100 YEARS OLD AND STILL WORRIED BY EMAILS...

AFEW years ago, worried by the increasing amount of time I was spending every morning deleting unwanted emails, I did some sums to calculate how long it would take before the entire working lives of everyone on Earth would be taken up deleting emails.

Using the best available figures for the growth in email traffic since the very first email was sent in 1971, combined with figures for the growth in the number of unwanted emails and the growth in the human population, I extrapolated the figures and, allowing two seconds for deleting a message, I calculated that we have just over 100 years left before email deletion takes up all our working hours.

I have recently, however, been considering the question of what happens to all these deleted emails, which makes the whole business even more worrying than ever. As the CIA, FBI, Wikileaks and hackers around the world have been reminding us, emails are never truly destroyed. You may think you have deleted them but the best you can hope for is that they have been sucked into a sort of electronic black hole whence they are hidden from prying eyes.

In 2004, however, Stephen Hawking explained a change in his ideas about the escape of information from black holes. He had previously introduced the idea of Hawking Radiation which seeps out of black holes, eventually leading to their evaporation, but then he stated his view that the seepage includes hidden information previously thought to be inaccessible.

This may not seem particularly relevant to us, as even a tiny black hole is liable to take a trillion or so years to release its secrets, while a black hole the size of the Sun has been calculated to last 2 x 10-to-the-67th years. That’s a two followed by 67 zeroes, which is about 60 more zeroes than the time since the Big Bang.

All the same, I cannot help feeling anxious about what the scientific chaps of that far distant future will make of my deleted emails.

Yesterday morning, for example, I instantly deleted over 50 emails including two messages from bereft young ladies from foreign parts wishing to leave large sums of money in my bank account, three vouchers for discounts in unappealing restaurants, 16 notifications of events in which I am not remotely interested, three invitations to previews at art galleries of works by artists of whom I have never heard and whose works strike me as frighteningly pretentious, one suggestion from a kitchen shop that I might like to organise my sink, four notifications of Easter Eggs which did not offer me any free chocolate, three notifications of dull talks which I would even have to pay to go to, dozens of press releases about celebrities I have never heard of and several queries, checking up on whether I had received their previous email.

Oh dear! In a mere trillion years, someone reading his Daily Hawking Radiation News may find these and dismiss me as a total flibbertigibbet with a disorganised sink. These emailers have a lot to answer for.