Summary
How do we prepare for the distant future? Helen Keen meets the people who try to.
If our tech society continues then we can leave data for future generations in huge, mundane quantities, detailing our every tweet and Facebook 'like'. But how long could this information be stored? And if society as we know it ends, will our achievements vanish with it? How do we plan for and protect those who will be our distant descendants and yet may have hopes, fears, languages, beliefs, even religions that we simply cannot predict? What if anything can we, should we, pass on?
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | This was an impregnable fortress. The only way you get out was in a wooden box. |
| 0:05.0 | The controversial maximum security prison impossible to escape from. |
| 0:09.0 | And one of the duties of a political prisoner is the escape. |
| 0:12.0 | The IRA inmates who found a way. of a political prisoner is the escape. |
| 0:12.5 | The IRA inmates who found a way. |
| 0:14.5 | I'm Carlo Gableer and I'll be navigating a path |
| 0:19.5 | through the disturbing inside story of the biggest jailbreak in British and Irish history. |
| 0:25.0 | The narrative that they want is that this is a big achievement by them. |
| 0:28.5 | Escape from the Maze, listen first on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:34.0 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:41.0 | How do you want to be remembered? |
| 0:45.0 | No, not in terms of your good deeds or amazing discoveries or even as a great laugh, |
| 0:51.0 | but how, in what way, what medium. It's a question that future |
| 0:57.6 | thinkers are struggling with. How can our here and now make sense to people in years to come? |
| 1:05.6 | We've worked out that you could take all the information that's stored on computers in the |
| 1:11.1 | whole world at the moment, and if you were able to write that into the DNA format |
| 1:16.4 | the amount of physical volume that information would take would be about the size of a small van. |
| 1:24.0 | And the big question is, what's really worth remembering? |
| 1:28.0 | Present stories will just disappear, just carelessness. |
| 1:32.0 | And that's why we should select some stories which we think, |
| 1:36.5 | which are worth to be preserved to our grandchildren, let's say, or to people in one million |
| 1:42.4 | years. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.