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KEO Time Capsule To Remain In Orbit 'Til 52001 AD
cascino writes: "CNN is reporting that a French organization under the direction of Jean-Marc Philippe [KEO] is planning on launching a time capsule, called the KEO, next year that will contain electronic messages inscribed on CD's from people around the world. So what, you ask? It is planned to remain in orbit until the year 52001." But wouldn't DVDs hold a lot more data? Perhaps they would like my Visa statements. The cool thing is you can send up to 6,000 characters worth of what you think should be on there.
Well, all those layers of abstraction will not really matter. It is really just like a cryptographic challenge, as if the writings are somehow encoded onto a disc. They will start by assuming that the data is written along the rings, indicated by it's circular nature. Studying the pits, they will realize that they are repetitive, and the proper character length will be conjectured, and then acted upon. Thus, all that is left is to crack the meaning of the characters, and eventually come to understand the language.
It's not going to be that easy, but neither is trying to decipher a written language. It may be that in 50,000 years they will have no concept of a character based language, and as in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, they may use a language based upon glyphs, similar to Egyptian hieroglyphics.
The computer abstraction is a rather minor detail, but I think that it more accurately shows how data was transported in the year 2000. We didn't convert things into writing, we used bits.
All the specifics do not matter, as when you encrypt data, just moving it around and adding headers will not stop any decent cryptanalyst. The hardest part, no matter how the languge is preserved, will always be deciphering the language.
.. but we crashed in the Andes and I had to eat him!
By the way, if you're wondering how he tasted?
Sacra-licious!
And I am discouraged that you think there are better things to do with our time and money than hope, dream, and experiment...
... which is very appropro simply because a human being 50k years from now will be truely an alien to us).
Dont' be, 'cause that's not what I said at all.
What I said is, I think there are better things to hope, dream, and experiment with using this money.
You didn't address the issue of it most probably landing in the ocean and sinking to the bottom (how would people know that it should be something retrieved?). And as to your other points, we've had GREAT difficulty deciphering things that are 5000 years old (and have no real way of judging our accuracy... at best, they are educated guesses that seem to 'fit' all available, if scant, data). 50,000 is HUGE. How much do we know about cave-man language? Nothing. And with the ever increasing pace of change, I think 50,000 years looking back to now will be EVERY bit as difficult, if not more so. After all, their references will be totally alien to us, and ours to them.
As I stated, "Godel, Escher, and Bach" has an interesting section on decoding messages (done in the context of aliens trying to decode messages we leave for them
Another poster posted a very excellent description of why digital media is totally the wrong way to go with this (too many layers of wrappers and encodings and 'frames of reference'). As I stated elsewhere, I think the only *correct* way to go with this would be titanium tablets with deep engravings, or something similar. The CDROM media and all the various encodings used are way too transient within the relm of human existance (only barely arrived here, and will be obsolete in our lifetimes). Better stick with something that has more staying power, don't you think?
- Spryguy
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
6,000 characters, eh? How many characters is the DeCSS source?
They could put the satellite inside a shrinkwrap licence with an NDA that expires in 50,001. That would say more about our society than any CD content...
It won't take 1000 years before some punk will haul it in for the fun of it.
I suppose you could count that under "random debris".
I still maintain that hodge-podging together a bunch of publicly written babble in hundreds of different languages and encoding it on a CDROM using an arbitrary digital format might not be the best way of doing this.
If you really read my post, you'd get that not only was I saying it was highly unlikely this project would end up serving any purpose, but that the way they're going about it seems to minimize it's success. I didn't attack the concept, but just the implementation.
Using a more 'universal' language, like mathematics and pictures... and using something more concrege like engravings in titanium plates, would make MUCH more sense, and be MUCH more valuable to any eventually finders of this time capsuel. Wouldn't you think?
What I'm interested in is exactly how the meta-data they're including in this project (for how to build a CDROM player and decoder) is being presented, and just how much of this meta-data there is. Is there enough? Is there enough meta-meta-data for them to be able to recognize and decode the meta-data, so that they can recognize and decode the data itself? Wouldn't it be easier to skip all the digital media nonsense, and just jump right into a tutorial on our society and ourselves?
- Spryguy
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
Note to self: When electronic copy of self gets into space in 300 years, epoxy a copy of self to that bird on my way outward. May as well put another copy of self where someone will find it.
You just described the bulk of all the /. AC postings.
-pf
Make affiliate bucks
> They will start by assuming that the data is written along the rings, indicated by it's
> circular nature.
Hopefully not. DAT data are written diagonally in a helical scan fashion striped across the tape. Making an assupmtion based on the form factor of the medium is not the best idea. It's possible that a future civilization will simply not think about the idea of actually mechanically spinning a storage medium, and will be looking for holographic data created by a laser striking the pits. Circular doesn't help.
> All the specifics do not matter, as when you encrypt data, just moving it around and adding
> headers will not stop any decent cryptanalyst.
Recall, though, that most cryptographic analysis is performed based on known characteristics of the output -- frequency of letters in the target language, for instance.
"Decrypting" a CD is much more analagous to trying to crack a one-time pad cipher, where you don't have any idea what the plaintext looks like, nor whether the output is even textual in nature. For all the analyzing party knows, the CD itself is just a random string of bits to be USED as a one-time pad in some ancient cryptographic system, or a sound recording of white noise (roughly the same thing, actually...).
I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm just saying that it seems to be a very short-sighted way of trying to communicate to the future, putting a lot of unnecessary obstacles in the way of archaeologists. If we're designing a project explicitly for time-capsule use, the fewest possible layers of abstraction would seem to be called for. IMHO.
--
What about non text data? ... line drawings...
Use a simple vector format like metapost which should be fairly easy to decypher. A gif would probably be dificult to figure out, and a jpg nearly impossable. For bitmaps, pnm is rather simple (asci art would probably be meaningless because they wouldn't know what a 00100101 would look like).
Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
What method is in place for assuring the capsule will be opened in 52001 and not some other time? Does the capsule broadcast its presence in 52001 and announce that it is ready to be opened?
----
Celebrate the finer things in life
Okay I know the vaccum of space perserves everything so decaying really isn't a problem. But there is alot of space crap up there. What are the odds of something hitting a tiny time capsule? Or destroying it? Or maybe a space ship in a few thousand years might hit the thing?
:) ]
Hell some phsyco alien might seize it and hold it for randsom. Hopefully we'll have developped giant laser cannons to blow him away by then....
[I've lost it I know..
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
Some things never change...
You want representative? I sent off copies of the last two spams I received with a short explanation of what they were. If that's not representative of the money-grubbing weasels we've all become, I don't know what is.
To the ones who will eventuly read this. Please understand us, we think to live is to make others less importent. While we do try to change many of us never acheive balance and peace, with both the world and with ourselves. If what you believe is that we are in fact savages; than I pity the world that I live in. Because in the end that is the only thing that my generation could do. Live, Breath, and try to love. Although some of those came easier than the others.
Peace be with you and may you live in boring times. D.F
There thats it
Theres one problem with reflecting your reality, sometimes your reality starts to reflect you.
I sure hope they won't use Word to create the files...;-)
If the *RIAA* has it's way, all the CD players will be SDMI enabled, and the aliens will have to micropay for each piece of info they want to read.
It the MPAA were involved they would hope to god they got one of the early apex schematics, or the region encoding would simply thwart all attempts to view it.
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
-Jaron Lanier
52001? I don't think there's going to be an orbit in 52001.
You had me at "dicks fuck assholes".
I can see it now... Today, we have problems with birds getting sucked into jet intakes. In 52001, there will be near-daily reports of orbital disasters as starvessels have their Bussard collectors fouled by one or two of the countless, pesky "time capsules" orbiting the planet.
;)
(We might have to use those giant laser cannons to destroy all the time capsules!
-J
Karma: T-rexcellent.
I knew that was coming.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
problem solved if we just give them a slab of rock with the blueprints for a cd-rom drive.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
and promptly vomits in his helmet.
"..don't you eat that yellow snow."
They'll start putting their crazy encryption on it and our future generations will never know what was going on!
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
Well, if it is indeed an experiement in hope, trust, and optimism, it has to be one of the most misguided and braindead and useless ones I can possibly fathom.
Let's take this by parts, shall we?
Let's assume that the CD media actually do survive 50k years in the harshness of space, and then survive re-entry. Where exactly do you think it's going to plop down? Probably in the Indian or Pacific Oceans... what if it lands in one of the deep trenches? Do actually think anyone in 50k years will NOTICE its re-entry, and be around to retrieve it? Even assuming there ARE human beings and a reasonably advanced civilization, are they going to care to spend whatever will be necessary to track, locate, and retrieve this thing?
