Translator: Erick Soares Figueiredo Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
I think everyone in the audience asked already about the future,
at least in Saskia's talk, pressing the Forward button.
I am passionate about these questions about the future,
and I want to know how the future will see us.
Never before, information was spread in such a density and speed,
and across our planet, we share our thoughts and emotions in real time,
and what will remain from all these shares, posts, likes and tweets?
How will the image of our world look like in a distance of 100 years?
Or 1000 years?
Let's try to answer this by what we know from the past.
Far less than 1% of the antique texts
are still known.
And since publishing and reproduction then took some kind of effort,
we still - after 2000 years -
we still can reconstruct the antique world and its way of thinking.
[In contrast], publishing today
is simple as a post or tweet or video upload,
and not only scientists or newspapers are publishing,
everybody can do it today.
And since pseudoscience has such mass appeal,
those stories about crop circles and aliens
find a lot of audience,
and they are spread much more often than scientific papers.
That’s why a Google search for 'crop circle'
yields 20 million entries,
whereas, for example, 'moon landing' brings only six million.
A scary fact is that five million from these six million
are moon landing hoax entries.
You know, there's the space probe Gaia
producing the most detailed mapping of our galaxy,
producing lots of data?
And yet, over its five-year mission,
the entire data output is getting microscopically small
compared to the daily Internet data traffic.
The things we really spend money on, we puts a lots off effort into,
they will all drown in oceans of irrelevant, trivial contents
and, I would say, redundant bullshit.
So, you see?
A picture of our time in a distance of 2000 years
will result in a very distorted image of our time.
You know all these 'fail' videos, yeah?
Where people are hurting themselves while doing stupid things,
like really trying to stand on an inflated exercise ball?
You know what the people will think in the future?
'‘Well, those guys from the 21st century never performed spaceflight.
Too many documents prove
they're obviously misunderstanding, misinterpreting the law of gravity.'
So, this picture in the future will be very distorted,
and probably our era will be defined
by Minecraft videos, porn videos,
selfies, kitty images ...
But having a, in some aspects, 'fails' remembrance
is even better than having none at all.
Why this?
It says the Internet doesn't forget, right?
But I want you to consider this:
These days our World Wide Web turned into what it is per definition:
world wide.
3.4 billion people are online,
and that´s 3.4 billion Internet users
creating data and data traffic.
Every single minute,
600 hours of video material are uploaded in YouTube.
This is only from this year, 2016.
In the total duration
of 35,000 years,
30,000 years ago, we started to paint in caves,
and only 4500 years ago we built the pyramids.
So this is quite a long thing we upload.
More and more videos in higher definition from mobile devices
that leads to -
that our data traffic volume in the last ten years,
it doubled, doubled, doubled, every 18 months.
And now I want you to step to a different perspective:
Data traffic needs energy, and energy causes carbon emission.
In fact, the Internet is already responsible
for 3% of the global carbon emission.
And if data traffic increases in the coming ten years
as it did in the past ten years,
it will be more than 50 times higher than today.
Theoretically, we soon run out of breath.
This critical point is too close as to rely on new technologies
such as unlimited energy sources or electricity-free data transfer;
it was both far down the line.
That means that in a very close future,
economic and ecological reasons
will force us to delete data massively.
A profound erasure executed by algorithms.
In other words,
the image our grandchildren will have of our time
will have been created by machines.
And what Snapchat started could be a common feature in the future:
a deletion after a predefined period,
resulting in a society which floats in a permanent presence,
having no past anymore.
This is why we should select today
what we want to be kept for tomorrow.
The project Memory of Mankind keeps our stories,
both for our grandchildren and for a remote future.
This is accomplished in a very durable way,
stored deep and protected deep in a salt mine in Hallstatt,
a UNESCO World Heritage region in the Austrian Alps.
And ceramic tablets carry analog information -
that means text are letters and images are photos.
These ceramic tablets
are the most durable data carriers we ever used:
They are resistant to high heat and pressure,
and water and chemicals,
and radiation,
magnetism.
And in order to be recovered sometime in the future,
everybody who takes part in this project receives a token -
a small ceramic disc indicating the location of this archive
and at the same time serving as a barrier against unauthorized access.
It can only be comprehended by a society
which has at least a similar technical understanding as we have.
Languages are changing, so there‘s a deciphering tool:
You can imagine a Pictionary of photos -
thousands of photos of things and situations
directly labeled with the respective words,
combined with the theoretical volumes of our main languages,
such as thesaurus, grammar, phrases, orthography.
The contents of this Memory of Mankind project
are split into three sections,
there is common content, specific content and individual content.
In order to transmit a mostly objective, global, overall image,
we created some mechanisms to fill this archive with content.
For example,
big newspapers of every country send their daily editorials.
Editorials are more than just news,
they are already some kind of interpretation,
can be contradicting.
Similarly, we invite significant magazines to store their monthly issues.
And common content is also randomly selected Facebook profiles.
And, of course, also the weird things,
like the conspiracy theories or the alien crop circles,
but, of course, declared as such.
Probably to give them something in the future to laugh about.
Specific contents are contributions by institutions
like museums, universities or awards for literature or science.
And an important part of Memory of Mankind is the documentation
about our nuclear waste repositories by the atomic industry.
Individual contents is created by you and me:
stories of life, wedding photos, cooking recipes,
whatever you find worthwhile to be preserved for eternity.
Everybody can take part in the Memory of Mankind.
Send your personal message in a bottle to the future.
The Memory of Mankind project certainly raises some questions.
One is:
Who in the future might be interested in our legacy?
Well, as long as societies are based on the principle of cause and effect,
and the academic application of this principle,
the question 'What was before?' is part of the common understanding.
That's why we are interested in our roots
in the same way as the Romans were in theirs.
The more interesting question, however, for me, is:
What side effect may this project have on our presence?
Isn't there a huge discrepancy
between the physical traces we leave behind and our virtual legacy?
Never before have human beings exercised such an impact on our biosphere.
The toxic chemical waste will outlast our species many times over.
And the effects of global warming
will shape the lives of countless generations.
And yet, at the same time,
we don't leave any durable records about our present activities at all.
In fact, we inhabit this planet like there is no tomorrow:
wasting the place and leaving without paying the rent.
Think of surveillance cameras:
We accept to be permanently watched
because we understand this should prevent us from committing criminal acts,
and if something happens,
the suspect swiftly is detected.
There are no surveillance cameras watching our planet.
And in the future it will be unknown, completely unknown,
'Who did it?
Who was responsible for this ecological disbalance?'
So is this probably the reason why we behave like reckless morons?
Because nobody will ever know?
In reverse, would a permanent record about our present activities
make us behave more responsibly?
If it is known forever, who profited from the exploitation of our planet,
which families, which groups,
which companies are to be made accountable for,
will this change anything?
I think so.
A big common voice, as we know, can change things.
Think of Avaaz, for instance.
So, let´s take this big selfie.
I mean, despite all the mess around,
there is so many fascinating things happening.
Breathtaking, really breathtaking discoveries.
You remember the images of Pluto
and the quantum physics effects,
or the last indigenous tribes,
or how the smartphone changed our life?
I mean, like any generation,
we do have some pretty good stories to tell.
Or the TED Talks - what a wonderful portrait of what moves us today.
So let's keep the roots of our grandchildren,
presenting them with a yesterday
to give them the chance to survive our tomorrow.
We, ourselves, we too need the past to understand our presence.
And as a great humanist, Wilhelm von Humboldt,
200 years ago, put it into the words:
'Only who knows his past, can have a future.'
Thank you.
(Applause)