Remember
There is a proverb that I've heard several times now which states that every human dies twice: the first when you stop breathing forever, and the second when your name is last mentioned forever. I don't know the exact source of this proverb, and Internet sources seem to disagree on its origin, but it has really stuck with me. In mid-February 2018, I had the opportunity to watch the 2017 Pixar movie Coco, and it too revolved around a central concept where you die twice: first when your body stops living and second when the last person on Earth who remembers you forgets about you. One of the characters in the film made clear the inevitability of both forms of death: it happens to everyone eventually.
In some sense, this post is a sequel to a different post I wrote a couple years ago called "Eternity". In that post, I talked about a scenario in which you are allowed to live eternally, but no one else. What made this scary for me was the eternity. Throughout life, we form bonds with people, connections like friendship and love that are not easily broken and are sorrowfully lost. Death is one powerful way we can lose these kinds of connections, and when you are the only person who can escape death, a cycle of building bonds and losing them forms. Your parents, your friends, your spouse, your siblings, your children – these are all people whom you might hold dear in life for a time, but you will have to let them go eventually. You might make new friends, marry new people, have new kids – but they too will pass away eventually. This cycle of making new friends, falling in love again, and watching them all pass away – it feels a lot like you are leaving one life and entering a new one. You will have completely new friends, new families, and new relationships. Wait a hundred years, then wipe the slate clean and restart. Your brain, however, can only hold so much information. You will have so many good memories with these friends and loved ones that eventually, your brain will reach its capacity. You will have to forget.
At first, it might be little bits and pieces. To step out of our hypothetical context momentarily: our brains are doing this already on a daily basis. Our brains take in massive amounts of information and only store the most essential parts in long-term memory. Back when you were a child in elementary school, you might have had a really good time at some event – a water-balloon fight or a party perhaps – but as you got older and got to experience so many more good times, it's certainly possible you might forget that one small good time you had in elementary school.
Returning to our hypothetical context, we have all of eternity to work with. As you develop so many more friendships throughout your life, it is likely, perhaps hundreds of years down the road, you might forget entire friendships. After all, your life would be filled with so many more friendships – one friendship you had early in your life might start to feel like that one good time you had in elementary school. Moreover, as this cycle of making new friends, families, and relationships iterates over and over again, it's plausible that, many thousands of years down the road, you might even forget entire sequences of this cycle, entire "lives" you lived. After all, the people you knew will have faded out of memory just as the Ancient Egyptians and those lived before them have from our memories. Historians might remember things that people from that time period accomplished – the Great Pyramid of Giza, for example – but we do not remember who those people were: all the little quirks about their personalities, their laughter, their friendships, their troubles, their strengths, their weaknesses.
But memory is not the only place where the past exists. Over the summer last year, I read George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (published in 1949). It is arguably Orwell's most famous work, as it remains incredibly relevant today as technology increasingly automates our lives. There was one particular scene which struck me deeply. In the scene, one of the antagonists in the book asks the protagonist metaphysical questions about the past. Namely, does the past exist "concretely" in space? Is there a place, somewhere out there, where the past is happening? The protagonist answers, "No." Where, then, does it exist? In two places, the protagonist replies: in the memory and in records, where it is written down. From this, the antagonist proceeds to conclude that if you can change both people's memories and the written records, then you can change the past – a denial of the existence of objective reality.
Nineteen Eighty-Four is a work of satire, so I don't think Orwell really meant to contend that objective reality is nonexistent. He probably just meant to point out the absurdity of this view as a means to satirize government overreach. I think Orwell did make a good point, however, in his description of where the past exists: both in memory and in records. Accordingly, if you live eternally, one way you might indirectly remember those cycles of your life is by recording your life: keeping a vivid diary, a photo album, a video library, a blog. For as long as they are preserved, these records would allow you to be reminded of the elements of your past lives even after you have forgotten about them. (Technically, there is a third place where the past exists: your consciousness! This is because it takes time for light and sound to travel through space and be processed by your senses. While for most practical purposes on Earth, this time is negligible, it becomes extremely significant for astronomers looking up into the sky.)