Let's assume they do, or by some miracle, it lands on land, near a population center (without killing anyone), and all the contents are recovered intact. Fine. Not bloody likely, but fine. THEN what? They have to figure out from hieroglyphics how to build a 20th century-based CDROM player from whatever materials and technologies they have on hand, learn how to decode all the contents, rediscover ASCII and "English", and THEN figure out what to make of all the obsolete ancient babble stored on it?
Yeah right. I don't believe any of the above would be likely to happen, but that huge long string of required events? I can't think of much that is less likely...
Isn't there something better we can do with our time and energy and money that would help us NOW, or our immediate progeny? Gawd, I hope so...
- Spryguy
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
but lets send up DeCSS just to piss off the RIAA.
CDs/DVDs are a terrible medium for this. They should do the same thing as the Clock of the Long Now does with their Rosetta Disk (life expectancy >10 000 years). Actually, the Long Now foundation is well positioned with such luminaries as Stewart Brand, Danny Hillis and Mitch Kapor on its board.
I can see it now. IN the year 52001, the world, who wants to learn about it's past, wil have one question...
"Who is this Natalie Portman, and why is she naked, and pertified?"
-------------------------------------------------
Like the Rosetta Stone, the information will be represented in such a manner so as to facilitate the task of decryption.
YM: "Like the DVD Content Scrambling System, the information will be represented in such a manner so as to facilitate the task of decryption."
I bet the copyright laws of AD 52001 will be so harsh that even reading something in a language other than the national language of your Master State will be considered "circumvention" and actionable under whatever hyped up version of DMCA they've passed by then.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
Won't they be obsolete?
Here is the message I included with the assumption that a) humanity will have destroyed itself and earth along with it or b) humanity avoided extinction and the world is a perfect place Loveless, by Ursula Rucker: As we await sister sun's arrival child star's you'll listen to my tail, triste As it was told to me by my sister afar Earth her name and this, this is her story Sister Moon, hear me now I fear my end too soon, too soon My wounds are deep gaping , unhealing can't believe, refuse to believe my children have no feelings for me see them sealing the fate of early death and destruction watch my foolish daughters and sons as they - kill me slowly - kill me quicker - kill me they've loved me as would an unfaithfull lover parttime and half assed now unmasked with their deciet no more sweet, sneaky thrill seakings tomorrow brings nevers and nothings ended days for my world and its unchanging ways now, apocolyptic truths of revelations hastens our omega my children's and mine each time my breath, skin and tears are polluted and poisoned by their careless games and toys and this is only the begning of my children's sinning my power is fading mother earth now a play thing for the ungrateful child so cold ten billion fold my tears I long for the once adoring embrance of my children their prayers, their care and tenderness has now turned loveless their embrace is now like an Anaconda's grip unmercifull and swift swift with the killing killing is a sport fun with fire in my wonderous rainforest reflect the neglect they have for their main source they slaughter their sibling blossoms and geese like the first murder of caine their pure sister oceans will never be the same due to daily spoil and brother sky's choke for oil refineries, factories, smoke the mother earth family is dying no use crying...now my power is fading mother earth now a play thing for my ungrateful child so cold ten billion fold my tears but I'll continue to spin until my curious homo sapiens offspring pay the price for their sins against my tainted tears, my breathless breath and once firtile skins my sorrows are many and murderous they kill and I kill one million plus I never wanted to hurt my children but my creator makes me take revenge it's the circle of life or at least...it was now it's the end no, no it's too late for repentence accept your death sentence I've given you all I can such beauty in life you'll never have again now it's the end now it's the end now it's the end now it's the end
They would probably be as useful.
... DeCSS code :-)
I hope these people take into account the second law of thermodynamics which states (in part): "systems become more disorganised in time" In any system that is in temperatures above zero K, a form of wear and tear is always present. More wear and tear will occur the higher the temperature. Even high hardness solids at human comfortable temperatures slowly loose there form. Molecules are constantly moving (as in fluids like glass) or vibrating (in solids and also crystals). It is possible that with glass platters the pits could eventually level (eliminating its information content). Are there any mathematical models proving the life span of a glass platter for 50,000 years? CDRs should be out of the question because along with molecular movement there is also very slow chemical changes occuring. CDR substrates have different thermal properties from their acrylic media, they could literally warp right off in little flakes. I've had a number of CDRs do this to me (cheap ones, I'll admit). Hows that for a dead sea scrolls scenerio? They should be cutting data on laboratory grade sapphire. They should protect that disc with some super heavy duty heat shealding like a raybestos covered relfective dewar (a thermos bottle). Keep that disc cool and free of thermo wear and tear! Perhaps insead of some kind of ISO cdrom, maybe they should burn images of human readable text on to the disk. It should be as simple as possible for the 50,000s to read it. With just a microscope you don't need to know what: atapi is ISO is ASCII is You just need to know what the language is. Thats going to be hard enough right there. Scott
We put that up in space and eventually mankind will forget about it (probably during the next US Presidential sex scandal or Survivor III). When commuter space travel becomes reality and we're all taking weekend trips to the moon in a space age version of a minivan, some teenage kids will park the van somewhere in orbit and have at it. A clunk will be heard on the door and after a sudden bout of panic by the teenagers thinking the space police caught them in the act, they retreive the item and and sell it on eBay as a valued antique...
So how do we make sure it stays in orbit if someone happens to come across it in the future?
Glass is not a almost solid fluid at all. It stays in place like any good solid. The original research into it was flawed and retracted some 8 years (I think) later after a NEW study came out that said just as many windows were thicker at the top than at the bottom.
The thickness difference was caused by the way the glass was originally spun. The process was refined as years went by until they had almost square windows.
As such, it won't deform in space unless some heavy particles hit it, but if it is protected well, bigger objects have a much better chance of destroying it.
Sure it is. The USAF must know something about it that they're not telling us. Maybe thats' what was going on at area51: testing the flight characteristics of colors. Yeah, that's it.
Anyway, "That's not flying, it's falling, with style!" - Buzz Lightyear
-----
Planning to be moderated ± 1: Bad Pun.
Great. One run-on sentence, and you have a stroke.
until (succeed) try { again(); }
until (succeed) try { again(); }
Well, for our "ancestors" to get hit by this object, WE would need to send it back in time. I think you mean "descendants."
-17028
What if they stumble on this thing in the year 20,000? They could open it 22,001 years too early! Wouldn't that be a bitch?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
It's arrogant for the current humanity to assume that sentients of the future would be less capable of interpreting messages than we are capable of transmitting them. Do we really think we are the peak of human existence? I bet the Greeks thought so. Or perhaps the Mayans. Look, it's cyclical.
The only assumption that it's necessary to make is that there will be sentient life at the time. If there is, it's not really relevant what stage of the Enlightenment/Dark Ages cycle that they're in. If they're all just digging in the muck, they'll ignore it. If they're at a point where they are capable of initiating a decoding project, they can.
Either way, the more interesting aspect of it happens now. What does today's humanity feel is important enough or trivial or funny or insightful enough that it should last some unfathomable amount of time? What does humanity feel should be communicated? Graffiti? Threats? Religious tracts? Politics? Science? Love? Music? Art? Code?
For us, right now, what it amounts to is tossing a bottle in the sea. We have no way of knowing that it will survive, find a destination, be picked up, read or cared about by anyone. But everyone feels they have something to say. Why not say it?
What would you say?
---
"The Constitution...is not a suicide pact."
"Life. Don't talk to me about life."
i thought that standard cd's have a life of about 15 years, of course, the less you handle it, the longer it lasts, but a cd designed for a 15 year life cannot last for 50,000 years... and then you have gold cd's... 100 years, maybe you can stretch it out a couple more hundred years. if anyone is out there to read our message in 50,000 years all they'll find is some obsolete technology with silver platters of an unrecognizable array of 1's and 0's.
"Tread softly because you tread on my dreams"
That will also be the year Windows finally works properly, with all those years of backwards compatibility . . .
:)
"don't CDs go bad after about 100 years or so?"
Dye based burned CDs do, I don't know about gold burns. Regular CD data is pressed glass, so if they use those they might be fine. I say might because except at most extremely cold temperatures, glass eventually moves a little (This is why windowpanes in very old houses are thicker at the bottom. Really.). Given that in an Earth orbit the casing for this thing will get plenty of sunlight, it might be warm enough for the glass to shift a little. Over 50,000 years, that could make the disc unreadable.
Of course, at the same time, it is also likely that the plastic around the glass would hold it in place, at least if the plastic fills in the gaps between the tracks in the glass.
