Image by University of Southampton
The invention and evolution of insurance make for fascinating stories. According to historians, the first insured were not people but merchant shipments out of, and into, ancient India, Greece, or Babylon. Should your precious cargo disappear at sea due to bad weather, or on land thanks to banditry, and be covered in the fine print, international trade was hedged enough to let business grow apace. When insurance policies extended to cover widows and orphans, this heralded another notch in the development of “benevolent societies.”
Now, thanks to the fully mapped human genome completed in 2003 and the more recent technology of something called “5D memory crystal,” the future survival of our species has an intriguing insurance policy all its own. If, that is, non-human life forms can get hold of it for replication.
This so-called “eternity crystal,” or “superhuman memory crystal,” was developed by a team inside the Optoelectronics Research Centre at England’s University of Southampton. Using lasers at blindingly fast speeds, the research team inscribed this tiny disc with all the genetic information a mad scientist would need to fuse it with synthesized material and existing cells to bring humanity back from whatever brink—nuclear annihilation, climate change, asteroid shower—marked our end.
The disc is not only as close to indestructible as possible—or, shall we say, “chemically and thermally durable“—but decipherable from various angles you might not know even existed. The disc’s “5D” moniker means it holds its precious data within two optical dimensions plus three spatial coordinates. The plot of Jurassic Park, by parallel but not equal comparison, required one mosquito encased in amber.
Anyone who wants a peek at this intriguing item will be disappointed. It is already locked for safekeeping in what is called the Memory of Mankind archive, deep inside an ancient salt cave in Hallstatt, Austria. Exactly how intelligent life forms of the future will locate this salt mine, along with all its booty documenting the legacy of our species, is a bit vague, but probably specific enough given the probability that we know nothing at all about the probability of it being discovered in the first place. According to the Memory of Mankind website, “Uncountable identic small tokens made of strong ceramic” encoding the mine’s location will be distributed widely enough for those future intelligent life forms to find these tokens as well.
Has ever a task so mammoth fallen upon an object so small? Have the laws of probability ever fallen so deep into the realm of what seems like science fiction? Do these even qualify as the best, let alone correct, questions?
The “eternity crystal” is distressing to contemplate, and staggeringly so. That all of us know we will die is knowledge concrete enough to make the routine of daily life bearable, and the refuge of religion a divine comfort. The remainder of life yet to be lived is the hope that torture victims and prison inmates hold on to with an iron grip. But the thought that all of humanity will one day pass into oblivion boggles the mind.
Slim, too, seems the prospects that alien intelligent life forms would even care enough to give us a second chance. Should the fault of our own extinction be ours alone, what is the “intelligence,” aside from perhaps “entertainment,” in bringing us back for a sequel? Alternately, if the “eternity crystal” becomes instead the default option of human regeneration by some lucky, resourceful members of our own beleaguered and exhausted species, what makes the brainiac team of scientists at UK’s Southampton University so sure they should bother?
No less than the British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking warned against efforts to contact alien life forms, pointing to our own brutal treatment of one another as a prime example. (As the most famous scientist to suffer a devastating neurodegenerative disease, he was intimately familiar with unforeseen calamities.) Hawking’s warning prompted a stimulating debate about what alien life forms might possibly want from us anyway, with our own conception of time being so small, the distances so vast, and a seemingly infinite supply of stars sustaining any and all of the resources that undiscovered life forms could possibly want for. What does it even mean for us to ponder the possibility of alien life forms?
What the “eternity crystal” reveals best is the unrelenting drive of our species to endure and survive. It beckons us all to acknowledge that humanity is one big, almost inconceivable whole, a collective project that must somehow be preserved and insured, even if only tucked away in an Austrian salt mine. Hope does not spring eternal. It happens because we marshal our resources and imagine the outcomes, fantastical as they seem, without the pessimism of statistics or cynical forethought.
