The other day, some scientists casually announced that they found a way to encode 360 Terabytes into crystal in a format that would last for 14 billion years. You can read about it here in Popular Mechanics.
As someone who’s read way more than 300 science fiction novels (I’m a nerd), this discovery is one of the most significant events in human history.
Why?
Can you imagine if all of the knowledge of the lost Library of Alexandria was available to us now – even a slice? Or if you could have an understanding of Zheng He’s exploration fleet that made Columbus look like some guy in a kayak?
When the Internet was created, the most common joke called back to the impossibility of actually finding anything you needed, despite having access to the wealth of human knowledge. Google has been solving that.
But when we project out into the future, most of our storage mediums are lacking. In 1,000 years, no one will have a clue what a floppy disc is. Or Blue-Ray. Or USB. Now, we can barely scratch the surface of history. Much of scifi explores the notion of gaps in future human history.
We regularly make discoveries of obscure but significant experiences from history that have been lost in time. Recently, a lost piece of Mozart’s was played for the first time in recent history… One created with his Nemesis.
The epic rivalry between Mozart and Salieri was recently illuminated by a collaboration between them. A (kind of awful) collaboration that was intended as a “feel better” card for someone in the court. Epic history? Not really, but it helps breathe some life into the past.
So, we can hear music that hasn’t been heard for hundreds of years, simply from the data in a piece of paper.
We can also taste food and drink from thousands of years ago, if we de-crypt their instructions – old recipes. For example, if you’d like, you can make beer from 1,800 BC using a Sumerian Beer recipe found in this paper. It’s highly unlikely that the taste will be similar to a Bud Light, or anything we’ve tasted lately.
Did you know that traditional Italian food has no tomatoes? They came from South America. An Amazon purchase of an old Roman cookbook has dishes that none of us readers have likely tasted. I’m still having difficulty imagining what Italian food would be like without tomato sauce… (Wait… Italians didn’t invent noodles either?!)
We will never know all the incredible things that we don’t know. All of the secrets hidden in the past. One or two will occasionally make themselves known. But for the most part, we’re lost in the mist.
It’s nice to know that in 1 billion years, someone might still know how to make Kraft Dinner with Tomatoes.
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