Can we preserve knowledge … forever?

Summary

TED Radio Hour — Can We Preserve Knowledge … Forever?

Original Air Date: April 24, 2026
Host: Manoush Zomorodi
Theme: Exploring the possibility, methods, and imperatives of preserving humanity’s knowledge—for all eternity.

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Episode Overview

This episode investigates the urgent question: can we truly preserve human knowledge—digital, cultural, and environmental—for eternity? Host Manoush Zomorodi guides conversations with pioneering guests: game developer CM Ralph, Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle, molecular biologist Dina Zielinski, archaeologist Chris Fisher, and tribal leader Andrew Gildersleeve. Together, they examine the struggles of data loss, digital obsolescence, legal battles, next-generation solutions like DNA data storage, and ambitious projects to digitally map the Earth. Their stories reveal why archiving isn't just technical—it's deeply personal and cultural.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

I. Saving the Forgotten: The Rediscovery of “Caper in the Castro”

Guest(s): CM Ralph (Video game creator), Adrienne Shaw (Temple University, Media Studies)
[00:38–06:18]

• 1989: “Caper in the Castro” becomes the first known LGBTQ video game, created by CM Ralph in Silicon Valley.
• Preservation Challenges: The game was created on a now-obsolete 800 MB diskette, and featured a cast and storyline reflecting the AIDS epidemic’s devastating impact on the queer community.
• Rediscovery: Years later, academic Adrienne Shaw tracks down Ralph. Together, with technological help, they manage to extract the game and upload it to the Internet Archive, making it playable again.

CM Ralph: “It’s my love letter to my community.” [06:11]

• Emotional Impact: Letters from players show the importance of this kind of preservation for cultural inheritance—not just saving a game, but salvaging marginalized history.
• Broader Theme: How changing storage media puts vital stories at risk of disappearance.

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II. The Library of the Internet: Brewster Kahle & The Internet Archive

Guest: Brewster Kahle (Founder, Internet Archive)
[06:58–19:30]

• Digital Ephemerality:

  • “The average life of a webpage before it’s either changed or deleted is 100 days.” [07:17]
  • Web content, software, videos, and other formats are vanishing, often without notice.

• The Archive’s Mission:

  • Inspired by the burning of libraries as cultural erasure, Brewster founded the Internet Archive in 1996.
  • Dreamed of “the Library of Everything”—books, music, films, software, websites—preserved for anyone curious enough to seek them.

• The Wayback Machine:

  • Crawls the web, saving pages and creating timestamps of how sites have changed.
  • Collects 1 billion URLs per day; critical for journalists, lawyers, historians.
  • Captured versions of deleted content (e.g., Trump’s Twitter feed).
  • Addresses technical challenges like locked databases, obsolete formats.

• Collective Responsibility:

  • The public is invited to preserve content: “Anyone can go and participate in making things permanently available… I did this for the obituary for my aunt.” [12:05–13:13]

• Notable Misses:

  • “We missed Napster… maybe the biggest music library ever built by people.” [10:34–10:38]
  • Modern threats echo the past: “If you just take the libraries in Ukraine that are being purposefully targeted... it’s a way of erasing a culture.” [10:38–11:05]

• Legal Fights over Ebooks:

  • Publishers see digital lending as piracy; Archive argues it’s equal access and true preservation.
  • Raises the existential question: “Is all of this as we go digital, is it going to be public or private?” [17:14]

Brewster Kahle: “Universal access to all knowledge, I think it can be one of the greatest achievements of humankind… something that we’re remembered for for millennia.” [17:30]

• How to Persist?
  • Copies must be maintained in multiple locations, regularly upgraded, and—most importantly—used and valued by communities.

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III. Data on DNA: The Next Frontier of Memory

Guest: Dina Zielinski (Molecular Biologist, Bioinformatician)
[20:25–32:41]

• Exponential Data Growth:

  • By 2025, the world will have over 175 zettabytes (1 zettabyte = 1 trillion gigabytes) of digital data. [20:50]

• DNA as Storage Medium:

  • DNA is "the original storage device”—optimized by billions of years of evolution.
  • Capable of storing any data that can be encoded in 0s and 1s (converted to DNA’s As, Ts, Cs, and Gs).
  • Demonstrated by mapping a digital museum onto DNA, now stored in Zielinski's fridge.

