Speaker 1: From how stuff works dot com. This is the Stuff
Speaker 1: of Life. I'm Julie Douglas, host of the Stuff of Life,
Speaker 1: a podcast that teases a part the tales we tell,
Speaker 1: because when we crack open a story and look inside,
Speaker 1: we see the seeds of what make our world so maddening,
Speaker 1: so strange, and so achingly beautiful and at times ridiculous.
Speaker 1: The Stuff of Life is a podcast about how we're
Speaker 1: all just getting by, learning and surviving through stories we share.
Speaker 1: Today's story is about achieving immortality, the idea that in
Speaker 1: stories we transcend death, whether it's an I was here,
Speaker 1: graffiti scrawl, or an epic length autobiography. In this way,
Speaker 1: we humans try to build out eternity. We pass on
Speaker 1: our genes, we record our stories, and we make and
Speaker 1: collect objects as evidence of our existence. For our first
Speaker 1: look into building as Trinity will time travel back to
Speaker 1: historian Paul Hudson to the Crypt of Civilization, the most
Speaker 1: famous time capsule You've never heard of, which holds, among
Speaker 1: other things, these objects, one container of beer, about one quarter,
Speaker 1: one plastic bird, one plastic ash train, one beetle, plastic ornament, ample,
Speaker 1: one benny makeup mirror. There's controversy about these things that
Speaker 1: I've never thought about. Some people didn't want Donald Duck
Speaker 1: in there because well, Donald Duck is not wearing pants.
Speaker 1: Then we'll meet Marius Ursake, the co founder of the
Speaker 1: site Eternomy, a site where you can preserve your memories, photos,
Speaker 1: your social media footprint in an eternal avatar. Right now,
Speaker 1: the only way to donod our memories is by actually
Speaker 1: writing these if we don't have get a cable to
Speaker 1: blog into our heads and bollowed everything. And finally we'll
Speaker 1: talk to our crew here at how stuff works about
Speaker 1: what they want to be remembered for an instagram of
Speaker 1: the pancakes they made. Probably not, I mean, we certainly
Speaker 1: narrativise our own lives. We we organized the events in
Speaker 1: our lives into a coherent story that we sort of
Speaker 1: model on the arcs of characters and the stories that
Speaker 1: we read and watching movies. When I think of time capsules,
Speaker 1: I think back to grade school in Michigan one cold
Speaker 1: spring morning, when our class gathered around the school flagpole
Speaker 1: and ceremoniously lowered a container filled with lucky rabbits, foots,
Speaker 1: school portraits, and scraps of paper documenting our hopes and dreams.
Speaker 1: It seemed like a momentous occasion, like one day we
Speaker 1: would be discovered. Little did my third grade self know
Speaker 1: that I was participating in a ritual popularized by Thornwell Jacobs,
Speaker 1: the father of the modern time capsule and the creator
Speaker 1: of the Crypt of Civilization. Jacobs wasn't just forward thinking,
Speaker 1: but a millenarian, someone who stared deep into the future,
Speaker 1: hoping someday someone may stare back, specifically someone in the
Speaker 1: year who stumbles upon the crypt of Civilization, a possibility
Speaker 1: simply because Jacobs thought this that nothing is too beautiful
Speaker 1: to happen in life, and um so he didn't know,
Speaker 1: but he hoped that somehow someone would open the you know,
Speaker 1: the Crypto Civilization and really get a good idea of
Speaker 1: just what things were like. I am Paul Stephen Hudson.
Speaker 1: I am professor of history at Georgia Perimeter College in Atlanta,
Speaker 1: and also I'm co founder of the International Time Capsule Society.
Speaker 1: For Paul, the discovery of the crypt led to a
Speaker 1: lifelong passion for the things that people preserve of I
Speaker 1: first encountered it around nineteen seventy. I was an undergraduate
Speaker 1: at Oldthorpe University in nineteen seventy. It was kind of
Speaker 1: a distressed university. The buildings were almost these beautiful shells,
Speaker 1: but that particular building where the crypt was, there was
Speaker 1: only one story operational in the other stories, and the
Speaker 1: basement where the crypt is we're sealed off. But I
Speaker 1: was exploring and really in a place I shouldn't have been.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure how I got there, but I got
Speaker 1: to where the crypt was, and it was a sealed
Speaker 1: off area. It was dark, and I had a flashlight
Speaker 1: and I was just looking at things, and um, then
Speaker 1: I saw this stainless steel door with this message on
Speaker 1: it about I really didn't quite know what it was.
