Computers Do Not Lie

Annamaria on Monday

My computer expects to live forever. If not the Fountain of Youth, it thinks(?) it has found something close to immortality.  On Friday, 9 December 2021, I found on my desktop, this message:

The number of digits in the message struck me immediately. How many years would 10,918,801 days make?  I reached for my Calculator app. Answer: 29,914 years! (Give or take a few calendar quarters.)

I was also beginning to wonder if this longevity applied only to my computer or could it also apply to me. I knew immediately that I wouldn't want to live that long.

My next thought was: not so fast, girlie. What about leap years? A quick mental calculation came up with just under 7500 extra days in all those millennia. That is, if leap years continue to be counted that far into the future. Well, they just might you know, since the need for a leap year is based on the rotation and orbit around the sun of our sacred planet. Anyway, I then subtracted another 20 years from my total, bringing it down to a mere 29,894 years.  (Give or take a few months.)

What would life on Earth be like in the year 31,915, on that fateful day when my computer will refuse to back up to its peripheral hard drive?

There's a lot of talk on broadcast media and podcasts about the condition of the Earth, given climate change. Save the planet!! You hear these words.  You read them.  But it really is not the existence of the planet that is in danger.  It will keep spinning and orbiting, whether we are here or not.

It is Earth's ability to support human life that is called into question, thanks to the destructive nature of human behavior.

I stopped considering any of these possibilities this past Friday, and went on to concentrate on my work in progress and my preparation for a long absence from New York, given my upcoming trip to spend the holidays and winter months with my loved ones in Italy.

However, all of my imaginings about the next 10,918,801 days came back to haunt me over the weekend. Because on Saturday, my computer sent me this message:

And on Sunday, this one:

It seems my first my interpretation of the message was wrong.  I now know that my computer has given me, not a countdown, but a declaration of its own immortality.

I wish it a lot of luck.