The Future Computational Visualization of Your Ancestral Tree May Get Some Rain From the Clouds

Have you ever gone online and looked at your family tree? Perhaps much of the work has been done for you, therefore when you click on a name, it tells of the individual ancestor, all of their offspring, and their ancestral line. What if it told you more? What if we took some of the strategies from Vannevar Bush from Bell Labs and his concept of life logging or recording an entire life? What if your future ancestors had access to everything that you did throughout your life? Is this possible? Let's talk.

You see, with all the social networking you are doing, you are putting more and more of yourself online. The Internet is recording every website you go to, every e-mail you send, every YouTube video you watch. It knows more about you than you know about yourself, and can probably predict what you will do next even if you don't know yourself. This might scare you from a surveillance standpoint, and have you questioning the validity of your personal privacy, it does me often enough. In the future personal privacy might not actually be a compound word or phrase that anyone ever uses, it may not exist, certainly not online.

Now then back to the ancestral tree, what if everything from your entire life was still digitally archived in the cloud. Your grandchildren, and their grandchildren, and their grandchildren could look up everything about you, how you lived, what you did, and could learn from your life experiences. This would help them understand from where they came, and their genetic line, and the lessons you learned, perhaps the hard way. This would help them do better, accomplish more, and get along in a way that would help them advance.

Wouldn't that be a wonderful gift to your offspring's future offspring? What if you had all this information from all your past ancestors? Wouldn't that be of interest to you? Wouldn't you like to know what they were like, what they did, what they thought, who their friends were, and what their dreams happen to be? All of this could be possible in the future, and it may even be probable. In fact your mind may be re-created someday in the cloud, and you will live in digital eternity. Interestingly enough you may not be living in heaven, but you'll still be up in the clouds.

Yes, this is an interesting futuristic concept, and there have been a number of futurists discuss things along this line. As the coordinator for a think tank it is interesting that in the present period we are completing components that would allow this transition. Indeed I asked her to please consider all this and think on it.