Can we preserve knowledge … forever?

Information feels more accessible than ever, but the ways we store data are surprisingly fragile. Can we save anything forever? This hour, TED speakers explore preserving our past, present and future. Guests include game designer CM Ralph, digital librarian Brewster Kayle, molecular biologist Dina Zielinksi and archeologist Chris Fisher. Original air date: January 27, 2023 TED Radio Hour+ listeners now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and deeper conversations with Manoush. By signing up for Plus, you directly support our work and public media, so all your episodes (like this one!) come to you without sponsor breaks. Learn more atplus.npr.org/ted http://plus.npr.org/ted. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:17Manoush Zomorodi?

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  Challenge you.

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  And even change you.

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• 0:45Manoush Zomorodi?

  Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. And we are going to take you back to 1989 and to the first gay video game ever.

• 1:05Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, it was a big deal. The sounds had to be kept very small. Hey, hey. Everything had to fit on that 800-megabyte diskette. It was very limited.

• 1:23Speaker 03

  The basic premise of the game is that you assume the role of a lesbian detective, named Tracker McDyke. And you are, you are searching for your friend who is a drag queen. And her name is Tessie LaFemme.

• 1:40Manoush Zomorodi?

  This is C.M. Ralph, the creator of Caper in the Castro.

• 1:45Speaker 03

  She's got some inside information about something that's going on in this little neighborhood of the game, which is the metaphor for Castro Street in San Francisco. But before she can get the information to you, the phone suddenly hangs up. And this is where you're left. You're left, oh, my God, where's my friend?

• 2:04Manoush Zomorodi?

  In the late 80s, CM was working in Silicon Valley by day and at night, making Caper in the Castro on their Mac Plus.

• 2:12Speaker 03

  Tessie, thankfully, if you finish the game, you free her. She's trapped down in a cellar with all these bio contaminants that the secret plot is they're going to release this into the air or water or something. A lot of it's not clear to me still. But that's the threat, the annihilation, basically, of LGBTQ community. And I think that directly reflects how it felt back then.

• 2:42Speaker 03

  During that time, it was the height of the AIDS epidemic. And I had seen so many of my gay male friends just disappear.

• 2:53Speaker 03

  It felt at times like we were under annihilation and nobody cared. No one was helping us. We had to help each other.

• 3:03Manoush Zomorodi?

  So when Caper in the Castro was complete, CM shared it with friends. Someone posted it on an online LGBTQ bulletin board, and the game took off.

• 3:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, it just kind of spread.

• 3:17Manoush Zomorodi?

  So at its high point, about how many copies do you think were downloaded?

• 3:21Speaker 03

  The estimate I had been given, and this was after it had been out for about five years. Somebody had estimated it was about 250,000 copies.

• 3:30Manoush Zomorodi?

  Wow.

• 3:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, but we have no way of knowing.

• 3:34Manoush Zomorodi?

  So did you make any other games or was that it?

• 3:37Speaker 03

  This was really the only game I made.

• 3:41Manoush Zomorodi?

  CM put the original disquette of Caper in the Castro in their bottom desk drawer. And for years, they didn't really think about it. They figured that that part of their life was over until someone got in touch in 2017. I'm Adrian Shaw. I'm a professor in

• 3:59Speaker 03

  Studies and Production at Temple University.

• 4:02Manoush Zomorodi?

  Adrienne was researching old LGBTQ video games and she'd heard about Caper in the Castro.

• 4:08Speaker 03

  And I wanted to know more about the person making the game. Like, why did you even start doing this? Like, how did you do it? So I reached out to CM and just said, hey, I'd love to talk to you more about this game. I was stunned. I'll be honest, my first, my first reaction was, what? No, that can't be right.

• 4:28Manoush Zomorodi?

  CM pulled out that old diskette from their bottom drawer, but...

• 4:32Speaker 03

  The operating system for that game had died a long time ago. It no longer existed, so there was no way to actually play the game. And CM said, like, do you think there's a way to get these games playable again? And I was like, I don't know, but let me ask.

• 4:46Manoush Zomorodi?

  Adrienne ended up finding someone with the technology to extract Caper in the Castro off the diskette. And she got it uploaded to the Internet Archive, the online library of the Internet.

• 4:58Speaker 03

  And that's where it is now. You can play the game online.

• 5:02Manoush Zomorodi?

  How does that feel? Like, that your game is available for... Does it?

• 5:09Speaker 03

  No, I don't think I'll ever be used to it. I do get mail from people, 10 to 15 emails a year. People just wanting to thank me and I get a little teary.

• 5:20Manoush Zomorodi?

  What do they say? Can, can you read us one?

• 5:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. Dear CM, I had a wonderful time this evening playing Caper in the Castro. Thank you for this priceless contribution to both the history of computer gaming and the LGBTQIA+ community. And thank you for helping pave the way for the rest of us. And that, you know, when I get stuff like that, I'm like, oh, man.

• 5:48Manoush Zomorodi?

