Bit by bit

Let’s say all of humanity suddenly vanishes from the face of the planet. Maybe the rapture comes, which would probably settle some bets among the most pointy-hatted of religious purists. Or maybe there’s a hot sale on scented candles at a Bed, Bath & Beyond in the Andromeda galaxy, and every last person on earth decides they just can’t live without the smell of cinnamon-tinged eucalyptus leaves.

Okay. So what do we, as a species, leave behind?

That depends.

Certain things will remain long after we’re gone. Cities will eventually crumble and decay, but not for millennia, so whoever takes our place as the dominant species – hyper-intelligent giraffes, perhaps, or cockroaches who learn to manufacture conveniently-priced kitchen items – will have their run of the joint. Escaped zoo orangutans can play the craps tables in Vegas for the next several centuries, ’cause they’ll be there for a good long while, and maybe while they’re at it the buggers can figure out how the hell one actually plays craps.

Statues and stone monuments, properly shielded from the elements, will endure. Drawings and paintings, especially those preserved in museums, will last. You can eliminate people, but you can’t eliminate most of the artifacts they leave behind.

Digital files, though. That’s another story.

Life is increasingly digital, whether we want it to be or not. Bank transactions, correspondence, streaming movies on demand, and pictures of cats that look like Merv Griffin are all inescapably computerized; this ensures that an ever-greater percentage of our lives are lived in a kind of virtual hinterland, an ethereal ocean of interconnected ones and zeroes. We’ve grown comfortable with this. So comfortable, in fact, that we think nothing of consigning our personal data and life’s history to this great intangible mass. Humankind’s latest monument is a bank of humming computer servers at Google headquarters, guarded by pimply coders who power themselves through their workdays on the steam of meat lover’s pizzas and pitchers of high-octane Mountain Dew. In other words, the new stewards of human history are clones of me in high school, only better paid and less prone to nosebleeds.

Digital media, though, only lasts for about ten years, on average. That’s about the life expectancy of a stray dog, or an unwrapped Twinkie.

As long as we keep backing up our data to new storage devices, that’s not an issue. But consider a giant asteroid that collides with the earth and causes humans to become extinct, as likely happened with the dinosaurs. Poof, gone in two blinks. Centuries later, an intelligent species from the planet Dingleberry touches down on Earth to study the ghostly remnants of our civilization. What will they find?

With computer storage gone the way of woolly mammoths and Nicholas Cage’s career, the traveling Dingleberrians will think that human civilization reached its peak around 1996. Thousands of years of evolution, centuries spent in the pursuit of betterment and achievement, and to the alien archaeologists, our best accomplishments were glow-in-the-dark Nerf balls and “Seinfeld.”

I’m not knocking computers. While it’s true that they’ve spread like chlamydia at a frat kegger, they certainly have some great uses, like Photoshopping your enemies’ heads onto the bodies of obese hippopotamuses. But the actual, physical information stored therein, the means of holding onto data, is alarmingly fleeting; PCs, tablets and smartphones are loose piles of sand just waiting for the one stiff breeze that sends ’em all to hell. 

People are a funny lot, constantly building edifices that stand as testaments to their own greatness. The pyramids, the Sears Tower, the world’s largest ball of twine in Cawker City, Kansas: These are all attempts to leave behind something important, a series of peacock feathers meant to say, “Yeah, we’re pretty awesome.” The urge is understandable. On an individual level, most of us feel the need to make some kind of mark – it’s why we have children, write books, knit sweaters, and carve our initials into the desk when the teacher isn’t looking. We want to endure. Centuries after the final human has breathed his last, bathroom stalls from Rio to Amsterdam will still be riddled with etchings of cartoon genitals. What a legacy.

But the things we now rely on to mark our moment in history – blogs, social media feeds, vicious YouTube arguments between lobotomy patients – those will all evaporate like water. When clipboard-toting Dingleberrians studying your living room observe your wall-mounted photo prints, they’ll know that you once spent part of a summer taking scuba lessons from a freckly ginger with a birthmark on his chin that looked like Scandanavia. With the rest of the photos from that trip tucked away digitally in some now-defunct hard drive, they’ll never know that you and the instructor ended each day holding hands at sunset and smoking hash out of a hollowed-out apple. That little detail will be gone forever.

One wonders whether all of the permanent markers of our race have already been built, left to tell a story rooted in antiquity. It’s the price of transitioning from the real world to the virtual one. Let’s make a pact, you and me: If astronomers detect an asteroid that’s on a collision course with Earth, we’ll gather up humankind’s digital detritus, hop into a rocketship, and head to a planet on which we can preserve our collective history: our Facebook posts and digital music and videos of birds dancing to Van Halen. It’s not much, and it pales in comparison to the greatness of Stonehenge and the Great Wall of China, but it’s what we have. It would be a shame if it were all lost to time.

I suggest a place somewhere in Andromeda. I hear the sales there are spectacular.