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Delivering an Earth-Shattering Discovery?
An anonymous reader asks: "Just for fun... suppose you've made an Earth-shattering discovery that, when revealed, will cause massive social upheaval. Maybe you've discovered a new energy source or weapon, or figured out how to factor large primes in
seconds, or learned how to time travel back in time and affect the present. Being a nice guy, you decide to warn the world now and give
everybody a few years to prepare before revealing the discovery. How can you absolutely encrypt or otherwise protect your discovery, but guarantee its revealing at a certain future date even if you and everybody you know is long gone? For example, could you bounce an electromagnetic signal describing the discovery off a celestial body several light-years away?"
Hell, I can already do that.
int factorLargePrime( int largePrime ) {
return largePrime;
}
--
#include <malloc.h>
free(your.mind);
Write it down using my handwriting, it'll take them centuries to decipher that...
Encode it with Rot13 and pray.
my religion lies somewhere between buddhism and super monkey ball - pamphlet?
On the other hand, if you are the guy in his own backyard or garage who has just made a startling discovery about nanotechnology or cold fusion....well, thats not going to happen so don't worry too much about it.
Just put it on a super slow medium... Like a Word file on NTFS...
When is your novel due for publishing?
Send it through an AOL mail gateway!
if it was time travel then you could just travel forward and reveal it then. IMHO it would be a bad idea to wait more than a week or two, odds are somebody else is fairly close to coming up with the same thing.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts."
why? What have you done now? Why are you asking such an interesting question whilst chosing to remain anonymous?
Feel that power? That's mah MOUSING FINGER
And change the present, then do whatever you want. If it doesn't work, you can travel back to before you did it, and re-do it until you get it right.
However, do not travel back to before you invented the time machine, as you may end up causing yourself to not invent it, and that would be disasterous.
someone about to die from a disease, freeze them and when they find a cure for the disease they will thaw 'em,heal 'em, and there's your secret
Write it on a Post-It note and tape it to the bottom of your keyboard, with your passwords!
Aw, fuck it. Let's go bowling. - The Big Lebowski
Encrypt your factoring method with a 4096-bit key. Then wait for them to break it.
...that if the signal comes back, it doesn't come back too late to do any good (are humans still around, and if not, could your breakthrough have helped humanity survive?)
...that your 'breakthrough' isn't independantly discovered between when you send the message and when it bounces back.
...that whatever you bounce the signal from doesn't have intelligent life on it that may possibly suffer from the same social upheaval that you are protecting this society from.
:)
Any others?
-Matt
Milhouse: We gotta spread this stuff around. Let's put it on the internet!
Bart: No! We have to reach people whose opinions actually matter! And I think I know how.
"All art is quite useless." -- Oscar Wilde
... they're still doing those encryption-breaking projects!
Wouldn't a dead man's switch work? I remember seeing an article on slashdot.
You could, for instance set up a stable server that could run for months, or even years if necessary without maintainence, and then perhaps you could
decrypt the information on the server and spread it throughout the internet (ex: post on slashdot).
Oh, and if you could go back in the future, no worries.
The future you will come back and warn everybody in advance.
Anyone complaining of the negative effects of my world-changing discovery will be sent to the reeducation camps.
that is a really stupid idea. do not, i repeat, do not give the information to an alien race first.
The Segway has already been revealed!
Didn't this happen already with the discovery of cloning?
The problem solved itself because once the ground-breaking discovery was made, the process of engineering it into a relevant technique that had any practical application took enough years for the discussion and social adjustment required to take place. Not that we're finished with that discussion, and not everyone likes it, but I think we've gotten over the 'future shock' on that one.
--LP
Being a nice guy, you decide to warn the world now and give everybody a few years to prepare before revealing the discovery.
This sounds suspiciously similar to "It".
Please, if you actually have something worthy of talking about just say what it is. People who come to me promising a revolution in the future but refuse to talk about what it actually is give me a bad Amway feeling.
Mmmm.. Donuts
If you wanted to "warn the world NOW" (emphasis added) without revealing the discovery until a few years later, would anyone take you seriously?
For example:
"I have discovered a source of energy that does not create light or heat, is infinitely renewable, and costs less per Joule than a stick of gum to produce. I can't tell you what it is for a few years, but I CAN tell you that it will throw everything into disarray (socially and economically)...you'd better start preparing."
The reaction of the world at large could be summed up in a single word: "Crackpot".
Nobody would take you seriously until you revealed the device (and thus "proved" your crackpot theory) -- then all hell would break loose as the energy mogul equivalent of the RIAA tried you keep people from sharing this cheap energy source with heavy political donations and an "energy bandit" media campaign.
...maybe secretly include it in an FBI memo. Noone reads those until it's too late anyway.
mmkay...who just found out that the earth is round
Uhmm, somebody posted a paper on testing primality in polynomial time on the 6th... and the world didn't end.
Okay man, the fact that you're asking such a question is really creeping me out dude. A.) What the hell do you know, and B.) How long can i look forward to life as i know it?
I'm extremely paranoid.
I really don't want to die.
Not really. I don't.
on the other hand, perhaps that's a bad idea...
Just put all of your findings in a U.S. citizenship application, then send it to the INS for processing. With what's going on at the INS right now, it'll take YEARS before that application ever sees the light of day again.
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
and then wait for it to evolve and develop human-like speech patterns.
For example, if what you discovered was time travel, simply send the damn machine, or better yet, millions of the machine into the future 2 years from now.
If you discover a new energy source, use that energy source to power a device that will reveal that energy source in X amount of time.
(I won't touch discovering a weapon. A weapon is not a discovery, it's an implementation.)
Meanwhile, the very act of warning the world, seriously increases the odds that someone else will duplicate your discovery long before your time is up. After all, the materials you used are all there, the knowledge is all there, what the heck makes you think you're so unique that you're the only person working on the problem or capable of coming up with an answer. Historicly, any discovery is usually a horse race, with multiple groups likely to arrive at the same answer in rapid succession.
No Zen is good zen
You made an implicit assumption that you should reveal this discovery. What about ethics? If your discovery truly will shatter society, should you reveal it and go down in history in infamy, or should you keep your mouth shut and avoid the history books altogether? As wonderful as it is to be famous (or infamous) for a revolutionary new idea, do you really want to be responsible for widespread havoc?
Someone else will eventually have the same idea. Maybe even next week -- see Newton and Leibniz. Perhaps other discoverers, too, will have the good sense to keep their mouths shut. But when eventually one blabs, you will at least have the satisfaction of knowing that you were not the one who destroyed society.
BTW: Asimov once wrote a story called The Dead Past that explores this theme.
Transmeta.
I have an earth-shattering discovery that I will reveal in ten seconds. Get ready.
10...9...8...7...6...5...4...3...2...1...
It's a slow news day on Slashdot.
Are you asking this question because it is a nice philosophical one or did you actually discover something? Chances are, it might take us decades to make use of it. Furthermore, what makes you think that, say, in the next couple of decades, no one else will make that discovery?
where's all that Karma?
but your logic is flawed..
for if you did discover time travel, and you did keep it a secret for a couple years, as soon as you reveal it some jackass will travel back in time and patent it before you even thought of it!
...and hide it as a bug.
Just tell me, I promise I won't tell anyone!
(Score:5, Not Funny)
Well, my suggestion would be to announce your creation anonymously. This way, there is no chance of the creation being traced back to you for the time being. Only problem is, will people believe you?
He must have invented something -really- good. Or just thinks he has.... remember awhile back, I think it was around January that ZeoSync made its infamous claim of compressing random data to one one-hundredth of the original size? Did Slashdot ever do a followup story on them (if so I'm sorry) but notice www.zeosync.com has been 404'ing to their ISP's default error page hehe.
In that case, unlike most slashdotters saying "say what you've invented already" I'd rather you not.
Of course, this is likely to be a moot point. In order to warn people, you've got be to able to convince them that your accomplishment is real. Unfortunately, history shows that once a desirable result is known to be possible, it doesn't take very long for other people to duplicate that result.
"Lord, grant that I may always be right, for Thou knowest that I am hard to turn" -- A Scots-Irish prayer
worst "ask slashdot" ever!
Encrypt your content with RC5-64, send it to distributed.net, sit back, and watch the cracking!
... "can anyone locate an ask slashdot question lamer than this one?"
I think the answer to this question is "no" but I eargerly await a counterexample.
Am I the only person who realized the "Segway Human Transport" spells out SHT? Who wants to ride a SHT?
... hmm ...
Combined with the idea it was called "It"
It seemed neat, but expensive.
FLR
A couple steps:
1) Factor the revelation into multiple questions and comments.
2) Either submit them to "Ask Slashdot" or get them included in something like the Bible or Quran.
It is now time to flip off your computer.
I think you're pre-supposing that humanity will be ready to receive what you have to tell them after you've warned them about it.
Even if you don't warn them about it, the assumption that humanity will always become more "responsible" (or whatever) over time is sketchy at best.
Electric_Boy banned: Banned by Metallica: See http://infringe.napster.com/metallica.html
You could submit it to slashdot. They would proceed to ignore the article in favor of questions about "discovering weapons", "factoring large primes", and other silliness. It would be likely that they would publish the article immediately after it was too late, such as discussing upcoming confrences after they start or the difference in LOTR DVDs after the first one had been released. (And a month after the differences had been announced).
No Zen is good zen
Why do you want to leave the world in suspense? How the heck are people going to "prepare" for something when you won't even tell them what it is. Your scenereo sounds something like this:
You make a news annoucement saying "I've discovered a terrible secret, but I won't tell you what it is for 20 years!"
