What (the) Fung is an NFT?

I've heard that some relatively unknown artists and teens made a huge amount of  money from selling them. The artist Swoon has minted a collection of her art. Damian Hurst has a collection for sale along with the physical artwork. So does JR. Today I read that a music company has been sending NFT's of the Claire De Lune by Debussy, and other music into space. Maybe this will be a way for us to connect to our fellow beings on faraway planets. Art and music is a universal language.

Last week, thanks to Brainard Carey, and David Hauser from BeyondMars I learned how to mint an NFT. You can see my surreal watercolor of a Fish, hanging keys and a lemon, one of my favorite watercolors https://beyondmars.art/linda_berkowitz_art . It is inexpensive to buy my NFT, but someday soon when i'm a more well known artist, it may be worth a lot of money.

Since my introduction to NFT's, I have been obsessed, thinking and reading about them, sometimes all night on my iphone. I worried about it's impact on the environment, but was reassured that the new technology that I would use for mine by BeyondMars.com being free is also environmentally safe.

So what is it? After all this research I'm still trying to understand.  I'm told It is a non fungible token, a unique digital item that cannot be reproduced. It is part of a blockchain. The information(digital art, video or music) is stored in groups or blocks linked through a complicated digital chain of information. Collectors purchase this digital piece of art or music. 

Think about this. At a time in the future when there are colonies on Mars or other planets, large collections of art, video and music will be sent digitally through space. 

While living on Mars in my spacepod, I buy an original digital image by Beeple. In my fantasy life I have a lot of money😊. How will I view it? I probably will have the newest Apple device or computer. My first was, I might be able to view it in 3D like a hologram floating in space. This would be wrong.  You cannot alter a non-fungible token. Altering it would make it fungible. 

The original, original art on paper or canvas is still there. The artist can still sell it or keep it. There are other digital copies as well, but they are not the minted original stored on the blockchain. 

Perhaps someday the physical original will be gone and aliens will find this digital file with my artwork. At this time still-art, like my watercolor will seem very out-dated. Maybe the beings that see it, however they view it, will enjoy looking at art from an earlier, more innocent time and place. Maybe they will try to explain my art. They will think the fish being a large upright object is probably what humans looked like in the year 2021. I'm not sure what they will make of the keys and the lemon. I hope they have a sense of humor.