Why even bother with quantum DRM? A sufficiently advanced organization of matter is indistinguishable from noise if you lack the capability to decode it. See

Why even bother with quantum DRM? A sufficiently advanced organization of matter is indistinguishable from noise if you lack the capability to decode it. See an encrypted file or a butterfly chrysalis: it all looks like noise to us, but something emerges with the right key. What if there was no hierarchy in this proposed civilization? Or what if they developed the means to encode civilization-wide access rights to every object they handled by saying “the nth crystalline molecule from the top (read right-to-left) has your signature flaw embedded in it?” We have no way of detecting that with our current tech level, and even if we could trivially detect the crystalline flaws it doesn’t mean we’d see or comprehend the scheme they employed. Working with a tech model that we understand (well, some of us, not including me), if you handed a hard drive to a Roman emperor and told them what it held, they wouldn’t be able to do anything with it or even examine it non-destructively even if they put the whole of the empire to the task. Ain’t trying to say that it existed. I do like the remark in one of the Culture series that says technology is more like a rock face than a line: different sequences of discoveries lie along the path that a particular civilization travels. There’s lots of room for surprise, whether discussing ancient, contemporary, or future civilizations.