February 10, 2016 • 29 mins
In one way or another we’re all trying to transcend death, whether it’s through an “I was here” graffiti scrawl or an e-epic-length autobiography. In this episode we look at our attempts to achieve immortality – through objects that we store in time capsules, and through the information we store in the avatars we build of ourselves.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From how stuff works dot com. This is the Stuff
of Life. I'm Julie Douglas, host of the Stuff of Life,
a podcast that teases a part the tales we tell,
because when we crack open a story and look inside,
we see the seeds of what make our world so maddening,
(00:22):
so strange, and so achingly beautiful and at times ridiculous.
The Stuff of Life is a podcast about how we're
all just getting by, learning and surviving through stories we share.
Today's story is about achieving immortality, the idea that in
stories we transcend death, whether it's an I was here,
(00:43):
graffiti scrawl, or an epic length autobiography. In this way,
we humans try to build out eternity. We pass on
our genes, we record our stories, and we make and
collect objects as evidence of our existence. For our first
look into building as Trinity will time travel back to
historian Paul Hudson to the Crypt of Civilization, the most
(01:07):
famous time capsule You've never heard of, which holds, among
other things, these objects, one container of beer, about one quarter,
one plastic bird, one plastic ash train, one beetle, plastic ornament, ample,
one benny makeup mirror. There's controversy about these things that
I've never thought about. Some people didn't want Donald Duck
(01:30):
in there because well, Donald Duck is not wearing pants.
Then we'll meet Marius Ursake, the co founder of the
site Eternomy, a site where you can preserve your memories, photos,
your social media footprint in an eternal avatar. Right now,
the only way to donod our memories is by actually
(01:53):
writing these if we don't have get a cable to
blog into our heads and bollowed everything. And finally we'll
talk to our crew here at how stuff works about
what they want to be remembered for an instagram of
the pancakes they made. Probably not, I mean, we certainly
narrativise our own lives. We we organized the events in
(02:13):
our lives into a coherent story that we sort of
model on the arcs of characters and the stories that
we read and watching movies. When I think of time capsules,
I think back to grade school in Michigan one cold
spring morning, when our class gathered around the school flagpole
(02:34):
and ceremoniously lowered a container filled with lucky rabbits, foots,
school portraits, and scraps of paper documenting our hopes and dreams.
It seemed like a momentous occasion, like one day we
would be discovered. Little did my third grade self know
that I was participating in a ritual popularized by Thornwell Jacobs,
(02:58):
the father of the modern time capsule and the creator
of the Crypt of Civilization. Jacobs wasn't just forward thinking,
but a millenarian, someone who stared deep into the future,
hoping someday someone may stare back, specifically someone in the
year who stumbles upon the crypt of Civilization, a possibility
(03:23):
simply because Jacobs thought this that nothing is too beautiful
to happen in life, and um so he didn't know,
but he hoped that somehow someone would open the you know,
the Crypto Civilization and really get a good idea of
just what things were like. I am Paul Stephen Hudson.
(03:45):
I am professor of history at Georgia Perimeter College in Atlanta,
and also I'm co founder of the International Time Capsule Society.
For Paul, the discovery of the crypt led to a
lifelong passion for the things that people preserve of I
first encountered it around nineteen seventy. I was an undergraduate
(04:05):
at Oldthorpe University in nineteen seventy. It was kind of
a distressed university. The buildings were almost these beautiful shells,
but that particular building where the crypt was, there was
only one story operational in the other stories, and the
basement where the crypt is we're sealed off. But I
(04:27):
was exploring and really in a place I shouldn't have been.
I'm not sure how I got there, but I got
to where the crypt was, and it was a sealed
off area. It was dark, and I had a flashlight
and I was just looking at things, and um, then
I saw this stainless steel door with this message on
it about I really didn't quite know what it was.
(04:50):
And there were cobwebs on the door and so forth,
and I thought, what is this? The crypt is located
on the bottom floor of a phoebe Hearst Hall, gone
or the cobwebs. There even a plaque with an explanation
that the content is placed inside in Ny will remain
hermetically sealed until the year. But still there's little fanfare
(05:10):
about this subterranean time capsule, and the casual visitor could
easily glide by jacobs heroic attempt to catalog civilization. He
was inspired by the Pyramids. Um, we have pictures of it.
That's a sealed chamber. It looks the way you would
imagine a pyramid chamber to look like. It's just literally
cluttered with artifacts. But there's a kind of order, you know,
(05:31):
in the storage of them. But Dr Jacobs and he
um he was a millinarian. He thought in terms of
thousands of years, and to him, six thousand years really
wasn't that long. There was six thousand years ago with
the Pyramids, why not six thousand years into the future.
Like red we are all interested in the future. All
(05:54):
that is where you and I are going to spend
the rest. Imagine a room twenty feet long, ten ft
high and ten ft wide stuffed with artifacts. We're talking
about painstakingly preserved micro films of eight hundred works of literature,
more than six hundred and forty pages, including the Koran,
the Bible, and the Iliad, not to mention musical and
(06:16):
historical recordings and films. And then there are the objects themselves.
