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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.
> 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.
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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
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?
Great. One run-on sentence, and you have a stroke.
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?
That will also be the year Windows finally works properly, with all those years of backwards compatibility . . .
:)
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!"
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 . . .
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?
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.
"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
I'd be more worried about Lunar Modules and stuff like that or capsules filled with monkeys (or monkey corpses). They'd be much bigger than a time capsule.
"Aw dammit, we have to about the mission. Damned monkeys!"
And our starships would most likely be contructed in space. But those vehicles that get you to our space station / space port might have a hard time. Might be like rush hour traffic or a futuristic version of "Frogger".
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
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?)
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.
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
I suggested this for the Source Code contest. It didn't win :-(
Gerv
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're right. Instead lets send up pyramids covered with stone engravings. They're out of date, but at least we know they've withstood 5,000 years worth of punishment on earth.
You say you want a revolution?
I hope by 52001 we'll be using some alternate source of propullsion, otherwise it'll be just sad.
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
Is here.
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sulli
sulli
RTFJ.
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
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Even if the satellite survives, how do I know my message will?
The CD-ROMs on which the messages will be stored underwent exhaustive testing in July 1998 at the National Grand Accelerator of Heavy Ions (GANIL). The CD-ROMs were exposed to the equivalent of 50,000 years' of cosmic radiation in GANIL's particle accelerator and passed with flying colors. Despite the heavy exposure, the disks remained intact and legible.
How will our distant descendants be able to read our messages?
It's obvious that today's state-of-the-art technology in data storage, the laser reader, will be obsolete and totally forgotten by then. At any rate, it would be impossible to include one in the cargo due to its prohibitive volume and innate fragility. We are therefore currently drafting a "user manual" using simple symbolic images to explain how to construct a CD player so as to be able to access the content of the disks. Like the Rosetta Stone, the information will be represented in such a manner so as to facilitate the task of decryption.
They're going to have to build one hell of a radiation shield to protect CDs for 50000 years.
(Don't blame me... Slashdot is screwing up my links!)
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
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
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!
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.
--
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
Slashdot post, 2000 AD:CD ROM, 52001 AD:
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
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.
Remember, this is going to me in a vacuum, so these CD-ROMs might survive a whole lot better than you think.
ufdraco