Earth Log
A chronological record of human civilization, written during the lifetime of its author and inscribed permanently on the BSV blockchain.
Earth Log is a long-term writing project: a chronological record of human civilization, written during the lifetime of its author, Marquez Comelab, and inscribed permanently on the BSV blockchain.
Each entry is given a fixed structure — a heavy block of metadata above a body of plain prose — and once an entry is inscribed, the inscription cannot be altered. If an earlier entry is later found to contain an error, the response is not to edit it but to write a new entry that names the correction. The honest record is the full sequence, including the parts the author has since revised his understanding of.
The entries are written for two readerships at once. The first is people alive during the author's lifetime, who want a perspective on what is happening in their world and on the long arc of how it came to be that way. The second is readers — human, post-human, artificial, or otherwise — who may encounter these entries long after the civilization that produced them has changed beyond recognition or ceased to exist.
This site is the on-chain presentation of the corpus. The plain-text source of every entry is itself inscribed on BSV and remains canonical; what you read here is a presentation layer designed for readability, also inscribed on BSV, also durable for as long as HTML browsers exist.
Featured Entries
Three places to start. The full corpus is on the Index.
The Short Story of How We Came About
A citation-free plain-prose retelling of the entire science arc as a single self-contained narrative, written for two kinds of reader: the present-day reader who wants the shape of the story without the apparatus, and the far-future reader who may no longer share the academic context the detailed entries assume. The entry covers, in plain language, the same ground EL #0003…
A Voice Across Time
The opening entry of the Earth Log Project. It introduces the planet, the species, and the purpose of the logs: a chronological record of human civilization, written during the lifetime of its author, permanently inscribed on the BSV blockchain, and addressed both to readers in the present and to any reader — human, post-human, artificial, or otherwise — who might one day…
How to Read an Earth Log
The first Earth Log Reader's Guide. A reader-facing primer addressed both to readers living in the author's time and to readers who may discover these inscriptions long after. The entry explains what an Earth Log is, the anatomy of an entry (metadata block, optional comment, entry body, signature, optional references), and walks through the metadata fields one by one.…
Why on the Blockchain
A generation ago, the internet gave ordinary people the ability to publish — but websites need to be paid for year after year, and a great deal of the early internet has been quietly lost when hosting expired and domains lapsed.
The BSV blockchain is a public, permanent, distributed ledger. If you write something onto it, the writing is timestamped, preserved, and held across thousands of independent computers. No company owns it. No platform can remove it. No expired domain can lose it. And it costs a fraction of a cent.
The author calls this practice blocking — by analogy with blogging on the early web. To learn more, see The Practice of Blocking.
The Canonical Edition: earthlog.web3
You are reading the World Wide Web edition of Earth Log, hosted on conventional web infrastructure at earthlog.earth. The same content is also published — and is canonical at — earthlog.web3, where every entry, every page of this presentation, the stylesheet, and the image assets are inscribed individually on the BSV blockchain.
The advantage of the on-chain edition is that it cannot be lost. The hosting bill on earthlog.earth can lapse; the inscription on the BSV blockchain remains so long as the chain itself exists. Each entry's source-citation TXID below — at the foot of every Earth Log — links directly to the immutable plain-text version on chain, and is the same regardless of which edition of this site you are reading.
If you have a Web3-enabled browser, the canonical reading experience is at earthlog.web3. If you do not, the version you are looking at right now is the next-best thing, and it works in any browser that has ever been written.