Tag: totalhistory

DNA memory

When stored on most conventional storage devices—USB pens, DVDs, or magnetic tapes—data starts to degrade after 50 years or so. DNA could hold data error-free for millennia, thanks to the inherent stability of its double helix and Reed-Solomon codes. If kept in the clement European air outside their laboratory in Zurich, they estimate a ballpark figure of around 2000 years. But place these glass beads in the dark at -18C, the conditions of the Svalbard Global Seed Bank on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, and you could save your photos, music, and eBooks for 2M.

and using CRISPR to store movies:

We use the CRISPR–Cas system to encode the pixel values of black and white images and a short movie into the genomes of a population of living bacteria. In doing so, we push the technical limits of this information storage system and optimize strategies to minimize those limitations. They also uncover underlying principles of the CRISPR–Cas adaptation system, including sequence determinants of spacer acquisition that are relevant for understanding both the basic biology of bacterial adaptation and its technological applications. This work demonstrates that this system can capture and stably store practical amounts of real data within the genomes of populations of living cells.

another approach:

Roswell is bringing the $100 genome that can scale rapidly and also deliver Exabyte data storage.

Corpse-generated content

While you’re still alive, you set up a profile page on the site, including text, pictures, and videos, and then after you croak the URL is released to your family or friends. You might, for instance, offer instructions for what to do about your ashes or how to interpret your will, or provide a list of your financial accounts and passwords, or just post a video telling everyone what you really think of them.

a desire to stick around by any means possible is old as sentience. this will greatly help the rapid adoption of total history.

World Tree

MyHeritage eventually hopes to have 3B profiles, including people who’ve passed away. And at that point the family relationship between any 2 people in the world is just a mouse click away.

2012-05-26: I suspect we’ll be able to construct a family tree of all humans who ever lived in the next 50 years. Once you combine billions of complete DNA with data mining, you can predict how long ago any given mutation occurred. Genetics dictates which mutations dominated in what ways. Extract enough DNA from human remains to interpolate. the genographic project is a small step in that direction

2022-03-10:

The study integrated data on modern and ancient human genomes from eight different databases and included a total of 3609 individual genome sequences from 215 populations. The ancient genomes included samples found across the world with ages ranging from 1 ka to 100 ka. The algorithms predicted where common ancestors must be present in the evolutionary trees to explain the patterns of genetic variation. The resulting network contained 27m ancestors.

After adding location data on these sample genomes, the authors used the network to estimate where the predicted common ancestors had lived. The results successfully recaptured key events in human evolutionary history, including the migration out of Africa.

Total history

Where total history comes to the layperson.

We’ve had agriculture for ~12 ka, towns for 10 ka, and writing for ~5 ka. But we’re still living in the dark ages leading up to the dawn of history. Don’t we have history already, you ask? Well actually, we don’t. We know much less about our ancestors than our descendants will know about us. Indeed, we’ve acquired bad behavioral habits – because we’re used to forgetting things over time. In fact, collectively we’re on the edge of losing the ability to forget.

2012-05-06: The transcribed Life. It may already be possible to have your smartphone record every sound it can pick up, and transcribe it continuously. What are the implications when you can search your words and those you interact with?
2013-11-23: Before and after. Meanwhile, someone taped 35 years of TV

Total history is something we haven’t experienced yet. I expect to live long enough to be lifelogging, but my first 40 or 50 years are going to be very poorly documented, mere gigabytes of text and audio to document decades of experience. What I can be fairly sure of is that our descendants’ relationship with their history is going to be very different from our own, because they will be able to see it with a level of depth and clarity that nobody has ever experienced before. Meet your descendants. They don’t know what it’s like to be involuntarily lost, don’t understand what we mean by the word “privacy”, and will have access (sooner or later) to a historical representation of our species that defies understanding. They live in a world where history has a sharply-drawn start line, and everything they individually do or say will sooner or later be visible to everyone who comes after them, forever.

2017-04-11: Truth

2023-02-24: Others are thinking about the implications, now with a LLM lens

Sooner or later, every single conversation I have will be recorded and transcribed and I’ll be able to look back at it later – details from a phone call with the bank, in the hardware store asking a question, someone mentions a book at the pub, an idea in a workshop. Ignoring the societal consequences for a sec lol ahem… how should the app to manage all that chatter work?

Web revisionism

One of the reasons some alert readers noticed the change and were able to prove it – was that Google had archived the pages before the change occurred. Now that all of the White House pages about Iraq are no longer archived by Google, such historical revisionism will be harder to catch.

Integrity-preserving services like archive.org become more important all the time. Ideally distributed, anonymous and secure, to make it impossible to purge anything from the record.