One set, Lionel, model train, six cars, one track, one
cigarette holder, one model air things that would represent a
cross section of daily life for someone living in everything
from dental floss and false eyelashes, two shot glasses, and
typewriters and toasters. But the most important object inside is
(06:40):
something called the language integrator. The idea is that six
thousand years from now, English will be obsolete, and the
language integrator will help decode the contents of the crypt
You turn a wheel and then it plays a record,
and the very first item you see as apple, and
then you hear the word apple, and it's It's based
(07:03):
on an old cryptographical language from World War One called
Basic English. It has about five thousand words. But what
Dr Jacobs and the organizers hoped is that would be
the key to the English language. And like the Rosetta Stone,
you know, that's what helped archaeologists really understand what the
pyramids were all about. The problem is, you know, whoever
(07:29):
opens this time capsule or finds it, they probably won't
know what it's all about. Because we're also complex, and
it's really kind of scatter shot. You might ask yourself,
if you were doing a time capsule, what what would
you put in it? Or you might give one answer
today in a different answer tomorrow. You're just sort of
defining yourself and and where you are, unless, of course,
(07:50):
the item is so recognizable, so valuable, that it transcends
the ages with that good taste or a good time
go ahead. The one thing that he was pretty sure
of though, and this was during the time of the
Egyptians as well, is that people would be drinking beer.
(08:12):
You know, the Egyptians were great beer drinkers. And everything
in the crypt was donated, and it was the Anheuser
Busch company that donated an ampule. If it is open
by an archaeologist or historian or someone else, um that
bud would be for them. The fascinating thing about time
(08:36):
capsules is that in an attempt to document our interest,
they also unwittingly document our anxieties. Among recordings about engineering
feats like the Panama Canal, there's a preoccupation with Adolf
Hitler in the rise of fascism, and while the Crypt
has frozen in time, many of the Harme works of
(08:58):
this particular era, it's hardly a true reflection of that society.
In fact, the Portrait of America in nine contains a
very large gap in knowledge. There are very few contributions
from African Americans, and one lone black doll becomes a
stand in for the rich multicultural heritage of the United States.
(09:19):
But all of this may be a moot point. After all,
how likely is it that when arrives the crypt will
actually be opened? He said he could no more imagine
that than chro magnant Man could comprehend the skyline in
New York, so he really didn't didn't know. Um Now,
(09:41):
I do think the artifacts will be preserved. I mean,
I'm just sort of guessing here. For one thing, I
doubt if there will. I hate to say it that
there will be in Atlanta or United States. I mean
it will be. It's an archaeological site, you know, projected,
you know, six thousand years into the future. So I
think the big question is not so much if the
(10:02):
artifacts will be preserved, but the big question is who
will know to open it, Which makes you wonder why
we extend ourselves into the future in the first place.
There's a kind of a naive optimism that someone who
does a time capsule has. I think no noble effort
is in vain. That was one of Dr Jacob's favorite
(10:25):
things here. You know, whether it's opened or not, it
does show that you really care about your fellow men
and woman. And and somehow you want to reach out
to them. Paul has been all over the world and
(10:48):
he's seen a lot of time capsules, but his idea
of a time capsule isn't just a container stored away,
but other ways that we reach into the future. A
grandparents letter, the voyage are golden records hurling out to
space containing the sounds and images of life on Earth.
A pregnant woman carrying a genetic code, one that can
(11:09):
move backward and forward in time. And it's this idea,
the ability to move forward and backward in time, that's
at the heart of what some e death companies are
trying to do. As artists in Hamilton's says, technology amplifies
human presence at a distance, and the company Attornemy aims
(11:30):
to amplify your data, your memories, thoughts, and emotions across time,
creating an immortal avatar of yourself, a digital simulacrum that
can exist in the past, present, in future. My name
is Mariossake, and I'm the CEO and founder of Attornemy,
and what we're trying to build at Atternomy is a
(11:51):
network of artificial intelligent avatars that would preserve people's thoughts,
stories and memories ideally forever. Mary has co founded the
site euternomy for a very personal reason, one we can
all relate to. My grandmother died after farting Alzheimer's for
three years, and her memories started fading the way during
(12:14):
those three years. But after she passed away, and after
we so I went to the whole reading process, I
realized that the only things I had left from her
were like plenty pictures more or less, ninety years of joy,
of sorrows, and experiences of various things that happened in
person's life are reduced to just a couple of photos
(12:35):
and memories that are eventually lost. Marius drew a major
influences from his life, from his love of sci fi
to whose experiments and technology to ask the question, what
if you could preserve someone's memories using artificial intelligence, allowing
people to access those memories, but also do it in
a meaningful way because differences like the ability to first
(12:59):
of all like informational person about the person during their lifetime,
So acting like a biographer. Because right now the problem
with other websites websites have collect your memories is that
you have to do a lot of like manual work,
uploading photos and do everything by yourself, or writing your biography,
which usually it's a pretty big task that people always
(13:24):
live for tomorrow. And in this way, a constellation of
data points begin to coalesce and tell a recognizable version
of you emerges all through your digital footprint and conversations
with your avatar. Think of the ability to timeline your life,
to have your avatar recalls specific memories for you. Marius
(13:47):
likens this avatar relationship to Tomagotchi, the handheld digital pet
that you interact with every day. The idea is the same.
The more you interact with your avatar, the more you
nurture it, and the more it begins to truly reflect
you and your thoughts in ten years and twenty years,
or you know, for the younger generation forty fifty years,
(14:07):
the amount of information that's going to be gathered on
top on everything that you already post on Facebook or
an email is going to be huge, and it's going
to be very useful in uh preserving as much of
that person's UH consciousness of personality or thoughts as possible. Also,
(14:31):
because I know some of you are wondering eternomy does
not want to build a robot out of your memories
and let it loose. We're not trying to create like
a clone, like a very lifelike clone. We're trying to
create something that offers a very easy interface to access
those memories. But it's going to be very clear that
that's not a copy of the person. It termly launched
(14:55):
its beta site in two thousand and fourteen and more
than thirty thousand people signed up. So who are they?
