Thanks for the recommendation! I love stuff like that.

Sure, if it isn’t copied a million times. You’re assuming it is left on the same disk.

What about your text messages and phone calls?

That’s fair. Adding to my point, with the wealth of information future people will have at their disposal, it could be possible to recreate this time era. That is, to simulate entire cities or countries. Who knows what tech they’ll have or what they’ll want to do with it. My point is that the info from this time period, between the advent of the internet and the widespread use of quantum-safe crypto, will be easily accessible to them, and contains such an accurate record of our daily activities. I’ve had the same email address since 2005 and have never deleted messages, so my email alone could probably be used to create a pretty accurate model of a large chunk of my life. Cross-reference that with the information the people I associate with left behind and they definitely could create such a model.

And, adding further, if you were inclined to create such a simulation, you’d likely want to simulate as many people as possible so that the simulation was as realistic as possible.

I agree with you about today’s models, but the models of the future are sure to be better than today’s.

What makes you say that? Who knows what they’ll want to do in the future. Even the most mundane historic records interest today’s archeologists.

What I meant was that info already exists. It was sent using older crypto.

I think about this often. I think that Millennials, and especially Gen Z, will be the best-documented lives in history. Almost everything you’ve ever done online is sitting on a hard drive somewhere. Once the encryption schemes are broken, posterity will have full access to all of it. They’ll probably study us for hundreds of years—possibly thousands (if we even make it that far as a species).

I’ve also wondered if all of that data collected about a person could be used to recreate them—a digital copy. It probably wouldn’t be perfect, but I bet it would be close enough to be useful.

I’m definitely not excited for people to have access to and study my college Facebook account :⁠-⁠P