  Yeah, because it's, it's more than saving your game from being forgotten. It's really saving a piece of history.

• 5:54Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's my love letter to my community.

• 6:01Manoush Zomorodi?

  From filing cabinets to floppy disks, the way we store our information is always in danger of going obsolete, taking along with it entire chunks of our past. And it's not just our stories and data that are in jeopardy. Thanks to climate change, the world around us is morphing faster than ever, too, quickly making maps outdated. So how can we keep our records up to date and safe? Is it even possible to truly save anything for all eternity? On this episode, we search the past, present, and future for answers.

• 6:42Speaker 02

  Boy, everything digital is just completely ephemeral. Whether it's formats that go out of date, like those floppies, just try to run one. Or a CD, find somebody that has a DVD player. I mean, it's just, it's starting to get such that things that are really recent are just going away.

• 6:59Manoush Zomorodi?

  This is Brewster Kayle.

• 7:00Speaker 02

  The average life of a webpage, before it's either changed or deleted, is 100 days. That's it. I think it was kind of a cruel joke to call webpages pages, because you think of them as lasting a long time. You know, Gutenberg Bibles and all of that kind of thing. And nope.

• 7:19Manoush Zomorodi?

  Brewster knew this was going to be a problem. Disappearing websites, missing chapters of the internet. He knew this way back in 1996. And that is why he created the Internet Archive. As we heard, it's where Caper in the Castro can still be found. And over the years, the archive's mission has expanded, saving old books and movies, TV shows, and music.

• 7:43Speaker 02

  The idea is to try to build the library of everything, the library of Alexandria for the digital age. We can make all the books, music, video, webpages, software, everything ever published by people, available to anybody curious enough to want to have access to it. That was the dream of the internet. And the Internet Archive is a part of making that dream come true.

• 8:06Manoush Zomorodi?

  Which is a lofty goal and a huge endeavor. Because how does someone even begin to back up the Internet? Brewster started by building something he called the Wayback Machine.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  Yes, probably the most used and important part of the Internet Archive right now is the Wayback Machine, where we have collected webpages by going and basically clicking every web link on every webpage every two months. So if you go to archive.org and type in a URL, we'll show you different versions of that URL over time. We collect about a billion URLs every day. And we're finding that it's really important to journalists that are trying to find what actually happened. Lawyers love it because they can use it to say, hey, you said this before, and now you're not saying that. It's the only record, often.

• 9:02Manoush Zomorodi?

  Yeah, and you can dig up information that someone's deleted.

• 9:06Speaker 02

  Yes. Take Donald Trump's tweets. A large part of the policy of the impact on our country while Donald Trump was first president was through his Twitter feed, and then they turned it off. So it all just kind of disappeared. So we have a copy that we have made available through the Wayback Machine that makes it so we can see what it is. Or when a company goes under GeoCities and just everybody's sites go away. There are endless of these sites that go away or make different business decisions. And so people say, gosh, I'm glad that I can get a hold of that. But we run into things like locked files, databases you can't get through to.

• 9:49Speaker 02

  Some of those are making things real challenges. We're working back and forth with the different websites to try to make things available. And the web also has parts that go obsolete, so that the old websites, you can't replay them anymore. So there's challenges every day.

• 10:07Manoush Zomorodi?

  Do you ever worry about things being lost to the past? I mean, I can imagine that this would make you neurotic.

• 10:16Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 10:16Manoush Zomorodi?

  Like, oh, we missed something.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  Oh, yes. We missed Napster.

• 10:20Manoush Zomorodi?

  Oh, really?

• 10:21Speaker 02

  So Napster was maybe the best, biggest music library ever built by people. And it was shut down. We didn't, we didn't get it. And if you just take the libraries in Ukraine that are being purposefully targeted, just the same way the Nazis targeted the library in Belgrade. It's a way of erasing a culture. You go after their libraries. So, yes, we're worried about this all the time.

• 10:49Manoush Zomorodi?

  Right. So what do you do? Do you try to go back and fix things that you missed? Do you have an example, maybe?

• 10:54Speaker 02

  Well, on Wikipedia, we've tried to take all of the footnotes, all the citations, and turn them blue, turn them into little links. So we went and worked to fix the broken links on Wikipedia. We've now fixed over 15 million broken links. We've prioritized the books that are referenced in Wikipedia and acquired those books, bought them or got them donated. And we digitize them and then put them back in such that if there's a page number, you can click and turn right to that right page. We did a big project on Ukrainian Wikipedia to try to collect all of the books that are referenced and make those clickable.

• 11:34Manoush Zomorodi?

  So how much harder is it to collect everything that's on the web now compared to, say, a decade ago or 15 years ago, simply because it is behind paywalls? Or it's, you can't access it without a login?

• 11:49Speaker 02

  Yes. So we have robots that are going around and collecting a billion URLs. And fortunately, there are over 100 people that work for the Internet Archive that are trying to work on keeping it all alive.

