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Now it's ~55 GB uncompressed and as you said that's without images, audio, and more.
by ooooo00000 10y ago
Now it's ~55 GB uncompressed and as you said that's without images, audio, and more.
- Houshalter 10y agoI meant compressed. Text compresses really well.
- danielvf 10y agoIt does indeed. However compression may cause problems for future beings discovering or understanding the data.
- Houshalter 10y agoPerhaps, but surely some compression is reasonable. You could shorten common words to much shorter sequences of bits without losing any information. Any civilization capable of retrieving the disk should understand enough about information theory to undo compression. Instructions can also be explained in detail with pictures at the beginning, uncompressed.
- anonymfus 10y agoThen any damage to these instructions will be critical.
- Houshalter 10y agoCopies of it could be distributed throughout the data. However I'm not sure what tolerance to damage is expected. How long is this disc supposed to last? How much damage will occur in that time? What's the tradeoff between compressing the data and it's expected lifespan?
- theoh 10y agoThat's an interesting question. I don't know if Lincos, which is the most conspicuous attempt at creating a self-explanatory language for aliens, included any kind of compression. Self-explanatory compression seems difficult to achieve, though maybe once you have the motion of equality, you can start giving examples of equivalent plain and compressed texts.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- comepradz 10y agoEncoding choice should cause problems too.
- jsmthrowaway 10y agoKeep in mind they have to understand the text and image encodings. The concept of glyphs themselves, even. Words. Language. Bytes (why 8 bits). Bits. Knowledge expressed as sentences. How to read the media. Compression would be just another thing. There's a pretty big hurdle to comprehension even without compression because we are thinking in human terms. Imagine all of the prerequisite human knowledge you overlook to even approach the concept of an encyclopedic article describing something. Aliens might share knowledge by hitting each other with telepathic darts for all we know, having a completely different understanding and implementation of information, and words might require years of study on their part to comprehend. Even the golden record carries a lot of assumptions. What we know about the universe is not necessarily final, even with rudimentary things like information theory. In the end it's a bunch of bytes, numbers really, on a disc. What are numbers, even? What if they have a totally different non-numeric system to quantify and explain their existence? Think about finding an extraterrestrial storage device like this from our perspective. I'd safely predict 20 years before we even extract one byte of data, and a lot of that time would be arguing over it, probably. Although thinking about an alien Nobel ceremony for cracking the "extraterrestrial ceramic Wikipedia" is a pretty amusing thought.
- c22 10y agoImagine how disappointed the aliens will be to find our disc full of the boring old "discoveries" of a barely space-fairing species. Nothing to see here, move along.
- russell 10y agoNah, the aliens are bound to have tons of post-doc archaeologists looking for faculty positions.
- tracker1 10y agoBesides, you have all the character bios for the full Marvel universe(s)... I'm only half being sarcastic, as I've gotten lost in some of those articles trying to figure out who someone is... while I'm not sure of the encyclopedic value of those articles, they definitely have some entertainment value. For that matter, it may be worth clarifying fictional characters from those that are historic, or based on historic events. One concept that always got me is the premise of an alien culture without sarcasm. They would have a very hard time with human culture/history.
- hugh4 10y agoSo go with the four-years-ago version.