More than half of them are millennials and English speaking.
I think that first of all, these people have a
much richer digital footprints than all those generations because of
using so many online tools, and this percentage is only
going to be increasing in the future at global level.
(15:18):
Of millennials already used Facebook. To give you an example,
you see the picture emerging here. Attornemy appeals to people
who are already creating a digital bread trail of information,
and the website gives them a chance to make sense
of it, contextualize it in the form of a decades
long relationship with their biographer, this version of themselves. Think
(15:42):
of what this might do for the way that we
recall our memories. We actually forget more than of things
that happened plus every day, and the lot will also
help collect those kinds of information and stories and later
make it accessible if he wants to we call it.
(16:03):
Of course, all of this is predicated on one thing
that we truly interact with our avatars, something Autnomy is
still trying to finesse with psychologists. At this stage. What
we've been most interested in is how to ask questions
and what kind of questions we would have to ask
people to engage them and make them like really interested
(16:26):
in collecting their memories. Marius gives these questions as an
example of the nuance needed when you begin your relationship
with your avatar. The question why did you decide to
become a doctor is intrusive compared to what were the
things that will lead you to choosing to become a doctor.
Some harder questions would be what are the things that
(16:47):
you want to be remembered for? And then there are
the intimate questions did you ever cheat on your partner?
How did it feel? The thing is that even though
at tournomy is meant to grant cyber immortality and reserve memories,
this day to day journaling of person's life is very
much rooted in the present. For us, it's more a
(17:09):
toll for the living person to be able to collect
the memories. So we're more focused on writing the story
of your life for and curating it from all sources,
and less about interfering with the grieving process. I think
(17:29):
it's important to understand that this is not just an
app This is something that in order to be able
to work as most people want, will take years, probably
even decades, because there's a lot of technology that's still
not yelped out there. But instead of like waiting for
(17:49):
that perfect moment where artificient just could be at that level,
which could be in five years, could be in ten years,
or could be in twenty years when that similarity moment
will be reached, we prefer to start working right now
because unfortunately a lot of the memories are dual appearing.
A lot of these things have happened to us. Every
day we forget. A lot of people pass away and
(18:10):
they take, uh, you know, away, all the memories and
everything about them. So we decided to start earlier to
focus on this, but we still have a long, long journey.
(18:32):
So this topic is pretty much mental catnip at how
stock works the place where I work, and in the
grand tradition of water cooler conversations, I put the idea
of cyber immortality to some of my coworkers, and here's
what they had to say about it. There's a beautiful
sort of historical database angle to it, right, Like there
will be history books written, for example, about things that
(18:54):
are happening in today's society. But when someone five years
from now, presuming we have maintained enough techno eology in
an ongoing way that we can keep these records updated,
is like what were like the hot topic issues of
the century, Like what really was the gun control debate about?
Like they could if you have a database where that
searchable and you could get five hundred strangers and read
(19:18):
things that they had all written about that, you're going
to get a really interesting and probably much more complete
picture than if someone just writes about it later based
on their own research. That's Holly Fry, a co host
of stuff you missed in history class. My first thing
that popped in my head when you had related to
us that he likened it to a tamagochi is can
you game the system to create a much better version
(19:40):
of yourself than you actually are like, could I only
upload photoshop files where I look really great? And could
I only include like the best of me in it?
As you know, if I'm the custodian of this record,
can I manipulate it in such a way that future
generations would be like, Man, that Holly Fry was amazing.
It's the grand tradition of how we celebrate death, right.
(20:03):
I mean, when you get up and give a eulogy
for somebody, you don't make notes of all the horrible
things they did and the reasons that lots of people
didn't like them. You remember the highlights of their life.
Here's Joe McCormick, a co host of stuff to blow
your mind. So yeah, I guess in death we try
to we try to emphasize the positive in the same
way that we do on our our social media profiles.
(20:26):
I think that this whole idea feels funny to me
personally on multiple levels. That Senior editor Alison Laddermilk, For one,
I mean, why am I compiling all my memories and
spending my time on that when I could be out
making new ones. So that's my first issue with this.
But I mean, as you can guess from that statement.
(20:48):
I'm not big on social media, like I just I
really don't tend to use it all that much. So
and this seems like a bit of a progression of that.
So so that I think that makes sense for me.
And then the other thing, guess that. I mean, yeah,
it's carefully curated like Facebook is. I mean, we present
our happy side. We feel they need to make a
fake Instagram account because we can't share, you know, like
(21:11):
the photo of us looking like a train wreck. It's
just we can't. Well, I mean, some people don't feel
like they're at liberty to do so, so they hide
it and they only invite their close friends for their
Instagram account. It just feels ridiculous to me. And I
mean that's just I think that a lot of people
would perpetuate that account of themselves just as very glossy
(21:32):
and it's bogus. It annoys me, it makes me mad.
The conversation, as you might expect, begins to veer towards
the what ifs. I'm thinking about the movie Strange Days.
Do you remember that film where you check the digital
I love that movie. I have no regrets admitting how
much I love that movie. For a variety of reasons,
(21:54):
but you could replay memories, like there was an apparatus
that let you relive memories that you would recorded. Angela said,
has this beautiful moment where she says, memories are supposed
to fade. Their designed that way for a reason. So
then I wonder if you have something like this that
you are working on, and you can, you know, then
several decades down the road look back and see exactly
(22:15):
the person you were in your twenties or your thirties,
will it then affect the way you progress in a
way that is unnatural versus how you would have just
progressed had you only had your human memories to work with.
