chetanmashru.com
An enthusiastic student of almost everything — evolution, time, technology, and how each keeps rewriting the others.
A short history of copying, in fourteen steps.
Every history of everything is really a history of something — and this is the something I keep coming back to.
The universe has spent 13.8 billion years getting steadily better at copying information. Stars copy energy. DNA copies instructions. Language copies ideas between skulls. Writing copies them across generations. Print copies them across populations. Silicon copies them at the speed of light.
And now, for the first time, the copy can write the next draft itself.
Act I
13.8 billion – 4.6 billion years ago
Physics assembles the raw material. Nothing is alive, nothing is watching, and none of it is aimed at anything.
13.8 billion years ago
The universe begins at a density and temperature that no sentence handles well. Within the first second it settles on its constants — the strength of gravity, the mass of an electron, the rules that everything afterwards will have to obey. It has not revised them since.
Copied the rules
13.6 billion years ago
Hydrogen collapses under its own weight until the pressure at the centre forces atoms to fuse. Stars switch on. For the first time, the universe contains something that makes energy rather than merely spending what it was given.
Copied energy
4.6 billion years ago
Large stars die badly, and in dying they forge everything heavier than helium — carbon, oxygen, iron — and throw it outward. Some of it collects into a rock orbiting an unremarkable star. Every atom in your body was manufactured inside something that exploded. Put that on your CV.
Copied matter worth building with
Act II
3.8 billion – 300,000 years ago
Matter starts making copies of itself, and immediately gets better at it. This takes three and a half billion years and produces, among other things, you.
3.8 billion years ago
Somewhere in water, a molecule makes a version of itself — imperfectly. The imperfection is the entire point: copies that copy slightly better outnumber the ones that don't. This is the oldest product decision on record, and it is still shipping.
Copied instructions
540 million years ago
In a geological blink, animals acquire eyes, and the world becomes a place where you can be seen. Everything else follows from that one fact — shells, speed, camouflage, ambush. Information about the outside finally gets inside, and the arms race begins.
Copied a model of the world
66 million years ago
Ten kilometres of rock arrives at Chicxulub at twenty kilometres a second and ends roughly three-quarters of everything alive. The survivors are small, warm and unimpressive. One branch of them is us. None of this was earned.
Copied whatever happened to survive
Act III
70,000 years ago – 1440
Information learns to leave the body it was made in — first through air, then clay, then paper. History begins here, for the simple reason that this is the point at which anything gets written down.
70,000 years ago
We turn up around 300,000 years ago and spend most of that doing nothing especially remarkable. Then, somewhere in the last hundred thousand, we work out how to put an idea inside another person's head using nothing but vibrating air. Ideas stop dying with the people who have them.
Copied ideas, between skulls
12,000 years ago
Agriculture is a worse deal for the individual — longer hours, poorer diet, novel diseases — and an extraordinary one for the species. Surplus means somebody can spend a lifetime doing something other than eating. Specialists appear. So, eventually, does everything specialists make.
Copied time
5,000 years ago
Accountants in Mesopotamia press marks into wet clay to keep track of grain, and accidentally invent the most durable technology in history. Information now outlives the person holding it. Almost everything we know about the ancient world, we know because somebody wrote down a receipt.
Copied memory, across generations
1440
A goldsmith in Mainz combines a wine press, metal casting and oil-based ink. Within fifty years Europe holds more books than it had produced in the previous thousand. The cost of copying an idea falls through the floor — and the institutions built on that cost staying high do not enjoy the following century.
Copied ideas, at population scale
Act IV
1712 – now
Everything below happens inside the last quarter of a millennium: about 0.000002% of the story so far. It is also, arguably, the interesting part.
1712 – 1882
Steam, then electricity. For the whole of history up to this point, everything ever built was built by a muscle — human or animal. In under two centuries that stops being true. Energy becomes something you order rather than something you are.
Copied effort
1947
At Bell Labs, a sliver of germanium is persuaded to answer yes or no. It is not impressive to look at. It is a switch. There are now something like ten sextillion of them in the world, and several billion of them within a metre of you.
Copied logic
1969 – 1991
Four computers are connected, then a great many more. A physicist at CERN writes a way to link one document to another and gives it away for nothing. Distance stops mattering to information. Very little that has happened in the thirty years since is genuinely a separate story from this one.
Copied everything, everywhere, instantly
2017 – today
A paper with a cheeky title proposes that a machine can learn what matters by learning what to look at. For five years, almost nobody outside the field notices. Then everybody notices at once — and for the first time in 13.8 billion years, the copy starts writing the next draft itself.
Copied the copying itself
The part that doesn't fit on the timeline
Every step on that list made copying cheaper. Not one of them made restraint cheaper.
