up creating the features of matter than would allow coagulation and interaction thereby ultimately leading to our planet and ourselves?
Again as an alternative why couldn't the over-arching container created by this distant and unfathomably complex creature be a computer simulation? I've blogged about this before too and it's one of my favourites, but, at the moment, there's no way to prove that none of these theories are not true.
Combining some of these ideas I came to the conclusion that our species and all life that does exist and has ever existed on our planet is part of a data storage mechanism from some other being that may or not still pay attention to us. A million years ago a society with extremely advanced technological abilities compared with ours of today in a distant corner of the galaxy created a mechanism to store their data in perpetuity. They encoded all their information about them: their history, their ideas and dreams into a structure lying underneath what we perceive of as life on this planet.
You could take this idea further, as previously, and say that this race of beings encoded their data into the very structure of the universe as we perceive it. The atoms, quarks, bosons and the gravity and other forces we register with our senses and machines is their data. We perceive it as something else, but this is only because we haven't realised it yet.
The idea that we're just cogs in someone else's machine is certainly not new either and is both appealing and horrifying. Still, it's just an idea... right? Bit of a wacky one for sure, but if our species had the technology wouldn't we do the same? We already engineer molecules and we've only been at it for 50 years. What will we be able to do in 1,000? If non-human, supremely intelligent creatures exist in the universe then why wouldn't they do the same?
Of course this doesn't explain how you can save information across universes. There is the Cyclic Model of universe creation and destruction that says that our universe expands and contracts forever and each time it contracts all the energy becomes crushed into another big bang situation. How could data be maintained over successive cycles? We would need to encode data into the very energy itself or find some way to project information out of the universe. All mad ideas and bordering on religious, but certainly interesting.
Not wishing to jinx anything, but I hope to be accepted onto a MSc by Dissertation course at Essex University starting in a few weeks. I have found an excellent supervisor who is willing to help me with a year-long research project. This would be extremely exciting to me and would allow me to take some time from work to concentrate on the things that I care more about and want to pursue academically and as a "career" if possible. Computational Pragmatics is the field and not doubt I'll be writing about this in future to. Wish me luck!