Perhaps someone that knows more about the materials used in a CD could comment further on this?
So just how long is the decss source? :)
Simon
Simon
The real linux_penguin has Slashdot ID 101961. Anyone else is an impostor. Including Bruce Perens.
Really. Isn't there enough space junk?
We don't know exactly how prehistoric tools were made or how large monuments (pyramids, stonehenge, Easter Island statues) were constructed. However we can do the equivalent thing today with modern methods. In 50000 years it might be easiest to read a CD by taking a picture of it with an ultra high resolution digital camera and having pattern recognition AI do the rest.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
fun to find someone who has the exact same thought at the exact same minute. But damnit, he stole my Karma! And I was about to get a Karma of 0!
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
That just makes things worse, doesn't it?
Now who or whatever finds the object has to not only figure out how to decode the CDROM itself to find its content... but now has to decode different alphabets and grammars and languages and syntaxes -- which means they first have to recognize that there ARE multiple laguages and grammars and such represented in the data! It just adds to the increasingly improbability of this thing ever meaning anything to anyone in any way.
- Spryguy
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
"We have just received a small platter from the year 2000! I wonder what it's for? Hmm, It could be for storing information, but that's silly! Who would ever store information on easily scratched or broken plastic disks? It must be some kind of coaster, or ornament..."
----
Oh my god, Bear is driving! How can this be?
ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
Cobol, indeed!
We all know that while we don't know what computers will do then, or what the language will look like, it *will* be called Fortran . . .
I wonder what would happen if we put DeCSS on one of those cds? Would MPAA have to send lawyers to take this satellite out? Or would lawyers be on hand to sue our decendants when they opened this thing up in 50,000 years? :)
Perhaps I'm stating the obvious here, but isn't it a whole lot easier to secure a storage facility on earth?
Before you give me arguments about space being a vacuum and preventing decay, think about a few things. It costs a lot to launch a satellite, and keep it in the atmosphere. We haven't tested satellites staying in the atmosphere anywhere near that long. You've got serious radiation and equipment problems. If the equipment fails, then the orbit slowly decays and like fried bacon there goes your CD's of data.
I'm sure there are plenty of time-capsule projects on earth right now (didn't some tv channel do something around Y2K?). However, those do not get nearly the publicity as the coolness factor of space. Face it, it'd be easier, cheaper, and probably more reliable to get a safe location on the earth. Bury it in the ocean, in a mountain, or something. Put it at the bottom of the big crater in Arizona (right in the middle). Make it transmit a radio signal when it's ready to be opened, or make it very public knowledge where it is, put it in history books for others to read. You can store more stuff, you've basically got unlimited space. It can be airtight, in several layers, to have similar benefits to space. It can be fireproof, or perhaps taken care of by an organization for a few hundred/thousand years, which checks up on it every decade to make sure it's still intact. I dunno, space is cool, but orbit doesn't seem perfect to keep something preserved - too many problems.
On another thought, why not launch it onto the moon and embed itself there? Then it could transmit in 50,000 years, and probably be relatively untouched. It won't go away, will only be subject to radiation and not orbit problems, and faces a much better chance of staying put. Now that'd be cool.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
#include
#include <stdlib.h>
int main (int argc, char* argv[])
{
printf("Hello, future!\n") ;
return EXIT_SUCCESS ;
}
Vacume smacume, what about radiation and extreme temperature shift? I think this is a cool idea but they better be using something other than standard cd's.
What about that diamond with water, air, earth, and some human blood? I can see it now, all of mankind is wiped out by a 50,000 year old common cold.
http://evoketv.com - TV Listings 2.0
A: ...and now the historic occasion when B here will read the first message retrieved from the capsule.
B: 42
A: ?
B: That's all that's there. The number 42.
"When this thing falls, it may fall to an world barren of humanity. Not because we blew ourselves up, or got hit by a comet, or any number of the zillions of ways we could be wiped out as a species, but merely because we don't need the world anymore."
I damn well hope so. I want to get bored and make baby universes or something. Someone get Stephen Hakwing to stop wasting time on faster than light travel and have him work on that idea!
Wow...they started planning this 50,000 years ago?
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
Several futurists have speculated on what the human race will look like in the future, and they have come up with:
- Larger heads to hold larger brains, with facial features moved downward.
- Smaller bodies, as machines take over more of the work.
- Larger eyes to see more clearly. With the way the human skull is constructed, this may result in a teardrop shape created by the eyeball and the upper eyelid.
- Vegetarian digestive systems as the health fad gains momentum.
- Excessive cuteness: only the cutest babies will be cared for by The Man, meaning only the cutest babies get to pass on their genes.
In other words, we'll look like the figurines you buy at Hallmark.Make sure to take this into account when designing content for the space capsule's CD-ROM collection.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
Heh. Your assumption here is that indo-european
language conventions will survive longer than
digital encoding conventions. I see no reason to
think so. If we found a slab of rock with charac-
ters written 50k years ago, with no relation to
any modern language, we'd never decode it. How do
you think egyptian language was decoded? They found
a slab where message was written in both greek and
egyptian (written when one of Alexander the Macedonian's heirs was a pharaoh there). Before that, nobody was even close. That's even though whole damn egypt is covered in engravings, and language is still alive (I think). And, that's something like 2500(?) years since it was widely used there to engrave. If they want them to easily learn the language, they have to leave drawings, alot of them. Every word in the dictionary with a visual illustration. Engraved on stainless steel. These guys are probably hoping that either conventions of encoding will survive (which is a bit silly, if they do, why not full archive of the internet?), or that posterity will be much smarter than us.
-- ATTENTION: do not read this sig. It doesn't say much.
Sure, the earth has lasted for billions of years, but I think 50,000 years is way too long for this time capsule to be out there -- at least for a first attempt (at least I *think* it's a first attempt). I don't think it'll last... and if it does, I doubt that it would be more useful to whatever is on this planet in 50,000 years than it would be to the inhabitants of this planet in 1,000 years.
I also think it would be more useful to *include* a playback device (rather than a manual for constructing one) as well as a suggestion that, if this message is received, *then* you try something longer term (and include this data with it, adding to it whatever you think is appropriate).
Also, I don't know what the plans are, but I sure hope they have some major electromagnetic disturbance being transmitted in conjunction with this satellite's de-orbiting; something to get the attention of the planet's inhabitants.
Just think, 1000-2000 years ago there's sure a lot of information that would be interesting to historians today. 50,000 years ago? The human race was almost unrecognizable, civilization didn't even exist (did it?), and there would be some very disappointing holes left in history in the meantime.
Think about it. Is there *anything* madmade in the world at all that has ever survived near that long. The oldest manmade things I can thing of are about 5,000 years old, and hard to find (and piece together) at that. Sure space might not weather away at an object, but the atmosphere is also protective. This satellite will be subject to super-high-speed micrometeorites and solar effects etc. for thousands of years.
Anyone remember the old Honda motor bike commercials? Children are walking through a museum of the future, and they come across a motorbike:
Curator: And here we have a motorbike -- people used to ride them for fun!
Children: Fun?? Ffffuuuunnnn...
Child (UK accent): But why would anyone want to ride a motorbike for fun?
Curator (slow, puzzled voice): We ... don't ... know...
It was pretty funny in a bizarre way.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Hell, I also miss MEEPT!!! who was probably the original of the true original ppl here. Defender of MS, writer of obscure posts, and the poster boy for /. flames. Oh well, I guess that Sengan is back (Rambus story today). We should set a pool to see when ppl start flaming him again.
Here is my message exactly, think about it! I am gonna get picked up by time travellers soon! "Hey, if you could please travel back in time to 12:30AM EST Aug 30, 2000. Go to (my address) and pick me up I really wanna know what the future is like!"
from the page: The astronomical clock ...an "astronomical clock"
showing the current position and rotation speed
of different radio pulsars.
By calculating the deceleration rate over time,
the discoverers will be able to data KEO
as being 50,000 years old...
unfortunately sometime around the year 2280, a klingon will use it for target practice...
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
So I suffer a little despair reading your reply.
The 50k part is not so hard to believe, being made of tempered glass and all, and after going through some simulations in a particle accelerator, we can more or less say that the storage medium is okay.
The reentry part is the same; design and such to survive, otherwise launching it is pointless. So that's still otherwise okay, even if it isn't 100%.
Reasons why people may notice it's reentry 50k years from now; Space Agencies track it, because we are tracking anything bigger than a baseball, it's possible that we will continue doing so in the future. Likewise, it's re-entry is targeted to look *really* impressive, so if people today go to hunt down meteorites and meteroides, perhaps people of the future will as well, if only children doing so out of curiosity.