I mean, we certainly narrativise our own lives. We we
organize the events in our lives into a coherent story
that we sort of model on the arcs of characters
(22:38):
and the stories that we read and watching movies and stuff.
And if we were to include all events in this narrative,
it wouldn't be a narrative, wouldn't be interesting. I mean,
it's only by selective memory that we construct a meaningful
arc for ourselves. So you know, while I did this
and this and this and that's how I got to
where I am today. But you're leaving out all kinds
of extraneous information nation. I mean, are are you more
(23:02):
concerned about telling the literal, correct cause and effect story
of your life or in telling a story the way
like a fiction writer would tell a story. I see
this creating weird factions of people in the future, Like
the next wave of division will be about how you
maintained your avatar online and what your parameters and your
(23:25):
ethos was around it. Wow. Yeah, I think you're right.
I think there will be an aesthetic that develops around it.
For sure. It'll be like the truth tellers and and
the gloss people, and it's sort of a science as
humanity split. Right, This gets us into the nitty gritty
(23:45):
of how you even begin to interact with your avatar.
You know, you want to start with your avatar sort
of like you would at a cocktail party. What do
you do? How's it going? You don't want to go
straight to have you ever killed anyone? It's doing? It's
doing the yawn stretch? What is that? Oh? In the
all of the movies from the fifties that you go
to the drive in and the guy yawns and stretches
(24:06):
and puts his arm around the girl. Yes, do you
know what I'm talking? Yes, it's just it's just I
think none of us had framed it in a dating
sort of way prior to that, so there was a
little bit of a I don't want to date myself.
Maybe some people do. I'm not judging, but you know,
it's but yeah, it's a kind of trust issue like that.
(24:27):
So maybe if it bakes me some cookies, I will
tell it more information. I just talked to it. Who's
the time I goche At that point, I would bore
it to death. It was be like this story again,
please rejected by my avatar. Yeah, so some of the
data trails you create could be mundane, but some of
(24:50):
it could be well troubling. Will you also get into
the realm of like legal issues like could they be
petitioned by a court or another legal entity to look
at somebody's stuff. There's which I'm sure they've thought about.
I mean, if they're putting together a company around it,
they probably have a legal team who has drawn up
some documents around this. But that's just a whole other
(25:12):
thing to consider. What if I do something terrible in
the future, and then somebody wants to look at look
at my history and try to figure out where it
all went wrong. Well, and then I just have my
pale blue dot moment. None of this matters anyway. We're
a spec you know, we're just creating so much data.
Now I did start actually just while you were talking.
(25:34):
Have some some breakthroughs here. It could provide a scientific benefit,
because maybe once we have tons and tons of data,
we could use some machine analysis to say, hey, is
there any correlation between people who make certain types of
posts and then people who die prematurely of certain diseases? Oh,
what do you know? People who take lots of selfies
(25:55):
are more likely to, uh, I don't know, have their
heads explode spontaneously on their fiftieth birthday. I mean that
would be useful knowledge that you could use for for
a real purpose, to achieve something. I guess. Oh, but
I automatically see it becoming horrifying and a business driver,
and then I'm like, oh it to be clear, eternomy
(26:15):
isn't interested in running ads against your emotions at all. Still,
the idea gets the group to thinking about the ability
to do it based on our experience with social media
and advertising. Maybe you're looking at pictures of your ex
partner who unceremoniously dumped you, and you start to get
a little misty eyed, and upcoms the hogandahs at and
(26:36):
you're like, I'm all over that, or the obvious would
just be one weird trick to stay young forever. Oh yeah,
this one spiky fruit and you will never die. You've
all had that dark moment where we've probably clicked on
something similar to that, right, No, me neither. I mean, ultimately,
(27:08):
this brings me to a more general question, which is
how do we want to be remembered and why do
we want to be remembered? What? What is the inherent
motivation to have people remember you in a certain way
after you die. It's a fair question. For some people,
it could be that you get to control your story,
You get to outline your life and make sense of it.
(27:30):
For others, it could be a way to vanquish death
if there's still some scrap of evidence of your existence,
are you really completely absent? That being said, attornemy is
such a fascinating tool and concept simply because beyond capturing
our digital movements and our active memories. It captures our imaginations.
(27:51):
After all, we're storytellers and we can't quite figure out
how this one is going to end. Thank you to
Marry Sasaki at Tournamy for showing us how each of
us has a hero's journey, a narrative to explain the
impossible slash possible paradox of our existence. Thanks to Paul
(28:13):
Headson for cracking open the crypt and letting us peer inside.
And thanks to How Stuff Works staff members Alison Loudermilk,
Joe McCormick, and Holly Fry. In our next episode, a
supplement to this one, we'll look at our relationship with objects,
the ones we include in time capsules and the ones
that are shoved away in a storage unit. We need
(28:36):
a certain amount of community and human interaction, but what
happens a lot of times with individuals is they've been
hurt so many times or have had trauma with people
that people become unsaved to them, so they turned to
objects instead. The Stuff of Life is written and co
produced by me Julie Douglas. Original music composition is by
(28:58):
co producer Noel Brown. An editorial oversight is provided by
head of prodiction Jerry Rowland. You can send your thoughts
to us at the stuff of life at how stuff
works dot com, and you can visit our Facebook page,
where we'll post some outtakes from our how Stuff Works roundtable,
including what imitations we'd like to be remembered for. I'm
(29:19):
very confused about this immortality issue. I find it upsetting,
but I love my children and I want them to
live forever.
