California Attorney General Rob Bonta issued a “consumer alert” in the wake of its bankruptcy regarding the “trove of sensitive consumer data 23andMe has amassed.” Bonta reminded Californians that they have the right to direct the company to delete their genetic data.
What about individual data is so important? Why should people worry that they’ve left a spot of saliva as a DNA sequence in some company database? Surely they are just a drop of water in an endless sea. But as the forensic DNA revolution showed, even drops in the ocean can be told apart. Perhaps our attitude to individual inconsequence has changed. The 23andMe incident illustrates the overthrow of the 20th-century view of individual insignificance in the great statistical aggregation of the universe and its replacement by the realization that the entire signature of the universe depends on the individual contribution of every little thing.
We are mentally ready for such a concept. Many readers are familiar with the blockchain, the technology underlying Bitcoin. Each block in a blockchain is linked to the previous block through cryptographic hashes, forming a chain. Once a link is added, altering it is extremely difficult because it requires changing all subsequent blocks. This tracks very closely with our experience of causality, our notion that effects follow causes in time. Changing the past is impossible because you would alter the present. Things are never truly forgotten, and that scares us.
The idea that “three little people actually do amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world” is contrary to what popular culture taught us in the past. Formerly, it was a given that “all we are is dust in the wind.” But causality means you must be careful even of dust. A concrete example of this causality is the Mars Sample Return quarantine procedure. We know that one DNA sequence, undetected in the Martian dust, can alter the character of life on Earth forever.
“The NASA-ESA team is working closely with each agency’s planetary protection leadership to … provide safety assurance by preventing any uncontained, unsterilized Mars material from being delivered to Earth.”
Late 20th-century physics, mathematics, and computer science taught the public that reality, rather than being linear and predictable, was full of surprises. “In a chaotic system, no detail is small enough to ignore. Adjusting the position of a butterfly in Brazil by a millimeter, in one infamous metaphor, could mean the difference between a typhoon striking Tokyo and a tornado tearing through Tennessee… Uncertainty that starts off as a rounding error eventually grows so large that it engulfs the entire calculation. In chaotic systems, this growth can be represented as movement across a written-out number: Ignorance in the one-tenths place spreads left, eventually moving across the decimal point to become ignorance in the tens place.”
Not only that, we now understand that nothing is forgotten. T(1) is built on T(0). Ray Bradbury’s Sound of Thunder story about time machine hunters shooting dinosaurs in the past probably did more than almost any other work of popular fiction to demolish the idea that individual events would smooth out as rounding errors. The guide warns the time travel hunter:
“We don’t want to change the Future. We don’t belong here in the Past. The government doesn’t like us here. We have to pay big graft to keep our franchise. A Time Machine is finicky business. Not knowing it, we might kill an important animal, a small bird, a roach, a flower even, thus destroying an important link in a growing species.”
“That’s not clear,” said Eckels.
“All right,” Travis continued, “say we accidentally kill one mouse here. That means all the future families of this one particular mouse are destroyed, right?
“Right”
“And all the families of the families of the families of that one mouse! With a stamp of your foot, you annihilate first one, then a dozen, then a thousand, a million, a billion possible mice!”
“So they’re dead,” said Eckels. “So what?”
“So what?” Travis snorted quietly. “Well, what about the foxes that’ll need those mice to survive? For want of ten mice, a fox dies. For want of ten foxes a lion starves. For want of a lion, all manner of insects, vultures, infinite billions of life forms are thrown into chaos and destruction. Eventually it all boils down to this: fifty nine million years later, a caveman, one of a dozen on the entire world, goes hunting wild boar or sabertoothed tiger for food. But you, friend, have stepped on all the tigers in that region. By stepping on one single mouse. So the caveman starves. And the caveman, please note, is not just any expendable man, no! He is an entire future nation.”
This idea is so serious that some cosmologists have seriously proposed that everything that can happen does happen. “Originated by U.S. physicist Hugh Everett in the late 1950s, [the Many Worlds theory] envisions our Universe as just one of numerous parallel worlds that branch off from each other, nanosecond by nanosecond, without intersecting or communicating.”
One might initially wonder: does it matter then what I choose? If I’ve made the “right” choice in some version of events, doesn’t that cancel any mess made in this one? However, this doesn’t help if you experience only one trajectory that you live with. Perhaps we are summed across all possibilities. Far from making choices meaningless, causality multiplies them indefinitely.
As with so many other things, our ultimate significance is still shrouded in mystery, but the balance of our fears has changed. People are trapped between wanting to be remembered forever and being afraid of actually being preserved for all eternity. Once we feared being forgotten. Hector pleaded with the gods for immortality after his spear had missed Achilles, “Nay, but not without a struggle let me die, neither ingloriously, but in the working of some great deed for the hearing of men that are yet to be” [Iliad Book 22, line 305]. But we moderns with a similar chance want only to be forgotten. Mister California, please delete my data from 23andMe.
