If your parents had, for some reason, announced the arrival of their bouncing bundle of baby you via radio or television, would the insectoid hive mind on Tau Ceti have gotten word about you yet? What about the machine intelligences on Alpha Bootis? Broadcast transmissions radiate out from planet Earth at the speed of light, but even just our tiny corner of our speck of a galaxy is a big place. So who knows about you so far?
The totally useless but completely awesome light cone RSS feed tracks the growing spread of your (potential) influence throughout the universe. You plug in your date of birth, and each day the RSS feed tells you which new star news of fabulous you has reached. Or could have reached if your parents had had the foresight to make everyone out there could know about you. Or maybe just your thought processes impacted some quantum flunctuation that is even now causing a pseudobutterfly’s wings to flap in the upper atmosphere of Proxima Centauri and starting a hurricane that will destroy the ancient and noble civilization of that world.
Think about it.
This is your brain:
This is your brain on light cone:
“A human being is a part of a whole, called by us "universe", a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” -- Albert Einstein (found here)
Whoa.
