Live Forever

Public Domain, 2006

Death is an absurdity to the living. Those who say they do not fear death, do not believe in it - rather they believe in an afterlife. We have explored our planet, the solar system, and seen beyond the galaxy. Yet death remains terminal, and the experience itself remains open to conjecture.

At the moment, a member of some online forum might be killed by some random event, and that'll be that. But in the coming years, well into the internet's lifespan, the web will become increasingly cluttered with the deceased. That is, their online life will be preserved - MySpace, Facebook, Bebo filled with dormant accounts as shrines. In twenty years we might visit YouTube and see Peter Oakley alive and well, talking, sharing his memories and experiences long after the organic matter that stored them has decayed. Part of him will be preserved electronically, essentially forever.

Descartes still communicates through the printing press three and a half centuries after his death. Now images and sounds of people are captured and experienced after the fact. Technology is driven by storage, computing power being a byproduct of our data-mass. Increased capacity will eventually culminate in downloading the mind from a failing organic frame, if not the transcendence of the mind itself entirely into a non-organic frame. From preserving one's thoughts (ideas), we progress to preserving one's processes of thought (mind).

Based on drafts written 22/06/05, 28/08/06, 08/04/08
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