Speaker 1: And there were cobwebs on the door and so forth,
Speaker 1: and I thought, what is this? The crypt is located
Speaker 1: on the bottom floor of a phoebe Hearst Hall, gone
Speaker 1: or the cobwebs. There even a plaque with an explanation
Speaker 1: that the content is placed inside in Ny will remain
Speaker 1: hermetically sealed until the year. But still there's little fanfare
Speaker 1: about this subterranean time capsule, and the casual visitor could
Speaker 1: easily glide by jacobs heroic attempt to catalog civilization. He
Speaker 1: was inspired by the Pyramids. Um, we have pictures of it.
Speaker 1: That's a sealed chamber. It looks the way you would
Speaker 1: imagine a pyramid chamber to look like. It's just literally
Speaker 1: cluttered with artifacts. But there's a kind of order, you know,
Speaker 1: in the storage of them. But Dr Jacobs and he
Speaker 1: um he was a millinarian. He thought in terms of
Speaker 1: thousands of years, and to him, six thousand years really
Speaker 1: wasn't that long. There was six thousand years ago with
Speaker 1: the Pyramids, why not six thousand years into the future.
Speaker 1: Like red we are all interested in the future. All
Speaker 1: that is where you and I are going to spend
Speaker 1: the rest. Imagine a room twenty feet long, ten ft
Speaker 1: high and ten ft wide stuffed with artifacts. We're talking
Speaker 1: about painstakingly preserved micro films of eight hundred works of literature,
Speaker 1: more than six hundred and forty pages, including the Koran,
Speaker 1: the Bible, and the Iliad, not to mention musical and
Speaker 1: historical recordings and films. And then there are the objects themselves.
Speaker 1: One set, Lionel, model train, six cars, one track, one
Speaker 1: cigarette holder, one model air things that would represent a
Speaker 1: cross section of daily life for someone living in everything
Speaker 1: from dental floss and false eyelashes, two shot glasses, and
Speaker 1: typewriters and toasters. But the most important object inside is
Speaker 1: something called the language integrator. The idea is that six
Speaker 1: thousand years from now, English will be obsolete, and the
Speaker 1: language integrator will help decode the contents of the crypt
Speaker 1: You turn a wheel and then it plays a record,
Speaker 1: and the very first item you see as apple, and
Speaker 1: then you hear the word apple, and it's It's based
Speaker 1: on an old cryptographical language from World War One called
Speaker 1: Basic English. It has about five thousand words. But what
Speaker 1: Dr Jacobs and the organizers hoped is that would be
Speaker 1: the key to the English language. And like the Rosetta Stone,
Speaker 1: you know, that's what helped archaeologists really understand what the
Speaker 1: pyramids were all about. The problem is, you know, whoever
Speaker 1: opens this time capsule or finds it, they probably won't
Speaker 1: know what it's all about. Because we're also complex, and
Speaker 1: it's really kind of scatter shot. You might ask yourself,
Speaker 1: if you were doing a time capsule, what what would
Speaker 1: you put in it? Or you might give one answer
Speaker 1: today in a different answer tomorrow. You're just sort of
Speaker 1: defining yourself and and where you are, unless, of course,
Speaker 1: the item is so recognizable, so valuable, that it transcends
Speaker 1: the ages with that good taste or a good time
Speaker 1: go ahead. The one thing that he was pretty sure
Speaker 1: of though, and this was during the time of the
Speaker 1: Egyptians as well, is that people would be drinking beer.