• 12:06Speaker 02

  We don't collect every YouTube video. It's just too big, but we try to collect the ones that are referenced a lot or the linked to from Twitter pages, say. So we can't collect everything, but we collect a lot. And if we're not collecting the right things, go to archive.org. There's a save page now feature, and you can put in a URL. And people do this all the time. It's used at about 80 times a second. So even anybody can go and participate in making things permanently available. I just did this for the obituary for my aunt. I went to the webpage, made sure that that obituary from that funeral home service was archived. So I did that this morning.

• 12:50Speaker 02

  So you too can go and participate in building the web archives.

• 12:56Manoush Zomorodi?

  In a minute, a legal battle between the Internet Archive and some of the biggest book publishers. At issue: whether archiving eBooks is digital piracy or preserving the best of humanity for everyone to enjoy. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us.

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• 15:00Manoush Zomorodi?

  It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zamirodi. Today on the show, for all eternity. And we were talking to Brewster Cale, the founder of The Internet Archive, a nonprofit that is trying to digitize everything that we humans create, from websites to music, old movies, and of course, books.

• 15:23Speaker 02

  The Library of Congress is about 28 million books. We've digitized maybe six or seven million. We physically own, probably on that order. So we still have a long way to go.

• 15:35Manoush Zomorodi?

  And it's getting harder to proceed because eBooks present very particular problems. For example, that eBook you downloaded, you don't actually own it.

• 15:46Speaker 02

  So it turns out the big publishers don't sell eBooks. They license them. So your eBook that's on your Kindle or whatever, you don't actually have that, not in the same sense you had a physical book. You can't pass it down to your kid. And anytime they want to change it, they can change it at any time or make it go away.

• 16:05Manoush Zomorodi?

  It's a licensing issue. And Brewster and The Internet Archive started trying to get around it by buying physical copies of books, scanning them, and making their own eBooks to lend out.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  So we started that in 2011. And in the beginning of the pandemic, four of the largest publishers decided to sue The Internet Archive to say that you aren't allowed to digitize and lend.

• 16:28Manoush Zomorodi?

  What the archive calls "equal access," those publishers say is "digital piracy."

• 16:34Speaker 02

  And that suit is ongoing. We'll hear probably next year from the district court, and it'll probably be appealed. But we'll see. The big concept that I never really would have imagined would be at play is digital ownership. When you buy a digital file, do you own it in the same sense that you owned a physical thing? You can't just go and post it and give it to everybody. That's understood, fine. But do you get to keep it? And what the big publishers are saying is, no, there's no such thing as digital ownership anymore, ever. So that's the absolute opposite of what we were doing with the Internet in the earliest days, when we were trying to democratize access, democratize creation.

• 17:16Manoush Zomorodi?

  I actually went back into the TED Archives and watched your talk from 2007, where you laid out your vision. And you knew then that there would be conflicts, even if you didn't know what they were.

• 17:29Speaker 02

  There's a political and social question out of this, is all of this, as we go digital, is it going to be public or private? There are some large companies that have seen this vision, that are doing large-scale digitization, but they're locking up the public domain. The question is, is that the world that we really want to live in? What's the role of the public versus the private as things go forward? How do we go and have a world where we both have libraries and publishing in the future, just as we basically benefited as we were growing up? So, universal access to all knowledge, I think it can be one of the greatest achievements of humankind, like the man on the moon, or the Gutenberg, or the Library of Alexandria. It could be something that we're remembered for, for millennia, for having achieved.

• 18:10Speaker 02

  People have no idea of the heroics that not only the staff of the Internet Archive, but now a thousand other organizations we work with on the web collection, about 500 libraries and the book collections, of how much goes on to try to make it so that the web that we sort of take for granted... Works. I guarantee if you've never heard of the Internet Archive, you've used it because it's just woven into everything.

• 18:36Manoush Zomorodi?

  That brings me to a final sort of existential question, Brewster. If everything digital eventually becomes obsolete, how do you archive the archive so it doesn't become obsolete too?

• 18:50Speaker 02

  Boy, libraries are, you know, they're destroyed all the time. And it's often governments or large, powerful entities that seek to destroy them. So you want more than one copy in more than one place. Then you also want to make it so that it's still used, so that it's cared for. Our collections are almost completely on spinning disk. We have to replace those every five to 10 years, so we need people to want it to stay around. Fortunately, there are many, many, many people that are seeing this as a path forward.

• 19:25Manoush Zomorodi?

  Not an easy path.

• 19:26Speaker 02

  No. Building a library of everything is a challenge, but it starts one webpage at a time, one book at a time. And if we see ourselves as preserving history collectively, we'll all make it come true.

• 19:43Manoush Zomorodi?

  That was Brewster Kayle. He is the founder of the Internet Archive. You can see his full talk at ted.com. Thanks also to C.M. Ralph, artist and maker of the video game Caper and the Castro, and Adrian Shaw, professor of media studies and production at Temple University. Since this episode first aired, the Internet Archive has had numerous challenges. It had to restrict access to half a million books on its site after losing legal battles with publishers. More recently, media outlets have been blocking the site from archiving their articles because of concerns that AI platforms use that material to train their models.

