At some point in the future, you’ll
be able to back-up your brain on a machine and ensure that you never die. Your brain will live on a machine and might
be able to be transferred back to a body. But if you die before this brain back-up technology is developed, you
won’t be around to experience that world or to experience immortality.
Unless … unless we can recreate you
somehow.
Question: with the thousands of
letters he wrote, could we recreate Thomas Jefferson? Maybe.
Now look at
people that blog often and write lots of emails. Could we recreate them? More likely. Especially bloggers like Danah Boyd that
really inject their personality into their blogs. Even more importantly, save your IMs as they
might really reveal your personality.
So the next
time your spouse/mother/friend gets mad at you for spending all your time in
front of your computer just remind them that this time will potentially extend
your life (or help you live forever).
Physicist Frank Tipler has speculated that at the Big Crunch, all light information will reconvene in one spot, and an intelligent supercomputer will be able to reconstitute all past beings based extrapolations of this information. It doesn’t look like this will work for a number of reasons, but it was an interesting idea.
Clickstream Immortality
Auren has a provocative post on the digital footprint one creates while communicating: your blog posts, emails, IMs, etc. He contends:Question: with the thousands of letters he wrote, could we recreate Thomas Jefferson? Maybe. Now look at people that blog