Speaker 1: You know, the Egyptians were great beer drinkers. And everything
Speaker 1: in the crypt was donated, and it was the Anheuser
Speaker 1: Busch company that donated an ampule. If it is open
Speaker 1: by an archaeologist or historian or someone else, um that
Speaker 1: bud would be for them. The fascinating thing about time
Speaker 1: capsules is that in an attempt to document our interest,
Speaker 1: they also unwittingly document our anxieties. Among recordings about engineering
Speaker 1: feats like the Panama Canal, there's a preoccupation with Adolf
Speaker 1: Hitler in the rise of fascism, and while the Crypt
Speaker 1: has frozen in time, many of the Harme works of
Speaker 1: this particular era, it's hardly a true reflection of that society.
Speaker 1: In fact, the Portrait of America in nine contains a
Speaker 1: very large gap in knowledge. There are very few contributions
Speaker 1: from African Americans, and one lone black doll becomes a
Speaker 1: stand in for the rich multicultural heritage of the United States.
Speaker 1: But all of this may be a moot point. After all,
Speaker 1: how likely is it that when arrives the crypt will
Speaker 1: actually be opened? He said he could no more imagine
Speaker 1: that than chro magnant Man could comprehend the skyline in
Speaker 1: New York, so he really didn't didn't know. Um Now,
Speaker 1: I do think the artifacts will be preserved. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm just sort of guessing here. For one thing, I
Speaker 1: doubt if there will. I hate to say it that
Speaker 1: there will be in Atlanta or United States. I mean
Speaker 1: it will be. It's an archaeological site, you know, projected,
Speaker 1: you know, six thousand years into the future. So I
Speaker 1: think the big question is not so much if the
Speaker 1: artifacts will be preserved, but the big question is who
Speaker 1: will know to open it, Which makes you wonder why
Speaker 1: we extend ourselves into the future in the first place.
Speaker 1: There's a kind of a naive optimism that someone who
Speaker 1: does a time capsule has. I think no noble effort
Speaker 1: is in vain. That was one of Dr Jacob's favorite
Speaker 1: things here. You know, whether it's opened or not, it
Speaker 1: does show that you really care about your fellow men
Speaker 1: and woman. And and somehow you want to reach out
Speaker 1: to them. Paul has been all over the world and
Speaker 1: he's seen a lot of time capsules, but his idea
Speaker 1: of a time capsule isn't just a container stored away,
Speaker 1: but other ways that we reach into the future. A
Speaker 1: grandparents letter, the voyage are golden records hurling out to
Speaker 1: space containing the sounds and images of life on Earth.
Speaker 1: A pregnant woman carrying a genetic code, one that can
Speaker 1: move backward and forward in time. And it's this idea,
Speaker 1: the ability to move forward and backward in time, that's
Speaker 1: at the heart of what some e death companies are
Speaker 1: trying to do. As artists in Hamilton's says, technology amplifies
Speaker 1: human presence at a distance, and the company Attornemy aims
Speaker 1: to amplify your data, your memories, thoughts, and emotions across time,
Speaker 1: creating an immortal avatar of yourself, a digital simulacrum that
Speaker 1: can exist in the past, present, in future. My name
Speaker 1: is Mariossake, and I'm the CEO and founder of Attornemy,
Speaker 1: and what we're trying to build at Atternomy is a
Speaker 1: network of artificial intelligent avatars that would preserve people's thoughts,
Speaker 1: stories and memories ideally forever. Mary has co founded the
Speaker 1: site euternomy for a very personal reason, one we can
Speaker 1: all relate to. My grandmother died after farting Alzheimer's for
Speaker 1: three years, and her memories started fading the way during
Speaker 1: those three years. But after she passed away, and after
Speaker 1: we so I went to the whole reading process, I
Speaker 1: realized that the only things I had left from her
Speaker 1: were like plenty pictures more or less, ninety years of joy,
Speaker 1: of sorrows, and experiences of various things that happened in
Speaker 1: person's life are reduced to just a couple of photos
Speaker 1: and memories that are eventually lost. Marius drew a major
Speaker 1: influences from his life, from his love of sci fi
Speaker 1: to whose experiments and technology to ask the question, what
Speaker 1: if you could preserve someone's memories using artificial intelligence, allowing
Speaker 1: people to access those memories, but also do it in
Speaker 1: a meaningful way because differences like the ability to first
Speaker 1: of all like informational person about the person during their lifetime,
Speaker 1: So acting like a biographer. Because right now the problem
Speaker 1: with other websites websites have collect your memories is that
Speaker 1: you have to do a lot of like manual work,
Speaker 1: uploading photos and do everything by yourself, or writing your biography,
Speaker 1: which usually it's a pretty big task that people always
Speaker 1: live for tomorrow. And in this way, a constellation of
Speaker 1: data points begin to coalesce and tell a recognizable version
Speaker 1: of you emerges all through your digital footprint and conversations
Speaker 1: with your avatar. Think of the ability to timeline your life,
Speaker 1: to have your avatar recalls specific memories for you. Marius
Speaker 1: likens this avatar relationship to Tomagotchi, the handheld digital pet
Speaker 1: that you interact with every day. The idea is the same.
