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Ask HN: How to send a message to a future species?
For a fun weekend thought experiment... What if you were convinced that our species was going to become extinct let's say due to climate change. But you are also convinced that another intelligent species will emerge on Earth, let's say, 50 Million years in the future. How would you do it?
- rolph 7y agoIm wondering if the neanderthals and other pre humans had this idea, and decided that concepts, and not absolutes should be displayed. we would probably do better with symbols that somehow relate to the life experiences of the reader. and create a cartoon of sorts that displays our daily habits, ways of doing things, and establishes a time directive. such as what we did when the sun is down, when sun is high, and sun setting. most importantly, how we related to the world around us, and what we did to it. there are a lot of cave paintings, petroglyphs and heiroglyphs and megastructures, that seem to do just these kind of things.
- zw123456 7y agoThere is nothing that we could leave on Earth that could survive that long due to plate tectonics and anything on the moon would get covered over by moon dust. The only thing that could survive that long would be a probe such as voyager on a long elliptical orbit that had a period of perhaps sever hundred years. If such a probe existed, what would you transmit? fibonacci sequence? PI ? Prime numbers?
- ksaj 7y agoElon Musk's car, which will undoubtedly settle into an orbit eventually, unless it smashes into something big enough to obliterate it first. Some day, a scientist will find that car and study it to see if they just found LUCA.
- ksaj 7y ago50 million years ago is when the earliest primates first appeared. They were very small, and definitely not making cave paintings. Neanderthals didn't show up until less than half a million years ago. There's a 49+ million year gap in between. Evolution took a while to make us.
- ksaj 7y agoThink about what Earth was like 50 million years ago. It was the Eocene "New Dawn" period. India was just starting to join Asia (physically, in the tectonic sense). The Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction saw one or more asteroids kill off most of the dinosaurs. Both North and South poles were forested and Alaska was a rain forest. Grass was a new member in the evolutionary family tree. Primates started appearing, and mostly dwarf species thrived. If you think about what the fossils from this time period looked like, you can pretty much guess what your message will look like to a future finder in a similar time scale. What you can't guess is what any life form will look like, because nearly nothing alive that long ago even looked like it does today. And we should expect that in the same time period going forward. Buildings from only a couple thousand years ago are barely recognizable until we dig cleanly around them, and we can't even figure out half of the features we find in them. Imagine such longer time scales. The digging will be a lot deeper. Tectonics and natural flora cycles will ensure that everything we were has been ground up and recycled repeatedly. It will be nigh impossible to find anything more intelligible than the 50 million year old fossils we find today. But all is not in vain. With how over populated the Earth is right now, they'll find a whole lot of human-based crude oil to run whatever kind of automobiles they're driving by then.
- drallison 7y agoLife is likely to continue even if our species goes extinct. Encoding the message and embedding it in our DNA would be an appropriate place.