If people of the future lack all exploration and curiosity, then no, they will just let it sit wherever it lands and then I can't care anyway, because the human race will have died.
How about what *we* have done, in reconstructing 2000 year old languages? Analyzing dead sea scrolls, heiroglyphs, steles and stones? Why would archeologists and scientists of the future be any less intrepid and saavy? After all, this is, as you admit, and experiment in hope and optimism.
It's happened before, when we reconstruct a dinosaur, analyze a 10,000 year old bee's DNA, or try to figure out how a 20,000 year old human walks. Are you denying that people will continue to do so, 50,000 years from now?
And I am discouraged that you think there are better things to do with our time and money than hope, dream, and experiment...
The nick is a joke! Really!
GPL Deconstructed
They claim to have taken into account everything there is to account for, but I think they may have missed one of the most fundamental processes of life on this planet: evolution.
So true. Life will have long become extinct from exponentially increasing genetic load.
50,000 years is roughly 5 times the sum of all recorded (known?) human history thus far.
Actually, about ten times, and that even includes cave paintings if you use a reliable dating method. Here in good old Oz, we have "40,000 year old" cave paintings that need perspex rain shields. Yeah, right...
They became god-like beings of pure energy, with no more need for a planet than we have for an appendix.
Actually, our appendix provides valuable biological partitioning between our stomach and intestines. Removing it greatly increases the likelihood of bowel problems, and for those to become complicated. Similarly with tonsils. If gall bladders, long considered optional, are removed, your chances of colon cancer quadruple.
There is a big difference between what SciFi authors hope will take place, and what actually happens. Clarke was working with already-outdated biology at the time he wrote that, and more observations have been made since then.
For example, it seems that turtles have always needed complete shells - there are no fossilised proto-turtles with half-formed shells; the nice neat horse evolution diagrams have been binned when it was discovered that along with the secquence of "needed" changes came other non-sequences that just plain didn't make sense; archaeopteryx has been deemed a hoatzin and grouped with the other fossils of toothed true birds, and so on.
When this thing falls, it may fall to an world barren of humanity.
It won't fall. The same orbital slip that's driving the moon away from Earth will drive the satellite away. By the way, if you backtrack the moon, it's volume occluded the earth's about a million years or so ago - but I see no big, flat groove on the equator.
The only real chance you have of becoming a disembodied spirit is to step into freeway traffic. Flights of fantasy can be very comforting but sooner or later reality will bite you one the behind.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
If we launch the DeCSS into space, can the RIAA demand the satellite be grounded? Might be fun to find out.. heh
Let's get Linus to whip up a special flavor of kernel source just for the occasion!
Oh great. Now Kaplan is going to impound the HOWTO. Nice going!
.02
My
Quux26
My
Quux26
www.crashspace.net
I wonder if it will be looted long before its intended time of return.
We as a race aren't likely to survive that long given the present hijinx of mankind.ROACHES!Roaches will survive nuclear war.
Roaches adapt quickly(ever try ~50 different products in the attempt to erradicate the fukkers?)Their evolution will be extremely faster than our own.Whatever doesnt kill them makes them stronger in front of your eyes.
Cockroaches will come after us.
But who cares?By that time X-day will occur,You pinks will be toast and Bob will have set me up to live FOREVER on my own personal SEX-PLANET where busty lovedrones will polish my knob continually as I hork a bottomless bong,jam to the best subgenius tunes and rule with an iron penis!
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
"Morlocks" is one of the two future races from H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (which I've mirrored). Morlocks look like orcs from Tolkien's LotR. Their main diet is people of the Eloi race, who look like those figurines your wife/sister/aunt collects.
But all this may be OT, as the time traveller from the story went past AD 52,001 all the way to AD 802,701.
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!
Will I retire or break 10K?
I remember hearing that CD-ROMs of commercial manufacture only have a lifespan of approx 100 years. CDR and CD-RW only have a lifespan of 5-7 after burning. How are these going to be useful in 50000 years? Coasters of the future?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Now if we could do that in 1976, why couldn't we make a rugged CD-player? Especially with the Jeep CD player and everything else. Let's face it: the worst thing that a reasonably-sized satellite could survive would be a micrometeor the size of a fist (maybe smaller, I didn't do any calculations, just an educated guess). Anything larger would obliterate the satellite
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
I doubt the RIAA would give a shit seeing as they don't publish DVD's which is about the only useful thing for DeCSS.
Erik
Source for a universal turing machine should fit inside 6000 characters. Seems like we oughta keep that from getting lost.
If our history is not preserved, and in 50k years they continuously wonder what happened before them as we do, then this would be a great blessing. If the dinosours had left historical documents in some strange media and it took us 300 years and $100 billion to decode, but gave us information similar to this project of the time I'd say it was worth it...
"I told you a million times not to exaggerate!"
hey crackhead bob, the Sumerians spoke Sumerian, and wrote in Cuneiform, the Indians in the Indus valley originally wrote in sanskrit, a language evolved from aryan (not the racist shit, the people) people who came down into india from eastern europe. buy a clue, please. -zephc, posting AC to avoid nega-karma
---
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
yes, nothing like porn and britney spears jpegs to represent our time. our children will be proud.
I realize there is a lot of real-estate in an Earth orbit, but aren't the probabilities high that this will smack into something in 50000 years? In 50000 years will we need orbiting items? Will we grab anything close in the universe and disintegrate it for power?
-----
"Defenestration" is to throw out of a window; what's a word for throwing 'Windows' out of something?
Yeah -- they might need it in order to read the DVDs we send up there....
Oh, wait... d'oh!
That, my friend, is for the ingenuity and intelligence of future archeologists to discover how to deal with. Undoubtedly someone, somewhere, will have a CD inside a airtight seal, inside a storage case somewhere, trapped inside a forgotten building in the middle of the desert, and someone will find it in 20,000 years, and they will wonder; what is this?
We have to count on the intelligence of our descendents to decipher the 1/0 that make up our society today. It is with these 1/0s that we have our computers, our programs, our internet, and we cannot do them the disservice of removing that knowledge.
How would we today try to read a CD, then, if we found it? Let's assume we don't think it's a decoration or jewlery. Maybe they'll think they are some sort of currency, seeing as how many are printed, and how *everyone* has a collection of them. Not so far from the mark, actually...
Anyway, how would we unlock a CD, today? Visual analysis tells us that there are grooves, and that the grooves are close enough togeter to form spectral gratings. Which would require us to look closely at the groove structures to see why all CDs are not identical. The minute we look down we see pits of various sizes. Aha! At that point one can copy this directly into another medium.
Then the networks can get to work. Distributed.net volunteers time and cpucycles and such to try to 'crack' this stream of 1s and 0s. We can try various cyphers, we can try to apply linguistic theory, distribution codes, encryption codes, etc. Maybe it will take *years*, and millions upon millions of gigaflops of cycles to decode it.
Say 2 years later, we have distribution charts. We see that this disc used a primitive error correction code, and that there is some sort of syntax code that the linguists(by then a hard science) can tackle.
Maybe we'll have to look and compare to any media that have been saved from that time period. Say, a n inscription that happens to be upon the side of a building that has survived all this time. From that 50 word script we have a rough letter distribution. We try to match language to language. We try to match word to word. We try to match syntax with every known variation of language we have from that period; English, Dutch, Chinese, Japanese, Swahili, whatever.
It's not impossible, especially since we are designing it to be read; as opposed to designing it to be *sold* or *used*
The nick is a joke! Really!
GPL Deconstructed
This being the case, they'd really have to make that CD out of bloody Kryptonite if they expect it to last fifty thousand years. They really ought to have picked a smarter media that doesn't decay this quickly.
Nice idea. They have probably already done that on one of the other 80 CDs (but certainly not that detailed though). One should mark as well the positions of all known wrecks (e.g. Titanic, all those subs), that should give a pretty detailed picture of our level of technology once they dig some of them out.
Sure seems like it would be safer to drop this thing on the far side of the moon, with a big, obvious bullseye drawn a few acres around it.
It would be safe from orbital debris, woudn't need any moving parts, and could have hundreds of pounds of stuff included.
Why would you use something as archaic as a CD for this? I suppose you need something that will last that long, and a CD MAY do do that ina vacuum in space with no light or heat or anything, but what are the chances that anyone could read this 50,000 years from now?
I hope they're putting a CD player with a solar panel on it in there as well. At least that would be something.
We definately need to put the Hello World program on there in as many different languages as possible. Then again, maybe we should change it to say "Hello Universe."
Refrag
I have a website. It's about Macs.
