transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] This message comes from Great Wolf Lodge. There's adventure for the whole family, including an indoor waterpark that's always 84 degrees, attractions, spacious suites and more. You're just a short drive away from an unforgettable family getaway. Learn more at greatwolf.com.

Speaker 2:
[00:18] This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks.

Speaker 1:
[00:25] Our job now is to dream big.

Speaker 2:
[00:26] Delivered at TED conferences.

Speaker 3:
[00:28] To bring about the future we want to see.

Speaker 2:
[00:30] Around the world.

Speaker 4:
[00:31] To understand who we are.

Speaker 2:
[00:33] From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.

Speaker 4:
[00:38] You just don't know what you're going to find.

Speaker 2:
[00:40] Challenge you.

Speaker 1:
[00:41] We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy?

Speaker 2:
[00:43] And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes.

Speaker 3:
[00:48] Do you feel that way?

Speaker 2:
[00:49] 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.

Speaker 5:
[01:08] Yeah, it was a big deal. The sounds had to be kept very small. Everything had to fit on that 800 megabyte diskette. It was very limited. The basic premise of the game is that you assume the role of a lesbian detective named Tracker McDyke, and you are searching for your friend who is a drag queen, and her name is Tessie LeFemme.

Speaker 2:
[01:41] This is CM Ralph, the creator of Caper in the Castro.

Speaker 5:
[01:46] 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. It's called 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?

Speaker 2:
[02:05] In the late 80s, CM was working in Silicon Valley by day, and at night making Caper in the Castro on their Mac Plus.

Speaker 5:
[02:13] Tessie, thankfully, if you finish the game, you free her. She's trapped down in a cellar with all these bio contaminants. 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. I think that directly reflects how it felt back then. During that time, it was the height of the AIDS epidemic, and I had seen so many of my gay male friends just disappear. It felt at times like we were under annihilation and nobody cared. No one was helping us. We had to help each other.

Speaker 2:
[03:04] So, when Caper and the Castro was complete, CM shared it with friends. Someone posted it on an online LGBTQ bulletin board, and the game took off.

Speaker 5:
[03:15] Yeah, you know, it just kind of spread.

Speaker 2:
[03:18] So, at its high point, about how many copies do you think were downloaded?

Speaker 5:
[03:22] 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.

Speaker 2:
[03:31] Wow!

Speaker 5:
[03:32] Yeah. But we have no way of knowing.

Speaker 2:
[03:35] So, did you make any other games or was that it?

Speaker 5:
[03:38] This was really the only game I made.

Speaker 2:
[03:42] 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.

Speaker 3:
[03:57] I'm Adrienne Shaw. I'm a professor in Media Studies and Production at Temple University.

Speaker 2:
[04:03] Adrienne was researching old LGBTQ video games, and she'd heard about Caper in the Castro.

Speaker 3:
[04:09] And I wanted to know more about the person making the game.

Speaker 5:
[04:13] Like, why did you even start doing this?

Speaker 3:
[04:14] 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.

Speaker 5:
[04:21] I was stunned. I'll be honest with you. My first reaction was, what? No, that can't be right.

Speaker 2:
[04:29] CM pulled out that old disquette from their bottom drawer.

Speaker 5:
[04:32] But 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.

Speaker 3:
[04:40] And CM said, 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.

Speaker 2:
[04:47] Adrienne ended up finding someone with the technology to extract Caper and the Castro off the disquette. And she got it uploaded to the Internet Archive, the online library of the Internet.

Speaker 5:
[04:59] And that's where it is now. You can play the game online.

Speaker 2:
[05:04] Well, how does that feel? Like, that your game is available for, does it?

Speaker 5:
[05:10] 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.

Speaker 2:
[05:21] What do they say? Can you read us one?

Speaker 5:
[05:24] 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 plus 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.

Speaker 2:
[05:49] Yeah, because it's more than saving your game from being forgotten. It's really saving a piece of history.

Speaker 5:
[05:55] Yeah. It's my love letter to my community.

Speaker 2:
[06:02] 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. 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.

Speaker 6:
[06:43] Boys, everything digital is just completely ephemeral. Whether it's formats that go out of date, like those floppies, just try to run on. Or a CD, find somebody that is a DVD player. I mean, it's just starting to get such that things that are really recent are just going away.

Speaker 2:
[07:00] This is Brewster Kayle.

Speaker 6:
[07:01] The average life of a web page 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 could think of them as lasting a long time. You know, Gutenberg Bibles and all of that kind of thing. And nope.

Speaker 2:
[07:20] 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.

