I’ve written stories and articles and whatever about this before but one of my biggest fears is to be lost to time. Not just me, but the entire human experience. I love love love projects like the internet archive and such because they get their hands on any kind of information, no matter how important or mundane, and archive it.

When I was a practicing astrophysicist, giving talks at conferences about things the human mind could only barely comprehend, it haunted me at night that at some point in time, all of our collected knowledge will be lost. Humans will go extinct. All that will be left of us, if we’re lucky, will be the few spacecraft, like the Voyager probes, that we were able to send out in hopes of being seen and remembered by something.

I think journaling is very important, especially journaling for someone in the future to read. No matter who you are or how unimportant you may think you are, I think it’s important to catalogue how you feel. How you react to the world around yourself. I think that there’s no such thing as unimportant information. I want to archive how people felt about things. How people viewed the things happening around them. Things ‘unimportant’ like what a person’s favorite color is or their favorite food. It’s important to me. It’s important to the human experience.

I think it’s important to get as accurate a picture of the human existence as possible, and that means that every single person’s thoughts and emotions are valuable.

I dream about finding a way to archive every single thing. Every emotion someone feels, every noteworthy and unnoteworthy thing. Infinite amounts of any and every aspect of the human condition.

I just dream of a species remembered. For everything that we were. Even though we may be lost to time, I hope that our knowledge won’t be.