Six Grand into the Future

According to my Google stats, this is the 6,000th post at this blog.   Seems hard to believe, but looking at the numbers for the annual totals, it looks right.

Born in 2005 at a time when blogging was all the rage,  I've been thinking lately that it's a bit sad to see that this method of recording thoughts, interests and some aspects of personal history has been usurped in popularity by the needy instantaneousness and somewhat artificial sense of connectedness of Facebook and Twitter.   As with devotion to mobile telephony,  I seem to be about 5 to 10 years beyond the cut-off age at which being permanently available via social networking is vitally important.   I can't even stand texting if I can avoid it.  

It might just be my imagination, but I get the impression that Facebook may have just slid past some sort of peak of popularity as well.  A lot more people now seem to recognize the harmful uses to which it can be put for spreading gossip and bullying, particularly amongst the young.   (Or the old, come to think of it.   A certain ageing cartoonist in Australia has recently put it to appallingly scurrilous use for personal rumour-mongering about the Prime Minister.   I may do a post about that soon.)  But maybe I am just being unduly influenced by headlines about Facebook's poor performing share float.

In any event, it's time to give myself another burst of mild self congratulation for maintaining this eclectic place for so long.  It's funny how after doing it for this length of time, I forget quiet a few of the things I have said in years past, but I am happy to say that most of the time, upon re-reading old posts, I am pleasantly surprised at their quality.  

It's odd to think that the blog may exist in cyberspace into the far future.   Given my interest in speculative matters such as how a technological recreation of a person may be achieved*, and after re-watching the end of Spielberg's AI recently (with its short term quasi-resurrection from information somehow caught up in the cracks of space-time),  I wonder if readers will think this too grandiose a thought:  if a person has a big enough blog written for a long enough time, will future super-advanced  quantum computers with some sort of extraordinary ability to analyse neurological function from a long enough example of the use of language, as well as from life events and thoughts recorded in a diary-like thing such as a blog,  be able to derive enough information from it to be able a make a perfect cyber copy of the author?  Of course, a few photos of me and a detailed breakdown of DNA analysis being embedded in the blog would help too.**

Maybe that idea has already been dealt with in a science fiction novel or story -  there seem to be few new ideas in that genre now.  But there you have it - the most self aggrandising idea for keeping a blog going possible - it might be for my literal immortality.***  Or, it could just be that it's more diverting than other things I could be doing with my time.

And thus begins the next six thousand....

Updates: 

*  long term readers - the number of which remain I have no idea:  if they are like me, they are reading fewer personal blogs less regularly anyway - will recall that I always thought the weakest link in Frank Tipler's Physics of Immortality was his extraordinarily clumsy mechanism for future resurrection, whereby all possible versions of every person have to recreated to come up with the one that is actually me.   If it turns out to be true, I guess that maintaining this blog will at least help the Omega Point not bother recreating those versions of me which are inconsistent with events noted here.  But, now that I think of it, I suppose that if  Tipler is right, and I want to have future versions of me having (say) an eternal memory of a pleasurable life not lived, I should start lying here.   

**  There is actually one photo of me buried in the middle of this blog, which at least shows me in vague outline.   I've googled my name in the past and never found a photo of myself.   I'm not making it easy for the Omega Point...

***  It would be ironic if this future quantum computer has the complete set of the works of Shakespeare fed into it and recreates Chris Marlowe, or (even worse) a hundred monkeys.