hey future
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Future, you don’t know me but, I just want to tell you about what’s going on here where I am. Maybe it will matter to you … where you are.
I work at a library, do you still have those? At least for now, in my world the library is a place that you can have, for free, knowledge that others have discovered. Things uncovered from times before you were born. So, like you Future, I also get messages from the past.
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Here in my world, people die. Do they still do that in your world, Future? When a person passes away here, their family often makes a tribute to the memory of their loved one. They have a funeral … they bury them in the ground or burn them to ash … there is a gathering of friends and family … they usually write some sort of testimonial about their life. This is known as an obituary.
Where I am, these family reports are almost always the last evidence we have of a person’s life.
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In this place and time, Future, we have the ability to go just about anywhere we want on what is called the “world wide web”. You must still have that. I hope.
This web is how most people find out about what is going on in their world. If it can be found somewhere in those filaments, then it is real, it happened.
But from time to time mistakes do occur. We have not yet achieved perfection. You might have done so, Future, and you might think of us as primitives. Well here, things break or get lost. We do our best, though. If something gets forgotten, hopefully we have a record of it somewhere - an instruction on how to get it back.
Kind of like a seed.
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Future, there are a lot of people here that you will never know. Not because their families and friends didn’t try to tell you about them. They did. No, we made a mistake. We lost them.
There is a library of their seeds. I hope it is still in your world.
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Future, we forgot two million people in June of this year. Their families and friends told us about them on the web’s biggest message board, but somehow they are not to be found there anymore.
We didn’t learn from that mistake and a couple of months later we lost another 200,000.
I am going to go to the library now, Future, and at least try to show you the record of those people being here.
Here is the seed you will search for at the library:
https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/search
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At the library we will look at the earliest and the latest day in August for the year I live in now, 2024. Fortunately, the librarian has archived the first and the next to last day - so we have numbers for almost the entire month.
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Future, ‘recent results’ are how many obituaries the world’s biggest message board has had put on it since it began.
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Now we just need to subtract the first number from the last number to see how many obituaries have accumulated over the month of August.
48,323,192 minus 47,977,820 equals 345,372.
This is what the archive at the library recorded on those days.
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Now we will show the evidence of our forgetting.
Let us go back to the world’s largest message board. We will have to use an advanced search by clicking on ‘more filters’.
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Click the drop down menu under the publish date and enter a custom range. We want to only see results for August of 2024.
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Now dear listener, oh so patient Future, what is the difference between what the library of history has shown us and what the world’s largest message board has to tell?
Yes, over 200,000 records of people have been lost in just one month.
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Future, I hope that you will still be able to visit that library and see for yourself that these people lived.
Then again, maybe these mistakes have been fixed and you know them well. I hope so.
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* I do not have paid subscriptions. But if you want to help me out, please consider contributing to a crowd fund I have to pay for a FOIA (public records request). Thank you.
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