Dina Zielinski: “I forget [the DNA museum] is there sometimes, and then I move my mustard jar over and there it is.” [22:02]

• Stability & Longevity:

  • DNA, properly preserved (cold, dry, in silica beads), can keep data for thousands of years—“like Otzi the Iceman.” [23:15–24:19]

• Encoding & Decoding:

  • Data is translated from binary to DNA letters, synthesized chemically; “just a text file” sent to a synthesis company.
  • Retrieval involves sequencing the DNA—possible in principle for future generations.

• Obstacles:

  • Right now, cost is prohibitive: $7,000 to store just 2 MB in 2017. Currently limited to critical archival data.
  • New approaches (e.g., use of natural enzymes) may bring costs down “within the next decade.”

• Philosophical Reflections:

  • Saving data on DNA is part of prepping for disaster scenarios—“we’re kind of preparing for the worst here.” [31:33]
  • But also optimism: “It really isn’t [science fiction]... an elegant, ideal solution with shortcomings that are being addressed.” [31:51–32:41]

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IV. Archiving the Earth: LiDAR, Archaeology, and the Fragile World

Guests: Chris Fisher (Archaeologist, Earth Archive founder), Andrew Gildersleeve (Yakutat Tlingit Tribe CEO)
[33:59–51:02]

• Discovery & Loss:
  • Fisher’s work in Mexico and Honduras used LiDAR (airborne laser mapping) to rapidly uncover ancient cities—work that “in 45 minutes… collected 20 years worth of normal archaeological fieldwork.” [36:16]

Chris Fisher: “I actually started to tear up a little bit because I was like, oh my God, this changes everything.” [36:16]

• Paradox of Documentation:

  • After a team visit, preservation efforts (e.g., soldier camps) unintentionally damaged fragile archaeology even as they sought to protect it.
  • “By documenting this place and understanding it and going to it, we’d actually fundamentally changed it.” [40:41]

• The Earth Archive:

  • Global LiDAR scanning project to create permanent, 3D digital records of the planet’s surface—starting with the most threatened areas.
  • Goals:
    1. Provide a high-resolution “before” dataset for monitoring climate and environmental change.
    2. Enable broad, multidisciplinary research on a digital “virtual planet.”
    3. Create a cultural, ecological time capsule for future generations.
  • “Once you do the [LiDAR] scan, it freezes the Earth and everything on it in time.” [44:40]

• Data for Community Empowerment:

  • Collaboration with Yakutat Tlingit tribe in Alaska—mapping island forests and burial grounds at risk from climate and industry.

Andrew Gildersleeve: “When people can see it… fundamentally [they] won’t allow it to happen anymore. It’s only when these things occur out of sight… that this type of environmental degradation occurs.” [47:46]

• Limits & Realism:
  • Even with all this recording, change is inevitable. “Any changes we make are baked in for probably the next 20 or 30 years, if not more… At this point, the landscape is going to change and it’s going to change pretty dramatically.” [49:14]
  • Fisher’s transformation: from excavator to “librarian, archivist, preserving the future.” [50:08]

Chris Fisher: “Maybe my name will be in the metadata somewhere… and that’ll be my legacy.” [50:32]

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• CM Ralph:

  • (Emotional on preservation) “It’s my love letter to my community.” [06:11]
  • (On impact) “I get mail from people… people just wanting to thank me, and I get a little teary.” [05:25]

• Brewster Kahle:

  • “The average life of a webpage before it’s either changed or deleted is 100 days. That’s it.” [07:17]
  • “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.” [09:22]
  • “Do you get to keep it?...There’s no such thing as digital ownership anymore, ever.” [16:20]

• Dina Zielinski:

  • “DNA is quite stable if you remove the moisture from it.” [25:29]
  • (On archiving foundational rights) “Here in France, they store the Rights of Man in DNA and actually keep it in the French National Archives here.” [28:52]

