Building Eternity

Today's story is about achieving immortality, the idea that in stories we transcend death, whether it's an I was here, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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

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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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

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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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

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 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 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. 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. 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.

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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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. 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 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

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 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, 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. 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.

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 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 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 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

very confused about this immortality issue. I find it upsetting, but I love my children and I want them to live forever.