From how stuff works dot com. This is the Stuff
of Life. I'm Julie Douglas, host of the Stuff of Life,
a podcast that teases a part the tales we tell,
because when we crack open a story and look inside,
we see the seeds of what make our world so maddening,
(00:22):
so strange, and so achingly beautiful and at times ridiculous.
The Stuff of Life is a podcast about how we're
all just getting by, learning and surviving through stories we share.
Today's story is about achieving immortality, the idea that in
stories we transcend death, whether it's an I was here,
(00:43):
graffiti scrawl, or an epic length autobiography. In this way,
we humans try to build out eternity. We pass on
our genes, we record our stories, and we make and
collect objects as evidence of our existence. For our first
look into building as Trinity will time travel back to
historian Paul Hudson to the Crypt of Civilization, the most
(01:07):
famous time capsule You've never heard of, which holds, among
other things, these objects, one container of beer, about one quarter,
one plastic bird, one plastic ash train, one beetle, plastic ornament, ample,
one benny makeup mirror. There's controversy about these things that
I've never thought about. Some people didn't want Donald Duck
(01:30):
in there because well, Donald Duck is not wearing pants.
Then we'll meet Marius Ursake, the co founder of the
site Eternomy, a site where you can preserve your memories, photos,
your social media footprint in an eternal avatar. Right now,
the only way to donod our memories is by actually
(01:53):
writing these if we don't have get a cable to
blog into our heads and bollowed everything. And finally we'll
talk to our crew here at how stuff works about
what they want to be remembered for an instagram of
the pancakes they made. Probably not, I mean, we certainly
narrativise our own lives. We we organized the events in
(02:13):
our lives into a coherent story that we sort of
model on the arcs of characters and the stories that
we read and watching movies. When I think of time capsules,
I think back to grade school in Michigan one cold
spring morning, when our class gathered around the school flagpole
(02:34):
and ceremoniously lowered a container filled with lucky rabbits, foots,
school portraits, and scraps of paper documenting our hopes and dreams.
It seemed like a momentous occasion, like one day we
would be discovered. Little did my third grade self know
that I was participating in a ritual popularized by Thornwell Jacobs,
(02:58):
the father of the modern time capsule and the creator
of the Crypt of Civilization. Jacobs wasn't just forward thinking,
but a millenarian, someone who stared deep into the future,
hoping someday someone may stare back, specifically someone in the
year who stumbles upon the crypt of Civilization, a possibility
(03:23):
simply because Jacobs thought this that nothing is too beautiful
to happen in life, and um so he didn't know,
but he hoped that somehow someone would open the you know,
the Crypto Civilization and really get a good idea of
just what things were like. I am Paul Stephen Hudson.
(03:45):
I am professor of history at Georgia Perimeter College in Atlanta,
and also I'm co founder of the International Time Capsule Society.
For Paul, the discovery of the crypt led to a
lifelong passion for the things that people preserve of I
first encountered it around nineteen seventy. I was an undergraduate
(04:05):
at Oldthorpe University in nineteen seventy. It was kind of
a distressed university. The buildings were almost these beautiful shells,
but that particular building where the crypt was, there was
only one story operational in the other stories, and the
basement where the crypt is we're sealed off. But I
(04:27):
was exploring and really in a place I shouldn't have been.
I'm not sure how I got there, but I got
to where the crypt was, and it was a sealed
off area. It was dark, and I had a flashlight
and I was just looking at things, and um, then
I saw this stainless steel door with this message on
it about I really didn't quite know what it was.
(04:50):
And there were cobwebs on the door and so forth,
and I thought, what is this? The crypt is located
on the bottom floor of a phoebe Hearst Hall, gone
or the cobwebs. There even a plaque with an explanation
that the content is placed inside in Ny will remain
hermetically sealed until the year. But still there's little fanfare
(05:10):
about this subterranean time capsule, and the casual visitor could
easily glide by jacobs heroic attempt to catalog civilization. He
was inspired by the Pyramids. Um, we have pictures of it.
That's a sealed chamber. It looks the way you would
imagine a pyramid chamber to look like. It's just literally
cluttered with artifacts. But there's a kind of order, you know,
(05:31):
in the storage of them. But Dr Jacobs and he
um he was a millinarian. He thought in terms of
thousands of years, and to him, six thousand years really
wasn't that long. There was six thousand years ago with
the Pyramids, why not six thousand years into the future.
Like red we are all interested in the future. All
(05:54):
that is where you and I are going to spend
the rest. Imagine a room twenty feet long, ten ft
high and ten ft wide stuffed with artifacts. We're talking
about painstakingly preserved micro films of eight hundred works of literature,
more than six hundred and forty pages, including the Koran,
the Bible, and the Iliad, not to mention musical and
(06:16):
historical recordings and films. And then there are the objects themselves.