I remember reading somewhere about how many years data would be readable on a few different storage medias, such as CD, floppy, tape and paper. I remember that the CD would only last a few years or something like that, and they would absolutely not last 50000 years.
Will they last longer in space, or is there something else they will do to make them stay readable?
Phobos - Greek word for fear or flight
There once was a whore from Sydney,
Who could take a penis up to the kidney.
Along came a client from Quebec,
Who crammed one up to her neck.
Gee, he had a long one,
Didn't he?
On the off chance that you understand me, please unfreeze my body, I want to get laid by a future chick!
I just want everyone to know that we here in the dawn of the 21st century have a sense of humor, we bitch and gripe a lot but all in all, we have a good time and work hard. To you future generations, never give up your guns, never give up your freedom and shoot anyone who tells you that you should!
--- Never hold a dustbuster and a cat at the same time ---
Setting his threshold to 5, Sparky eliminated most of the trolls on /.
Since this seems to be the most rational of the posts in this thread, here is my reply:
Most of us have 'examined' those beliefs from the inside. For myself, I was raised christian (both Lutheran (on dad's side) and Baptist (mom's side)). I studied and contemplated the bible. I asked questions, and was constantly told not to ask questions. I was told that questions are not good. You are not to ask questions, just accept it as is.
Then a preacher in the Lutheran church said that god used his son to block the bullet that was aimed at us. He 'loved us so much that he threw his son in front of the bullet'. Personally, I saw that as a cowardly, abusive, and patently stupid act. It caused many more questions in my mind. Eventually, those questions led to me being thrown out of church for being 'possessed' simply because I asked questions.
Christianity has been an excuse for killing, and rape, and torture, and now it is an excuse for abusive words, and being ostrasized from your community. It is an abusive religion, and an absolutely impossible to breach ignorance. Once I finally gave up on religion, I was happier, and far more satisfied with my life. I treat people with respect, I repect myself, and I enjoy my life. When I was 'into' religion, I was constantly beating myself up because 'I was not worthy' (as this is the main tenet of christianity, all humans are scum, and we are not worthy).
It is not a sense of guilt or discomfort that seeing Christians babble about their 'god' causes in me. It is anger, and outrage. That an entire sect of our 'modern' world can believe so wholly and fully in such a fairy tale, and use it as an excuse to deride any scientific advance, not to mention any personal advance, is beyond incredulity. If you choose to believe such, so be it. Believe what you wish, but please, shut up about it already!
If people want to be christian, they will be. If they don't, the last thing that they want to hear is how they are going to burn in hell if they don't 'drop to their knees and pray to god to save our imortal souls'.
BTW, slight ontopic rant:
Why the hell would someone post this on slashdot? Does anyone really think whoever is around in 50,000 years is going to want to see a thousand copies of the penis birds and penis fish posts? Or any of the other completely idiotic and childish crap that the people of slashdot are going to try to put in there. I just hope to god that someone edits out the stupidity before they put it up.
Bite my yammer.
After all, don't CDs go bad after about 100 years or so?
Fist Prost
"We're talking about a planet of helpdesks."
-Jaron Lanier
--- Never hold a dustbuster and a cat at the same time ---
Setting his threshold to 5, Sparky eliminated most of the trolls on /.
6000 characters is enough for some source. Decss? PGP? Get a group of people and post the source of the current Linux kernel.
About the ocean landing; it was designed with a bouancy of less than 1 to insure it floated, assuming it lands intact.
c e</a>
<a href="http://www.keo.org/uk/technik.html">Referen
You may be right about the frames of reference thing. We just don't know if future selves have the capability of decoding it all.
The nick is a joke! Really!
GPL Deconstructed
I tried to put a fibonnacci sequence (like this, obviously: 010101101110111110111111110), but it won't take my submission, it keeps saying I didn't fill in the required fields. I even switched my birthdate to the European style (day/month/year instead of month/day/year)... anybody else have problems w/ this server?
I figure there's no way that the space aliens in question will be able to decipher the meaning of any human language, but if they do anything they will look for discernable patterns on the disk. Of course, it's a snowball's chance in hell but whatever.
Don't post on slashdot. Get back to work.
Go ahead, mark me flamebait, you know it's true.
Bite my yammer.
I'm pretty suprised that the likes of Star Trek has never really covered something similar.. nearest thing would have to be 'The Deconstruction of Falling Stars' at the end of Babylon 5 Season 4.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
... if it is taken down by the MPAA two years from now. Or if the MPAA prevents it from being sent up at all.
AFAIK are CD's are not able to store informations for such a long time. By now even 30 years might be a problem. Certain conditions like constant low temperature are required.
Jack Valenti and the lawyers of the MPAA will be defrosted, to sue the scientists who figure out how to decrypt the recovered DVD...
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
simple solution to that problem:
Oh, and while you're at it, you might get your engraver to add crucial bits of the various CD recording standards.
If you see what archaeologists can figure out with stuff just dumped around randomly, I have do doubt that the archaeologists of 50,000 years from now will be able to figure this stuff out.
I still like the idea mentioned in a past Slashdot story of engraving stuff really small onto (metallic?) discs. That way all you need is a 1800's-era microscope to get useful information.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Oh, the marvels of French engineering, innovation and design.
Language data formatted to be put on a cd surely does not work like a one time pad. A one time pad is truly random, while the point of this cd is to show the patterns in the language. A cd, no matter what data is put on there, with the possible exception of random noise, will have patterns to it.
We are in a pickle, but any method of preservation that does not encrypt the data can be thought of as essentially the same: no plain text, no sense of the output.
But it will take a long time to decipher any method we choose.
Don't cd's only last for about 25 years or so?
Yea? Then how come I got a server error when I submitted my text? ;)
I am not sure that alien computers will be able to read an iso9660 file system. I like the idea of a disk with perforations in it better: if theyc can't see, they can feel.
I don't see how one follows from the other. Surely the same evolution and development that has given humans the power to create universes has also finally taught them to RTFM (one of which is enclosed in the capsule).
Turning the data on the discs back into the original characters should be extremely easy for the super-humans. Understanding it will be more interesting, just as understanding writings from our own ancient history is interesting and challenging, but ultimately largely achievable and well worth the effort.
Then they get this time capsule that opens and says, "It's been 52,001 years since the birth of Jesus Christ!" Of course, if it gets to that, then the response will be, "Jesus who?"
--
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
Uuhm, there will NEVER be working time machines. Don't believe me? So tell me, where are the tourists?
What in the world makes you think that CD-ROMs exposed to space for fifty thousand years would be readable by our current equipment, let alone technology from the future?
And why would they care?
I suppose it would be akin to asking me if I really want to know the daily habits of one "Oog the Caveman" who lived 50,000BC.
Bah weep grah nah weep ninee bahn!
(The Universal Greeting)
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
> titianium, tungsten, glass, etc
They'll probably melt it down to make light bulbs.
Slingshot it around the sun...it worked for Captain Koik.
I dont' know about you but Boomers are really starting to cheese me off --- Me
Since time travel may be invented by then, I tried to invite the recipients over for dinner tonight. I provided coordinates in space and time (and my apartment number). Assuming they are carbon-based, there should be plenty to eat.
But alas, the form would not submit. It said my input was wrong, but it didn't say why. I triple-checked everything and it still doesn't work. I wonder what language they are using to process the form date - it appears to have a function to check for and prevent causality paradoxes.
Shit. Dining alone AGAIN.
I suggested this for the Source Code contest. It didn't win :-(
Gerv
John Johansen should contribute the DeCSS source. I really want to see how RIAA would react.
why not include the ultimate dictionary, everything?
What are they going to make of all the grits,NP, Penis Bird comments? Now that this has been posted on /. they will be getting alot of these.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
My guess is the people who will read that will be experts in anchent/dead languages such as english.
Such people exist today.. cyphering Hyroglyphs etc.
I suspect they'll have modern english documents about as well as we have allready documented dead languages.
Language hobbiests document the language as it is currently used noting strangenesses like the use of the words POP and Soda...
As the words go into disuse the documentation becomes of accademic value as well as hobby value.
The older the changes are the more accademic value they have.. the newer the more hobby value they have. By the time English will cease to have any hobby intrest it will have been long dead and become of extream accademic value.
Thus the hobbiest becomes the historian...
I don't actually exist.
I may be wrong... but wouldn't CD's deteriorate after that long? Or at least experience a little corruption?
And where will you find a CD player that far off?
Won't we be picking up info through embedded head antennae or something by then? A spinning disk with a player may seem absurd (and a little hard to come by) by then.
