The universe is a flash drive
I want you to rethink “data” and what it means to think about data.
Let’s start with an example.
We’re on a desert island. I give you a flash drive. I tell you, truthfully, there is a .docx file on the flash drive with an entire dictionary on it. You wonder why out of all the items I could have chosen to bring on a desert island I chose this one. You look at your magnifying glass solemnly — you thought it would be a good idea for starting fires. You take my flash drive and use it as a poor excuse for a hacky sack.
Let’s rewind.
We’re on a desert island. I give you a compact Oxford English Dictionary. You’re confused, again — the text is too small for you to read. But you take out your magnifying glass. It was supposed to be for fires, but you realize now can read the dictionary to pass the time. You have a fully functioning dictionary because you figured out the tool to make use of it.
In both of these examples I gave you a dictionary. Both dictionaries required a special tool to be of any use to you (computer, magnifying glass). In one of the stories you did not have the tool, in the other you did. However, the fact remains, in both I gave you a dictionary.
This is an over-stylized example, but it makes a compelling point — just because we don’t have the means of extracting data from an object doesn’t mean the object does not hold inside it immense data.
When this revelation first occurred to me I had to sit with it for a few minutes and consider its significance — by the nature of history everything has data linking it back the beginning of time inscribed into its physical and chemical makeup. This is obvious when we zoom all the way out: we can think pretty clearly about how other planets were pulled around by gravity and born from cosmic dust, how asteroids pockmarked their surface. Perhaps, too, looking at maps of a city a trained eye can trace out its history — expansion, decline, revitalization.
But when we think of a felled tree or a bottle of wine it is much more difficult for us to imagine the whole history of the object through to the present. Surely, today we could not model this history, but it does not mean it isn’t there, and that there isn’t, among all the data the felled tree holds within it — from its chemical makeup to its physical position to its temperature to data fields we can’t even imagine — the whole of its history.
The history of the tree is the dictionary in a flash drive.
Or take a human brain, with its memories written across its synapses. As I’ve written before, I can close my eyes and see and hear this, so it must be in there somewhere. My brain has the algorithm for turning my synapses and chemicals into a representation of that video. Now if I were to give you my brain (err, someone else were to give it to you?) and asked you to extract that video from it, you couldn’t today. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t on our way there.
The whole of the human and physical experience of Earth is written across the globe. The history of Mycenae, the books of the Library of Alexandria, what you ate for lunch yesterday. It’s all in the air and the soil and built into the desks we sit at. Maybe we will never have access to some of this data, or maybe we never will figure out where to look for some questions. Yet, every day we are able to take more data and learn from it. Progress is discovering how to turn some missing light into a picture of a black hole or how to look back into the climate of eons ago through some ice at the bottom of the Arctic or how to diagnose cancer in dinosaurs. Each of these is taking the physical evidence in front of us and turning into something we can understand. The evidence has been there, waiting. We just hadn’t known how to understand it before.
When we talk about data people think of Excel and R and machine learning. But data is just the stuff that needs formatting the world to be understandable. In the example at the start of this article, the data is the the dictionary, and our job is to take the unreadable flash drives and make them readable compact dictionaries.
And so the whole universe is the flash drive. Realizing that, everything takes on a slightly different meaning. In a rock or a cloud or a wallet or a nice Chablis you see there is a history imprinted in its manifestation — the physical, the chemical, the sociopolitical, the economic, all of these forces are there in some form. We just need to figure out how to learn from them.