One set, Lionel, model train, six cars, one track, one
cigarette holder, one model air things that would represent a
cross section of daily life for someone living in everything
from dental floss and false eyelashes, two shot glasses, and
typewriters and toasters. But the most important object inside is
(06:40):
something called the language integrator. The idea is that six
thousand years from now, English will be obsolete, and the
language integrator will help decode the contents of the crypt
You turn a wheel and then it plays a record,
and the very first item you see as apple, and
then you hear the word apple, and it's It's based
(07:03):
on an old cryptographical language from World War One called
Basic English. It has about five thousand words. But what
Dr Jacobs and the organizers hoped is that would be
the key to the English language. And like the Rosetta Stone,
you know, that's what helped archaeologists really understand what the
pyramids were all about. The problem is, you know, whoever
(07:29):
opens this time capsule or finds it, they probably won't
know what it's all about. Because we're also complex, and
it's really kind of scatter shot. You might ask yourself,
if you were doing a time capsule, what what would
you put in it? Or you might give one answer
today in a different answer tomorrow. You're just sort of
defining yourself and and where you are, unless, of course,
(07:50):
the item is so recognizable, so valuable, that it transcends
the ages with that good taste or a good time
go ahead. The one thing that he was pretty sure
of though, and this was during the time of the
Egyptians as well, is that people would be drinking beer.
(08:12):
You know, the Egyptians were great beer drinkers. And everything
in the crypt was donated, and it was the Anheuser
Busch company that donated an ampule. If it is open
by an archaeologist or historian or someone else, um that
bud would be for them. The fascinating thing about time
(08:36):
capsules is that in an attempt to document our interest,
they also unwittingly document our anxieties. Among recordings about engineering
feats like the Panama Canal, there's a preoccupation with Adolf
Hitler in the rise of fascism, and while the Crypt
has frozen in time, many of the Harme works of
(08:58):
this particular era, it's hardly a true reflection of that society.
In fact, the Portrait of America in nine contains a
very large gap in knowledge. There are very few contributions
from African Americans, and one lone black doll becomes a
stand in for the rich multicultural heritage of the United States.
(09:19):
But all of this may be a moot point. After all,
how likely is it that when arrives the crypt will
actually be opened? He said he could no more imagine
that than chro magnant Man could comprehend the skyline in
New York, so he really didn't didn't know. Um Now,
(09:41):
I do think the artifacts will be preserved. I mean,
I'm just sort of guessing here. For one thing, I
doubt if there will. I hate to say it that
there will be in Atlanta or United States. I mean
it will be. It's an archaeological site, you know, projected,
you know, six thousand years into the future. So I
think the big question is not so much if the
(10:02):
artifacts will be preserved, but the big question is who
will know to open it, Which makes you wonder why
we extend ourselves into the future in the first place.
There's a kind of a naive optimism that someone who
does a time capsule has. I think no noble effort
is in vain. That was one of Dr Jacob's favorite
(10:25):
things here. You know, whether it's opened or not, it
does show that you really care about your fellow men
and woman. And and somehow you want to reach out
to them. Paul has been all over the world and
(10:48):
he's seen a lot of time capsules, but his idea
of a time capsule isn't just a container stored away,
but other ways that we reach into the future. A
grandparents letter, the voyage are golden records hurling out to
space containing the sounds and images of life on Earth.
A pregnant woman carrying a genetic code, one that can
(11:09):
move backward and forward in time. And it's this idea,
the ability to move forward and backward in time, that's
at the heart of what some e death companies are
trying to do. As artists in Hamilton's says, technology amplifies
human presence at a distance, and the company Attornemy aims
(11:30):
to amplify your data, your memories, thoughts, and emotions across time,
creating an immortal avatar of yourself, a digital simulacrum that
can exist in the past, present, in future. My name
is Mariossake, and I'm the CEO and founder of Attornemy,
and what we're trying to build at Atternomy is a
(11:51):
network of artificial intelligent avatars that would preserve people's thoughts,
stories and memories ideally forever. Mary has co founded the
site euternomy for a very personal reason, one we can
all relate to. My grandmother died after farting Alzheimer's for
three years, and her memories started fading the way during
(12:14):
those three years. But after she passed away, and after
we so I went to the whole reading process, I
realized that the only things I had left from her
were like plenty pictures more or less, ninety years of joy,
of sorrows, and experiences of various things that happened in
person's life are reduced to just a couple of photos
(12:35):
and memories that are eventually lost. Marius drew a major
influences from his life, from his love of sci fi
to whose experiments and technology to ask the question, what
if you could preserve someone's memories using artificial intelligence, allowing
people to access those memories, but also do it in
a meaningful way because differences like the ability to first
(12:59):
of all like informational person about the person during their lifetime,
So acting like a biographer. Because right now the problem
with other websites websites have collect your memories is that
you have to do a lot of like manual work,
uploading photos and do everything by yourself, or writing your biography,
which usually it's a pretty big task that people always
(13:24):
live for tomorrow. And in this way, a constellation of
data points begin to coalesce and tell a recognizable version
of you emerges all through your digital footprint and conversations
with your avatar. Think of the ability to timeline your life,
to have your avatar recalls specific memories for you. Marius
(13:47):
likens this avatar relationship to Tomagotchi, the handheld digital pet
that you interact with every day. The idea is the same.
The more you interact with your avatar, the more you
nurture it, and the more it begins to truly reflect
you and your thoughts in ten years and twenty years,
or you know, for the younger generation forty fifty years,
(14:07):
the amount of information that's going to be gathered on
top on everything that you already post on Facebook or
an email is going to be huge, and it's going
to be very useful in uh preserving as much of
that person's UH consciousness of personality or thoughts as possible. Also,
(14:31):
because I know some of you are wondering eternomy does
not want to build a robot out of your memories
and let it loose. We're not trying to create like
a clone, like a very lifelike clone. We're trying to
create something that offers a very easy interface to access
those memories. But it's going to be very clear that
that's not a copy of the person. It termly launched
(14:55):
its beta site in two thousand and fourteen and more
than thirty thousand people signed up. So who are they?