Then 20 years later you finally announce your discovery to people who have forgotten about you.
The reason entire world has forgotten about you is because you sound just like another crackpot trumpeting hidden vauge doom.
Are people going to be "better prepared" in 20 years? Why? I'd say get the truth out in the open when you discover the problem and let society work it out. That or just never ever release your secret if you fear that humanity would not survive (hint: people are pretty resourceful, they're good at suriving).
If you just don't want to be around when people discover your secret, put it in your safe deposit box and forget about it. When you die your heirs will go through the box and be faced with the same dilemma you have. Note: this is the cowards way out.
I read the internet for the articles.
The question is pointless.
If I tell you that I have done something which will affect society in such a manner you won't believe it without proof.
If I prove it then someone else WILL discovery it simply because they know it is possible.
Look back over history and look at how many people, how many countries have a legitimate claim to various inventions. (By legitimate I mean, developed within 5 years of each other without reasonable belief they had access to the other invention... simply knowing it exists does NOT count.).
Err, ok, so you want to tell everyone to warn them FIRST, and then ensure the details are available in the near future? That's easy. Kill yourself and when you come back after being reincarnated you can divulge all the details you want. I'd recommend implimenting this plan right away so you're old enough when you want to make the BIG ANNOUNCEMENT.
Seriously, it's a good plan.
I seriously don't think there's much outside of a major war or the impending destruction of the planet that would really cause massive social upheaval. We lived through 9/11 and in reality, despite the destuction, the fear and the subsequent massive loss of privacy and civil rights, things continue to tick on much the same as always. Despite cries that everything has changed, in reality very little has changed. If we finally were visited by aliens, or if someone finally did catch bigfoot or the lochness monster it'd be news for a few days, and then we'd be back to our everyday concerns. Never underestimate the people's propensity for self-centeredness.
since there was actually some bloke who had gotten a patent on enscribing "information" or recording "data" on genes, clearly doing this invitro on your potential child would provide a secure and somewhat time delayed mechanism to store this. Perhaps even better would be direct manipulation to assure it appears in some expressed form, such as a bar code readable birth mark?
No, this is a joke...really.
Firstly, you need to rely on the human eliment. From experience you need a religious group of some kind, either that or some VERY determined people.
;-)
Allow them to know your secret, then explain the conditions for release, explain why they can't tell anyone until those conditions. Assuming they're all sensible people and see it for what it is (this could be hard, perhaps you need to produce them in order to ensure things happen correctly. Have children.) then your problem is solved. Your data is relatively secure, and you have allies.
Just a few more years to go for one such 'announcement' people.
I'm not sure this is the best or most foolproof way, but if you asked what *I* would do, I'll let you know what I'd probably end up doing:
I would not tell anyone about it, get a bunch of ISP accounts in varying jurisdictions through whatever pseudo-surreptitious mechanisms I could find (with cash, via acquaintances, etc), and set up cron jobs to email a bunch of journalists and columnists in 5 years, including less famous ones on both ends of the political spectrum who have nothing to lose by supressing the truth and everything to gain.
--Another Anonymous Coward, just wondering if the government is asking Slashdot, trying to figure out what methods they have to make sure they have compromises for...
Before you "warn" everyone, you need to include in your warning an example of a working exploit. Otherwise it is dismissed as just a "theoretical" vulnerability.
Example announcement:
Look, I've just discovered how to build a <time machine / weapon that destroys the sun / plastic decder ring that cracks any code>. Click here for detailed plans on how to build one in your own garage.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
To be on the safe side, I would recommend writing it down using MS Powerpoint and emailing it as an attachment to yourself through a MS Exchange server.
You can be assured that the document will vanish for the foreseeable future. Of course, there is a good change that it will never be found again...
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
have the package with the data/key/whatever develiver on a rainy day to you or someone else in the future. Now, the only question remains is how do we get our hands on a Delorian?
"But doc, how's this help me get back to 1985?"
C
-- Chris Martin, System Administrator
Have a politician print it in his/her campaign material.
No intelligent person can take that what's printed in there serious.
where's all that Karma?
Simple - file a patent on the idea. Then, in about 18 years time, dig it up, and not only was nobody aware of your idea for the first 15 or so years, but hopefully in the last 3 they have found out about it, (because you leaked it, hahahaha), and you can rip them off by charging a licensing fee of billions multiplied by foobar per nanosecond that they use it.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
It is nice to think that if you invent something then you will be the only one who knows about it.
But, as an example, Newton and Leibnitz: they both invented calculus independently, one slightly before the other, but the other published first.
threadeds blog
BTW Are your going to tell us your secret after receiving all this useful advice?
Yeah, it's not like some whacky patent clerk working in his spare time is going to rewrite 300 years of established physics. That shit never happens.
Unfortunately, any sort of space bounce will not work. The sheer amount of power needed to get a usable signal to bounce of a distant enough object, and then be usable on it's return, would be enough to allow any government monitoring station to pick up at its transmission.
I'm not sure about the bouncing off of some celestial body thing (?), but you can usually pay a lawyer to hang on to a letter or some such for a certain period of time, and then send it for you. If you did this with say 10 lawyers or so through out the country/globe, I think the chances of your discovery getting out would be pretty good, regardless of your future good health, etc.
:-)
Although I guess its funner to say, encase your discovery in a meteor, and then send it in to a decaying orbit, to crash land on the White House lawn in a year or something, but I think the more regular and mundane ways are probably better.
If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide. -Ghandi
it is a product of one and itself. What you mean is factor composites into primes. Either that or you know something I don't ;).
====
Crudely Drawn Games
if you post it as AC.
Start a secret society of people you can trust and instruct them to pass on the knowledge by word of mouth.
why are you assuming whoever decrypts your message will do the right thing with the information?
Surely linux must be possibly being defamed somewhere, that we could be reading that instead of this crap? Where's the RIAA/MPAA/Sony/Microsoft are evil angle?
I know what his secret is. He found a way to end SPAM. It involves Lasers, GPS, and Traceroute. He uses traceroute to find where the SPAM came from then uses a laser with GPS to destroy the whole city. He wants to warn people that if they live next to a SPAMmer then they will be in danger of being vaporized.
Thats what this whole thing is about.
The above is not worth reading.
Keep it for yourself, and screw everyone else. Mortgage your house to get a good IP laywer on retainer. Patent, trademark and copyright your invention/discovery six ways from Sunday, and for good measure encrypt it just so the DMCA covers you, too. Once you're safe from the blood-sucking corporations....
:-)
Discovered a new energy source? Use it to power your car and house. Don't say anything to anyone else. Put some dummy solar cells on your roof or something to hide what's really powering everything.
Discovered/invented a new weapon? Hop on the first flight to Redmond and leave it on a timer in Microsoft's parking lot. With the business end pointed at Bill's window, if that much precision is necessary.
Found a way to time travel? I'd mail myself a letter in 1995 telling me to not trust my friends who later went on to fuck my girlfriend in 1996. I'd also include a nice list of stocks to invest in (and when to sell them for maximum profit), and the names of a few people who have annoyed me since then, to possibly hunt down and kill them before we ever met in the past. Perhaps I'd even dispatch a nice, thick package to the White House with a few newspapers from September 12, 2001.
Or if I'm feeling extra generous, maybe I'll travel far back into the past and try to remove the concept of religion from mankind's history, and thus eliminate war and most hatred. Or maybe I'll just take a shortcut and only go back far enough to bust a cap in Muhammed.
Why does this remind me of that Norweign dead net admin that dies with his password and they had to call "TO ALL HACKERS OF THE WORLD" , isnt that a similar case????
The lunatic is in my head
write it in a legal document... they take years to decrypt =)
-- Coops
zadok.org.uk
The preparation issue is one thing and frankly, totally subjective as you haven't revealed it yet so you have no independent verification. This sounds like fantasizing.
Given that, one might question how to move a great innovation properly. Do you allow the military to grab it away or can you inform the public sufficiently that a countermeasure can be devised if it's misused? If it, as it exists initially will make the owner richer, but only the rich can afford it, how do you make it available to all? If it has potential to upset the economy, how does one prevent that whilst benefiting society?
Interesting to consider.
I eat paste.
There are no stupid questions only stupid people. But I must make an exception in this case. It is also a stupid question. Just have another beer and don't worry about it!
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
No matter what you do, or what you say there are always people who are too ignorant and lacking in the ability to adapt that they will fight it. Darwin calls these the exstinct species, or the soon to be.
Look at history, there is always a major upheave about ever generation as the new age of people decide that the world the parents wanted was better for their parents, but doesn't work for the now.
People live and people die, the only this that remaind constant is change. Just tell people, like pulling off a bandaid it just has to be done and will hurt some no matter what.
"And your both 6 months pregnant by Billy Ray Sirus" "Then why is mom showing and i'm not?" - Married With Children
Leak your information to society's lowest common denominator. Go to middle-of-nowhere-town in Arizona and enlighten some toothless trailer park people about it. Spread the news around the various crankpot ogranizations out there. Nobody credible will believe them or you, but the idea will probably be serialized into bad sci-fi TV shows. Eventually, over half of the population will believe in the idea even though the reputible scientific comunity will refute it. At that point, you'll have given the government long enough for its secret organizations to have established the correct safety nets to handle the problem.
Someone you trust is one of us.
first of all -- nice question.
One thing I want to say is that there are theory abound that important discoveries are always discoverable within a relatively short timeframe of eachother. IIRC the phenomenon is called the critical mass of knowledge or somesuch.