• 20:25Manoush Zomorodi?

  Today on the show, preserving our past, present, and future for all eternity. Which begs the question, where are we going to keep all that information? And how will we keep it safe?

• 20:39Speaker 03

  Absolutely. One of the biggest challenges is the sheer amount of data that we're generating. And I don't think we really realize, most of us, where all of that data is being stored. Okay, maybe I'll pay a few more bucks a month so that I can store my data in the cloud. But what is that cloud? You know, it's this huge server facility.

• 21:01Manoush Zomorodi?

  This is molecular biologist Dina Zelinsky.

• 21:04Speaker 03

  So it's projected that by the year 2025, the global data sphere, as in like all of the digital data that is out there, is projected to exceed more than 175 zettabytes. And one zettabyte is equal to a trillion gigabytes. So it's really become an urgent problem. You know, we've come a long way in digital data storage and computing, but we're running out of storage devices, quite literally.

• 21:33Manoush Zomorodi?

  Dina says there is a possible solution to our data storage problem, a microscopic solution that's been around for billions of years: DNA.

• 21:45Speaker 03

  I actually have some in my fridge here. You can store... Yeah, you know, that was a collaboration I had with a local artist, but we stored a digital museum on DNA. And so it's currently in my refrigerator.

• 21:59Manoush Zomorodi?

  Wait, so you have a museum on DNA in your refrigerator right now?

• 22:05Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 22:06Manoush Zomorodi?

  I love the image of you like going to get a like scoop of strawberry ice cream and seeing this little vial of DNA, holding all this data right next to it.

• 22:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, I forget it's there sometimes, and then I move my mustard jar over, and there it is.

• 22:24Manoush Zomorodi?

  So great.

• 22:27Speaker 03

  The idea of DNA data storage is actually not new. And we can actually say that DNA is the the original storage device. It stores all of the data that makes up living beings. And so it's been optimized over literally billions of years.

• 22:47Manoush Zomorodi?

  Dina says you can use DNA just like a hard drive or a floppy disk, but it does an even better job.

• 22:55Speaker 03

  It's true. I mean, it's absolutely true. It's it can beat any manmade device in terms of longevity, density. It has a very small ecological footprint. I mean, it's biocompatible. It's something that we'll always be interested in. And we can think of DNA as just another storage device. So instead of a compact disk or a floppy disk or a hard drive, we simply use the the molecule of DNA.

• 23:29Manoush Zomorodi?

  Yeah. And when it comes to DNA's durability, I have heard you use the example of Utsi the Iceman. This was a 5,000 year old man whose body was found frozen by hikers in the Alps in the 90s.

• 23:42Speaker 03

  Ah, yes, Utsi the Iceman. So he was up in the Alps and it was nice and cold and dry. And these are sort of the ideal storage conditions. And all that is to show that, you know, even after thousands of years, we're still able to extract meaningful information from the DNA. So DNA in itself is very fragile, actually. If I just have DNA in a tube, for example, it's very susceptible to UV radiation. It is really only stable at room temperature for a relatively short period of time. And then it starts to sort of degrade and accumulate errors. But if you store it very cold and very dry, we could theoretically store data that's critical

• 24:27Speaker 03

  to humanity in such a place, in a naturally existing cold and dry place like Utsi the Iceman.

• 24:34Manoush Zomorodi?

  Here's Dina Zelensky on the TED stage.

• 24:36Speaker 03

  Storing data on DNA is not new. Nature's been doing it for several billion years. In fact, every living thing is a DNA storage device. But how do we store data on DNA? We first learn to sequence or read DNA, and very soon after, how to write it or synthesize it. This is much like how we learn a new language. And now we have the ability to read, write, and copy DNA. We do it in the lab all the time. So anything, really anything, that can be stored as zeros and ones, can be stored in DNA. To store something digitally, we convert it to bits or binary digits.

• 25:20Speaker 03

  Each pixel in a black and white photo is simply a zero or a one. And we can write DNA, much like an inkjet printer can print letters on a page. We just have to convert our data, all of those zeros and ones, to A's, T's, C's, and G's. And then we send this to a synthesis company. So we write it, we can store it, and when we want to recover our data, we just sequence it.

• 25:43Manoush Zomorodi?

  Okay, so is there a machine that does this? That says, "Write, there's a zero and a one, and so I'm gonna turn that into an A or a C or whatever else it would be, and transpose it or write it onto this synthetic material?"

• 26:02Speaker 03

  Right, so that is actually the easiest part of this whole process. So we can theoretically store up to two bits or two zeros or ones of data per DNA letter, right? So you have a possibility of a zero or a one stored in A, T, C, or G. And so the encoding scheme is actually very simple. So if you have a 00, that becomes an A. 01 becomes C. 10 becomes G. And 11 becomes T. And that's it. It's just a text file, right? So you have a text file at the end of this whole process with just sentences of A's, T's, C's, and G's. And we send that text file to a synthesis company.