More than half of them are millennials and English speaking.
I think that first of all, these people have a
much richer digital footprints than all those generations because of
using so many online tools, and this percentage is only
going to be increasing in the future at global level.
(15:18):
Of millennials already used Facebook. To give you an example,
you see the picture emerging here. Attornemy appeals to people
who are already creating a digital bread trail of information,
and the website gives them a chance to make sense
of it, contextualize it in the form of a decades
long relationship with their biographer, this version of themselves. Think
(15:42):
of what this might do for the way that we
recall our memories. We actually forget more than of things
that happened plus every day, and the lot will also
help collect those kinds of information and stories and later
make it accessible if he wants to we call it.
(16:03):
Of course, all of this is predicated on one thing
that we truly interact with our avatars, something Autnomy is
still trying to finesse with psychologists. At this stage. What
we've been most interested in is how to ask questions
and what kind of questions we would have to ask
people to engage them and make them like really interested
(16:26):
in collecting their memories. Marius gives these questions as an
example of the nuance needed when you begin your relationship
with your avatar. The question why did you decide to
become a doctor is intrusive compared to what were the
things that will lead you to choosing to become a doctor.
Some harder questions would be what are the things that
(16:47):
you want to be remembered for? And then there are
the intimate questions did you ever cheat on your partner?
How did it feel? The thing is that even though
at tournomy is meant to grant cyber immortality and reserve memories,
this day to day journaling of person's life is very
much rooted in the present. For us, it's more a
(17:09):
toll for the living person to be able to collect
the memories. So we're more focused on writing the story
of your life for and curating it from all sources,
and less about interfering with the grieving process. I think
(17:29):
it's important to understand that this is not just an
app This is something that in order to be able
to work as most people want, will take years, probably
even decades, because there's a lot of technology that's still
not yelped out there. But instead of like waiting for
(17:49):
that perfect moment where artificient just could be at that level,
which could be in five years, could be in ten years,
or could be in twenty years when that similarity moment
will be reached, we prefer to start working right now
because unfortunately a lot of the memories are dual appearing.
A lot of these things have happened to us. Every
day we forget. A lot of people pass away and
(18:10):
they take, uh, you know, away, all the memories and
everything about them. So we decided to start earlier to
focus on this, but we still have a long, long journey.
(18:32):
So this topic is pretty much mental catnip at how
stock works the place where I work, and in the
grand tradition of water cooler conversations, I put the idea
of cyber immortality to some of my coworkers, and here's
what they had to say about it. There's a beautiful
sort of historical database angle to it, right, Like there
will be history books written, for example, about things that
(18:54):
are happening in today's society. But when someone five years
from now, presuming we have maintained enough techno eology in
an ongoing way that we can keep these records updated,
is like what were like the hot topic issues of
the century, Like what really was the gun control debate about?
Like they could if you have a database where that
searchable and you could get five hundred strangers and read
(19:18):
things that they had all written about that, you're going
to get a really interesting and probably much more complete
picture than if someone just writes about it later based
on their own research. That's Holly Fry, a co host
of stuff you missed in history class. My first thing
that popped in my head when you had related to
us that he likened it to a tamagochi is can
you game the system to create a much better version
(19:40):
of yourself than you actually are like, could I only
upload photoshop files where I look really great? And could
I only include like the best of me in it?
As you know, if I'm the custodian of this record,
can I manipulate it in such a way that future
generations would be like, Man, that Holly Fry was amazing.
It's the grand tradition of how we celebrate death, right.
(20:03):
I mean, when you get up and give a eulogy
for somebody, you don't make notes of all the horrible
things they did and the reasons that lots of people
didn't like them. You remember the highlights of their life.
Here's Joe McCormick, a co host of stuff to blow
your mind. So yeah, I guess in death we try
to we try to emphasize the positive in the same
way that we do on our our social media profiles.
(20:26):
I think that this whole idea feels funny to me
personally on multiple levels. That Senior editor Alison Laddermilk, For one,
I mean, why am I compiling all my memories and
spending my time on that when I could be out
making new ones. So that's my first issue with this.
But I mean, as you can guess from that statement.
(20:48):
I'm not big on social media, like I just I
really don't tend to use it all that much. So
and this seems like a bit of a progression of that.
So so that I think that makes sense for me.
And then the other thing, guess that. I mean, yeah,
it's carefully curated like Facebook is. I mean, we present
our happy side. We feel they need to make a
fake Instagram account because we can't share, you know, like
(21:11):
the photo of us looking like a train wreck. It's
just we can't. Well, I mean, some people don't feel
like they're at liberty to do so, so they hide
it and they only invite their close friends for their
Instagram account. It just feels ridiculous to me. And I
mean that's just I think that a lot of people
would perpetuate that account of themselves just as very glossy
(21:32):
and it's bogus. It annoys me, it makes me mad.
The conversation, as you might expect, begins to veer towards
the what ifs. I'm thinking about the movie Strange Days.
Do you remember that film where you check the digital
I love that movie. I have no regrets admitting how
much I love that movie. For a variety of reasons,
(21:54):
but you could replay memories, like there was an apparatus
that let you relive memories that you would recorded. Angela said,
has this beautiful moment where she says, memories are supposed
to fade. Their designed that way for a reason. So
then I wonder if you have something like this that
you are working on, and you can, you know, then
several decades down the road look back and see exactly
(22:15):
the person you were in your twenties or your thirties,
will it then affect the way you progress in a
way that is unnatural versus how you would have just
progressed had you only had your human memories to work with.
