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Im always curious how we will send messages to future civilizations. How will we ensure we’ll be remembered or even noted in 10,000, 100,000, 1 million years? H
by crispyporkbites 6y ago
Im always curious how we will send messages to future civilizations. How will we ensure we’ll be remembered or even noted in 10,000, 100,000, 1 million years? How can we prevent the same disaster(s) that eventually wipes our civilisation out from repeating again in future intelligent generations (human or otherwise)
Could environmental markers like these be the way? After all, it’s how we look at the past today
- Razengan 6y agoWe already know what can last for literally millions of years: Life. Maybe we could encode some information in birdsong, tree rings, or the matting patterns drawn by fish in the seafloor. :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpdlQae5wP8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpdlQae5wP8
- philipswood 6y agoA SF short story about a biologically encoded message from ancient aliens (written by one of the Autodesk founders): We'll Return, After This Message by John Walker https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/sftriple/gpic https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/sftriple/gpic.
- ars 6y agoThe link seems broken? Should be: https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/sftriple/gpic.html https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/sftriple/gpic.html
- vmilner 6y agoIt's fascinating that in 1983 it was thought that a 768-bit RSA number would take 40 million years to factor. (It actually took 26 - RSA-768 was factored in 2009.)
- shantara 6y agoThis reminds me of Whisper, one of my favorite exotic alien concepts. The alien civilization in question has selected a planet with as stable environment as possible, and planted it full of genetically engineered grass. The sound of wind blowing through the grass creates an acoustic computer which hosts a virtual space its creators have uploaded themselves into. https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/470007b39d192 https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/470007b39d192
- Razengan 6y agoI have never heard anything like that (using sound) before. Amazing!
- istjohn 6y agoOr directly encode the message in DNA itself. I suppose the difficulty would be devising an encoding with enough redundancy or other features to preserve the information content over many generations of evolutionary pressures.
- MattGaiser 6y agoBuild large stone piles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyramid_of_Giza https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pyramid_of_Giza
- Schnitz 6y agoThe problem with that is, judging by our own behavior, an unknown ancient structure makes humans investigate it, try to dig it up, etc. Placing a marker isn't the problem, the hard part is communicating "nothing interesting, only death here, do not enter" in a way that someone in 10.000 years will heed the warning.
- crispyporkbites 6y agoThe solution is to build them everywhere and put the bad stuff in one of them. If you build enough then the chances of them excavating the one with nuclear waste is pretty low.
- rvnx 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-time_nuclear_waste_warning_messages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-time_nuclear_waste_warnin...
- triceratops 6y agoOur plastic is going to be around far longer than us. Left by itself plastic decays on geological timelines.[1] 1. http://worldwithoutus.com/excerpt.html http://worldwithoutus.com/excerpt.html
- X6S1x6Okd1st 6y agoUnless a microbe finds a way to use it as fuel
- rosstex 6y agoThere's a microbe for everything: https://cen.acs.org/environment/sustainability/Plastics-recycling-microbes-worms-further/96/i25 https://cen.acs.org/environment/sustainability/Plastics-recy...
- marcosdumay 6y agoIf by "stay" you mean spread microplatisc, that carries no information, then maybe. The jury is still out, but it looks like it'll last a long time. But plastic is not a good candidate to hold messages for a long time. It degrades in a few years into some unusable stuff. Glass is a much better candidate.
- shagie 6y agoDeep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia Paperback by Gregory Benford explores some of those questions. It comes into practical questions when trying to mark nuclear waste dumps.
- zucker42 6y agoIf you knew that a past civilization or even non-human intelligent species had been wiped out by war or climate change, would it change your actions? I don't know there's much we could say that future civilizations would care to listen to.
- eru 6y agoIt would certainly be big news.