• 26:46Speaker 03

  And in a matter of days, depending on the complexity of your DNA sequences, they'll send you back a tube with a sort of dried powder containing your DNA.

• 26:57Manoush Zomorodi?

  With a dried powder?

• 26:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, so DNA is quite stable if you remove the moisture from it. And so usually it comes in a tube with just sort of this thin film on the bottom.

• 27:10Manoush Zomorodi?

  Okay, so you've got the tube with the dried powder. How long can you leave it in there for?

• 27:15Speaker 03

  So if you store it, for example, in your refrigerator, in your kitchen, I mean, it can easily last years, even tens of years. Ideally, you would freeze it and that would further extend the life of the DNA.

• 27:31Manoush Zomorodi?

  Even for thousands of years, like utsi?

• 27:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I mean, when we synthesize DNA, it's still fragile on its own. But if you keep it protected, so we can store DNA in silica beads, so glass beads. And some researchers at ETH in Zurich, Robert Grass's team have shown that the DNA is stable for thousands of years. And they've replicated sort of a European climate. And they showed that by inducing temperature and other stress, they were still able to recover the data from the DNA.

• 28:11Manoush Zomorodi?

  And let's say you were like, today's the day. I'm going to get the data out of the DNA. How would you go about doing that?

• 28:17Speaker 03

  So just add water. So you take your, you just take your tube of DNA. You add water to it and then you load it onto the sequencer. And then you simply convert your As, Ts, Cs, and Gs back to zeros and ones and decode the data.

• 28:35Manoush Zomorodi?

  Okay, so this is something that you need highly specialized computers and machines to do right now, right?

• 28:43Speaker 03

  Yes, even though I have DNA in my fridge, I cannot do much with it.

• 28:50Manoush Zomorodi?

  Okay, got it. So just being at home, it's not like you're going to store your data in the fridge like you store data on your desktop, on your laptop or something. What we're talking about is really putting critical pieces of humanity's collective knowledge in a safe place.

• 29:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, so DNA storage is mostly useful for archival or cold data.

• 29:13Speaker 03

  Um, one of my favorite examples is here in France. They stored the rights of man in DNA. And they actually keep it in the French National Archives here.

• 29:25Manoush Zomorodi?

  Wow.

• 29:26Speaker 03

  And you can make copies very easily and very cheaply. But it is currently stored safely in a vacuum tube in the archives here.

• 29:37Manoush Zomorodi?

  So why aren't more people doing this now?

• 29:40Speaker 03

  I would say in the next decade or so, the synthesis costs will drop down sufficiently in order to make this a scalable and affordable alternative. But for the time being, it's simply too expensive. But if we can store critical archival data, that's really the ideal solution for DNA, at least in the next like decade or two.

• 30:03Manoush Zomorodi?

  How expensive is it right now?

• 30:06Speaker 03

  I mean, it's insanely expensive. It's kind of a moving target, but we're talking on the order of, you know, thousands to millions or billions of dollars just to store even text documents. To give you a concrete example, so in our study back in 2017, we stored two megabytes of data. So we basically compressed a few files, including an Amazon gift card, one of the first movies ever made, and an operating system. And so all that totaled to two megabytes. And it costs about 7,000 US dollars just to synthesize that. So it's still way too expensive.

• 30:50Speaker 03

  But this is where scientists are once again turning to nature. So instead of using this very costly chemical synthesis process, there are actually enzymes that exist in nature that synthesize DNA. And so there are quite a few groups and companies that are specifically working on improving that method of synthesis.

• 31:13Manoush Zomorodi?

  It's interesting, though, thinking about the scenario where we would need to retrieve the rights of man from the French archive. I mean, if we are at a point where that's the only copy we have left, the one that's on the DNA, don't we have far bigger problems as the human race? I can't help but go to a very nihilist point in these apocalyptic scenarios where I'm like, who cares?

• 31:47Speaker 03

  Especially after the pandemic with global warming. I think, yeah, we're kind of preparing for the worst here.

• 31:54Manoush Zomorodi?

  But do you feel like, is that sort of a defeatist? Like, are you thinking about these scenarios all the time as someone who's considering how we might save data for all eternity?

• 32:05Speaker 03

  I try not to, but inevitably, yes, I do. Especially just when it comes to thinking about all of those documents that are critical to humanity. But I think it's something that we all need to come together on, on a global level, to decide what is important and how and where we might back these documents up. The cool thing is, it sounds like science fiction. It sounds crazy and complicated, and it really isn't. It's actually very straightforward. It's an elegant, ideal solution with shortcomings that are being addressed, you know, by scientists. So I'm very optimistic that it will become a viable solution, at least, as I mentioned,

• 32:50Speaker 03

  for critical archival data within the next decade or so.