It basically says that when the society (body of knowledge) reaches a certain point -- *IF* one body does not discover this thing, another surely will within a short time. This example is beautifully illustrated with Bell and his telephone -- the fact that two inventors, almost simultaneously thought up the idea.
Some sociologists argue that this is true for even important discoveries -- i.e. if Eienstein really did become a clockmaker, somebody else would probabbly still thought up the theory of relativity anyway. now - admittantly, there is no way to prove this for obvious reasons. However there are compelling reasons to believe this is a phenomenon that does occur in our world (Bell's phone is not the only one. I can't come up with any other solid examples right now -- cuz its Sat morning -- but if you look through the history of science, this actually happens quite a bit).
It is possible that it is due to the speed at which science is advancing today. science advance fast = new discovery are made in short time between eachother. and since often these things need to be found consecutively (tech-tree style), it almost guarantees the *necessity* of a certain technology's discovery at a certain time.
A ancedotal evidence that would prove interesting, just for fun -- is that China had paper money (paper in general!) / printing / fireworks long before europe; somewhat refuting this theory but also may indicate that it does not work so well for societies that are completely different and far apart with no communication. but it is very possible that paper making, say, arrived in two ancient china-man/woman's head within a couple years of eachother.
how does this apply to the ask-slashdot in question? well if it is not obvious by now -- it means that you might as well just release it now before Dr. Evil's scientists find out about it. (or, use it to take over the world yourself. whatever)
My life in the land of the rising sun.
What makes you think that revealing the information at a later date won't cause social choas? How would you know, you would be long dead. There's no guarentee that societly later on will be able to cope with the discovery.
Also note that by releasing the information at a later date, you risk someone else making the same discovery and releasing their findings. If you can do it, you can be sure someone else can do it too, it's only a matter of time
IMHO, you are a coward & too irresponsible to handle such information if you choose to release your discovery at a later date because you do not want be held responsible for the social upheval. At least while you are alive you have some control over the information, but waiting until your dead only means that you've passed the responsiblity to someone else.
I would do this:
Build a small-scale demonstration model so that you can distinguish yourself from crackpots.
Hire a science fiction writer, hopefully one that appears to have a sense of ethics (for example, Spider Robinson). Tell them up front that you have this idea that will change the world, and that you know you appear to be a crackpot, but you want their advice and you are willing to pay a consulting rate by the hour.
Now get together with your consultant and brainstorm what to do.
if the discovery really is that incredible, chances are the discoverer will want to announce immediately after (s)he believes they've proven the theory. telling everyone will simply set off years of disbelief, debunking attempts, etc.
if the idea is found to be a sound one, it would probably take years to create a useful method of implementing it anyway.
It's only a model.
If you had discovered something so earth shattering that it couldn't be released for a good few years your only dependable option would be to create a benign household utility or similar using this knowledge and have it release the information to the owner at the specified date.
Thus proving that your discovery is valid and ensuring that the information is made available at the time you want it to be delivered.
+ you'd be making yourself a few beer tokens for yourself in the process.
That or asking your wife to post this letter ASAP.
This discovery has changed my life forever.
etc. I would also set up a strangely compelling web site and finagle an interview from slashdot, contributing to my already sizable following. By the time the Attorney Generals came around to investigate me, I would unleash my unstoppable superweapon on the world (because that's what it would be, right?), collect my followers & live peacefully ever after in the new utopia, with myself as benevolent king and my clone army ready to succeed me.I make sure to tell all my friends because w/this information, the sky is the limit!
If people only knew what I knew, they would run - not walk - to the phone & order now, while there's still time.
Now only my dreams can limit me!
Another good scenario would be finding a linear solution for an NP problem like the Travelling Salesman Problem.
If it really is an "earth-shattering" discovery (time travel, proof of a god, free energy, etc) then there will invariably be people who will want to keep this idea from coming to light, and it will still have the same societal effects 5 years from now. If it is a completely unthought of idea before now, that at least the possibility should be made public. Obviously I can't think of any situation that would not have been thought of before, but if the discovery maker were to write a book about the possibility of such an event, then at least some discussions would ensue, and people could somewhat prepare. The means of protecting the discovery would also depend on the discovery itself, although most likely any sort of discovery would involve diagrams or instructions, so that multiple copies could be made. First some sort of failsafe would have to be created in the event that you die. A copy could be mailed to a lawyer with instructions to read upon your death. It would be up to the discoverer to monitor the discussions concerning the idea, and perhaps come to a new conclusion concerning the discovery. If it becomes apparent that the human race will be unable or even unwilling to accept such a discovery, and such an introduction could cause massive societal disruption, then, unless the discovery is truly that important, it may be the responsibility of the discoverer to distroy the evidence and hope that it can be discovered again when the human race is ready.
There are many problems with bouncing it off of a celestial body. First of all you're going to lose information without a doubt at the point of bouncing. Second there's no guarantee that your going to get back enough of the signal to understand it when and if it finally does comes back. Also, if your worried about people finding out too early this is a bad idea since space travel will eventually become more common and people who want to find out your secret before everyone else could just fly out and intercept it. Unfortunately, I can't think of a better idea. Perhaps you could enclose your message in a time capsule and toss it into the ocean. I doubt current technology is sophisticated enough to find an object say the size of a baseball in the Atlantic. If that is too easy then you could toss a couple dummy capsules in there too to make the search last longer. If it's too hard you could put a timer in the capsule and have it emit weak radio singals once you think the world is ready for your discovery. Or you could include chemicals or materials that would respond well to sonar if it's still too easy. As with bouncing light into space there's still the problem of controlling who gets the message. In either case it won't be the world as a whole. I suppose the light-bouncing idea is more likely too be implemented by more people (scientists and governments) and these people are sometimes trustworthy. Maybe it would be best to split up the message. Sure, that would make it more difficult to predict when it will be decoded but you'd have a better chance of it being decoded by lots of people instead of just one person. In conclusion, if you have made an earth shattering discovery please don't hide it. Just tell us, we're big kids now, and we'll try not to wet our pants.
Nah, too risky to put up the revolutionary message into the submission cue. My ancestors were sent here from what you call Alpha Centari. For 10,000 years, we have awaited the birth of this thing called "Slashdot". With great relief we were finally able to transmit the message of the ages to mankind. And what a sense of humor they have sending us the reply of "message Rejected".What a rich sense of humor these humans have. We will be returning shortly to our home system secure in the knowledge that mankind will be able to protect itself during the thousand year war with the Prometheus sector. Farewall friends. "Message Rejected!" Hahaha, good one!
Please.
an Earth-Shattering Discovery
Look, it's the Vogons, isn't it?
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
2) Publish something in a big newspaper (NYTimes, Post, or something) that gives whatever warning you feel is necessary and an MD5 sum of your file. That way, if someone else rudely hits upon your discovery in the meantime, you can produce your PDF or whatever, show that the MD5 is right, and rightfully claim your glory.
"The best argument against democracy is a five minute chat with the average voter."
--Winston Churchill
If you password protect it on an NT 4.0 server running IIS and don't publish what the server is, well, give it a few months and someone will discover it.
To extend the length of time, put it on a more obscure network. Maybe put it on IPv6 with no IPv4 address...
At any rate, in a few days of discovery, script kiddies around the world will be working hard to show their talents on your machine. A few weeks later a PDF version will show up on alt.binaries.e-books.
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. - G.B. Shaw
Put it on a floppy disk, it'll be safe there.
But I don't feel the world is ready for it. Rest assured, I've arranged for the discovery to be revealed in due time.....
--rg
(Note: I ramble for a while, but only answer the question fully in the last paragraph) Believe it or not, I've been grinding my brain over this issue many times. For example, let's say you had an ability to put an invisible camera at any arbitrarily chosen point in space and watch what is happening. Not only that, but you could then choose to arbitrarily switch the contents of some space with the contents of another. You could instantly kill murderers and evil-doers world wide. But then, the question is, who should have control over this technology? Should you be the one to own it. Be the benevolent dictator who believes that you somehow will stick to some absolute pure moral ground that wouldn't corrupt your ways? I'm always tempted to think that way, but them I'm reminded by all these examples, mostly in literature, where some single person with ungodly power becomes corrupted automatically. Is this true? I mean, you could pull a Superman and have your little ice palace and help the world in secret. The only other option, then, is to just give it to the public and open up the technology. I think the best options then are only two: horde it completely to yourself or give it up to the world. Even if you horde it and you're being selfish, at least you're not letting it fall into the hands of groups or what not who could do crazy things with it. I think the inventor is one you have the least to worry about. The one with the brains to make the invention and to know exactly what it's about and what it's for, i feel is less likely to mis-use it. Now, if you want to release something with a 2-3 year time-delay, maybe release only a partial solution to the problem and base it on findings that you expect won't be discovered until 2-3 years from now. For example, a while back, you might have figured that sometime, within the next 10-15 years somebody would have figured out how to determine primality in p-time, and then when they did, your solution would be complete. I'm sure there are other theorems that were discovered today that have likely follow-up theorems that will be discovered in two years. I hope this is not another "IT" machine. Sheesh. If it is, just release the damn thing.
Philosophistry
> For example, could you bounce an electromagnetic
> signal describing the discovery off a celestial
> body several light-years away?
Based on the example presented, I think we can guess that the secret doesn't have anything to do with long distance signal transmissions!
Ron Rivest (The "R" in RSA) wrote a paper on time locked crypto, which sounds like what you want. But really, what are the chances you have an earth shattering discovery to reveal if you can't even use Google?
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
will be revealed in 100 years, so be ready.