Speaker 1: The more you interact with your avatar, the more you
Speaker 1: nurture it, and the more it begins to truly reflect
Speaker 1: you and your thoughts in ten years and twenty years,
Speaker 1: or you know, for the younger generation forty fifty years,
Speaker 1: the amount of information that's going to be gathered on
Speaker 1: top on everything that you already post on Facebook or
Speaker 1: an email is going to be huge, and it's going
Speaker 1: to be very useful in uh preserving as much of
Speaker 1: that person's UH consciousness of personality or thoughts as possible. Also,
Speaker 1: because I know some of you are wondering eternomy does
Speaker 1: not want to build a robot out of your memories
Speaker 1: and let it loose. We're not trying to create like
Speaker 1: a clone, like a very lifelike clone. We're trying to
Speaker 1: create something that offers a very easy interface to access
Speaker 1: those memories. But it's going to be very clear that
Speaker 1: that's not a copy of the person. It termly launched
Speaker 1: its beta site in two thousand and fourteen and more
Speaker 1: than thirty thousand people signed up. So who are they?
Speaker 1: More than half of them are millennials and English speaking.
Speaker 1: I think that first of all, these people have a
Speaker 1: much richer digital footprints than all those generations because of
Speaker 1: using so many online tools, and this percentage is only
Speaker 1: going to be increasing in the future at global level.
Speaker 1: Of millennials already used Facebook. To give you an example,
Speaker 1: you see the picture emerging here. Attornemy appeals to people
Speaker 1: who are already creating a digital bread trail of information,
Speaker 1: and the website gives them a chance to make sense
Speaker 1: of it, contextualize it in the form of a decades
Speaker 1: long relationship with their biographer, this version of themselves. Think
Speaker 1: of what this might do for the way that we
Speaker 1: recall our memories. We actually forget more than of things
Speaker 1: that happened plus every day, and the lot will also
Speaker 1: help collect those kinds of information and stories and later
Speaker 1: make it accessible if he wants to we call it.
Speaker 1: Of course, all of this is predicated on one thing
Speaker 1: that we truly interact with our avatars, something Autnomy is
Speaker 1: still trying to finesse with psychologists. At this stage. What
Speaker 1: we've been most interested in is how to ask questions
Speaker 1: and what kind of questions we would have to ask
Speaker 1: people to engage them and make them like really interested
Speaker 1: in collecting their memories. Marius gives these questions as an
Speaker 1: example of the nuance needed when you begin your relationship
Speaker 1: with your avatar. The question why did you decide to
Speaker 1: become a doctor is intrusive compared to what were the
Speaker 1: things that will lead you to choosing to become a doctor.
Speaker 1: Some harder questions would be what are the things that
Speaker 1: you want to be remembered for? And then there are
Speaker 1: the intimate questions did you ever cheat on your partner?
Speaker 1: How did it feel? The thing is that even though
Speaker 1: at tournomy is meant to grant cyber immortality and reserve memories,
Speaker 1: this day to day journaling of person's life is very
Speaker 1: much rooted in the present. For us, it's more a
Speaker 1: toll for the living person to be able to collect
Speaker 1: the memories. So we're more focused on writing the story
Speaker 1: of your life for and curating it from all sources,
Speaker 1: and less about interfering with the grieving process. I think
Speaker 1: it's important to understand that this is not just an
Speaker 1: app This is something that in order to be able
Speaker 1: to work as most people want, will take years, probably
Speaker 1: even decades, because there's a lot of technology that's still
Speaker 1: not yelped out there. But instead of like waiting for
Speaker 1: that perfect moment where artificient just could be at that level,
Speaker 1: which could be in five years, could be in ten years,
Speaker 1: or could be in twenty years when that similarity moment
Speaker 1: will be reached, we prefer to start working right now
Speaker 1: because unfortunately a lot of the memories are dual appearing.
