The Datastream Connects Us* To the Universe
We have to put ourselves out there.
The ever-expanding exabytes of data that we have amassed, in a nebulous network of external brains: All of this information is Us*. Everything that is virtuous and beautiful about humanity, as well as its most wicked depravity, is now digitally encoded, and ready for transmission.
Because it seems increasingly likely that we will kill each other off, or burn clean through this planet’s limited resources before anybody manages to build a starship, the only thing that will make the existence of humanity matter, in a cosmological sense, is if we take the data accumulated in the Internet, and beam it far and wide, across the Universe.
Information is viral. When our datastream is broadcast into the Universe, and a sentient being decodes it, that being will become a little bit human by virtue of having interacted with our digital selves. Transmission Received.
The day the antennae go up will be the greatest in human history.
*Us: the billions of gigabytes of data that we have exported out of our brains, into the digital realm, is humanity’s greatest creation. It is a binary representation of our collective existence—a digital genome. So long as this trove of data exists and spreads, our species will have fulfilled its biological imperative to survive and reproduce.