How about freezing Bill Gates and putting him in the time capsule! Let them cope with that ;-)
Wrong, 50000 years from now, future inhabitants of Earth will recover this capsule as it plunges into a desert somewhere (it deorbits in 50000 years, right?) - and the Wintel employees (because 50000 years from now, Microsoft OS (Windows) and Intel have merged, and taken over the government, and every other corporation, so every human is an employee) open it up and see the shiny DVD disks. One of them absently tries to insert it into the 3.5" floppy drive on his 733 MHz P9million, with ISA slots and UltraSuperMegaATA hard drive, but it won't fit.
"damn Mac shit" he'll mutter, and toss the whole lot.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
you forgot the obligitory Echelon .sig:
napalm c4 cyanide water supply terrorist stinger president airforce one bomb enriched uranium acid glue marx linux opensource gnu manifesto guns
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
People have been arguing about religion since time immemorial. It will probably never stop. But here's a little advice anyway:
To the zealots: You're never going to convince the atheists that you're right, and you just piss people off by trying. Just worry about your own eternity and let everyone else worry about theirs.
To the atheists: You're never going to convince the zealots that they're wrong, so ignore them and hope they shut up.
To the moderators: Make it clear that Slashdot isn't alt.religion.flame.flame.flame in whatever way you can.
Bugrit! Millenium hand and shrimp!
Make sure to ROT13 the dirty jokes so no one is offended.
UnilateralPress
."
Cape Canaveral, United Republic of Retired Persons
Septmon 42, 10999
In an effort to combat the deadly accrual of space debris, the World Space Agency began using X-ray lasers to disintegrate derelict objects in Sol3 orbit. Some of the larger debris targeted included ancient satellite parts. "There are lots of old satellite hulls out there, most of which were used purposes we can't even guess at," said WSA spokesdrone Xy-103FA8. "For instance, one of the first objects we destroyed was an ancient space pod with no listed use whatsoever; apparently they sent it up just so it could sit there for 50000 years. .
in 52001 will earth even still be around? IMHO this is kinda BS, even if the earth IS around humans probably won't be. 52001 is a pretty bad idea, how the hell are you going to tell future generations not to open it til then? I mean, the year 3001, sure, but _52001_?!?
If you think you know what the hell is going on you're probably full of shit. -- Robert Anton Wilson
If you think you know what the hell is going on you're probably full of shit. -- Robert Anton Wilson
jdube is who
I see they include instructions to build a CD player ... I wonder if the Morlocks would be able to figure that out!
dood, what's up with the whole CD idea? sure, they won't have players, but i'm figuring they'll send up a player, then again, languages may have changed and the info will be useless. anyways, of course it makes perfect sense that our language and logic will live on forever, but that's what the egyptians thought, and the difference in time between them and us is much less than that between us and the people who will open this capsule. we never would've cracked heiroglyphics without the rosetta stone. is a rosetta stone going to be enclosed? i just think this whole thing is dumb.
-"Hey, Baby. It's not a rash, it's textured love."
Putting CSS encrypted data into a time capsule is pointless because anyone trying to decrypt them would presumably land in jail over DMCA violations.
Even if the US isn't around in the year 52001, people and even aliens would still be bound by the DMCA. After all look what happened in Norway.
I would suggest unencrypted DVDs, except that then the MPAA might sue you for violating your license to create DVDs.
I doubt humans will exist in 52001 years
very shortsighted idea. i suppose u dont know anything computers.
twice as fast? hahahahahhahahaha
kings????? tsk tsk..u r on crack.
Is here.
-------------------
Otherwise how else are the apes in AD 52001 going to decrypt the DVDs?
sulli
sulli
RTFJ.
... what will happen at re-entry? Burn up? Smash into a few trillion bits of metal and plastic?
Hell, I can even see our future selves destroying it before it hits something when it becomes apparant that it's not going to burn up, or it being "cleaned" out of orbit when space junk starts being a major problem.
But I digress.. we're all picking holes in this one, so, smartarses, how would YOU make a time capsule designed to last 50k years? Where you you put it? What would you use to store the data?
Certainly, there are manmade objects that have lasted that long.
Just think of all the paleolithic stone tools that have been found. They're pretty primitive, but there can be no doubt that they are manmade.
But, this is beside the point - the real question is whether humanity will even be around, 50,000 years from now.
After all, even if you're not a subscriber to linear evolutionary progression, and not the more radical theories of the imminence of the Singularity, you have to admit that humanity has changed a great deal since the Paleolithic. It is only reasonable to assume that the same will be true of the coming 50 millennia.
-Ravn (born_to_live_forever)
- Peter Ravn Rasmussen
Know what f1RST p0sT! means?
In all honesty I doubt 50,000 years is a good idea. Maybe one thousand to two thousand years seems a bit more realistic to me.
Won't the data on the CDs be lost by then? I thought CDs only had a realiable life of ~20 years.
Josh
(This is why windowpanes in very old houses are thicker at the bottom. Really.)
Windows in old buildings are thicker at the bottom because builders found it easier to put the heavier, thicker ends of uneven panes of glass at the bottom rather than the top. Clever, huh?
See www.urbanlegends.com
If you're a jock, inflict some pain / If you're a nerd then use your brain - DAPHNE AND CELESTE
The hacker community should convince them to put the Linux source code up there. And I am assuming that they are putting a CD drive or someother type of device up there?
note - this is funnier to Simpsons fans.
Send your friends messages of love at fuck-you.org
I seriously doubt that the artist who came up with the concept is actually very interested in what is going into the capsule. As with a lot of art projects, the challenge and artistic merit is more in the production and realisation of the idea than the finished product. I wonder if Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa thinking 'Heres a nice picture for people to look at' or 'I am studying the form of a human face'? I'd wager the latter. Some of the best software apps I've written have been to overcome a challenge rather than to make something genuinuely useful.. My bible trigram frequency analyser for example.. Utterly useless, but great fun to write. (Can software be art? I guess thats another topic entirely.)
In essence what I'm saying is, who gives a toss whether anyone really reads it, lets have fun making it..
Onion
http://twitter.com/onion2k
Too bad all the satelites were systematicaly destoyed during world war 4...
_________________________________
I came... I saw... I commented.
It was me, I did it, I moved your cheese
I am quite sure that normal CD media will not last more than 50 years.
...the person who registered soon as they opened didn't say something very silly like "First Post!" and forget the other 5998 words their far descendants might read.
Andrew Borntreger
Andrew Borntreger
Champion of cinematic disasters
50000 years worth of orbital decay. I wonder if they've taken everything (Solar radiation pressure, changes due to lunar tidal erosion, random debris) into account. Probably the first two, but certainly not the last. If we remain spacefaring, what are the odds that this thing won't have a head-on with some space junk in the next 50K years?
The idea of free text space for all is wonderful. I'm thinking about adding something myself... and this really would be a boon to anthropologists if, say, all electronic historical records were to be wiped sometime in the future.
What is the structural composition of a CD? Would it break down in (presumably) vacuum under the influence of solar and stellar radiation? In less than 50,000 years? That could prove a problem, if it is the case.
Anyone else suddenly think of the gold disks on (I think) Voyager when they read this? Sort of the same idea, except across time instead of space...
What about non text data? Can't we get an allowance for (under 6Kb) graphics in here too? (OK, so that's a little small for photos, but I'd like to try diagrams, math in geometric form, modern physics stuff that might require line drawings...)
-- Still waiting for the Nike endorsement
If several people got together and each submitted part of the DeCSS code (and they actually included it), then we could ensure that the DVD Copy Associations lawyers stay in business for another 50001 years. Imagine, they deorbit the satellite, and pop, get slammed with an injunction. ;)
I like lots of people. That doesn't mean I go carting them around the galaxy with me. --Dr. Who
I believe that one of the most critically important additions to this time capsule should be some sort of highly detailed world map, right down to the nearest square metre if possible. That would be one of the most useful pieces of historical evidence, since it would show not only land formations and the movement of the earth's plates over the millennia, but also the city plans. Using this sort of evidence, whatever *intelligent* life form eventually finds this should be able to work out the urban sprawl and conclusively work out secondary information like population, density, agriculture and the general lifestyle of our era.
Yes, you are right, of course. That's why we have to put all those laser-zapping equiped sattelites in orbit to nuke the potential threats!
on our descendant's collective faces when they open up this time capsule, build a CD-reader and proceed to read 1 billion messages of HOT GRITS!, FIRST POST!, and NATALIE PORTMAN!
Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?
People should hurry up and make their submissions. This is a big chance for a lot of Slashdot readers to settle the dispute over who is "king".
Just imagine opening up this capsule in 50k years, reading the data, and finding something like this:
"FIRST POST!!!"