• Chris Fisher:

  • “In 45 minutes of flying, the LIDAR had collected 20 years worth of normal archaeological fieldwork.” [36:16]
  • “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.” [41:05]
  • “It’s totally weird. …I was trained as a field archaeologist… 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.” [50:08]

• Andrew Gildersleeve:

  • “LiDAR gives us an immediate and clear history… we need serious data to really start answering big questions of the tribe.” [47:46]

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Important Timestamps

• 00:38–06:18 — Rediscovering and preserving the first LGBTQ video game
• 06:58–19:30 — Brewster Kahle on disappearing digital content and the Internet Archive’s mission
• 20:25–32:41 — Dina Zielinski: Storing digital data and human rights documents in DNA
• 33:59–51:02 — Chris Fisher and Andrew Gildersleeve: LiDAR, the Earth Archive, and digital mapping's social and environmental impact

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Tone & Language

Warm, curious, sometimes urgent and reflective. The episode oscillates between the excitement of new technological possibilities and the sobering realization of what stands to be lost if we do not act to save our collective memory. The guests speak personally and passionately, often linking technological questions to cultural, communal, and emotional stakes.

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Summary Table: Preservation Methods Discussed

| Method | Strengths | Weaknesses/Barriers | Examples | |------------------|---------------------------------|-----------------------------|-------------------------------------| | Digital Archive | Accessible, broad coverage | Technical obsolescence, legal/political challenges | Internet Archive, Wayback Machine | | DNA Storage | Longevity, density, stability | Extremely high cost, limited DIY use | Rights of Man in DNA, digital museum in fridge | | LiDAR Mapping | Comprehensive spatial record, baseline for change | Resource-intensive, can't prevent change | Earth Archive, Yakutat Tlingit project |

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Conclusion:

Across media—digital, biological, and geographical—the fight to preserve human knowledge is a race against forgetting, disaster, and change. While the technology advances, the episode underscores that archiving is a collective, deeply human endeavor, requiring creativity, vigilance, and collaboration. The underlying question remains ongoing and open: What will future generations remember of us, and how will we help them remember well?

Transcript

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[Anoush Zamorodi]

Each week, groundbreaking TED talks.

[Chris Fisher]

Our job now is to dream big.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

Delivered at TED conferences to bring about the future we want to see around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.

[Andrew Gildersleeve]

You just don't know what you're gonna find challenge you.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is and even change you?

[Anoush Zamorodi]

I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and npr, I'm Minouche Zumarotti, and we are going to take you back to 1989 and to the first gay video game ever.

[CM Ralph]

Yeah, it was a big deal. The sounds had to be kept very small.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

Hey, hey.

[CM Ralph]

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 Lafeme.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

This is CM Ralph, the creator of Caper in the Castro.

[CM Ralph]

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?

[Anoush Zamorodi]

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

[CM Ralph]

Plus 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. 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.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

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.

[CM Ralph]

Yeah, you know, it just kind of spread.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

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

[CM Ralph]

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.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

Wow.

[CM Ralph]

Yeah. But we have no way of knowing.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

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

[CM Ralph]

This was really the only game I made.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

CM put the original diskette 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.

[Dina Zielinski]

I'm Adrienne Shaw. I'm a professor in media Studies and production at Temple University.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

Adrian was researching old LGBTQ video games, and she'd heard about Caper and the

[Dina Zielinski]

Castro, 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.

[CM Ralph]

I was stunned. I'll be honest with you. My first. My first reaction was, what? No, that can't be right.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

CM pulled out that old diskette from

[CM Ralph]

their bottom drawer, 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.

[Dina Zielinski]

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.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

Adrian ended up finding someone with the technology to extract Caper and the Castro off the diskette, and she got it uploaded to the Internet Archive, the online library of the Internet, and that's where it is now.

[CM Ralph]

You can play the game online.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

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

[CM Ralph]

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.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

What do they say? Can. Can you read us one?

[CM Ralph]

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.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

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

[CM Ralph]

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

[Anoush Zamorodi]

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.