I mean, we certainly narrativise our own lives. We we
organize the events in our lives into a coherent story
that we sort of model on the arcs of characters
(22:38):
and the stories that we read and watching movies and stuff.
And if we were to include all events in this narrative,
it wouldn't be a narrative, wouldn't be interesting. I mean,
it's only by selective memory that we construct a meaningful
arc for ourselves. So you know, while I did this
and this and this and that's how I got to
where I am today. But you're leaving out all kinds
of extraneous information nation. I mean, are are you more
(23:02):
concerned about telling the literal, correct cause and effect story
of your life or in telling a story the way
like a fiction writer would tell a story. I see
this creating weird factions of people in the future, Like
the next wave of division will be about how you
maintained your avatar online and what your parameters and your
(23:25):
ethos was around it. Wow. Yeah, I think you're right.
I think there will be an aesthetic that develops around it.
For sure. It'll be like the truth tellers and and
the gloss people, and it's sort of a science as
humanity split. Right, This gets us into the nitty gritty
(23:45):
of how you even begin to interact with your avatar.
You know, you want to start with your avatar sort
of like you would at a cocktail party. What do
you do? How's it going? You don't want to go
straight to have you ever killed anyone? It's doing? It's
doing the yawn stretch? What is that? Oh? In the
all of the movies from the fifties that you go
to the drive in and the guy yawns and stretches
(24:06):
and puts his arm around the girl. Yes, do you
know what I'm talking? Yes, it's just it's just I
think none of us had framed it in a dating
sort of way prior to that, so there was a
little bit of a I don't want to date myself.
Maybe some people do. I'm not judging, but you know,
it's but yeah, it's a kind of trust issue like that.
(24:27):
So maybe if it bakes me some cookies, I will
tell it more information. I just talked to it. Who's
the time I goche At that point, I would bore
it to death. It was be like this story again,
please rejected by my avatar. Yeah, so some of the
data trails you create could be mundane, but some of
(24:50):
it could be well troubling. Will you also get into
the realm of like legal issues like could they be
petitioned by a court or another legal entity to look
at somebody's stuff. There's which I'm sure they've thought about.
I mean, if they're putting together a company around it,
they probably have a legal team who has drawn up
some documents around this. But that's just a whole other
(25:12):
thing to consider. What if I do something terrible in
the future, and then somebody wants to look at look
at my history and try to figure out where it
all went wrong. Well, and then I just have my
pale blue dot moment. None of this matters anyway. We're
a spec you know, we're just creating so much data.
Now I did start actually just while you were talking.
(25:34):
Have some some breakthroughs here. It could provide a scientific benefit,
because maybe once we have tons and tons of data,
we could use some machine analysis to say, hey, is
there any correlation between people who make certain types of
posts and then people who die prematurely of certain diseases? Oh,
what do you know? People who take lots of selfies
(25:55):
are more likely to, uh, I don't know, have their
heads explode spontaneously on their fiftieth birthday. I mean that
would be useful knowledge that you could use for for
a real purpose, to achieve something. I guess. Oh, but
I automatically see it becoming horrifying and a business driver,
and then I'm like, oh it to be clear, eternomy
(26:15):
isn't interested in running ads against your emotions at all. Still,
the idea gets the group to thinking about the ability
to do it based on our experience with social media
and advertising. Maybe you're looking at pictures of your ex
partner who unceremoniously dumped you, and you start to get
a little misty eyed, and upcoms the hogandahs at and
(26:36):
you're like, I'm all over that, or the obvious would
just be one weird trick to stay young forever. Oh yeah,
this one spiky fruit and you will never die. You've
all had that dark moment where we've probably clicked on
something similar to that, right, No, me neither. I mean, ultimately,
(27:08):
this brings me to a more general question, which is
how do we want to be remembered and why do
we want to be remembered? What? What is the inherent
motivation to have people remember you in a certain way
after you die. It's a fair question. For some people,
it could be that you get to control your story,
You get to outline your life and make sense of it.
(27:30):
For others, it could be a way to vanquish death
if there's still some scrap of evidence of your existence,
are you really completely absent? That being said, attornemy is
such a fascinating tool and concept simply because beyond capturing
our digital movements and our active memories. It captures our imaginations.
(27:51):
After all, we're storytellers and we can't quite figure out
how this one is going to end. Thank you to
Marry Sasaki at Tournamy for showing us how each of
us has a hero's journey, a narrative to explain the
impossible slash possible paradox of our existence. Thanks to Paul
(28:13):
Headson for cracking open the crypt and letting us peer inside.
And thanks to How Stuff Works staff members Alison Loudermilk,
Joe McCormick, and Holly Fry. In our next episode, a
supplement to this one, we'll look at our relationship with objects,
the ones we include in time capsules and the ones
that are shoved away in a storage unit. We need
(28:36):
a certain amount of community and human interaction, but what
happens a lot of times with individuals is they've been
hurt so many times or have had trauma with people
that people become unsaved to them, so they turned to
objects instead. The Stuff of Life is written and co
produced by me Julie Douglas. Original music composition is by
(28:58):
co producer Noel Brown. An editorial oversight is provided by
head of prodiction Jerry Rowland. You can send your thoughts
to us at the stuff of life at how stuff
works dot com, and you can visit our Facebook page,
where we'll post some outtakes from our how Stuff Works roundtable,
including what imitations we'd like to be remembered for. I'm
(29:19):
very confused about this immortality issue. I find it upsetting,
but I love my children and I want them to
live forever.
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