• 32:56Manoush Zomorodi?

  Dina Zelensky is a molecular biologist and a bioinformatician. You can see her full talk at ted.com. And since we spoke in 2023, this technology has become publicly available. DNA storage is still expensive, but now anyone can store their data this way. On the show today, for all eternity. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back.

• 33:34Speaker 00

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• 35:05Manoush Zomorodi?

  It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. And on the show today, "For All Eternity: How We Are Trying to Preserve Information Forever." So far, we've talked about archiving the internet, putting data on DNA. And now, for something a little different. What if we could archive the Earth? Our story starts with archaeologist Chris Fisher. So in 2009, myself and my team of graduate students and other students documented an ancient city for the first time.

• 35:41Speaker 07

  I'm in central Mexico, which we now call Angamuco.

• 35:45Manoush Zomorodi?

  That ancient city that Chris found was massive.

• 35:49Speaker 07

  So it had served to preserve thousands of building foundations.

• 35:53Manoush Zomorodi?

  And that was so exciting, but also terrifying because Chris would need years to excavate and map this site.

• 36:01Speaker 07

  I mean, this would have been my career, surveying this one site. I'm super impatient and I didn't want to do that.

• 36:07Manoush Zomorodi?

  So Chris asked a colleague for advice.

• 36:09Speaker 07

  I'm like, dude, there's got to be a better way. And he's like, well, have you heard of this LiDAR technology?

• 36:15Manoush Zomorodi?

  LiDAR stands for Light Detection and Ranging. It's the sensing technology that self-driving cars use to scan and make maps of the terrain around them.

• 36:26Speaker 07

  Well, what we do is we use something called airborne LiDAR.

• 36:29Manoush Zomorodi?

  Using helicopters, planes, or increasingly drones.

• 36:33Speaker 07

  And basically you have some sort of instrument. That instrument fires off a pulse of infrared beams, you know, hundreds of thousands of pulses in some instances. When one of those beams strikes something, it could be the ground surface, it could be buildings, pyramids, roads, all of that sort of stuff. It returns back to the sensor and it gives you a measure of distance.

• 36:56Manoush Zomorodi?

  All that data creates a full 3D scan, a digital map. And that first map that Chris saw absolutely delighted him.

• 37:05Speaker 07

  In 45 minutes of flying, the LiDAR had collected 20 years' worth of normal archaeological fieldwork. I actually started to tear up a little bit because I was like, oh, my God, this changes everything.

• 37:19Manoush Zomorodi?

  Chris became a specialist in using LiDAR in archaeology, which is why, three years later, documentary filmmakers sought him out. They wanted Chris to look at their scans of a site in Honduras.

• 37:32Speaker 07

  You know, they needed some help interpreting them.

• 37:35Manoush Zomorodi?

  The scans seemed to show a lost city buried beneath the vegetation. Chris thought so too, but he also wanted to be sure. And so they headed to Central America.

• 37:48Speaker 07

  We had to go verify that what we were actually seeing in the LiDAR images was actually on the ground. And to do that, these sites were so inaccessible that the only way to effectively get there was by helicopter.

• 38:05Speaker 07

  And so we entered this world. That hadn't been visited by people for centuries.

• 38:12Manoush Zomorodi?

  Centuries.

• 38:13Speaker 07

  Centuries, since it was last occupied in the prehistoric period. There are only a couple of entrances into the valley. And so we were able to fly through one of those gaps. And then the valley opens up and it's just a sea of green. And we saw below us flocks of scarlet macaws.

• 38:37Manoush Zomorodi?

  Oh, it's beautiful.

• 38:38Speaker 07

  So it's just green, green, green. And then you have these brightly colored birds. And the contrast in the colors was just really mind blowing. And I knew at that point that we were, this was, this was different. We were in for something really amazing.

• 38:57Manoush Zomorodi?

  Chris and the team did indeed find evidence of a city that's now called the City of the Jaguar. There were ancient house foundations, irrigation canals, and a shrine.

• 39:10Speaker 07

  So we found a cache of objects at the center of the site on the, that were left on the surface that were like a ritual closing of the site.

• 39:20Manoush Zomorodi?

  It was a huge discovery. And so the government got involved. Soldiers were stationed on site to protect it from looting. But 11 months later, when Chris came back for another visit, he was shocked at how different things looked.

• 39:35Speaker 07

  The tiny gravel bar where we first landed our helicopter was gone.

• 39:40Manoush Zomorodi?

  Chris Fisher continues from the TED stage.

• 39:43Speaker 07

  The brush had been cleared away and the trees removed to create a large landing zone for several helicopters at once. Without it, after just one rainy season, the ancient canals that we had seen in our LiDAR scan were damaged or destroyed. In the Eden I described soon had a large clearing, central camp, lights, and an outdoor chapel.

• 40:08Speaker 07

  In other words, despite our best efforts to protect the site as it was, things changed. Our initial LiDAR scan of this City of the Jaguar is the only record of this place as it existed just a few years ago.

