Trustee's letter for October Fowey News
Dear Friends
The “Eternity Crystal”
In the news last month was a story that, deep in a salt cave in Hallstatt, Austria, there is now a tiny “5D memory crystal”, a form of time capsule apparently designed to last for billions of years. The crystal is equivalent to fused quartz, one of the most chemically and thermally durable materials on Earth. It is designed to survive extremes of freezing and fire, a direct impact force of 10 tons and remain unchanged by long exposure to cosmic radiation.
This resilience is crucial because a team at the University of Southampton have used “ultra-fast lasers to precisely inscribe data into nanostuctured voids oriented within silica.” The data it records is nothing less than the full human genome and, for the approximately three billion letters in the genome, each letter was sequenced 150 times to make sure it was in proper position.
The university calls it an “Eternity Crystal” not just because of its potential endurance but in honour of the precious information it contains. According to the team, led by Professor Peter Kazansky, the crystal could provide a blueprint to bring humanity back from extinction thousands, millions or even billions of years in the future. He said, “The 5D memory crystals opens up possibilities for other researchers to build an everlasting repository of genomic information from which complex organisms like plants and animals might be restored…”
On the Radio 4 Today Programme, Cambridge’s Professor Sarah Teichmann said of the crystal that, “The human material is there for eternity… I presume that it is in case we are obliterated so that the information that encodes a human being, how to be human essentially, will be there for perhaps some other intelligence to reconstruct human beings…”.
In response the comedian Robin Morgan added his view that he hoped that wouldn’t happen but should, “...an extra-terrestrial species find it, I hope they don’t recreate us. I hope they are able to read that particular Book of Life with a certain amount of fascination...”
The day before that broadcast Elon Musk, owner of Twitter/X and SpaceX posted on his own platform, that, “We should write all of human knowledge into these crystals” and also that, “One of these days, a large comet will hit Earth and destroy almost all life, as has happened many times in the past. Eventually, the Sun will expand enough to boil the oceans and destroy all life. Either become a spacefaring civilisation or die. Those are the two choices”.
This all speaks to something else Robin Morgan said to presenter Emma Barnett, “The human species is one that I think finds it very difficult not to believe that there will be a kind of eternity whether it’s the idea of us moving to Mars or whether it’s the idea that the extra-terrestrials from currently millions of light years away will find this crystal.”
The Bible book of Ecclesiastes was written by a titan of his times, now in retirement and ruminating on how he has spent his life and what he has learnt. He is known, somewhat ethereally, but appropriately given the subject, as, “The Preacher”. At one time he says, “… God has made everything beautiful in its time. Also he has set eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from beginning to end”. This older man knows in his heart just what today’s academics, comedians and entrepreneurs feel too - the sense that the life of humanity must continue in some way beyond this present existence. As so often, the Bible grapples with the fundamentals issues of being human.
In doing that, however, The Preacher goes beyond looking to a technical solution, either genetics or engineering. He sees that the expectation of the human heart does not exist in a vacuum, but that God has put it there in His great design and, whilst there are limitations to his own ability to fathom eternity, it can accordingly and inevitably only be answered by God.
Surely The Preacher is right? A very, very long time on Mars with Elon Musk isn’t going to satisfy the longing of our hearts, not least because that would be grossly unjust to all those not “elite” enough to afford SpaceX’s service. Nor does he expect to exist merely as part of a “restored” “repository of genomic information” or “how to be human essentially”, but rather as the very real person he is or was.
And of course, this chimes with each of us. Eternity, not just in name but in nature, is in our hearts - not endless longevity or anonymous biology but a transformed existence, reunited with loved ones and not bound by time or space. That is what eternity in the Bible means, and, whether he knows it or not, it is from where Robin Morgan’s term the “Book of Life” originates.
At Anchor Anglican Church Fowey we have recently spent a couple of weeks thinking about this sort of ancient wisdom in Ecclesiastes. It has left us hungry for more, so Dan Leafe and Ben Ireland will be leading an evening of Mexican food mixed with more of the book at 7pm on 14th October at Lankelly Fowey RFC. If that interests you, do just come along.
with every blessing
Dan Leafe, Trustee