World spec'mode

We will all die one day, and in the meantime, we all live without any particular well-defined reason. As individuals, we are constantly confronted with the absurdity of existence, the absence of clear, consensual goals, even if we are sometimes convinced that our lives have meaning or that we try to create meaning for ourselves. The only “certainty” of death pushes us to choose all sorts of criteria for leading a satisfying life despite its limited duration (pleasure, moral good, sacrifice, altruism, creation, knowledge, etc.), and sometimes without even realizing it, we need to leave our mark (a new idea, an artistic project, a profession, offspring, etc.) that will survive our death. By extension, civilization as a whole works to maintain its own stability over time, despite the enormous number of constraints and internal divisions within society, exacerbated by the continual cycle of births and deaths. We will die as individuals, but we will also one day die as a civilization. Inevitably, some catastrophe will eventually wipe out our species. Either that or genetic mutations and the fact that we may not have found a “planet B” before the final hours of the solar system. Indeed, the Sun itself will burn out in 5 to 7 billion years, after a phase of expansion that will render the Earth uninhabitable and then vaporize it. Then, in about a hundred thousand billion years, the Universe will enter a phase during which all the stars will have burned up their fuel and no new stars will be able to form due to a lack of available matter. By way of comparison, with 5D optical storage, the estimated lifespan of a time capsule using this technology would be in the order of 30 to 3,000 billion billion years. As a result, all that will remain in the Universe will be the corpses of stars (black holes, pulsars, white dwarfs, and black dwarfs) and isolated grains of dust, which will also eventually disappear after an even longer period of time: in at least 10^100 billion years, the Universe will reach thermal death. The particles of matter will also be so far apart from each other due to the expansion of the Universe that no new material bodies will ever be able to form again. Long after that, no particles will exist and the Universe will enter its final energy state, unless space-time itself breaks down in the meantime or quantum fluctuations give rise to a new Universe.
If extreme longevity is part of the very essence of any knowledge ark project, then this means that such a time capsule should not only be understood as a “trace” of our passage, like any work of art. First of all, unlike a work of art, which is primarily an individual legacy, the knowledge ark is a common legacy of all humanity, or at least of all the peoples and civilizations that designed it and whose heritage has been passed down to us today. Whereas a work of art is traditionally a labor of love for an individual, or even a small team, who consciously or unconsciously wanted to leave their mark on the rest of the world, an ark is a collective, civilizational, and even planetary work. It is not just a matter of imprinting a personal vision of the world, but of imprinting a wide range of perspectives and knowledge and maintaining it alive for generations to come, and beyond. The knowledge ark serves as an epistemic memory, but it also serves as a “vessel” for all artists, whether they are painters, writers, playwrights, filmmakers, musicians, etc. Thanks to new technologies, we could encapsulate thousands of works of art of all kinds and from all sources, whether masterpieces or not, on a small volume. This could even extend to any creative project that is unpretentious but highly personal to the person who created it, such as a message, a drawing, a naive watercolor, or any other personal mark. It is no coincidence that in many existing time capsules, the content consists mainly of testimonials, memories, messages, and other signatures. The knowledge ark could therefore be the vehicle for everything that once motivated a living person to leave a symbolic legacy after their death. The ark is in fact an extension of any work of art, but on behalf of a civilization, a species, or even an entire biosphere.
Still in line with the will of an epistemic memory creation, the knowledge ark is also the memory of all knowledge, or potential knowledge, that civilization has accumulated over the centuries in an attempt to understand this great Whole in which we wake up every day. All our science, embellished with all our philosophical speculations, is another collective legacy of our civilization, but this time it is not an aggregate of several individual perspectives, but rather a kind of “golem,” a patchwork with no defined author other than the human species on planet Earth. Our scientific heritage (and by extension, epistemic heritage in the strict sense) can also be seen as an attempt by the Universe, through humanity, to contemplate itself, and arks would therefore be a crystallization of this attempt. As we have said, there are many symbolic issues behind the creation of an ark, and one of them is the opportunity to give the Universe a kind of internal memory, much more durable than that of the fragile beings that we are. The collection and preservation of knowledge is in fact equivalent to inventing a recipe for immortality, artificially prolonging the life of all things, of every element of the Universe that has been the object of its attention through humanity. Every tree that has been photographed will always exist through photography, every person who has signed their name will always exist through their signature, every phenomenon that has manifested itself to humans will have its eternal and virtual double through mountains of images, texts, computer simulations, databases, sounds, and other encapsulated descriptions. The knowledge ark gives (almost) eternal life to everything that was destined to be ephemeral, whether in nature or in human life. It is a way of defying the instability of the Universe, of giving it a virtual replica that could perhaps even survive beyond its heat death. When humanity itself disappears, the universe could “lose its best biographer,” as the saying goes, but through knowledge arks, the universe would not lose its best biography.