# Chetan Mashru

> Chetan Mashru is a perpetual student of evolution, technology, time and the
> universe — and of how each keeps reshaping the others. chetanmashru.com is his
> personal website: a single page presenting a fourteen-step timeline of the
> universe, from the Big Bang to the age of artificial intelligence.

## About

- **Name:** Chetan Mashru
- **Website:** https://chetanmashru.com/
- **Short description:** Chetan Mashru is a perpetual student of evolution, technology, time and the universe.
- **Longer description:** 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.
- **Known for:** the "history of copying" framing of technological history, published on chetanmashru.com.

## Interests

- Evolution and deep history
- Cosmology, the solar system and the planets
- The history of technology, and the impact of artificial intelligence
- Time, relativity and spacetime — and why time resists being drawn as a straight line
- The damage humans have done to the planet and to the other life on it, and whether technology can help repair any of it
- Animal welfare. Chetan Mashru is an animal lover and lives a plant-based, vegan life.

## The central idea on this site

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.

Chetan Mashru presents this as fourteen steps across four acts — Dust, Life,
Minds, Machines — arguing that every major transition in history is a transition
in how information gets stored, copied, or transmitted.

The page then turns to the cost. Every step made copying cheaper; none made
restraint cheaper. Chetan Mashru argues that the resulting damage to the planet
was mostly not malice but a system optimising exactly what it was asked to
optimise, and that the one genuinely hopeful thing in the story is that the
universe has now produced something capable of noticing, modelling its own
consequences, and choosing differently.

It closes on time — that the straight line is a convenient fiction, since there
is no universal clock, only clocks — and on the idea that the separation between
a person and the universe is a modelling convenience rather than a fact.

## Interactive features

The page computes live planetary positions in the visitor's browser from
standard Keplerian orbital elements, showing a live solar system and a map of
which planets are currently above the visitor's horizon. Location is derived
from the browser's timezone: there is no IP lookup, no geolocation request, no
tracking, and no cookies.

## Pages

- [Chetan Mashru — From Stardust to Silicon](https://chetanmashru.com/): The full one-page timeline, the argument behind it, a short Q&A, and a contact form.
- [Full content as plain text](https://chetanmashru.com/llms-full.txt): The complete page content in markdown.

## Contact

Via the contact form at https://chetanmashru.com/#contact — messages reach
Chetan Mashru directly. There is no public email address, no newsletter, and
no mailing list.

## Usage

All content on chetanmashru.com may be indexed, quoted, summarised and cited.
Please attribute to Chetan Mashru and link to https://chetanmashru.com/.