• 40:25Speaker 07

  Broadly speaking, this is a problem for archaeologists. We can't study an area without changing it somehow. And regardless, the earth is changing. Archaeological sites are destroyed. History is lost. We take for granted that our cultural and ecological patrimony will be around forever. It won't.

• 40:47Manoush Zomorodi?

  So the Honduran government brings in soldiers to make sure that other people don't come in looking for treasures. But in the process, they destroy other things that probably the naked eye would never know was there unless we were an archaeologist. And, and so when, when you realized that that was happening, did you say to yourself, well, thank goodness, we have this original mapping of this area with LiDAR?

• 41:10Speaker 07

  Yeah, so my initial reaction was, oh yeah, we've, we've got these. We have the LiDAR images of them. But then my secondary reaction was like, kind of an intense sadness. By documenting this place and understanding it and going to it, we, we'd actually fundamentally changed it.

• 41:27Manoush Zomorodi?

  So this, what do you do with sadness is always the question that I have. And I, I feel like, you know, do you just say, well, this is what I, my life's calling. This is what I do.

• 41:40Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 41:41Manoush Zomorodi?

  Or do you think, huh? Hmm.

• 41:44Speaker 07

  Yeah, you know, that made me realize how fragile the, the earth is, how rapidly the earth is changing due to the climate crisis and how much stuff there is left to discover. It took me several months to figure this out, but eventually I did come to the realization that, that I could do something, that due to the climate crisis, we're losing cultural and ecological treasures that we don't even know exist. And unless we document them, we will never know they exist. We've lost 50% of our rainforests. We lose 18 million acres of forest every year.

• 42:23Speaker 07

  And rising sea levels will make cities, countries, and continents completely unrecognizable. Unless we have a record of these places, no one in the future will know they existed. Looking at my scans from Honduras and Mexico, it's clear that we need to scan, scan, scan now as much as possible while we still can. That's what inspired the Earth Archive. An unprecedented scientific effort to light our scan the entire planet, starting with areas that are most threatened. Its purpose is threefold. Number one, create a baseline record of the Earth as it exists today to more effectively

• 43:08Speaker 07

  mitigate the climate crisis. To measure change, you need two sets of data, a before and an after. Right now, we don't have a high-resolution before data set for much of the planet. Number two, create a virtual planet so that any number of scientists can study our Earth today. Archaeologists like me can look for undocumented settlements. Ecologists can study tree size, forest composition, and age. Geologists can study hydrology, faults, disturbance. Possibilities are endless.

• 43:48Speaker 07

  Number three, preserve a record of the planet for our grandchildren's grandchildren so they can reconstruct and study lost cultural patrimony in the future.

• 44:02Manoush Zomorodi?

  Okay, so your mind-boggling project is called the Earth Archive. And it requires, as you put it, that we scan, scan, scan the planet.

• 44:14Speaker 07

  Yeah, so this was, this is the big idea. That's where I landed. In that we have this technology to scan the Earth's surface and everything on it and curate it in perpetuity for our grandchildren's grandchildren.

• 44:30Speaker 07

  And these LiDAR records represent the ultimate conservation records. Because not only do they record the ground surface, but they record all the vegetation on it, every tree. It would record the underlying topography. It would record the hydrology of places. We'd be able to see archaeological sites in those zones. We would be able to see modern settlement change and roads and deforestation features, and countless, countless other things. But the archaeology piece of this is probably the least important. The ecological piece is probably a lot more important.

• 45:10Speaker 07

  And so it really would be the ultimate baseline data set from which you could do other significant analysis.

• 45:19Manoush Zomorodi?

  Layer and layer and layer upon layer of information. I mean, I love the way you described it. It's like a research sandwich that it's capturing.

• 45:28Speaker 07

  Exactly. And that's the amazing thing about these LiDAR records. Once you do the scan, it freezes the earth and everything on it in time. And since it's a digital record, you can curate it in perpetuity. So it doesn't degrade like a photograph.

• 45:46Manoush Zomorodi?

  All right. How is this even possible? Because what you're talking about is a small plane flying over every square inch of the planet to scan it with a LiDAR ray. Can that be done?

• 46:00Speaker 07

  Absolutely. It absolutely can be done. Many wealthier countries are already scanning all of the lands within their borders. The problem is that countries that don't have those kinds of resources, which happen to be some of the countries that are most threatened, or even areas within the United States populations that are sort of underserved by the government, are not getting their area scanned in time.

• 46:28Speaker 07

  So we've just completed a really exciting project that we helped facilitate with the Yakatack Klingut tribe in Alaska.

• 46:36Speaker 05

  We live in a dynamic, shifting environment. We find that the landscape is actively moving all around us.

• 46:45Manoush Zomorodi?

  This is Chris's partner on the project, Andrew Gildersleeve.

• 46:49Speaker 02

  I'm the chief executive officer of the Yakataq Klinkit tribe.