Speaker 6:
[07:44] 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, web pages, 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.

Speaker 2:
[08:07] 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.

Speaker 6:
[08:20] Yes, probably the most used and important part of the Internet Archive right now is the Wayback Machine, where we have collected web pages by going and basically clicking every web link on every web page 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. 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.

Speaker 2:
[09:03] Yeah, you can dig up information that someone's deleted.

Speaker 6:
[09:07] 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. They're 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.

Speaker 2:
[09:45] Right.

Speaker 6:
[09:45] But we run into things like locked files, databases you can't get through to. 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.

Speaker 2:
[10:08] Do you ever worry about things being lost to the past? I mean, I can imagine that this would make you neurotic.

Speaker 6:
[10:17] Oh.

Speaker 2:
[10:17] Like, oh, we missed something.

Speaker 6:
[10:18] Oh, yes. We missed Napster.

Speaker 2:
[10:21] Oh, really?

Speaker 6:
[10:22] So Napster was maybe the best, biggest music library ever built by people, and it was shut down. 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.

Speaker 2:
[10:50] Right. So what do you do? Do you try to go back and fix things that you missed? Do you have an example, maybe?

Speaker 6:
[10:55] 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 in 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 digitized them and then put them back in so 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.

Speaker 2:
[11:35] 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 you can't access it without a login?

Speaker 6:
[11:50] 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. 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 web page, made sure that that obituary from that funeral home service was archived. I did that this morning. So you too can go and participate in building the web archives.

Speaker 2:
[12:57] 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 Zomorodi and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Wayfair. It's Way Day at Wayfair, where you can score the best deals in home and upgrade your space that work within your budget. And the best part, everything ships fast and free during Way Day. Get up to 80% off with fast and free shipping on everything. Head to wayfair.com, April 25th through the 27th to shop Way Day. That's wayfair.com. Wayfair, every style, every home.

Speaker 7:
[14:03] This message comes from Schwab. At Schwab, you can get everything from self-directed investing to full service wealth management, all in one place. No matter your investing goal, life stage, amount to invest or know-how, you can invest your way with Schwab. This message comes from Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it at progressive.com, Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Potential savings will vary, not available in all states.

Speaker 2:
[14:40] It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. Today on the show For All Eternity, and we were talking to Brewster Kayle, 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.

Speaker 6:
[15:03] 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.

Speaker 2:
[15:16] It's getting harder to proceed because e-books present very particular problems. For example, that e-book you downloaded, you don't actually own it.

Speaker 6:
[15:26] So it turns out the big publishers don't sell e-books. They license them. So your e-book 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.

Speaker 2:
[15:45] 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 e-books to lend out.

Speaker 6:
[15:57] 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.

Speaker 2:
[16:08] What the Archive calls equal access, those publishers say is digital piracy.

Speaker 6:
[16:14] 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 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.

Speaker 2:
[16:56] 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.

Speaker 6:
[17:09] 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's 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. 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.

Speaker 2:
[18:17] 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?

Speaker 6:
[18:31] Boy, libraries are 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 and 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 disc. 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.

Speaker 2:
[19:05] Not an easy path.

Speaker 6:
[19:07] No, building a library of everything is a challenge, but it starts one web page at a time, one book at a time. And if we see ourselves as preserving history collectively, we'll all make it come true.

Speaker 2:
[19:25] That was Brewster Kayle. He is the founder of the Internet Archive. You can see his full talk at ted.com. Thanks also to CM Ralph, artist and maker of the video game Caper in 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. 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?

Speaker 3:
[20:20] 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.

Speaker 2:
[20:41] This is molecular biologist Dina Zielinski.

Speaker 3:
[20:44] 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.

Speaker 2:
[21:13] Dina says there is a possible solution to our data storage problem, a microscopic solution that's been around for billions of years. DNA.

Speaker 3:
[21:25] 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.

Speaker 2:
[21:39] Wait, so you have a museum on DNA in your refrigerator right now?

Speaker 3:
[21:45] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[21:47] 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.

Speaker 3:
[21:56] Yeah, I forget it's there sometimes, and then I move my mustard jar over and there it is.

Speaker 2:
[22:04] It's so great.

Speaker 3:
[22:07] The idea of DNA data storage is actually not new, and we can actually say that DNA is 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.

Speaker 2:
[22:27] Dina says you can use DNA just like a hard drive or a floppy disk, but it does an even better job.

Speaker 3:
[22:35] It's true. I mean, it's absolutely true. It can beat any man-made 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 molecule of DNA.

