(Photo by Nasa, uploaded on Flickr by Jurvetson. See a high resolution version too!)

The Phoenix interplanetary exploration vehicle landed on Mars. My name, David Orban, is on it, together with those of the other members* of Planetary Society. This is of course a rather indirect way of being on Mars, but for the moment I can’t do better, and it is still thrilling to feel part of humanities space exploration efforts!

The photo above is really worth seeing at high resolution: it shows the Phoenix lander descending on the surface, as seen by the Mars Orbiter flying around the planet.

*If you want your name flying into space on other vehicles, you can participate in other programs that the Planetary Society is organizing too!

Image by ximenatapia
What are the consequences of the digitization of our data? How does the local storage that we used to own as our only solution for preserving digital memories, avoid becoming a puzzle for the industrial archeologists of the future, instead of a trusted safe for us and our children?

I use a lot of local storage, at more than a Terabyte in my home currently, and certainly more in my companies, and I also spread data out in the services that I use. For photos, videos, documents, slideshows, and so on, including of course the stream of consciousness of contemporary microblogging tools of one type or another. So much so that somebody remarked that I am brain downloading.  Which is, brain downloading, or brain dumping, somewhat the point really here. Since we do have this strong belief in the continuity of our identity, falsified day by day through our conversations where different accounts of the same events, forgetful memories, and just plain decadence, we jump to the opportunity of recording our feelings, thoughts, actions, and possessions.

And once the brain is dumped, what can you do with it? How do you treat it, what rights does it have, or what rights do you have on it?

There are a lot of things to talk about, and that is what we are going to do tomorrow at ‘Living In The Cloud“, an aperitivo that I organized tomorrow at 6PM. Please come along, and make yourself comfortable!