[Brewster Kahle]

Boys, it's 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 is a DVD player. I mean, it's just. It's starting to get such that things that are really recent are just going away.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

This is Brewster Kael.

[Brewster Kahle]

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 web pages pages because you think of them as lasting a long time. You know, Gutenberg Bibles and all of that kind of thing. And nope,

[Anoush Zamorodi]

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 archives mission has expanded, saving old books and movies, TV shows and music.

[Brewster Kahle]

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, which

[Anoush Zamorodi]

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.

[Brewster Kahle]

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. 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.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

Often, yeah. And you can dig up information that someone's deleted.

[Brewster Kahle]

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.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

Right.

[Brewster Kahle]

But we run into things like locked files, databases, you can't get through to. Some of those make 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.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

Do you ever worry about things being lost to the past? I mean, I can imagine that this would make you neurotic. Oh, like, oh, we missed something.

[Brewster Kahle]

Oh, yes. We missed Napster.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

Oh, really?

[Brewster Kahle]

So Napster was maybe the best, biggest music library ever built by people. And it was shut down. We didn't want. 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.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

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

[Brewster Kahle]

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, 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.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

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?

[Brewster Kahle]

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

[Anoush Zamorodi]

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 Anoush Zamorodi and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from npr. Stay with us.

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[Anoush Zamorodi]

It's the TED Radio Hour from npr. I'm Anoush Zumarodi. Today on the show for All Eternity, and we were talking to Brewster Kahle, 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.

[Brewster Kahle]

The Library of Congress has about 28 million books we've digitized, maybe 6 or 7 million we physically own, probably on that order. So we still have a long way to go.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

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.

[Brewster Kahle]

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.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

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.

[Brewster Kahle]

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 digitize and lend what the

[Anoush Zamorodi]

Archive calls equal access, those publishers say is digital piracy.

[Brewster Kahle]

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.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

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.

[Brewster Kahle]

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. 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.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

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?

[Brewster Kahle]

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.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

Not an easy path, no.

[Brewster Kahle]

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.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

That was Brewster Kahle. He is the founder of the Internet Archive. You can see his full [e-mail] thanks also to CM Ralph, artist and maker of the video game Caper in the Castro, and Adrian Shah, 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?

[Dina Zielinski]

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.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

This is molecular biologist Dina Zelinsky.

[Dina Zielinski]

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.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

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

[Dina Zielinski]

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.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

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

[Dina Zielinski]

Yes.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

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.

[Dina Zielinski]

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

[Anoush Zamorodi]

It's so great.

[Dina Zielinski]

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.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

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

[Dina Zielinski]

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 disc or a floppy disk or a hard drive, we simply use the molecule of DNA.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

Yeah. And when it comes to DNA's durability. I have heard you use the example of Otzi the Iceman. This is a 5000 year old man whose body was found frozen by hikers in the alps in the 90s.

[Dina Zielinski]

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

[Anoush Zamorodi]

Here's Dina Zielinski on the TED stage.

[Dina Zielinski]

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. 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 as, Ts, Cs and GS. 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.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

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.

[Dina Zielinski]

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 as, Ts, Cs and GS. 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 with a dried powder? 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.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

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

[Dina Zielinski]

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

[Anoush Zamorodi]

DNA even for thousands of years. Like Otzi.

[Dina Zielinski]

Yes. 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.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

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?

[Dina Zielinski]

So just add water. So 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.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

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

[Dina Zielinski]

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

[Anoush Zamorodi]

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.

[Dina Zielinski]

Yeah. So DNA storage is mostly useful for archival or cold data. One of my favorite examples is here in France. They store the rights of man in DNA and they actually keep it in the French National Archives here. Wow. And you can make copies very easily and very cheaply, but it is currently stored safely in a vacuum tube in the archives here.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

So why aren't more people doing this now?

[Dina Zielinski]

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.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

How expensive is it right now?

[Dina Zielinski]

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, 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 US$7,000 just to synthesize that. 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.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

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?

[Dina Zielinski]

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

[Anoush Zamorodi]

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?

[Dina Zielinski]

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.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

Dina Zielinski is a molecular biologist and a bioinformatician. You can see her full talk at TED. 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 Anoush Zamorodi and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from npr. We'll be right back.