Speaker 1: A lot of these things have happened to us. Every
Speaker 1: day we forget. A lot of people pass away and
Speaker 1: they take, uh, you know, away, all the memories and
Speaker 1: everything about them. So we decided to start earlier to
Speaker 1: focus on this, but we still have a long, long journey.
Speaker 1: So this topic is pretty much mental catnip at how
Speaker 1: stock works the place where I work, and in the
Speaker 1: grand tradition of water cooler conversations, I put the idea
Speaker 1: of cyber immortality to some of my coworkers, and here's
Speaker 1: what they had to say about it. There's a beautiful
Speaker 1: sort of historical database angle to it, right, Like there
Speaker 1: will be history books written, for example, about things that
Speaker 1: are happening in today's society. But when someone five years
Speaker 1: from now, presuming we have maintained enough techno eology in
Speaker 1: an ongoing way that we can keep these records updated,
Speaker 1: is like what were like the hot topic issues of
Speaker 1: the century, Like what really was the gun control debate about?
Speaker 1: Like they could if you have a database where that
Speaker 1: searchable and you could get five hundred strangers and read
Speaker 1: things that they had all written about that, you're going
Speaker 1: to get a really interesting and probably much more complete
Speaker 1: picture than if someone just writes about it later based
Speaker 1: on their own research. That's Holly Fry, a co host
Speaker 1: of stuff you missed in history class. My first thing
Speaker 1: that popped in my head when you had related to
Speaker 1: us that he likened it to a tamagochi is can
Speaker 1: you game the system to create a much better version
Speaker 1: of yourself than you actually are like, could I only
Speaker 1: upload photoshop files where I look really great? And could
Speaker 1: I only include like the best of me in it?
Speaker 1: As you know, if I'm the custodian of this record,
Speaker 1: can I manipulate it in such a way that future
Speaker 1: generations would be like, Man, that Holly Fry was amazing.
Speaker 1: It's the grand tradition of how we celebrate death, right.
Speaker 1: I mean, when you get up and give a eulogy
Speaker 1: for somebody, you don't make notes of all the horrible
Speaker 1: things they did and the reasons that lots of people
Speaker 1: didn't like them. You remember the highlights of their life.
Speaker 1: Here's Joe McCormick, a co host of stuff to blow
Speaker 1: your mind. So yeah, I guess in death we try
Speaker 1: to we try to emphasize the positive in the same
Speaker 1: way that we do on our our social media profiles.
Speaker 1: I think that this whole idea feels funny to me
Speaker 1: personally on multiple levels. That Senior editor Alison Laddermilk, For one,
Speaker 1: I mean, why am I compiling all my memories and
Speaker 1: spending my time on that when I could be out
Speaker 1: making new ones. So that's my first issue with this.
Speaker 1: But I mean, as you can guess from that statement.
Speaker 1: I'm not big on social media, like I just I
Speaker 1: really don't tend to use it all that much. So
Speaker 1: and this seems like a bit of a progression of that.
Speaker 1: So so that I think that makes sense for me.
Speaker 1: And then the other thing, guess that. I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's carefully curated like Facebook is. I mean, we present
Speaker 1: our happy side. We feel they need to make a
Speaker 1: fake Instagram account because we can't share, you know, like
Speaker 1: the photo of us looking like a train wreck. It's
Speaker 1: just we can't. Well, I mean, some people don't feel
Speaker 1: like they're at liberty to do so, so they hide
Speaker 1: it and they only invite their close friends for their
Speaker 1: Instagram account. It just feels ridiculous to me. And I
Speaker 1: mean that's just I think that a lot of people
Speaker 1: would perpetuate that account of themselves just as very glossy
Speaker 1: and it's bogus. It annoys me, it makes me mad.
