About
What this project is, who it is for, how it is structured, and why it lives on the blockchain.
Purpose
In the past, captains of ships kept journals to record facts about their voyages. Aircraft carry black boxes that preserve a record of a flight even when the flight itself does not survive. The Earth Log is in that tradition — but the ship is the planet, the voyage is human civilization, and the log is intended to outlast its author.
The project serves several purposes:
- To create a personal chronicle of humanity during the author's lifetime.
- To help readers today better understand current events and the trajectory of civilization.
- To leave a record of humanity for potential future readers, including the possibility that humanity itself may no longer exist when those readers encounter it.
- To help the author understand himself, humanity, the world, and the universe through the act of writing.
A secondary purpose is to demonstrate, by doing, what the BSV blockchain can be applied to. BSV is, at its heart, a timestamping machine — it exists to attach immutable, distributed, untamperable timestamps to data. It is worth asking what kind of data would most benefit from being preserved this way. The answer this project offers is: a record of humanity.
Two Audiences
Earth Logs are written for two readerships at once. The first is people living today, who want perspective on current events. The second is readers — human, post-human, artificial, or otherwise — who may discover these records long after the civilization that produced them. The same prose serves both. The structured metadata around the prose is what makes the corpus navigable in either direction in time.
The Earth Log Oath
In writing the Earth Logs, the author commits to recording events and ideas as honestly as he can understand them at the time they occur. He will distinguish between observation, interpretation, and speculation whenever possible. He will not alter earlier entries once they are recorded, but he will acknowledge errors and update his understanding in later logs. The purpose is not to create propaganda or mythology, but to leave an honest record of human life during his time.
Immutability and Corrections
Earlier entries are never altered once they have been inscribed. If the author's understanding changes, or an earlier entry is found to contain an error, the response is to write a new entry. The new entry references the earlier one using the metadata fields References and Corrections. The original entry remains on the chain as part of the honest record of what was known and believed at the time of writing.
Chained-TXID Provenance
A current Earth Log's own BSV transaction ID cannot exist at the time of writing, because the TXID is only generated when the entry is inscribed on the BSV blockchain. To turn this unavoidable gap into a verifiable provenance chain, every Earth Log from #0004 onward carries the immediately preceding log's TXID in its metadata. The result is a hash-linked chain of documents that mirrors the structure of the BSV blockchain itself. Tampering with any inscribed log breaks the chain visibly at the next entry's Preceding reference.
Registers and Chapter Summaries
A Register of Inscriptions is a meta-entry that lists every Earth Log committed to the BSV blockchain up to the date of its own inscription, with the EL-ID, inscription date, title, TXID, and tipping address per entry. The first Register is EL #0013.
A Chapter Summaries entry gives, in one paragraph for each preceding Earth Log, a brief account of what that entry is about. The first Chapter Summaries entry is EL #0014.
Together with the Reader's Guides series — the first of which is EL #0015 — these Project Reference entries are intended to make the corpus navigable for a reader coming to it cold.
The Two Inscription Layers: Plain Text & HTML on the BSV Blockchain (earthlog.web3)
The plain-text version of each entry, inscribed on BSV, is the canonical record. Plain text is the most durable format because any future reader with any text-rendering tool can read it, regardless of whether HTML or CSS conventions still exist. The site earthlog.web3 duplicates the same content into HTML form for readability and is itself inscribed on BSV — it exists on chain, immutable, free of the link-rot problem of conventional websites, and remains readable for as long as HTML browsers exist. If the two layers ever diverge, the plain-text inscription is the canonical truth.
The World Wide Web Edition: earthlog.earth (this site)
You are currently reading the World Wide Web edition of the project, hosted on conventional web infrastructure at earthlog.earth. Its purpose is to make the Earth Log project accessible to people on the conventional web — the web 1.0 and web 2.0 ecosystems most readers still rely on in 2026. The content is the same as the on-chain edition at earthlog.web3, but every page here also invites the reader to view the canonical version on the BSV blockchain, where the corpus is preserved against the link-rot and hosting-expiry problems that historically have caused so much of the early web to be lost.
Project Evolution
The Earth Log entries are immutable once inscribed. The conventions that shape them — taxonomies, tag lists, Series structures, metadata fields — may evolve as the project develops. When the changes are significant enough that readers should know about them, they are communicated through a dedicated Earth Log entry rather than by silently amending the conventions.