Let's say that you come up with the first true religion, an attitude so perfect towards the Powers that they grace your every gaze and gesture with convenient miracles. Well, first off, tell folks in your home town - none of them will believe you except for maybe your mom. Then go find some hooker to convert to your truth - she or he will probably be grateful enough for the attention to go along, but hardly in a position to convert the world. Okay, then go out and find about 12 guys for MLM. Generate some pyrotechnics by getting the Powers to help in some evictions of Lesser Powers from their human fan clubs. Throw some wine and bread parties. Perform stupid animal tricks with a jackass. Progress perhaps, but still not much danger of your word really getting out. Then take it to the point of self-righteous paranoia, accuse your closest aids of being ready to betray you, show the Powers that you really aren't cool enough to present the true religion after all, and see how they then justify all your paranoia by setting you up to be a human sacrifice in a very public way. The News at Six picks it up. Shazamm, your word gets out!
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
the large prime number and one! Simple, isn't it? :)
"I'll have a witty
What if you lose it, or die, or gets destroyed before released, and it never gets revealed? What if it was the cure for cancer, aids, or the next big disease, or it could be used to destroy the next big asteroid coming to earth (or a black hole, worst cases should not be discarded :).
:) to several governments agencies or labs or whatever that are distributed to leave them to release it when is safe, and release yourself it if you get bored of waiting :) That could be better than destroying it and left the next bad guy to discover it again and use it against us.
Of course, maybe we could not be ready to assimilate it (like in a tale when aliens give someone a device that turns metals to a "plastic" state and back, and destroyed civilization), but keeping it entirelly secret "at least for a time" could be the easiest way to not release it at all
Other approach you could use is the software vulnerabilities approach. You inform that discovery (anonymously if you want to stay alive, as many books teach
I've discovered a way to create a "tractor beam" and grab ahold of a large astroroid and pull intot he earth. Form there I will crash it into the north pole to raise all the oceans. Muhhaa, Muhhaa. Muhhaaa. Muhaa. ..Muh... Uhooo.
-Dr. Evil
The last line in the Movie "The Matrix"
2) Save the document in several "safe" places.
3) Take the SHA-1 hash of the document and publish it in the classified or personals section of a large newspaper.
4) Warn the world of your discovery.
5) When it comes time to prove your discovery, show that the document hashes to the value published in the newspaper.
Of course, if you're long gone, someone will have to run across your document by accident, in which case you can have a section of your document explaining something like "The hash of this document will be published in the August 15, 2002 issue of USA Today."
I knew my cryptography class would come in handy.
...just my 2 gil.
Besides, despite what the Amway and "Ginger" people think, theres no social upheaval from either of these things...
No sig for the moment.
Build a gigantic secret base under an island somewhere. Equip with bad 70's decor, absurd super-weapons, henchmen, girls in swimsuits that inexplicably produce large caliber handguns when required, speed boats, hilicopters, and so forth. Put security cameras everywhere, and pay a midget or a guy with claws or something to monitor them. Obtain an absurd exotic pet, like a singing tapir or a farting oscilot. Train said pet to run errands about the island. Develop some mildly disturbing hobby, interest or passtime, such as bobbing for bat guano or hunting opera singers with a crossbow. The secret plans themselves, of course, should be encoded somehow in a fantastically ugly peice of fo-futurostic art. Where else?
In spite of the suggestions and all the tests that I have made, I have not cavato a spider from the hole.
I actually thought about this, for a few minutes, while reading about quantum computation.
What if somebody discovers how to implement the Shor's quantum factoring algorithm, say, in their microwave oven, or with a cheap laser. Or not QC, just some teenager figures out how to factor numbers. Or there's a huge backdoor in Microsoft XYZ and 90% of the world's computers can be accessed at the push of a button (I'm talking even easier than you can hack windows now :-).
Well, as the poster says, maybe he'd just announce his discovery (maybe through a trusted Bruce Schneier type person in the case of crypto), and give everybody time to plan.
But would that be a good idea? Cracking crypto would be a pretty big deal. Like, foreign governments would assassinate you in two seconds to get that information. YOUR OWN government would probably not think twice about calling you a terrorist and shipping you to Cuba for "interrogation". And/or they'd discredit you and make you look like a fool to keep the information from coming out.
You'd probably be hunted for this information. It would be a huge discovery that would allow whoever had to gain quite a bit of power.
So my conclusion was, if you ever discover something like this, forget it. Destroy the machine, erase the notes. Let humanity find it on its own, go back to your day job.
Maybe you could come up with some way to prove you thought of it first, once someone else thinks of it, so you can take credit, but I sure wouldn't want to announce it up front.
In fact, it's possible something like this has already happened. Who knows?
Don't you know that people with such intentions ALWAYS get killed by some government agency and then people close to them and their loved ones get hunted down.
Fiction writers have used the device of the secret society to accomplish this goal. Round up a few easily influenced people, feed them the "sacred ritual" store the information in the Altar Of The Inner Circle, and wait for them to do as they have been told.
The social engineering effect should be much greater security than any other "clever" means. To keep your cult followers in line, you can even spread nasty rumors about them and set up satire in the mainstream media. Look at the "Stonecutters" episode of The Simpsons for an example of how to do this. Just because it's a big joke that the Iluminati are running the world in secret does not mean that they (or another simliar group) aren't doing just that.
On the other hand, there is no way I can think of to guarantee that your "discovery" won't be relased early, if ever. Copernicus did something of a similar fashion, but he had to rely on a friend to keep his letter safe until he was ready to release his opinion that the earth was not the Center of the Universe.
Also, it seems like the question is looking for a type of limited immortality. "How can my dead hand shape the future?"
How about putting your data into a program. The program then has code in it which will display the data in n years. Data (or a key to decrypt data) is stored in a format which is indistinguishable from the binary code of the program. Someone could simply change the date on their machine to fool the program, but you could, say, have the program detect the processor speed, and run filler code (i.e.
while oneInt (9999999 x 10 ^9999)
{
oneInt ++
}
). By the time the filler code is done, it's two years later. Just make sure that your system can handle bignums!
Give it to the gov to debate and regulate. It will take them at least two years to finish.
Table-ized A.I.
First, if you were to discover something that important, the govt would have wind of your discovery before you go to reveal it.
Say you invented a new power source, that would put all the electricity companies out of business, and runs off methane. Yes, it would provide great benefits to the average consumer but do you think the energy companies wouldnt do their damnest to keep from going out of business? Wouldnt that including paying off the manufacturers of your product to keep them from producing it? What about arbitrarily raising electricty rates for businesses who produce it? Or cutting off their power supply completely? Dont underestimate the ability of those in control to completely freak out when their world comes crashing down (Hillary Rosen asking for the ability to hack P2P users).
If you came out with an engine that could have thte power of a V8 and the gas milage of a insight, and almost zero maintenence (no oil changes, belts, spark plugs, etc). Do you think the auto industry would be receptive to this? Even worse, do you think the oil industry, with all their power over the white house, would stand for such an invention that would sharply reduce their revenue stream? Hell no, because car dealerships make a good deal of money off the service of vehicles in addition to selling vehicles. You take away a revenue stream, they're going to make less. And you dont want the people selling your stuff to be pissed at you, because they wont do that good of a job. What? start up your own automaker? Oh yea, I've got the money for that in my back pocket, lemme find it....
Look at your computer, its a digital replicator. You can have information, and make thousands of copies of it for "free" (no material expenses, since you already own the computer itself). The computers and the internet poses a threat in the same way the two inventions above pose a threat. Look at the way the internet has been accepting by those in power (control control control, status quo all the way). What makes you think any equally revolutionary invention will be treated differently.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Didn't Microsoft make the similar claims/predictions about their hailstorm-passport technology four years ago? They've done an excellent job of keeping the true purpose and identity of them so secret, including the use of frequent name changes, that even their PR department is spouting two completely different descriptions of .NET!
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Let's see, we need something happening over the scale of years that humans find incredibly difficult to alter.
:)
Plate tectonics? Bury something under a non-quake-safe building in San Francisco and wait for the rescue teams to say "hey, what's the big lead box doing in these foundations"?
Astrological stuff has already been covered - shoot a probe off on a solar orbit and calculate it to return in X years.
Radioactive decay? Cover your plans in something immensely radioactive but with a short halflife?
Plain mathematics? Encrypt it with half a dozen RC5 keys and wangle it into the RC5 tool, preferably without the knowledge of the general public to avoid a huge uptake in distributed.net projects. Encrypting it with half a dozen different keys would reduce the possibility of it being one of the earlier keys tried.
how about implanting it in a patient with a terminal illness? When they die the autopsy reveals a minidisc under their ribcage...
Aren't there plants, etc. with a hugely long gestation period? There's that smelly flower that only flowers every 50 years or whatever. Stuffing it in the petals of that should do the trick.
Or just buy an extremely fierce guard dog. The steady stream of gold-diggers should keep him well fed right up until he dies
Marvin the Anonymous Android
algorithm = blowfish; hard to optimize in hardware, nothing better than brute force known
b = number of key bits for which average brute-force time is "short" (12-168 hours), assuming a large distributed effort
t = average brute-force time for b bits
T = delay until message should be revealed
N = T / t
choose b, t, N so that 50 <= N <= 200
smaller N means smaller final message
larger N means less variation of delay
inner_msg = cleartext
for i = 1 to N publish final outer_msg, scheme, parameters, cracking program
Even if most people don't take it seriously, a few will. Of course then it'll take much longer. For T over a few years, factor in Moore's law.