Speaker 1: The conversation, as you might expect, begins to veer towards
Speaker 1: the what ifs. I'm thinking about the movie Strange Days.
Speaker 1: Do you remember that film where you check the digital
Speaker 1: I love that movie. I have no regrets admitting how
Speaker 1: much I love that movie. For a variety of reasons,
Speaker 1: but you could replay memories, like there was an apparatus
Speaker 1: that let you relive memories that you would recorded. Angela said,
Speaker 1: has this beautiful moment where she says, memories are supposed
Speaker 1: to fade. Their designed that way for a reason. So
Speaker 1: then I wonder if you have something like this that
Speaker 1: you are working on, and you can, you know, then
Speaker 1: several decades down the road look back and see exactly
Speaker 1: the person you were in your twenties or your thirties,
Speaker 1: will it then affect the way you progress in a
Speaker 1: way that is unnatural versus how you would have just
Speaker 1: progressed had you only had your human memories to work with.
Speaker 1: I mean, we certainly narrativise our own lives. We we
Speaker 1: organize the events in our lives into a coherent story
Speaker 1: that we sort of model on the arcs of characters
Speaker 1: and the stories that we read and watching movies and stuff.
Speaker 1: And if we were to include all events in this narrative,
Speaker 1: it wouldn't be a narrative, wouldn't be interesting. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's only by selective memory that we construct a meaningful
Speaker 1: arc for ourselves. So you know, while I did this
Speaker 1: and this and this and that's how I got to
Speaker 1: where I am today. But you're leaving out all kinds
Speaker 1: of extraneous information nation. I mean, are are you more
Speaker 1: concerned about telling the literal, correct cause and effect story
Speaker 1: of your life or in telling a story the way
Speaker 1: like a fiction writer would tell a story. I see
Speaker 1: this creating weird factions of people in the future, Like
Speaker 1: the next wave of division will be about how you
Speaker 1: maintained your avatar online and what your parameters and your
Speaker 1: ethos was around it. Wow. Yeah, I think you're right.
Speaker 1: I think there will be an aesthetic that develops around it.
Speaker 1: For sure. It'll be like the truth tellers and and
Speaker 1: the gloss people, and it's sort of a science as
Speaker 1: humanity split. Right, This gets us into the nitty gritty
Speaker 1: of how you even begin to interact with your avatar.
Speaker 1: You know, you want to start with your avatar sort
Speaker 1: of like you would at a cocktail party. What do
Speaker 1: you do? How's it going? You don't want to go
Speaker 1: straight to have you ever killed anyone? It's doing? It's
Speaker 1: doing the yawn stretch? What is that? Oh? In the
Speaker 1: all of the movies from the fifties that you go
Speaker 1: to the drive in and the guy yawns and stretches
Speaker 1: and puts his arm around the girl. Yes, do you
Speaker 1: know what I'm talking? Yes, it's just it's just I
Speaker 1: think none of us had framed it in a dating
Speaker 1: sort of way prior to that, so there was a
Speaker 1: little bit of a I don't want to date myself.
Speaker 1: Maybe some people do. I'm not judging, but you know,
Speaker 1: it's but yeah, it's a kind of trust issue like that.
Speaker 1: So maybe if it bakes me some cookies, I will
Speaker 1: tell it more information. I just talked to it. Who's
Speaker 1: the time I goche At that point, I would bore
Speaker 1: it to death. It was be like this story again,
Speaker 1: please rejected by my avatar. Yeah, so some of the
Speaker 1: data trails you create could be mundane, but some of
Speaker 1: it could be well troubling. Will you also get into
Speaker 1: the realm of like legal issues like could they be
Speaker 1: petitioned by a court or another legal entity to look
Speaker 1: at somebody's stuff. There's which I'm sure they've thought about.
Speaker 1: I mean, if they're putting together a company around it,
Speaker 1: they probably have a legal team who has drawn up
Speaker 1: some documents around this. But that's just a whole other
Speaker 1: thing to consider. What if I do something terrible in
Speaker 1: the future, and then somebody wants to look at look
Speaker 1: at my history and try to figure out where it
Speaker 1: all went wrong. Well, and then I just have my
Speaker 1: pale blue dot moment. None of this matters anyway. We're
Speaker 1: a spec you know, we're just creating so much data.