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
I'm quite sure I heard that CD's don't last decades, let alone millenia. Perhaps I heard wrong.
52001?? Aren't they assuming a bit much? We haven't even solved the Y10K problem yet. And you know we won't start working on it until 9996. Also - why send DeCSS up there when they're using CDs to hold the data? Just send a good sharware CD ripper that expires in 18250395 days. That'll give them a good month to rip all the songs they want before they have to fork over 8 billion dollars (adjusted for inflation) to get the full version.
What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.
No brain, no pain!
Hmmmmm.... Better hope the trolls don't find out about this...
...and now the historic occasion when B here will read the first message retrieved from the capsule. .....
(Fash forward to 52001)
A:
B:
A: ?
B: What the hell is a penis fish?
But, on a more serious note, I'm personally convinced that mankind won't be on the planet anymore by the time this thing lands, I must say however that at least they thought enough to include a manual on how to build a CD-ROM drive, but once they build it, how will they use it? (that, and how will they be sure they get all the various measurements correctly...)
Anyways, all in all its a nice idea, I'll now have to spend all my free time trying to think of what to include though...
-GreenHell
"I won't mod you down - I feel the need to call you a twit explicitly, rather than by implication."
Seriously, think about it, how whacked, by that time earth's orbit should be completely colonized with spacecraft highways taking people all over to different parts of the space station. Any probe would be creamed. What will probably happen is they will build a museum around it synchronized with its orbit so people can come in and ohh and ahh over the 21st century wonder sealed in a glass box with an even cleaner vacuum inside still traveling at the same speed with anti-theft devices all over it. I was originally thinking this is how we're going to preserve the historical aspect of our voyager space probes, moon and mars shit as well. Considering whenever they invent a decent velocity form of space travel we'll fly out voyager, point at it and say, look at the flying piece of fecal matter.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
You really think it won't last a few thousand more?
Put DeCSS on it!
Then again, they wouldn't have DVDs, and we're not sending any...
Maybe that's why, because they wouldn't have a player that could decode it and we're not allowed to include DeCSS!
(yes, I know the differences between DVD-video encryption and a DVD-ROM. It's a joke, roll with it.)
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
I think that by the time they get the time capsule... no one will have a CD drvie to read the CD anymore. Besides, even if they did have CD-ROM drives that could read it, How do we know that by then all of our languages won't be dead (I'm talkin deader than latin even) and then they wouldn't be able to read it. After all... Look at the egypitans who in the old kingdom (about 5000 BC) used hieroglyphics and god only knows what they spoke. And about 7800 years later, decrypting the Rosetta Stone was one of the greatest feats ever.. I think that after 50,000 years nothing the equivelent of the Rosetta Stone will exist anymore and it will just be a bunch of gibberish written on some kinda frisbee thingy.
---------------
CoyboyNeal is God
They're going to have to build one hell of a radiation shield to protect CDs for 50000 years.
The whole point of this endeavor is hope, trust, and optimism. That there will be an Earth and humans 50k years from now to see what we were. Sort of the same reasoning as saving your granddad's pocket watch for your grandkids; how do you know you'll have grandkids? How do you know that they'll be able to treasure and appreciate this piece of art?
Besides, if 300 years from now someone wants to *go* out into space, retrieve this satellite, bring it back, and open it up, *we* can't stop them. But we can hope they can appreciate our work and put it back, or put something else similar, for similar reasons.
The nick is a joke! Really!
GPL Deconstructed
void css_descramble(byte *sec,byte *key) { #define SALTED(i) (key[i] ^ sec[0x54 + (i)]) unsigned char *end = sec + 0x800; int val; unsigned int lfsr0, lfsr1; byte o_lfsr0, o_lfsr1; lfsr0 = ((SALTED(4) << 17) | (SALTED(3) << 9) | (SALTED(2) << 1)) + 8 - (SALTED(2)&7); lfsr0 = (reverse[lfsr0&0xff]<<17) | (reverse[(lfsr0>>8)&0xff] << 9) | (reverse[(lfsr0>>16)&0xff]<<1) |(lfsr0>>24); lfsr1 = (reverse[SALTED(0)] << 9) | 0x100 | (reverse[SALTED(1)]); sec+=0x80; val = 0; while (sec != end) { o_lfsr0 = (lfsr0 >> 12) ^ (lfsr0 >> 4) ^ (lfsr0 >> 3) ^ lfsr0; o_lfsr1 = ((lfsr1 >> 14) & 7) ^ lfsr1; o_lfsr1 ^= (o_lfsr1 << 3) ^ (o_lfsr1 << 6); lfsr1 = (lfsr1 >> 8) ^ (o_lfsr1 << 9); lfsr0 = (lfsr0 >> 8) ^ (o_lfsr0 << 17); val += o_lfsr0 + (byte)~o_lfsr1; *sec++ = csstab1[*sec] ^ (val & 0xff); val >>= 8; } }
Well, that takes care of 864 characters. What shall I do with the remaining 5136? Perhaps exerpts from Judge Kaplan's ruling? Do you think it could be interpreted as ancient human humor?
My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!
Umm, just to get this straight: They expect people to read this in 52,001? That sounds like wishful thinking: War is inevitable, as humans have demonstrated that we like to bash each other with clubs, swords, and nuclear warheads. Sure, one might say, direct nuclear conflict has been avoided for 50+ years now ! ! ! But think that for about 30 of the 50 years the cold war was (at its peak) threatening the total destruction of the human race. Even assuming that happens every 4 50 year spans (on average), that's 7500 years of threat.
post the DeCSS code in there!
Most sigs are dumb. This is one of them.
Get a group together, put the DeCSS code on there... ;-)
ehintz
In 52001, the inhabitants of Earth will capture a sattelite and take it to Outpost Headquarters where paleologists will unlock it and find inside small platters of glass....
"Look," they will say, "perfectly preserved glass platters that our ancient ancestors used for record-keeping once! And they're remarkably well preserved!"
Many years are spent, graduate students (if they still exist in 52001) come and go having completed dissertations on the decoding of the Orbital Glass Platters, thousands will wonder what the ancients used to think were important. Eventually they manage to decode some of the Ancient Tounge, with a mere 50,000 words in it, barely enough to fill a single memory cell in one of the millions of cockroachbots that comprise a part of the Human galactic ecosystem.
Once the initial progress is made, it is only a matter of seconds before a fully aware translator is coded, compiled, and executed to start the drudging work of making sense of the Ancient Glass Platters. Word spreads out from Earth through the networks of spaceborne miniroaches via radio, until thousands of years later the full content of the platters spreads throughout the Human galaxy. Our decendents will wonder at the strange and quaint sense of humor of the ancients, who were just beginning the age of mass communication and intelligent robotics.
"What," they will wonder, "is 'first post' supposed to mean?"
The Tyrrany Begins....
Finding God in a Dog
They're using tempered glass masters, as explained at their site.
The nick is a joke! Really!
GPL Deconstructed
Because it was invented by Mark to peddle Christianity to rich Greek housewives. While this served to disseminate and preserve the words of this messiah it rendered the private meditation of truths into a public observation of redemption. Who could argue but that the greatest moments of Christianity were when J. ate bread and drank wine with his buddies saying things like 'remember all this in the future when you do everyday things like eat and drink' and 'be excellent to each other' and 'party on'.
"..don't you eat that yellow snow."
And they'll still take 2-3 minutes to boot up.
It would be interesting to have a look at that "Library of Alexandria" that they intend to include. They should make that thing available on their website or even sell copies of it as regular CD-ROM. After all, I don't want to post something thats already there.
What information would be interesting for people in the distant future (not necessarily 50k years) ?
What information would WE like to have on our predecessors, that we don't have (because they didn't regard it as important enough) ?
Reminds me of the planet of the apes movies. Especially the second one where the people with psychokinetic powers live underground in the old subway.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
A huge asteroid could come along and smack the earth right out of orbit.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Yes, of course DVD's would hold a lot more data, but think of it this way:
By now, just about *everyone* has ditched their tape and 8-track players for CD-players. But the DVD market is moving so slowly that there may not be enough DVD players by 52001.
But be happy, after a quick visit to the Good Guys, the organizers almost put the data on DIVX! Thank god they gave that one up.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
precision is something on the order of magnitude 50k, so that if they *tried* carbon dating, they'd find that it was at least 50k years old, without knowing how much older it was...
This is based on the half life of C14 being 5730 years, as explained by this Carbon Dating guide
The nick is a joke! Really!
GPL Deconstructed
50,000 years. Hrm.
50,000 years is an insane amount of time to orbit a time capsule. They claim to have taken into account everything there is to account for, but I think they may have missed one of the most fundamental processes of life on this planet: evolution.