Just put it to common use in an episode or two of Star Trek, and then release bits and pieces of it to the world a little at a time as if slowly unlocking the key to it's mystery.
Actually there a thing I came up with that might solve it.
Let's say you want the secret to be revealed in 10 years.
Pick an asteroid and calculate its orbit. Encrypt your secret using the results of this simulation (that is use a simulated picture of what a certain portion of the sky would look like on that date). Aim a telescope at the point where asteroid will be at in 10 years. The key to the decryption would be a photo with asteroid in a certain location in the field of view.
Also, you would have to base the decryption on certain features of the asteroid (frequencies/spectral data) so u dont mix it up with other asteroids.
Problems may also happen if you miscalculate n-body. Also, note that you can use stars as well. stars have certain angular speeds etc that can be predicted, and also there are effects due to earth's precession.
Of course the solution doesnt have to be restricted to astronomy, but astronomy is the only thing that sorta guarantees people wont go and mess with your trigger event.
If you learn some way to factor primes beyond 1 and the prime, you've shattered number theory, but not civilization.
If it's going to "shatter the earth", is the preparation evacuating the planet? If that's its only application, why use it? Can it be used against other planets? If so, and you simply MUST test it, why not Mercury, or better yet, a potentially-threatening asteroid? I can personally see no need to EVER shatter the earth.
On the other hand, if it's not actually directly destructive, just world-CHANGING, we might as well get on with it. Trying to guess when it's ok to reveal it is futile, unless it's time travel, in which case, you can use the problem as the solution.
If it has no positive application, get ahold of somebody in power in a limited government, who is in favor of limited government (I'm specifically thinking of G. W. Bush, here), secretly develop methods in place to detect research in that direction and prevent progress. You'd end up with a secret orginization like the conspiracy theories postulate about Roswell and such, but the fact is, there are people who would want to create and use such a thing, and there's been only one country ever who had an overwhelming advantage that didn't take advantage of it. Yes, we used nukes on Japan, but we couldn't leave it a stalemate, and to take the island conventionally would have killed millions of civilians, instead of a few thousand, and more importantly, thousands of our soldiers.
Afterwards many in our military wanted to keep rolling, and take out the Soviet Union before they could catch up. We didn't. Imagine if it had been Stalin with the bomb. Socialism would have finally been allowed to fail worldwide.
I didn't want to get so far off the topic, but I needed to point out that there actually are some in power who can be trusted.
If you do it today, tomorrow nobody will believe you. If your idea really is that earth-shaking, three years from now you'll be labeled a rabble-rouser, ten years from now you'll be labeled a revolutionary, and a hundred years from now you'll be labeled a genius or a prophet. Maybe both.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Some discoveries are best kept to yourself, especially when you know the world cant handle it.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
I hate to sound like an annoying Green Peace type, but consider:
Our world might already be affected by us to the point we might be seeing an ice age soon (another one out of hudreds throughout history). What about our atmosphere? It's getting worse every day, not better. Some scientists say that even if we quit polluting now, it might already be too late? Can we ignore the possibility?
If you have an invention that might help save the world, then maybe you shouldn't wait several years. Weapons are a problem with many inventions, but have always become regulated. There's no real solution to that problem. If you're afraid of ruining the economy, oh well. Unlimited energy would ruin it in the end no matter what. Would people put up with dictator practices like charging high prices for a free energy source? Prices would have to be low, which would ruin our economy just as badly.
I guess the world will just have to adapt, ain't life a b*tch?
If it's still earth-shattering after some primo weed, try some receptive anal sex. After a while you'll discover it's nothing compared to getting ass-rammed while half a key high.
WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAHHHH!!
BUTT-RAMMIN' REVELATIONS, MUTHAFUCKAS!!!
Sounds like someone's writing a science fiction novel and is looking for a plausible plot device.
Beta sux! Join the Slashcott! http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4760465&cid=46173047
Just announce and prove your discovery without telling how you did it. Then if it's only a matter of time because other people duplicate your work - even Fermat's last theorem was eventually proven. If you really think it can not be duplicated - say an alien shuttle crashed in your backyard - leave some hints for others to follow. Or encrypt it in a way that currently will take 1M years to break so that there is a second way it can be discovered - either by duplicating your work or by building a radically faster computer.
well there's one simple way of doing this, and i'm sure that most slashdotters have seen it already.anyways here goes and all appologies to robert zemeckis and micheal j fox.
get someone who is not attached to you really, such as a friend or cousin or something like that get an agent, being a courrier, lawyer, bank or any other group that will be around for a while, like the masons or shriners, to hold on to the item or discovery until such time as it can be released.
the bank and lawyer and courier won't be able to open it legally until they are allowed to or deliver it to said persons. having another person give the discovery would take suspicion off of you.
so there's the solution and i'm sure eveyone here has seen a variation of this.
If you discover time travel for example why tell the world? They'd only use it to destroy themselves with.
Theres no point in releasing earth shattering discoveries, the world isnt even ready for computers and nuclear technology.
Everything we invent, they use to destroy the world.
Why invent anything? Every invention brings us one step closer to self destruction.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
The "anonymous reader" went and broke the final seal on mighty Cthulhu's undersea prison, and is now stressing out over how to break the news to the world.
On one hand, he could tell us now so we can slowly go insane over the course of the next 10 years, watching that unfathomable horror get out of bed, brush his teeth, read the paper, etc.
On the other hand, he could just wait and let us find out the hard way as Cthulhu emerges in 10 years. We'll instantly go insane, frozen in terror as that ageless beast proceeds to devour us all.
Surely you can see the bind he's in. Please, give him a little respect and take the topic seriously -- none of this "+1 Funny" business.
What prevents someone else coming up with the same earth shattering idea and publishing it before your discovery arrives from the stars? And if do bounce a signal off a star light years away, what is to say if anyone would be listening to that frequency in the future? Maybe by then we have lost the need of ears and are all part of the collective mind..
Maybe you could give it to the pope and say it was given to you, "by God" and it should be published in the year X.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it..
Thats the best solution.
Do you really believe your government will use this to help you?
Do you want to see time warfare? Do you want the government to control the past and future?
Dont release devices which humanity is not responsible enough to handle. We can barely handle nuclear power and computers how the hell are we supposed to handle time travel?
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
you could deposit only a part of the information and other parts somewhere else, with detailed instructions where to send them when they are to be revealed. of course, you would need backup copies in case one gets lost.
--
making up good sigs is a hard thing to do.
Hi, remember paper? Remember that it can be stored for very long periods of time without much degredation. And remember that there is something called a safe deposit box at banks? You lock up the documentation for your discovery, then when it is "time" to release it, open it up again. Problem solved. Worst case scenario, you are not around anymore, just bury the key into this wacky invention called a "time capsule".
today is spelling optional day.
All they have to do now is say "lets take earth" Then use our DNA to come to earth in human form and slowly take over from within witohut us ever knowing.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
There. I've announced it.
I'll come out swinging in two year's time.
Put it on an FTP server in the goatse.cx domain. No one's gonna look at that thing for years to come.
Is it me or is Ask Slashdot becoming a more and more fantasy focused?
Any discovery which you dont believe humanity can handle, dont reveal it. Keep it to yourself, or store it on a secure format and hide it in a save under the ground somewhere.
I'm sure the people who discovered nuclear technology are sorry now, considering how it was used.
Look every good technology gets in the hands of bad people, and its used for bad reasons, even computers.
Why release technology thats too advanced for the worst of our species to handle? If bin laden could use it to destroy the world, you dont release it.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Lock the plans in a swiss vault - that'll protect the thing for long enough. Then, if one govt finds out about it, tell all the others and the s#$t-storm will protect it for a few more years.
Just handle it the same way Starbucks did. Issue a short press release.
Starbucks has completed the coffee-distribution and location establishment phase of its operation, and is now ready to move into Phase Two. We have enjoyed furnishing you with coffee-related beverages and are excited about the important role you play in our future plans. Please pardon the inconvenience while we fortify the second wave of our corporate strategy.
I hope this doesn't go over the length limit, because the truly interesting bits are at the end. :-)
I'd like to clarify the question a bit. Who would we be protecting the data from? Presumably, it would be governments, criminal organizations, large corporations. Groups that have tremendous means at their disposal. In other words, you would need to be protecting your own person just as much as (if not more than) your secret.
If you have the means to protect yourself for the requisite amount of time (let's call it the "quiet period"), then you'd be able to use those same means to protect your secret.
So, let's assume that you're not entirely convinced of your ability to protect your own person, but you're willing to endure any amount of torture, or even death, to protect your data before the quiet period is up. Let's also assume that, nevertheless, you're filthy rich and can do anything that is possible with currently available technology.
The question is one of balancing between guaranteeing the protection of the secret during the quiet period, and guaranteeing the disclosure of the secret afterwards. This is made difficult because of your intention, at the beginning of the quiet period, to announce to the world that you have this secret. Whatever security you might have had from obscurity would be utterly lost. So...
Standard encryption is not much of a solution, because once you've announced the existence of your secret, you'd have to protect your encryption key just the same way you'd need to protect the secret itself. You're not gaining anything in terms of the guarantee of protection. On the other hand, if you keep the key in your head, it would die with you when you're tortured to death, and you'd lose your guarantee of disclosure.
Bouncing your secret in a data signal off a distant celestial body is not bad, but I suspect that there would be too much of a possibility of signal loss, compromising the guarantee of disclosure. You could back it up by bouncing multiple signals off several celestial bodies, and this might be as good a solution as I can think of.