Speaker 1: Now I did start actually just while you were talking.
Speaker 1: Have some some breakthroughs here. It could provide a scientific benefit,
Speaker 1: because maybe once we have tons and tons of data,
Speaker 1: we could use some machine analysis to say, hey, is
Speaker 1: there any correlation between people who make certain types of
Speaker 1: posts and then people who die prematurely of certain diseases? Oh,
Speaker 1: what do you know? People who take lots of selfies
Speaker 1: are more likely to, uh, I don't know, have their
Speaker 1: heads explode spontaneously on their fiftieth birthday. I mean that
Speaker 1: would be useful knowledge that you could use for for
Speaker 1: a real purpose, to achieve something. I guess. Oh, but
Speaker 1: I automatically see it becoming horrifying and a business driver,
Speaker 1: and then I'm like, oh it to be clear, eternomy
Speaker 1: isn't interested in running ads against your emotions at all. Still,
Speaker 1: the idea gets the group to thinking about the ability
Speaker 1: to do it based on our experience with social media
Speaker 1: and advertising. Maybe you're looking at pictures of your ex
Speaker 1: partner who unceremoniously dumped you, and you start to get
Speaker 1: a little misty eyed, and upcoms the hogandahs at and
Speaker 1: you're like, I'm all over that, or the obvious would
Speaker 1: just be one weird trick to stay young forever. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: this one spiky fruit and you will never die. You've
Speaker 1: all had that dark moment where we've probably clicked on
Speaker 1: something similar to that, right, No, me neither. I mean, ultimately,
Speaker 1: this brings me to a more general question, which is
Speaker 1: how do we want to be remembered and why do
Speaker 1: we want to be remembered? What? What is the inherent
Speaker 1: motivation to have people remember you in a certain way
Speaker 1: after you die. It's a fair question. For some people,
Speaker 1: it could be that you get to control your story,
Speaker 1: You get to outline your life and make sense of it.
Speaker 1: For others, it could be a way to vanquish death
Speaker 1: if there's still some scrap of evidence of your existence,
Speaker 1: are you really completely absent? That being said, attornemy is
Speaker 1: such a fascinating tool and concept simply because beyond capturing
Speaker 1: our digital movements and our active memories. It captures our imaginations.
Speaker 1: After all, we're storytellers and we can't quite figure out
Speaker 1: how this one is going to end. Thank you to
Speaker 1: Marry Sasaki at Tournamy for showing us how each of
Speaker 1: us has a hero's journey, a narrative to explain the
Speaker 1: impossible slash possible paradox of our existence. Thanks to Paul
Speaker 1: Headson for cracking open the crypt and letting us peer inside.
Speaker 1: And thanks to How Stuff Works staff members Alison Loudermilk,
Speaker 1: Joe McCormick, and Holly Fry. In our next episode, a
Speaker 1: supplement to this one, we'll look at our relationship with objects,
Speaker 1: the ones we include in time capsules and the ones
Speaker 1: that are shoved away in a storage unit. We need
Speaker 1: a certain amount of community and human interaction, but what
Speaker 1: happens a lot of times with individuals is they've been
Speaker 1: hurt so many times or have had trauma with people
Speaker 1: that people become unsaved to them, so they turned to
Speaker 1: objects instead. The Stuff of Life is written and co
Speaker 1: produced by me Julie Douglas. Original music composition is by
Speaker 1: co producer Noel Brown. An editorial oversight is provided by
Speaker 1: head of prodiction Jerry Rowland. You can send your thoughts
Speaker 1: to us at the stuff of life at how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com, and you can visit our Facebook page,
Speaker 1: where we'll post some outtakes from our how Stuff Works roundtable,
Speaker 1: including what imitations we'd like to be remembered for. I'm
Speaker 1: very confused about this immortality issue. I find it upsetting,
Speaker 1: but I love my children and I want them to
Speaker 1: live forever.