Speaker 2:
[23:09] Yeah. And when it comes to DNA's durability, I have heard you use the example of Utsi the Iceman. This is a 5,000-year-old man whose body was found frozen by hikers in the Alps in the 90s.

Speaker 3:
[23:22] 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 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 to humanity in such a place, in a naturally existing cold and dry place, like, let's see, the ice map.

Speaker 2:
[24:14] Here's Dina Zielinksi on the TED stage.

Speaker 3:
[24:16] Storing data on DNA is not new. Nature has 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. 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.

Speaker 2:
[25:23] Okay. So is there a machine that does this that says, right, there's a zero and a one, and so I'm going to turn that into an A or a C or whatever else it would be, and transpose it or write it onto this synthetic material.

Speaker 3:
[25:41] 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 0 or a 1 stored in A, T, C or G. And so the encoding scheme is actually very simple. So if you have a 0, 0, that becomes an A, 0, 1 becomes C, 1, 0 becomes G, and 1, 1 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, B's, C's, and G's. And we send that text file to a synthesis company. 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.

Speaker 2:
[26:37] With a dried powder?

Speaker 3:
[26:39] 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.

Speaker 2:
[26:50] Okay, so you've got the tube with the dried powder. How long can you leave it in there for?

Speaker 3:
[26:55] 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.

Speaker 2:
[27:11] Even for thousands of years, like Ötzi?

Speaker 3:
[27:15] 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.

Speaker 2:
[27:51] 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?

Speaker 3:
[27:57] So just add water. So you take your tube of DNA, you add water to it, and then you load it onto the sequencer. And then you simply convert your A's, T's, C's and G's back to zeros and ones and decode the data.

Speaker 2:
[28:15] Okay, so this is something that you need highly specialized computers and machines to do right now, right?

Speaker 3:
[28:23] Yes. Even though I have DNA in my fridge, I cannot do much with it.

Speaker 2:
[28:30] 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.

Speaker 3:
[28:47] Yes. So DNA storage is mostly useful for archival or cold data. 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.

Speaker 2:
[29:05] Wow.

Speaker 3:
[29:06] And you can make copies very easily and very cheaply, but it is currently stored safely in a vacuum tube in the archives here.

Speaker 2:
[29:17] So why aren't more people doing this now?

Speaker 3:
[29:20] 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 decade or two.

Speaker 2:
[29:43] How expensive is it right now?

Speaker 3:
[29:46] I mean, it's insanely expensive. It's kind of a moving target, but we're talking on the order of 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. 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.

Speaker 2:
[30:53] 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 sort of nihilist point in these apocalyptic scenarios where I'm like, who cares?

Speaker 3:
[31:27] Especially after the pandemic with global warming, I think, yeah, we're kind of preparing for the worst here.

Speaker 2:
[31:34] But do you feel like, is that sort of a defeatist? Are you thinking about these scenarios all the time as someone who's considering how we might save data for all eternity?

Speaker 3:
[31:45] 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 by scientists. So I'm very optimistic that it will become a viable solution, at least as I mentioned, for critical archival data within the next decade or so.

Speaker 2:
[32:36] Dina Zielinski 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 Zomorodi and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back.

Speaker 7:
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Speaker 2:
[34:34] 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.

Speaker 8:
[35:03] So in 2009, myself and my team of graduate students and other students documented an ancient city for the first time in Central Mexico, which we now call Anguimuco.

Speaker 2:
[35:14] That ancient city that Chris found was massive.

Speaker 8:
[35:18] So it had served to preserve thousands of building foundations.

Speaker 2:
[35:22] And that was so exciting, but also terrifying because Chris would need years to excavate and map this site.

Speaker 8:
[35:30] I mean, this would have been my career, surveying this one site. I'm super impatient and I didn't want to do that.

Speaker 2:
[35:35] So Chris asked a colleague for advice.

Speaker 8:
[35:38] I'm like, dude, there's gotta be a better way. And he's like, well, have you heard of this LIDAR technology?

Speaker 2:
[35:44] 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.

Speaker 8:
[35:55] But what we do is we use something called airborne LIDAR.

Speaker 2:
[35:58] Using helicopters, planes, or increasingly drones.

Speaker 8:
[36:02] And basically you have some sort of instrument. That instrument fires off a pulse of infrared beams, hundreds of thousands of pulses in some instances. When one of those beams strikes something, 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.

Speaker 2:
[36:24] All that data creates a full 3D scan, a digital map. And that first map that Chris saw absolutely delighted him.

Speaker 8:
[36:34] 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.

Speaker 2:
[36:48] 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.

Speaker 8:
[37:01] You know, they needed some help interpreting them.