My best proposal however, would be a variation on the celestial body proposal: pack the information into a capsule, and launch it into a trajectory that will bring it back to the earth after the quiet period is over. A back-up capsule with a different trajectory could better guarantee disclosure. I have no idea how much these projects would cost, but I suspect the capsule plan would cost less than the celestial body plan.
Really, the best form of protection is probably one in which it's not in people's interests to try to breach it in the first place. Some contraption in which any tampering guarantees destruction of the data will probably work best. Possibly something combining quantum encryption with radioactive decay as a timer...? I'm not well-versed enough to go beyond idle speculation here.
In this case, you'd have to play your political cards right, because somebody might decide that if they can't get their hands on it, then nobody should be allowed to.
In the end, however, your biggest challenge might be to get everyone to take you seriously when you announce that you have the plans for a breakthrough technology that will change the world in five years.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned for SEGA. ..."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
>Who wants to ride a SHT?
There is no shortage of people who pay big money to drive a truck called TRD. Seems to be quite the status symbol.
What the hell are you doing posting this here? Leave it up to the advice your friends and family have given you. No intelligent response is going to come of this.
I like how all the comments on this thread assume the author actually -has- a discovery like that and isn't just trying to let us in on an interesting daydream problem. =) My own two cents on the matter: Humanity is not good at preparing things. Just release it, anonymously if you're worried about repercussions, and watch the fur fly!
Screw humanity, did you patent your discovery yet!?
This is stating the obvious, but I haven't seen any comments modded above 1 that point this out.
You can't factor a prime number, by definition.
You can factor numbers which are the sum of two large primes, though.
Apparently Gates made the same mistake in his 'Business at the Speed of Light' book. So don't feel too bad.
Write it down and put it in the glovebox of a Saab. Those european cars are so incredibly safe.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
If someone discovers how to deliver an Earth-shattering discovery, how will they deliver the discovery of delivering an Earth-shattering discovery? mmmm!?
void deliverDiscovery(Discovery discovery)
{
deliverDiscovery(discovery);
}
have it written on the roof of your mouth or even on your chest with a tatoo. Anywhere nobody will see it until they perform an autopsy
Since this is just for fun, let's do some calculations. It's been a while for me, so forgive me if my math goes astray.
Let's suppose there were a convenient target, MirrorWorld, roughly 1 light-year away. We send our message by pulsing a high-powered laser toward the spot where MirrorWorld will be one year from now.
Ideally laser beams are tightly collimated, but even the best ones spread a bit. Let's suppose that the beam we use starts out about a millimeter wide, with a spread of 1 nanometer (10E-9 meters) for every meter of travel.
Now a beam of light travels about 9.5E15 meters/year, so by the time our beam hits MirrorWorld, it will be 9.5E6 meters (plus one millimeter) wide. That's not so bad - only about 75% the width of the planet earth.
Now, of course all our calculations were perfect, our execution flawless, and nothing unexpected happened to distort the curvature of space, so our beam will hit MirrorWorld dead center. Also, MirrorWorld is, a perfectly flat, perfectly reflecting surface, perfectly oriented to reflect all of the incident energy of our laser back to the position where the earth will be two years after we fired the beam without any loss and without increasing the rate of spread.
Of course, the beam continues to spread at it's original rate. After 2 years total travel, the energy in the orignal pulses would be spread across a beam about 1.9E+7 meters across. That works out to about 1.1E15 square meters of surface area by the time the beam hits the lens/antenna that we placed just outside the atmosphere (to avoid losses). If the lens is a perfect collector of energy, 1 square meter in size, we will receive 8.8E-16 joules for every joule transmitted in the original pulses.
Now, a table found here suggests that a ton of Uranium-235, used as fuel, contains about 7.4E16 joules. So if you burned a ton of U-235 per pulse, and your reactor and laser were 100% efficent, you could received 65.12 joules per pulse per square meter of receiving lens/antenna.
Maybe you don't need a ton of U-235 per pulse. Maybe your lens can be very large and your receiver very sensitive. Still, it's worth noting that, according to this site the total combined production of U-235 by the US and USSR was only 1950 tons. That's 1950 bits of information or less, depending on your coding... so try not to be too wordy.
The above discussion took the long way around, just for fun, but you can dismiss this idea more quickly and easily by simply asking "where in the sky do I look to see a heavenly body (outside of this solar system) reflecting the light from the Sun?". If the answer is "nowhere", then there probably isn't any way for you to reflect a signal either.
I think I'll post this anonymously, in case I did something really stupid. Enjoy!
post it to slashdot. but say first post and/or I wish I could build a beowolf cluster of those that should get it into the -1 range. Talk about goats ..you get the picture... It'll be hidden out of view...
Hiding it in spam would also work.
Sounds like a job for Hari Seldon's Time Vault, to me. ...just build a machine too complex to analyze from without, and which will destroy itself if tampered with...
How would you handle it if you actually created true artificial intelligence in a computer? I'm talking about a computer that can think as well or better than a human. This would kick off a revolution even greater than the industrial revolution. The danger lies in the weapons potential of such a technology. This would be much more dangerous and harder to control than nuclear weapons. Whatever nation's military has intelligent weapons will have a very significant advantage over other nations. When this genie is out of the bottle the world is sure to change significantly. If you realized that you had the keys to this technology would you risk just turning it loose for anyone to implement in whatever nasty way that they choose? How would you proceed?
I'm sory, but i fail to see a case where it would make sense to go to great lengths to keep information hidden until a specific date:
My main point is, that it's hard to announce (and why delay the revelation unless you inform at least someone who can do something in the meantime?) a discovery without revealing the identity of the person (or even worse: group) that discovered it. If he/they visibily go through a lot of trouble to hide the information, then someone will consider the information worthy enough to reproduce it. He has many options:
- ask/bribe/torture the person who discovered (whatever) to reproduce the information, or give out enough details that someone else can reproduce it.
- find out what the line of work of that person was and invest heavily in that direction (virtually noone can make an important discovery today without at least working with someone or refer to other's works (oops all that queries in a scientific database may reveal a pattern))
- find a way to get at the information anyway (maybe it resided on some harddisk that wasn't overwritten 10 times, maybe the method of keeping it secret is flawed)
Also, does it make sense to reveal that information at a fixed date in the future (e.g. bouncing it of a celestial body)? How can you know now what revealing the information might do at that date, and why do you think mankind will then be "ready" for it? revealing information at a fixed date in the future makes only sense for astronomical events (an asteroid will hit earth at it's next pass near the sun (maybe 80 years from now) and you think it's better to spare mankind the upheaval for the next 70 years (but how can you know, maybe we could do something about the asteroid in 40 years from now if only we knew, maybe shooting at it with a strong laser, so gas emissions will alter the course ever so slightly).
For other discoveries it makes even less sense to hide them for a fixed time, since it's impossible to guess, how fast (and whereto) society will evolve, when scientific discoveries will provide us with a good replacement for some technology or other, and, generally speaking, when the time is 'just right'. In that case it'd probably be better to involve some kind of human intervention/judgement to determine when to reveal the discovery.
One way to do that would be to build a (not necessarily secret, depends on the discovery) "society" to guard the information. maybe politicians from different countries, people from international organisations or even corporations. Technically you could give each member (or different groups of members) part of the information which makes only sense when it's all (or a significant number of information pieces) are put together (there are codes that do that for you: e.g. give one part a oneway pad, the other the encrypted information). But that still leaves the problem, that the information might be discovered independantly, somehow cajoled out of the original discoverers, or just 'rediscovered' (it's easier to get funding for a project if you know you will discover something).
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
For example, could you bounce an electromagnetic signal describing the discovery off a celestial body several light-years away?
It would be nice to bounce a fake "alien signal" off the planet just do screw up with the guys at the SETI program in the near future!
\m/
Apple did invent window clipping. Thats fairly inovative, but then again, that was over 20 years ago, and 20 years is a long time without anything new.
Think about it:
He guesses something about the future - say a five hundred years from now. He writes it down, but formulates it so that it sounds like he invented / discovered this NOW.
He buries this profound, deep secret NOW, waits a few hundred years.. THEN they'll dig up the secret and they'll be stunned! "WHAT? They knew about this way back then?! This changes our entire world view!"
It's sort of like the the pyramids, which were built long ago so we could discover them later.
That's what the UFO's have been doing all this time. And the worst part is.. The goverment has known this for years!
I would guess your thought is on primes in p and how much of our encryption appears to be destroyed. Well, Phil Zimmerman developed PGP in 1991. In 1996, the NSA stepped in and told the FTC to stop all prosecution of him. In recent times, the NSA reselected how the US does encryption. It would not allow RSA as a candidate. I would guess that the NSA has had the ability to decrypt RSA since at least 1996 and probably longer. As to how to deliver any real news, such as new power, etc. I say just release it to the press. Not one countries press, but all over the world. Make sure that you release it outside of your country first. If you are in a civil rights unfriendly country (China, and even USA, during emergency, are examples) move - canada, switzerland, or UK comes to mind. The world needs upheaval every so often.
The simple fact is that you CANNOT inform the world ahead of time. It is simply impossible, and if
anything that should have been your question -- HOW can one warn the world without revealing it ?
So you discovered cold-fusion ? PROVE IT. Oh you're just warning us so we'll be ready in 5 years ?
HA. Don't bother encrypting it, we're not even interested enough to 'call' your bullshit. (Until
you prove otherwise.)
So -- any ideas ? How can one warn the world without revealing something ? I'm giving it a
99.99% impossibility rating.
For one, I congratulate you on the irony here. This is a very clever analogy of the whole free software versus proprietary software debate.