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[Anoush Zamorodi]

This message comes from the John D. And Catherine T. MacArthur foundation, recognizing extraordinarily creative individuals whose ideas, solutions and discoveries expand people's expectations of what's possible. Macfound.org it's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Anoush Zamorodi. 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.

[Chris Fisher]

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 Angamuco.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

That ancient city that Chris found was

[Chris Fisher]

massive, so it had served to preserve thousands of building foundations.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

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

[Chris Fisher]

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

[Anoush Zamorodi]

So Chris asked a colleague for advice.

[Chris Fisher]

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

[Anoush Zamorodi]

LIDAR stands for light detection and ranging. It's the sensing technology that self driving cars use to scan and make maps and of the terrain around them.

[Chris Fisher]

Well, what we do is we use

[Anoush Zamorodi]

something called airborne LiDAR, using helicopters, planes, or increasingly drones.

[Chris Fisher]

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.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

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

[Chris Fisher]

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.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

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.

[Chris Fisher]

You know, they needed some help interpreting them.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

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.

[Chris Fisher]

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, Centuries, 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. 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.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

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.

[Chris Fisher]

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.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

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.

[Chris Fisher]

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

[Anoush Zamorodi]

Chris Fisher continues. From the TED stage.

[Chris Fisher]

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. 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 ecological patrimony will be around forever. It won't.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

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?

[Chris Fisher]

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 like kind of an intense sadness. By documenting this place and understanding it and going to it, we'd actually fundamentally changed it.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

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? Or do you think, huh?

[Chris Fisher]

Yeah. 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 lidar 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 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.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

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.

[Chris Fisher]

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 curated 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 archeological 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 archeology 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, layer and

[Anoush Zamorodi]

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.

[Chris Fisher]

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.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

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?

[Chris Fisher]

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 helped facilitate with the Yakutat Tlingit tribe in Alaska.

[Andrew Gildersleeve]

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

[Anoush Zamorodi]

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

[Andrew Gildersleeve]

I'm the chief executive officer of the Yakutat Tlingit 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 nearby.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

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

[Andrew Gildersleeve]

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

[Anoush Zamorodi]

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

[Andrew Gildersleeve]

So when Chris came onto the scene, we decided to move quickly, and we immediately moved to have a LIDAR scan of the Sperrier 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 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.

[Chris Fisher]

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.

[Andrew Gildersleeve]

LiDAR gives us an immediate and clear history. And as we live in this dynamic time, 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.

[Chris Fisher]

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

[Anoush Zamorodi]

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?

[Chris Fisher]

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 going to change and it's going to change pretty dramatically.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

So depressing.

[Chris Fisher]

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.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

Chris, I just want to, 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?

[Chris Fisher]

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.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

Do you think of yourself as leaving breadcrumbs of data for future humans?

[Andrew Gildersleeve]

Now?

[Anoush Zamorodi]

Are you that person?

[Chris Fisher]

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.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

Archaeologist Chris Fisher is the founder and co director of the Earth Archive. You can see his full [e-mail] and to learn more about the project, go to theeartharchive.com Many thanks to Andrew Gildersleeve of the Yakutat Tlingit tribe as well. And thank you so much for listening to our episode For All Eternity. It was produced by Andrea Gutierrez, James de la Housy, Katie Monteleone and Matthew Cloutier. It was edited by Sanaz Meshkinpour, Rachel Faulkner White and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes Fiona Guerin. Our intern is Susanna Brown, and our fellow is Malvika Dang. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei. Our audio engineers were Alex Drewenskas and Stacy Abbott. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Colin Helms, Anna Phelan, Jimmy Gutierrez, and Daniela Valarezzo. I'm Manoush Zamorodi, and you've been listening to the TED radio hour from NPR. This message comes from NPR's sponsor, the Capital One Venture X Business Card. Earn unlimited double miles on every purchase with the Capital One Venture X Business Card. What's in your Wallet?

[Dina Zielinski]

Terms apply.

[Anoush Zamorodi]

SeeCapitalOne.com for details.

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