Speaker 2:
[37:04] 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.

Speaker 8:
[37:17] 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. And so we entered this world that hadn't been visited by people for centuries.

Speaker 2:
[37:40] Centuries?

Speaker 8:
[37:41] 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.

Speaker 1:
[38:06] Ah, it's beautiful.

Speaker 8:
[38:07] 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 different. We were in for something really amazing.

Speaker 2:
[38:26] 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.

Speaker 8:
[38:39] So we found a cache of objects at the center of the site, that were left on the surface that were like a ritual closing of the site.

Speaker 2:
[38:49] 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.

Speaker 8:
[39:04] The tiny gravel bar where we first landed our helicopter was gone.

Speaker 2:
[39:09] Chris Fisher continues from the TED stage.

Speaker 8:
[39:11] 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. And the Eden I described soon had a large clearing, central camp, lights and an outdoor chapel. 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. 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 archaeological patrimony will be around forever. It won't.

Speaker 2:
[40:16] 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 so 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.

Speaker 8:
[40:39] Yeah, so my initial reaction was, oh yeah, we've got these. We have the LIDAR images of them. But then my secondary reaction was kind of an intense sadness. By documenting this place and understanding it and going to it, we'd actually fundamentally changed it.

Speaker 2:
[40:56] So what do you do with sadness is always the question that I have. And I feel like, do you just say, well, this is what I, my life's calling, this is what I do.

Speaker 8:
[41:09] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[41:09] Or do you think, huh, hmm.

Speaker 8:
[41:13] Yeah. You know, that made me realize how fragile 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 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. 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 the 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 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. 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.

Speaker 2:
[43:31] 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.

Speaker 8:
[43:43] Yeah, so 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. 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. And so it really would be the ultimate baseline data set from which you could do other significant analysis.

Speaker 2:
[44:48] 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.

Speaker 8:
[44:57] 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.

Speaker 2:
[45:15] 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. It cannot be done?

Speaker 8:
[45:29] 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. So we've just completed a really exciting project that we help facilitate with the Akatok Klingit tribe in Alaska.

Speaker 4:
[46:05] We live in a dynamic shifting environment. We find that the landscape is actively moving all around us.

Speaker 2:
[46:14] This is Chris' partner on the project, Andrew Gildersleeve.

Speaker 4:
[46:18] I'm the chief executive officer of the Akatok Klingit tribe. 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.

Speaker 2:
[46:36] Nearby, lots of logging is causing deforestation, especially on one particular island.

Speaker 4:
[46:44] It's made of gravel, and the trees are literally what hold the gravel together.

Speaker 2:
[46:49] And that is jeopardizing the tribe's livelihoods, their land, and their burial sites.

Speaker 4:
[46:56] So when Chris came onto the scene, we decided to move quickly, and we immediately moved to have a LIDAR scan of the Sparrier 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. And with LIDAR, it immediately meant that this island can 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.

Speaker 8:
[47:48] 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.

Speaker 4:
[48:04] LIDAR gives us an immediate and clear history. And as we live in this dynamic time and 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. 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.

Speaker 8:
[48:53] And it's also really exciting for us at the Earth Archive to help work with the Yakutat to build their own internal capacity to be able to understand and analyze the LIDAR data and use it to practice good conservation on their lands.

Speaker 2:
[49:12] Yeah, it makes me wonder, has anyone ever said to you, okay, that's great that you're going to 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?

Speaker 8:
[49:32] 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.

Speaker 2:
[49:53] So depressing.

Speaker 8:
[49:54] I know it is depressing, but we've got to fight, fight, fight to do the best that we can do for the generations that follow us.

Speaker 2:
[50:04] 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?

Speaker 8:
[50:26] It's totally weird. I mean, 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.

Speaker 2:
[50:44] Do you think of yourself as leaving breadcrumbs of data for future humans now? Are you that person?

Speaker 8:
[50:49] I hope so. 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 come up with. And maybe my name will be in the metadata somewhere, or the Earth Archives name will be in the metadata somewhere. And that'll be my legacy.

Speaker 2:
[51:20] 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 Gilderslieve of the Yakutat Klingit tribe as well. And thank you so much for listening to our episode for All Eternity. It was produced by Andrea Gutierrez, James Elahoussi, Katie Montalione and Matthew Cloutier. It was edited by Saanaz Meschgenpour, Rachel Faulkner-White and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes Fiona Geeran. Our intern is Susanna Brown and our fellow is Malvika Dang. Our theme music was written by Romteen Erabloui. Our audio engineers were Alex Dreewenskis and Stacey 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.

Speaker 7:
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