The person who believes by hiding their discovery away (because the world cannot handle it in their opinion) is obviously driven by a need to hold their proprietary code and not share. Although locking away what they believe to be intellectual capital is a damn foolish idea, they do it anyway.
A little question to the author: What happens when someone else makes the discovery on their own and shares that idea? Maybe like the GNU and Linux phenomenon? Does that count as a social upheaval in your opinion?
Personally I think it illustrates quite well the fallacy that discoveries can be judged to be "harmful" by any ONE individual or small group. The chance that your discovery would remain secret are small. In my opinion man does share similar interests and there is a high degree that someone else will make the same "discovery".
This is also an argument against "patents" - as they are very similar in nature. The case of Forgent around the JPEG patent is proof-positive of the "bad" nature of the "hidden secret" idea.
So perhaps we need to re-phrase the question to this: Suppose I stumbled across a secret that I thought I alone had found. Would it be morally correct for me to deny anyone else the knowledge?
I do not suppose it would. If the world was going to end tomorrow, would you believe it correct to withhold that information? I suppose you could and none would know you did withhold that information, except yourself. Would you honestly not share that information with even ONE other person?
All Ad hominem replies happily ignored as the sender shall be deemed to lack the faculties to comprehend the equation.
How to tell important things to stupid people when you really don't have time, nor care, to worry about their welfare.
Drag your friend into a bar with you.
Announce the end of the world in 15 minutes.
Tip the bartender really well. (You're not insensitive)
Say I "told you so" when the spaceships show up.
Hitchhike off the planet at the last second before it's vaporized.
(Stolen of course from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.)
-Tom
If you were smart enough for an earth-shattering discovery you surely wouldn't be dumb enough to ask slashdot what to do.
Pardonne
Basics set of action constants for Autocoding and general automation by end users
And be sure to understand what preparation means Cornering the Autocoding market
The best place to hide something is right out in the open.
Pick two different law firms guaranteed to be around in 5 years, which shouldn't be too hard. Have them each keep a copy of all pertinent papers in a 2 separate firesafes in 2 separate buildings, preferably in two separate states of low import. For example, North Dakota and Alaska. Then just pay the lawyers to hire a pr firm in 5 years and pimp the product.
Your question implies two things: 1) a very short time span. "A few years," you say. 2) Civilization as we know it today will still be around in those 2 years. In other words, you don't seem to be worried about making sure the survivors of a nuclear war will be able to make use of your discovery. You just seem to want to make sure that someone will be around in you disappear off the face of the earth.
Ah, I have it. You've discovered a cheap, non-polluting, renewable substitute for oil. It can both power vehicles with no emissions and produce biodegradable plastics. No wonder you're scared. You're lucky you aren't under arrest for being a terrorist.
Let it leak to the few who have all the power that it is a new, more powerful, killer operating system that will obsolete Windows and Office at the same time, that you intend it to be GPLed and are in beta testing right now (whatever the discovery is, it doesn't really matter).
Then Microsoft will call the President and he will personally direct the various three letter government agencies that take care of those things to, well, take care of those things.
Then when Microsoft's political and legal pressure has subsided (+/- 5 years) the world will be ready for the REAL discovery, and already have a crappy facimile in their house !
In teh event of an actual emergency this space might provide useful information.
Well I'm coming very late to this discussion but it's something I've thought about before. Many posters have pointed out that any breakthrough discovery is unlikely to be 10 or 20 years away from the rest of the scientific community, especially if you give a credible clue that the discovery exists to be made.
However one exception to this rule occurs to me. If you were to somehow develop advanced Artificial Intelligence that was thousands of times more intelligent than a human you could use this to solve a huge number of technical and scientific problems. If you could control the AI completely and safely (big if) it would be possible to develop technologies that would supress discovery of the same technique anywhere else in the world. How? One way would be development of advanced self-replicant nanotechnology that would allow you to surveil the entire Earth and subtly divert research efforts getting too close to your crucial discovery. Computers would mysteriously fail here and there, experiments would fail, etc. No one could detect your actions because, by definition, they don't have the detection technology.
Sounds crazy, I know. But all the rules go out the window if you assume the existance of a loyal machine that can think thousands or millions of times faster than we can. We'd all like to think it would be us to discover this first in our basements or something. In reality it's far more likely to be the NSA. Scary.
Karma police, I've given all I can, it's not enough, I've given all I can, but we're still on the payroll.
or learned how to time travel back in time and affect the present. Being a nice guy, you decide to warn the world now and give everybody a few years to prepare before revealing the discovery.
In the case of time travel, the solution is simple. Travel back a few years and place a series of bets that you know you will win. Publicise that you are doing this. People will gradually come to realise that you have indeed come from the future. Assuming that the outcome of the things you are betting on hasn't been affected by your presence in the past.Comment removed based on user account deletion
Don't delay. Reveal it immediately. Let survival-of-the-fittest work it out.
Like this!
Our fiction (especially science fiction) allows us to get our minds around "earth shattering" concepts before we have to really deal with them. I would launch a TV series about the discovery, treating it as fiction, of course.
You'll benefit from the "It's like Star Trek" effect- nowadays, any high-tech discovery is invariably compared to something on Star Trek, like the recent experiments in which a photon is "teleported."
Thanks to Star Trek and other science fiction, when we make contact with an alien race, the worldwide reaction won't be "Impossible!"-- rather, it will be "Finally!"
Marc Siry || interactive media professional, motorcycle enthusiast ||
You can do anything at Zombocom, so I would assume that you would be able to do something like this with a secret you were holding.
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
Spam your encrypted discovery broken into different parts over several porn and kiddie newsgroup while pretending it is your signature. When the right time comes, declare that they can go to these porn/kiddie newsgroup and decrypt your original discovery.
I think it depends a lot on the discovery, and the preparation that society needs to do. For example, I wouldn't worry too much about a new super-weapon, since we've already got lots of really deadly weapons, and we (sort of) manage to not destroy ourselves with them.
The time-travel case is logically impossible (to my simple logic, at any rate), and I can't think of how society would prepare for it anyway. So I'd just let loose.
The new energy source sounds like it would be good, and the disadvantages (widespread unemployment in the oil business) would not be affected by the timing of the release of the info, they would be affected by the timing of the implementation (which would take quite a while anyway).
Discovering an algorithm to factor really large (non-prime) numbers in time proportional to the size of the numbers e.g. O(log(n)) time, would be a more interesting case. If you could factor a 8192-bit composite number into two 4096-bit primes in a second or less, that would render RSA encryption obsolete, and I suspect it might obsolete other encryption algorithms, too.
In that case, I would:
The question is: how long is long enough? If you go for too short of time before disclosure, then the banks and everyone else don't have a chance to update their software. If you go for too long a time, then organized crime and various governments will have lots of time to take the technology away from you and use it against society.
I hate it when I make a joke and I get modded "+5 insightful". Mod the stupid comments "funny", not "insightful", pleas
What about the Segway? Wasn't that supposed to be earth shattering? I guess a $10,000 scooter didn't quite have the impact they expected.
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
I have discovered a truly marvelous method, which the margin of this Slashdot posting is too narrow to contain.
-- Terry
It means nothing. It can't be used in computer computations because it's slower than methods currently in use!
It's just a handy trick for finding large primes. Big deal. Next time somebody dies from cancer or AIDS, I'll try to comfort them with this fact.
Well, you can use David Brin's approach in `Heaven's Reach'.
Basically, every space ship had a recorder that, well, recorded everything the spaceship did for posterity. But of course, you didn't want the recordings to be made available right away because if you had enemies, they'd know what you were up to.
The solution was to put in what he called a WOM (write only memory). The recording was encrypted with a public key whose private key was destroyed at creation time. So you could encrypt but not decrypt. The key was large enough that it would take 100 years before it could be decripted. (of course in the book the bad guys got a hold of the key, and tried to steal the recorder, etc.)
So you can always encript it heavily, throw away the key and then distribute the cyphertext to everyone interested. If you show them that it is important enough you can be sure that they will try to decrypt it, but it will also give people time to see it coming.
Good luck, and I hope they don't beat it out of you prematurely
All of these responses take only that fact that it might be a scientific discovery, what if it is an asteroid. The writer implicitly said earth shatering discovery, he also didn't mention an asteroid. Although anyone with a good telescope could see it mayby he is the first one to find it.
If that is the fact then any philisophical, or socilogical anwsers would apply. It would be more an anwser of who has the most time to search the skys, which right now there aren't many billonairs investing in sky whatching technology it just isn't fun.
Go to lawyer A, and give him a key to a safety deposit box at bank B. Tell him not to open teh safety deposit box until the messiah comes, or 2006, or you die, or whatever -- we'll call this condition X.
Place inside ther safety deposit box directions to find, and your private encryption key to...
The encrypted documentation of your discovery, which you give to lawyer C.
Tell the bank not to let the safety deposit box be opened until such a time as lawyer A can document condition X has occurred.
This is actually more complicated than need be: just set up a trust, or get a trustworthy lawyer.
Don't bother. If it's actually earthshattering, no one credible will believe you until the full details of the discovery hits the light of day.
Ask SlashDot has been rather lax lately, with many, well...STUPID questions. Over the last week, however, the questions have been fresh and interesting. Is this a new trend?
1) Achieve an Earth-shattering discovery ...
2)
3) Profit!