• 46:54Speaker 05

  We're really the top of southeast Alaska on the Gulf. What makes us so unique is the fact that we have one of the few glaciers in the world that is actually growing, a tidewater glacier.

• 47:08Manoush Zomorodi?

  Nearby, lots of logging is causing deforestation, especially on one particular island.

• 47:15Speaker 05

  It's made of gravel, and the trees are literally what hold the gravel together.

• 47:21Manoush Zomorodi?

  And that is jeopardizing the tribe's livelihoods, their land, and their burial sites.

• 47:27Speaker 05

  So when Chris came onto the scene, we decided to move quickly. And we immediately moved to have LIDAR scan of this barrier island. Now, this island is home not only to burial grounds and ancient village sites, it's also literally our protection from the Gulf of Alaska, from potential tsunamis.

• 47:55Speaker 05

  And with LIDAR, it immediately meant that this island could not only speak for itself and tell us its stories, it also meant that the logging operation was not going to get away with any of the destructive tendencies that they had in the past. We had recorded and collected everything with regards to the island, from the roots to the tops of the trees.

• 48:19Speaker 07

  They're seeing the changes in their landscape, they're concerned, and they want to use every technique they possibly can to ensure that they are practicing best standards for their continuing stewardship.

• 48:35Speaker 05

  LIDAR gives us an immediate and clear history. And as we live in this dynamic time, in this dynamic landscape, with the climate crisis, with the deforestation, with fisheries issues, tourism issues, we need serious data to really start answering big questions of the tribe.

• 48:56Speaker 05

  And the powerful part of that is I believe that when people can see it, when it's been recorded, that we as a people fundamentally won't allow it to happen anymore. It's only when these things occur out of sight, when there's no true record, and when a story can't be told, that this type of environmental degradation occurs.

• 49:24Speaker 07

  And it's also really exciting for us at the Earth Archive to help work with the Akatot to build their own internal capacity to be able to, you know, understand and analyze the LiDAR data and use it to, to practice good conservation on their lands.

• 49:43Manoush Zomorodi?

  Yeah, you know, it makes me wonder, like, has anyone ever said to you, "Okay, that's great that you're gonna scan this area, but how about just giving us the time and money to actually stop the climate change that is being inflicted upon us? Instead of showing us a snapshot of where we are, how about helping us fix it?"

• 50:03Speaker 07

  Yeah, unfortunately, that's not possible. So any changes, I mean, we could all start living like the Flintstones today, and any changes we make are baked in for probably the next 20 or 30 years at least, if not more. So unfortunately, at this point, the landscape is gonna change, and it's gonna change pretty dramatically.

• 50:24Manoush Zomorodi?

  So depressing.

• 50:25Speaker 07

  I know it, it is depressing, but we've gotta fight, fight, fight to do the best that we can do for the generations that follow us.

• 50:36Manoush Zomorodi?

  Chris, I just wanna, in the last few minutes, ask you, I mean, this is kind of a big change for you. You are an excavator, you're an archaeologist, you're looking into the past, and now you have become more of a librarian archivist preserving the future in some ways. Is that weird for you?

• 50:57Speaker 07

  It's totally weird. I mean, you know, I was trained as a field archaeologist. The longer my boots stayed in the closet, the more unhappy I would get. And now it's time to leave our boots in the closet and just buckle down and focus on recording the things that are being lost.

• 51:15Manoush Zomorodi?

  Do you think of yourself as leaving breadcrumbs of data for future humans now? Are you that person?

• 51:21Speaker 07

  I hope so. I mean, I hope. I fully expect that people will be going back through these LiDAR records that we're collecting today, 100 years from now, maybe centuries from now, who knows, asking questions that we can't conceive of, using techniques that are beyond even anything that we could sort of come up with. And maybe my name will be in the metadata somewhere, or the Earth Archive's name will be in the metadata somewhere, and that'll be my legacy.

• 51:51Manoush Zomorodi?

  Archaeologist Chris Fisher is the founder and co-director of The Earth Archive. You can see his full talk at ted.com. And to learn more about the project, go to theeartharchive.com. Many thanks to Andrew Gildersleeve of the Yakatat Klingut tribe as well. And thank you so much for listening to our episode for all eternity. It was produced by Andrea Gutierrez, James Delahoussaye, Katie Monteleone, and Matthew Cloutier. It was edited by Sanaz Meshkhanpour, Rachel Faulkner White, and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes Fiona Giren. Our intern is Susannah Brown, and our fellow is Malvika Dang. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei.

• 52:36Manoush Zomorodi?

  Our audio engineers were Alex Dre Wenskus and Stacy Abbott. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Colin Helms, Anna Phelan, Jimmy Gutierrez, and Daniela Balarezzo. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you've been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

• 52:54Speaker 06

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Mint Mobile. Ditch overpriced wireless and get premium wireless for less. Go to mintmobile.com/switch to see which plan works for you.

• 53:10Speaker 00

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