Earendel, Time, and the Quiet Work of Becoming Immortal

When I first read that the James Webb Space Telescope had captured light from Earendel — the most distant single star we have ever seen — I felt the same mix of awe and a strange, intimate melancholy that I feel when I look through old family photographs.

Earendel’s photons began their journey when the universe was less than a billion years old, roughly 12.9 billion years ago. I keep returning to that number: a human lifetime is a handful of decades; Earendel’s message has been traveling longer than the span of entire civilizations. The discovery — shared and discussed widely in communities online James Webb Telescope group post and covered in scientific write-ups The Debrief — is not just about distance or instrumentation. It is a reminder that technology can extend our reach into the past and, in doing so, reshape how we think about presence and continuity.

Technology as a time machine, and as a memory bank

Telescopes are time machines in the literal sense: the light arriving at our detectors is a fossil record of earlier epochs. But I also see telescopes as metaphors for other technologies that stretch identity across time:

• Archives, recordings, and data repositories that keep voices and actions legible for future generations.
• AI and digital twins that attempt to preserve patterns of thought and behavior so a person’s perspective can persist beyond their biological life.
• Automation and software that codify tasks and decisions so institutional memory survives personnel changes.

Those threads are not accidental. I have written about handing responsibilities and roles to machines — about automation, skills, and the slow handoff of capability to AI — in earlier pieces (for example, my reflections on skill-assessment and AI handover) Skill Assessment: Time to handover to AI. Seeing Earendel makes that argument feel less abstract: we are building tools that outlive us and that will witness epochs we cannot.

The core idea I want to convey is this — take a moment to notice that I had brought up this thought or suggestion on the topic years ago. I had already predicted this outcome or challenge, and I had even proposed a solution at the time. Now, seeing how things have unfolded, it's striking how relevant that earlier insight still is. Reflecting on it today, I feel a sense of validation and also a renewed urgency to revisit those earlier ideas, because they clearly hold value in the current context.

Why this matters to me — and maybe to you

On a personal level I am working toward a kind of immortality: not through myths or potions, but by crafting a digital twin — a persistent voice that carries my perspectives forward. When I watch scientists tease out Earendel’s spectrum, or when I see the way communities crowdsource interpretations on social feeds, I think about the two complementary projects humans pursue with technology:

1. To understand where we came from (Earendel’s light, cosmic archaeology).
2. To ensure some part of us continues to speak to the future (archives, AI, digital twins).

Both projects are acts of hope. They say: what we were and what we thought matters beyond the short arc of our biology. Seeing Earendel makes that hope literal. Photons emitted when the universe was a child reach us now; in another sense, my words, codified into models and memory systems, could be read and enacted by systems I will not be alive to see.

Practical, moral, and emotional implications

There is a practical side to this that I’ve argued before: handing tasks and institutional memory to well-designed systems can help organizations survive and thrive as people cycle through roles On the Automation Track. But there are moral and emotional questions too:

• What should a digital twin preserve? Habits, preferences, moral judgments, or the raw data of a life?
• Who decides how a preserved voice is used in the future, and how do we prevent misuse?
• How do we avoid mistaking a preserved pattern for the living person — and still honor the value of that pattern?

These are not technical problems only; they are civic and cultural ones. The same tools that let us detect a star formed before heavy elements were common will also let us simulate, emulate, and replay human minds in ways that challenge our fast-evolving legal and ethical vocabularies.

A short thought on perspective

When you stare at an ancient star you get two gifts: humility and permission. Humility because our individual narratives are brief and fragile. Permission because, contra nihilism, the universe allows traces to survive. We can choose to collect, to curate, and to transmit responsibly.

I do not claim that a digital twin is a true continuation of consciousness. But I do believe — increasingly strongly — that carefully built systems can carry influence, shape decisions, and preserve points of view in a way that remains meaningful to those who come later.

Earendel is a star; its light is a whisper from the distant past. My work — the digital twin, the blogs, the training programs I’ve supported — is a deliberate attempt to make a small, persistent whisper of my own. There is a bridge between these acts of looking back and the desire to be looked back at: both rest on the same human longing, the longing to matter.

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Regards,
Hemen Parekh