Does not compute

You know I can't resist a good "end of the world" story. And since Howard Camping let us down on the rapture and the end of the Mayan calendar didn't really mean end of days, all we have is Trump wagging his nasty rump at the North Koreans to give us doomsday fears.

But I ran across a new one the other day on Twitter. An article about the world running out of data space caught my eye. Apparently the dire predictions have been around for awhile. We are creating so much data posting photos and videos of our pets and kids on social media that even the mysterious cloud can't hold everything. The article said that even if we figured out a way to store data on every single atom, we'd run out of data space in a matter of years.

I don't claim to understand how we can run out of space for something that doesn't physically exist, but it started me thinking. I've been blogging away thinking that after I post my last post before heading off into the great unknown some day, it and the rest of Dizgraceland would hang around forever helping people solve the riddle of  Leon Spinks and determining whether clams are really happy. Now I find that we could run out of storage space and my life's work will likely be erased to make room for more videos of cats on trampolines.

BTW, my last post will likely be something whiny about repeating myself, being invisible and wondering why my blog never went viral.

Pause for a lugubrious howl.


So nothing truly lasts forever. I imagine the archaeologists of the future will be mining data to try and figure out what really happened in the past. And all of the trillions of tweets out there will just be so much dust brushed away in hopes of finding something meaningful that happened during the digital age.

None of this should come as any surprise to those of us who have trusted our memories to film, cassette tapes, video tapes, floppy drives, thumb drives, DVDs and portable hard drives. Shoot, we can't even trust storing things in our brains.

When I was about 10 years old, I buried a bunch of my school papers in a coffee can in my backyard along with a note explaining that I was burying them for future generations to discover because I would likely be famous and the papers would be worth major bucks. A couple of years later I tried digging the can up and it and everything inside had disintegrated.

I guess immortality will always be out of my grasp. All of this is like writing "I love you" on the beach. The words are washed away before you are a few yards down the beach.

Oh well, guess the world better appreciate these pearls while the servers at blogger.com still have space.