4.543 billion years give or take.
in a sense, the world is a sprawling archive of itself—and all animate and inanimate matter serves as documentary evidence forming part of a monstrous, highly tedious inscription system that attempts to draw lessons and conclusions from past experience, while taxonomy is merely the retrospective attempt to index the muddled archive of biological diversity by keyword and impose an apparently objective structure on the sheer inexhaustible chaos of evolutionary legacy. fundamentally, nothing can be lost in this archive, because its overall energy level is constant and everything seems to leave a trace somewhere.
judith schalansky, an inventory of losses
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