50,000 years is roughly 5 times the sum of all recorded (known?) human history thus far. In that time, technology has increased exponentially and, recently, at greater than exponential rates. Won't we hit a plateau some time in the next, oh, 2,000 years or so? Sooner or later, physical, mechanical technology will slump in favor of other forms. Perhaps biological.. or psychological.
If this thing really lasts 50,000 years, who's to say that humanity will be able to interpret it when it falls? Our entire structure of thinking may be altered by then. Perhaps symbolic thinking will be too "primitive" for the descendants of the human race to waste their time on. It might sound to them like dolphins sound to us.
There is another possibility...
Arthur C. Clarke had an interesting concept in the 2001 series; a race of incredibly advanced beings found a way to write their minds into the granular structure of spacetime itself. They became god-like beings of pure energy, with no more need for a planet than we have for an appendix.
When this thing falls, it may fall to an world barren of humanity. Not because we blew ourselves up, or got hit by a comet, or any number of the zillions of ways we could be wiped out as a species, but merely because we don't need the world anymore.
Evolution, artificial or otherwise, will be the single largest factor in whether or not Keo can deliver our messages to future generations.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Not everthing begins and ends in the US, and not everything is written or spoken in English -- Yes, that's true, technology exists outside the Ameri-bubble!
Just cockroaches and rats.
"..don't you eat that yellow snow."
It's really sad a country has nothing better to do with their money than to send something into space and hope no one touches it until they data vaporizes off of it. :-)
That is if it isn't "swept" from space to make way for some space station.
This is one of those cases where digital media are the wrong answer to the question.
Consider these scenarios. 50,000 years from now, our descendants uncover a long-buried city. New York, let's say. They find many inscriptions carved into rock and marble and metal, and can recognize this as language and start to work on it. There's almost no abstraction -- visual symbols encoding meaning. A direct long-lasting representation of our words and thoughts. A difficult exercise, but one with clear and direct input data.
Up in space, space, however, another group of descendants finds an orbiting collection of CD media. What are they? There's no telling. Closer inspection reveals that the surfaces of the discs contain microscopic pits in ordered rows. Aha, the ancients have recorded something in binary on here. But the effort grinds to a halt, right there.
How do they even know what the pits represent? Is a pit a 0 and a flat space a 1? Or vice versa? Or is the disk encoded in that skip-bop format where a pit means flip-the-bit and a flat space means don't? Or vice versa? Or something altogether else? Does the bitstream start on the outside edge and read inward clockwise? Does it spiral from inside to outside edge, reading counter-clockwise? Where does it start? Where does it end?
And then, suppose they guess right and get past that part. Then they have have 0110101010010101010101001101101010101010101010... for days. What is it? Which bits of this are significant meaning, and which are meta meaning? Is there a format-specific header? How long is it and what does it mean? Are the data written into a filesystem, and if so, which parts are inodes or FAT tables or the like? How do they extract the actual significance from the housekeeping data?
And suppose again that they somehow guess correctly, or that it's all just written out as raw data, and the above questions are somehow moot. What format? ASCII? Unicode? Will the folks from the future know that we thought in terms of 8-bit bytes? Will they remember ASCII or UTF-8? Will there be endian issues? How will they know to try to read it as text, as opposed to JPG or MP3 or any of an arbitrarily huge number of other formats that may not have even been invented yet?
All of these layers of abstraction are taken care of for us by our digital toys, but people in the future will almost assuredly have no idea about the layout of the physical CDROM format and ASCII and ISO9660 and all of the layers and layers of stuff they'd have to weed through just to get to the actual LANGUAGE on the CD that we're wanting them to take the time to decode.
Somehow I'm still sold on the letters-carved-deep-into-rock encoding scheme as the best way to talk to the future.
--
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail script. Hell, that's been everywhere. Give 'em a good laugh.
- The still-passed-around FCC proposal on a modem tax.
Right?
"..don't you eat that yellow snow."
...by an international treaty. It's just another piece of junk for NORAD to track. There have already been close calls with the space shuttle. On one flight, a paint flek chipped the orbiter window.
What happens if this little wonder hits some other piece of space junk? Ever been hit by a CD fragment at 18000 mph?
If they don't put a stop to this crap, there won't just be little urns and messages and things orbiting up there--there will be bodies of whole astronauts, cosmonauts, and various other 'nauts floating around, because it is only a matter of time before one of these little missiles hits a manned craft.
Come on, people, get some sense. Lives are at stake.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
If I put in 6,001 characters will it cause the object to come crashing down to earth in a firey mass of twisted molten metal? Perhaps in Redmond, Washington? Or even on the Oracle towers? Seriously though, do people actually care? I mean, "News for Nerds", yup that qualfies. "Stuff that matters", hmmmm. 50K years from now, people are going to look back and think that we had nothing better to do than launch space debris. I guess it matters a little though, I'm taking to the time to post something.... --Chris
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
This is one of the coolest things I have ever seen anyone do! By 52001 I should be just about ready for retirement!
Abuse my rationalization of rhetoric as either metaphor or monotomy.
Write your message in COBOL.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
Hypothetically speaking, when the craft is recovered in 52001 by whatever intelligent race occupies the Earth at that time (yet another variable, you had better hope the evolution and extinction of species is on your side and an intelligent race is present, otherwise game over...), what is potential that they could ever decipher something as complicated as the English language. We would be far better served to send something a bit more universal such as a visual media or something based on mathematics. Programming code, pick your favorite flavor, would even be more desirable considering much of the underlying principles are rooted in mathematics and the use of variables.
Only under these extreme and diverse circumstances do I believe that such an undertaking would be of any benefit and do more than simply confuse the receivers of this package.
But hey, what do I know... J
It's MY-way or the HIGH-way!!! - my father
Okay, so I'm not trying to hurt your ego. You're very insightful comments have been pre-empted by the KEO people; they are using glass disc/masters that have been put through accelerators to simulate 50k years in space, and they're still readable. The craft has several layers of debris shielding as well titanium and tungstun and all that other neato stuff thanks to space programs the world over.
Oh, and this is an experiement in hope, trust, and optimism. They expect our space to stay clean and clear *because* they expect the US to want to continue sending satellites into space, and super powers who want to send space stations and spies into space, etc. Self interest, and all. If we pollute space to the point where KEO gets knocked out, so would just about anything else, like shuttles, rockets, stations, satellites, etc.
The nick is a joke! Really!
GPL Deconstructed
Read the KEO faq! They've already tested sample CDs in a particle accelerator, and they're still readable...
The nick is a joke! Really!
GPL Deconstructed
"Our ancient ancestors seemed to have worshipped some goddess known as
Natalie Portman. It seems they poured something called ``hot grits'' on
the idols as a libation."
Not like anything from our own ancient history could have been mistaken
like this, nooooooooooo.
To Who it Finds this:
Please forward to the human animal "Brighteyes" c/o Dr. Zaius.
Dear Mr. Heston,
I am writing this to warn you to watch out for those damn dirty apes.
Your Fan, Sonofgunns
P.S. Don't go spelunking with that busty silent girl.
I wonder how/why they'd do that, anyway? Track radio transmissions? Electronic activity?
KEO is supposedly totally passive, with no electrical activity. If they aim to target and destroy it, that'd be sending up *a lot* of money and effort at destroying, essentially, a rock.
The nick is a joke! Really!
GPL Deconstructed
That reads like the dots next to your senior photo in your Yearbook of Slashdot High School, Trollville, Iowa.
Scarce, scared, scarred, sacred... -Col. Bruce Hampton
I'd put the DeCSS source code.
I can't believe they're making this thing beat its wings. Surely, the time spent figuring that part out could have been better spent. Plus, won't that make the metals break down more quickly and effect the orbit and generally cause other problems?
Although, perhaps it will intrigue our target audience enough to make them take a look at it.
http://www.bullfrogfilms.com/catalog/223.html
I recommend this to everyone who is open minded. If you have the chance to get a book of Albert Jacquard, read it, it will literally open your eyes.
(Albert Jacquard is a french genetician, mathematician & philosopher who concluded (overly simplified, IANAP) that we are like the internet, a bunch of nodes making links to each other and when we die, the net still lives on, but our links simply disapear.)
Unfortunately, it will not fit the 6k limit.
I hope that english will be obsolete in 52001, and human beings will advance to being able to use C++ as a spoken language. Think about it.. not only would one be able to share ideas via spoken language, but one could share logic as well. --cr@ckwhore
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
BTW, where is OOG?
I haven't seen any posts by him and a good 3 or 4 months.
They should include a Rosetta Disk.