As I sit here sifting through my inbox, I delete an email that contains a password to a forum I recently signed up for.
It strikes me that for the first time in human existence, we have the power to influence the far future at a macro level.
Take for example, the deletion of the email.
At some point in the future, I will choose whether or not to make my email publicly available, to my family as a legacy.
Within the archive there might, or might not, be the email that I mentioned above.
If the email is in the archive, then a far distant descendant might open the email, and login to read my posts.
If the email is not in the archive, then it will not be possible for the same descendant to open the email, and therefore s/he will have a different timeline of my making in the here and now.
Now, let’s take a bold step forward.
The physical world around us is subject to entropy such that in the future the Earth will cease to exist.
However, the data we create today has the potential to outlast the lifetime of the Earth, either through extraterrestrial archiving or humankind taking it to the stars, for example.
This gives today’s email/data-set a potentially infinite lifetime.
Should a highly evolved future intelligence or technology decide to open my trivial email, then my actions today, would again create or deconstruct the future timeline as I sit here repeatedly deleting and restoring the email.
Now that we are talking about a potentially infinite future, we should consider what would happen if an extremely highly evolved intelligence had the power to reach back into the past using technologies beyond our current comprehension to influence the very act of deleting or restoring the email.
This would give the user (us) the power to interface with the future technology in such a way that we leave markers for the intelligence to interpret and send back to us.
Is this a data time machine? Can a time machine only work with effect from the moment that the data-set is created and stored for a time until which the above intelligence has the capability of reaching back to us?
Happy pondering 🙂
Technonic (Human) 2017