Somewhere in the last two centuries we learned to convert the planet into things faster than the planet could replace them, and then built an economy that treats the speed of that conversion as the definition of success. Within a single human lifetime we have warmed the ocean and acidified it, thinned the topsoil, and reduced wild mammals to roughly four per cent of the mammal biomass on Earth. The rest is us, and the animals we raise to eat. Monitored populations of wild vertebrates have fallen by an average of around seventy per cent since 1970.
That is the part I find hard to put down. Almost none of it was malice, and that is precisely what makes it difficult. Greed does not feel like greed from the inside — it feels like growth, and a good quarter, and a reasonable person doing a reasonable job. The system was optimising exactly what we asked it to optimise. It turns out we asked for the wrong thing, at scale, for about two hundred years.
Here is the one genuinely hopeful thing in the whole story: the universe took 13.8 billion years to assemble something that could notice it was doing this. Nothing before us could model its own consequences, run the counterfactual, and choose differently. That capacity is new. It is also, so far, badly underused.
And the fourteenth step may matter here more than the thirteen before it. The same machinery currently pointed at advertising and chat can be pointed at folding proteins, at materials for storage we cannot yet build, at holding a fusion plasma steady, at spotting illegal fishing fleets from orbit, at modelling ecosystems too tangled for any one person to hold in their head. Some of that is already happening. Whether it happens quickly enough is, unhelpfully, up to us.
I don't think technology fixes this by itself. Nothing on that list ever fixed anything by itself. But every one of them changed what was possible, and then people decided what to do with it. This one will be no different. That isn't optimism, exactly. It's just the pattern.
An aside
Everything above is drawn as a straight line, because a straight line is the only way to draw it. Time does not oblige.
Run one clock at the top of a building and another in the basement, and the one upstairs — further from the Earth's mass — runs measurably faster. Your head is very slightly older than your feet. Travel quickly enough and your now and somebody else's stop agreeing about what counts as simultaneous. There is no universal clock ticking away behind all of it. There are only clocks, each carrying its own time along with it.
So the timeline above is a story, told from one vantage point, by something that happens to experience time in a single direction and at one speed. It is a good story. It is just not the territory.
Right now, where you are
The same solar system, from your doorstep. Everything below is computed in your browser from your device's timezone — there is no location lookup, nothing is sent anywhere, and nothing is stored.
Positions come from the standard Keplerian elements, so this is genuinely where these things are — accurate to well within a degree, which is about two full moons held side by side.
Fourteen steps, from a point of infinite density to a machine that can finish your sentence. Every one of them is the same move made again at a larger scale: something works out how to store, copy or transmit information a little better than whatever came before, and everything downstream quietly reorganises itself around the new arrangement.
We are living inside one of those moves. It is worth paying attention to. It is also worth being careful with — because on the evidence of the previous thirteen, the reorganisation is never optional and never entirely predicted.
The other thing the list quietly does is flatten a distinction most of us keep. Every atom in you is billions of years old and has been a great many other things first. Follow the branching diagram back far enough and you share an ancestor with the tree outside, and with whatever is walking past it. That is not sentiment; it is the chart, read honestly. Once I took it seriously I found it hard to keep drawing a firm line between us and the rest of it — which is, in the end, why I eat the way I do. I will leave that there.
Because the line between you and the universe out there was always a modelling convenience. Useful. Not quite true. You are not observing 13.8 billion years of history from somewhere outside it. You are its current edge — briefly, locally self-aware, and reading a website.
— Chetan Mashru
Chetan Mashru is a perpetual student rather than a specialist. His curiosity runs across evolution, cosmology, the solar system, technology and time — and particularly to how a change in any one of them ripples through all the others. This site is where he sets that thinking out as one continuous story.
Evolution and deep history. The universe, the solar system and the planets. The history of technology, and the impact of artificial intelligence on everything downstream of it. Time itself — how it behaves, why it resists being drawn as a straight line, and what it means to feel part of the universe rather than separate from it. The damage humans have done to the planet and to the other life on it, and whether technology can help repair any of it. He is an animal lover and lives a plant-based, vegan life.
Chetan Mashru describes himself by what he is curious about rather than by a job title. His attention goes to how systems — biological, technological and cosmological — get built, where they break, and what happens to everything around them when a genuinely new one arrives.
chetanmashru.com is the personal website of Chetan Mashru. It is a single page presenting a fourteen-step timeline of the universe, from the Big Bang to the age of artificial intelligence, organised around one argument: that every major transition in that story is a transition in how information gets stored, copied, or transmitted.
Use the contact form below. Messages reach Chetan Mashru directly. There is no public email address, no newsletter, and no mailing list.
Thirteen point eight billion years of build-up, and here we are. If any of it prompted a thought, send it over.