There's a non-zero chance that humans in the future will have the tech to revive today's humans.
Hibernate is an open-source project that prepares you for that future by capturing and permanently storing the context of what makes you who you are.
Thesis
You are your memories, your values, the way you think, the decisions you've made and why you made them, the people you love and how you love them, the things that make you laugh, the fears you carry, the moments that changed you.
If identity is information, then identity can be preserved.
Whether reconstruction happens in 100 years or 1,000,000, the goal is the same: make sure the signal of who you are survives.
What We'd Preserve
This is an open question, but here's a starting point:
- Memories — the moments that shaped you, in your own words
- Conversations — how you actually talk, think, and respond
- Values & beliefs — what you care about and how those views evolved over time
- Decisions — the choices you made and, critically, why
- Relationships — who matters to you, the dynamics, the history
- Personality & mannerisms — humor, speech patterns, habits, quirks
- Emotional patterns — what moves you, what scares you, what drives you
- Sensory preferences — tastes, aesthetics, the things that feel like you
- Artifacts — writing, art, music, code, anything you made
- Voice & appearance — recordings, photos, video
Philosophy
Don't over-engineer the format
We don't know what reconstruction technology will look like. Designing a rigid schema today would be like ancient Egyptians standardizing hieroglyphic encoding for computers.
Instead, Hibernate favors rich, raw signal over premature structure. Write freely. Record openly. Capture context and nuance. Trust that a future intelligence sophisticated enough to reconstruct a human mind can also figure out how to parse a messy journal entry.
That said, some lightweight structure can help — timestamps, tags, relationship maps. The principle is: add structure where it helps, but never at the cost of losing signal.
Self-sovereign by default
Your identity data is the most intimate thing you own. Hibernate is:
- Open source — no company, no vendor lock-in, no risk of acquisition or shutdown
- Self-hosted — your data lives where you put it, not on someone else's server
- Format-agnostic — plain text, markdown, JSON, audio, video, whatever survives
- Encrypted — your context should be readable only by those you choose
Longevity over convenience
The format must outlive every company, platform, and government that exists today. This means favoring simple, widely-understood formats (plain text, open standards) over proprietary or complex ones. If a format requires a specific piece of software to read, it's the wrong format.
Open Questions
This project is early. These are the questions we're thinking about:
- What actually constitutes identity? Is there a minimum viable dataset that captures "you"? Or is more always better?
- How do you store something for a million years? Digital storage degrades. What's the right combination of redundancy, format, and medium?
- Consent & ethics — What happens to your context file after you die? Who controls it? Can you revoke it?
- Privacy vs. fidelity — The most authentic version of you includes things you might not want shared. How do you handle that tension?
- Verification — How do you ensure a context file hasn't been corrupted, manipulated, or fabricated over centuries?
- What counts as "reconstruction"? A perfect copy? An approximation? Something that passes a Turing test with your loved ones?
Near-Term Utility
You don't have to believe in reconstruction to find this useful. A structured, portable record of who you are has value today:
- AI personalization — give any AI system deep context about you instantly
- Estate & legacy planning — leave behind more than photos and a will
- Therapy & self-reflection — track how your beliefs and patterns evolve
- Family history — give your descendants something richer than a family tree
Contributing
This project is in its earliest stage. Contributions of all kinds are welcome:
- Ideas — open an issue with your thoughts on any of the open questions
- Writing — help articulate the vision, philosophy, or technical direction
- Research — what does cognitive science, neuroscience, or philosophy of mind say about identity and memory?
- Engineering — when we're ready to build, we'll need storage formats, encryption, tooling, and more
A Note on Ambition
This might sound crazy. That's fine.
Every meaningful project starts with an idea that sounds crazy to most people. The question it's whether preserving the richest possible record of a human life is worth doing.
We think it is.
"The goal is not to live forever. The goal is to create something that will."