The Next Post

I decided today that I wanted to add another post to my blog. I was trying to decide what to write about and was thinking maybe I'd describe the survival hike I just came back from this morning in which several friends and I got lost and spent the night outdoors surrounded by snow in the wilderness of the Sierra Nevadas, but that would take too long. I guess I'm not in the mood for writing long stories right now. Instead I decided to write about this new post.

My blog has seen good times and bad times, abundant words and meager words, and it just flat out stopped quite a long time ago...or did it? What's funny is that in the one and a half years since my last post I never received any reminders from the host website saying I haven't written anything in awhile. That makes me wonder how long blogs survive untended. If someone dies, does their blog last forever on the web? I guess it doesn't really matter how long a blog lasts, but rather how good the material is. Computerized writings and art seem more permanent than old-fashioned documents or paintings/sculptures/etc., but they only really exist as long as we have something that can process all the information being stored away in a server. If some freak accident occurred and everyone's computers exploded or a great disaster or war overthrew civilization as we know it and there were no more working computers or machines to read their data, then every bit of digitalized information from bank accounts to MP3 song files would suddenly become nothing more than microscopic bits of code engraved on plastic and silicon fragments lying in the dust of a disaster zone. And if everyone who knew how to make computers was killed then those bits would become more archaic than Egyptian hieroglyphics and the person who finally figured out how to read the information trapped in these chips would be considered one of the most important people of all time, and his achievement would be recorded for all history as the next Rosetta Stone. It's funny that this genius would be so curious to find out what sort of information was stored away that he'd devote his entire life of research to cracking the codes. And it's sad that he'd find yottabytes of information probably as useless as this blog post. But it's cool that he would have figured it out and demonstrated man's irresistible and unconquerable inclination to discover things that are difficult to discover. I like the combination of curiosity and mystery; it makes life more fun.

Writing this next post has made me ponder deeply, and hopefully you too have pondered deeply questions such as, "I wonder if most hieroglyphics are just random musings of some Egyptian guy on a relaxing Sunday afternoon?" Please stay tuned for more, just in case I decide to write another one.