This is precisely what makes me excited to be living in the early twenty-first century, where we are actively developing means of storing and transmitting information with unprecedented ease. To illustrate, the original copy of the United States Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776, at what is now known as Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was written on parchment, a type of writing material made from animal skin. Today, the original copy of the Declaration sits in the National Archives under intense protection in order to preserve its fragile centuries-old material for as long as possible. The text is incredibly faded; I could barely read it at all when I saw it in 2012 as part of my eighth grade field trip to Washington, DC. If this is how the document looks after just a few centuries, how will it look several millennia from now? Will it even still exist? The great thing is, it won't have to. Throughout the time the Declaration has been legible, people have made innumerable copies of the document and have distributed it for all to read. With the advent of computers, the Internet, and electronic information storage devices such as hard drives, we now have the ability to store the text of the Declaration of Independence cheaply, safely, and perpetually. True, hard drives have a finite lifespan, but there are so many copies of the Declaration on so many hard drives, each having the ability to communicate with other hard drives, that this is not really a worry; if one hard drive fails, we can be sure there's another one that still has the information.
Previously, the most analogous means of accurately storing information in perpetuity was books. The text of the Judaeo-Christian Bible, for instance, has managed to be preserved for millennia because it has been copied and transmitted so many times. However, as physical objects, books are much more expensive to create and copy than data stored on a hard drive. Furthermore, for many centuries, people had to copy books entirely by hand, since modern devices such as the printing press had not yet been invented. The ease that we have in the twenty-first century of storing and copying gigabytes of information (one letter of the English alphabet can be stored in 1 byte, so 1 gigabyte stores about 1 billion letters) within seconds would seem eminently luxurious to scribes in the Middle Ages, who spent months copying and translating books that weren't more than a few megabytes long (the Christian Bible is about 3.5 million letters long, or 3.5 megabytes of information).
It is this immense ability for technology to preserve which draws me to projects such as the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Websites also do not live forever; individual pages on a website might get changed or moved to different addresses, or if a website isn't concerned much about archiving its history, its content might get deleted over time, no longer directly accessible. Most of us who have spent time on the Internet have probably experienced this phenomenon: you're reading an old article published several years ago that includes a link to an external website, but when you click the link, you're taken to an error page, stating that the browser or server was unable to find the resource you were requesting. The Wayback Machine is designed to help mitigate some of these problems. As I'm writing this, the Wayback Machine holds archived versions of over 310 billion webpages. Type a website into the search bar – you'll be able to see how the website has changed with time. This is especially useful when the website no longer exists today. It is a window into Internet past.
Scientists are currently doing research into the biological processes that cause aging – that is, the gradual reduction of the ability of the body to perform its everyday biological functions with time, which increases the risk of death. Every now and then, I read articles about how someday in the future (I remember seeing one, most likely sensationalized, which claimed as early as 2050), humans will no longer have to worry about biological aging as leading to increased risks of death because we will have developed means of controlling aging. The idea is not completely far-fetched. In 2017, I watched a TED Talk given by biologist Elizabeth Blackburn, who studies telomeres, little "caps" at the end of chromosomes which protect genetic material from harm. As humans age, these telomeres grow shorter and shorter, and eventually, the telomeres are so critically short that they prevent the cell from dividing to form new cells – one of the effects of aging observed in elderly individuals.
Blackburn received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2009 for her work on telomeres, particularly the discovery of telomerase, a compound that has the ability to replenish an animal's supply of telomeres. Of course, there's still much to be researched about how we can utilize telomerase to improve human health, but I think it is a good illustration of the notion that human control over aging may not be entirely science fiction at some point the future. Perhaps one day, humans will no longer have to worry about dying of "old age", as it were. In other words, what if age became irrelevant to one's likelihood of dying? There are innumerable serious consequences, some of which are as yet inconceivable. However, one consequence is that an individual who manages to stay healthy might conceivably live over several hundreds of years old, while observing old friends and family drifting away, new friends and family coming in. Sound familiar?
As someone who hasn't even lived for 20 years yet, many things are still moving fairly quickly for me. Not more than nine years ago, I was still in elementary school. All this time, I've always had a forward-thinking mentality: elementary school prepared me for middle school, middle school prepared me for high school, high school prepared me for college, and college is preparing me to enter the workforce. However, I believe I am reaching a point where it is healthy for me to look not just to the future, but also to the present and the past.
Look around you. You have friends and family surrounding you who love you, who enjoy spending time with you. Thousands of years from now, it is possible that no one will remember who they were. But it is also possible, through our amazing technological innovations, that records of our lives will be preserved in an unprecedented way. We are entering an era of human history where many of us have access to a camera right in our pockets, the pictures of which can be saved onto recording devices that can store and transmit information effortlessly and indefinitely. Perhaps thousands of years from now, a curious individual need only to look into the archives – similar perhaps to today's Internet Archive – to find out who we were: all the little quirks about our personalities, our laughter, our friendships, our troubles, our strengths, our weaknesses. Through our technology, we will be remembered in a way that no other generation of human history ever has. The question is shifting from "will we be remembered?" to something more profound.
How do we want to be remembered?