It's simple, just use my earth-shatttering invention. I call it the 'Earth-shattering Discovery Revealer'. You'll hear about it gradually...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
It's pretty sad noone addressed the real problem here. Let's ignore the nature of the discovery or any other information. It can be some evidence that you want to be released at a certain point, regardless of what happens to you. Now, the real question is, how to store an information so that it remains secret until a specific date, yet cannot be easily destroyed or stolen, and how to guarantee its proper delivery afterwards. Bouncing the signal or any other methods like this are pretty difficult to implement and do not guarantee proper delivery - the signal can be jammed or affected by some other events. Lawyers, locker boxes, etc, are not particularly reliable, your information is still being kept in relatively few copies, depends on the trust you have to relatively few guys, and can be delivered only if those guys are still there and are not forced to take a different action that you wanted them to take.
;-).
Same about crypto messages - there's no guarantee that this or that this data will be cracked at a certain point, it's not really about the CPU speed and Moore's law, it's more about improving algorithms (e.g. djb's research) and computing paradigms (vide quantum computing). Finally, there's no guarantee someone would actually try to crack it AND would decide to publish it (I wouldn't rely on NSA in that matter
So, what is needed is a way to store the message in a secure and reliable way in so many places that it is not feasible to go after every single instance - say, few million computers. Furthermore, the information cannot be simply carried by a worm, because in this case it is quite possible it'll be eradicated before the time comes. Then, at a certain point, the information has to become readable and has to be delivered to each and every "carrier", so that someone would notify a broader audience.
This is what I'd do: Create a program which must be continuously running on a close machine, and who's only output is a simple monitor. Make sure to encrypt all data with the strongest encryption you can use, then have a timer which more or less on the given date spits out the big secret on the monitor, repeating it over and over again so that people can use optical-character recognition technology to read its display. Note that you will need a damn good power suply source, rock-solid hardware, and reliable power source for the clock (in case the machine loses power and then wakes up), and extremmelly good (gold?) connections for the external monitor.
sierra has already been doing this for years with team fortress 2.
--
|-_-| . o O ( bEef!)
As a huge discovery that'll cause social upheval. Lets get something straight, innovation will occur all the time no matter what so eventually whatever someone tries to hold back will come to light. No one is really that set to say that something could never be possible.
And this of course stops the bad guy who's after me and my friends to just turn off this box... of course, there's a chance he wouldn't find out about this box, but similarly, there's a chance he wouldn't find out I gave the secret to my mother-in-law. That's not really the point, however. The basic assumption here is that if I store the secret in a trivial way like this, it is quite possible the bad guys would find out sooner or later. Besides, what about the delivery? Ok, so the secret message appears on the screen, assuming the monitor (and the box itself) is still working fine after n years. There's one guy in the server room, he sees it, what's the guarantee he'll tell the world, and that he wouldn't be stopped after his first phone call to his wife that happens to trigger some Echelon ruleset?
For example, if what you discovered was time travel, simply send the damn machine, or better yet, millions of the machine into the future 2 years from now.
Funny you shouild mention that. That's exactly what you're going to do in 5 years when you do invent time travel. Except then I will wait two years, take one of the machines back, steal your prototype, and bring it back to me last week, at which point I will announce that I have just invented it...
Simple. Wander out and tell your mailman or gas-meter reader all about it. Any earth-shattering discovery can be used for terrorism ... and anything discovered like that (i.e. done by an American) is instantly suspicious -- I mean, if you're not at work, then you should be inside your home watching HBO or playing EverQuest like a good little boy. Your mailman or reader will report your info via TIPS, where it will be packaged up with all the other thousands of bits of info for just that shift alone, by low-level government employees. It will be archived for later retrieval once the FBI, CIA and NSA get the $13 billion (yearly) in funding that will be required to parse all that data.
It's the easiest thing to do other than carving out a dolmen and burying it in Northern Ireland. In fact, using TIPS should make it last longer.
[also misbehaves on Kuro5hin as Peahippo]
I am sure you will think I am a crackpot, but that should prove my point....
At least two such things already exist. They are being ignored because people think they are not real or they just don't get it. The first is the rife machine. (Analog is the best as it has a natural distortion). The second is Doyle Henderson's ideas on emotions.
So go ahead and release your information. People will think you are a crackpot, conspiracy web sites will eat you up, and everyone but the
'nutters' (peanut and almond) will ignore you. Then you can start crying about how no one gets you or no one believes you, etc.
You're not going to file several mysterious patents and claim social upheaval via self balancing motor scooter are you? Really, we don't need any more of those world shattering discoveries.
You have NO absolutely secure method of getting said info "to the future" without somebody keeping an eye on it or knowing about it. And any method I can think of (besides burying it in a capsule and having lawfirms release it on said date or UPS deliver it's location somewhere) requires some serious money. I wouldn't go with the net, cuz who knows what it'll look like in a few years. I wouldn't go with electronic media in general for fear of an EMP event of some sort. Too dicey for a lot of reasons (formats, decay, etc). Ultimately, cash will help guarantee your discovery will get into the right hands intact.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
What's the point of using any encryption if the computer has to have the key to decrypt the data anyway?
Take it down to your local western union, and tell them to deliver it to Marty McFly, during a thunderstorm on a deserted stretch of road about 60 years from now.
Post it on /., but in a really sarcastic tone, so nobody believes you.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
Dave? is that you?
narbey
-- "The evil stops here" -Petr
The usual problem with key escrow is that you want to make it possible-but-difficult to obtain your key, but impossible to do so secretly. You do this by making up N-1 random numbers and XORing them all with your key to produce an Nth number. Burn the copy of the key and distribute the N numbers to N different left-wing civil liberties organizations and newspapers. Nobody can get your key secretly unless they can sneak all the pieces out of all the different organizations.
The same thing could be done for time-release key escrow: use N organizations that all agree to your schedule for releasing the key. The use of many organizations mitigates the risk of premature disclosure by any single organization. The problem is that no organization is entirely immune to espionage, and neither is any combination of organizations.
So hide some pieces of your key using engineering solutions. Build timer-driven gadgets that hide underground, or at the bottoms of lakes, and announce themselves after three years. Find places like Stonehenge or the Pyramids, where a sunbeam enters a cave only on one day of the year, and build something clever in the cave.
An interesting service (but one for which I cannot figure out a revenue model) would be to generate public/private key pairs for various dates. Publish the public keys and corresponding dates immediately, and publish private keys on the dates in question. Eventually the service would end up getting used to protect some information that was really valuable, and then the service provider would be subject to rubber-hose cryptanalysis, so this isn't a great career choice.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
****Hypnotize Women into Bed****
Fat Bald Ugly Insecure Broke?
Guys!
Did you know you can learn to hypnotize women into bed?
Come on, dude - you can't tell me you don't need a little extra edge
when it comes to scoring. It's FUN, and it will CHANGE YOUR LIFE!
--err, I betting the same people that will respond to your SPAM message are the easiest to convince. Once you have that group sold, the rest is easy.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
If the discovery is truly important and disruptive, the government will track you down, extract all you know, and ensure it stays secret so only they can use it. You're in trouble if you tell anyone.
If it's not for fun... it would take two years:
... (commonwealth?)
to secure the rights
get the financing
pull together a company
to turn the discovery
into a profitable business model
If you don't... someone will.
Earth shattering discoveries are like that...
they create wealth
Bell Telepone,
Edison Electric,
Ford Motors
Linux
Sig: gotta light?
Why would someone ask Slashdot this question unless.... hmmmmm....
Darwinism.
;) letters fckgw come to mind)
;)
Sell the secret to the highest bidder, (if it is an energy discovery, careful who you talk to because there are some individuals with 'energy interests' around
Then let them deal with it. If humanity plunges into chaos, chances are the most intelligent individuals will survive.
In theory at least
Who care, you'll be sitting in your mountain with 20 million in supply's.
Write in the margin of your lab book, "I have discovered an ingenious proof of *insert Earth shattering idea here*, but alas it will not fit in this small space."
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
but I won't release it for another ten years.
Just reveal it - let the public be the judge.
I know you're reading this, I. Honestly, you're like a kid with a new toy.
Please don't get any reckless and stupid ideas. Do not talk about it. Not even hints. Not even vague warnings. Remember what I taught you: Just a few unimportant drips, together, become a leak.
Please try to be more responsible. You have quite a lot of natural talent for a beginner, and I had pinned some of my hopes on you and O. I would be very disappointed if you let your professionalism slip and betrayed the trust that we have all placed in you.
Anyway, relax. Stop reading Slashdot. Go and get a Coke or something, play a bit of Tempest, or you can crack something if you feel in the mood - I've some notes in the pink folder, if you can read my handwriting by now. Maybe a different perspective would help, I'm only human. I brought down a load of the glass Coke bottles, the good ones, in that fridge next to the B2 stairwell door. They ought to be well chilled by now. Just make sure to leave at least ten or so for O and don't touch more than one or two of my Dr. P, or any of that Budwar, and I'll see you later on when I'm all done up here.
Unfortunately, your counter-point overlooks one very large fact- Just because you can't think of a reason on why he should keep a specific date doesn't mean he can't or doesn't already have one. It doesn't have to be logical or make sense to you. The person in question obviously has one, be it factually sound or a figment of his imagination.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
I've thought about this before - in relation to antigravity. Think about all that would happen if someone announced tomorrow that they had discovered simple, cheap, safe antigravity technology - such that anyone could afford a personal vehicle that could hover and move in any direction, and "air barges" that could replace trucking.
- Millions of jobs would be lost in construction - we wouldn't need roads anymore.
- All fences would suddenly be useless. Anyone could access any piece of land anywhere in the world easily. People would have to deploy their own warning and air-defense systems to keep people off their property. Anything you don't want stolen would now have to be fully enclosed. A lot of land owners would not be happy.
- All upper-story windows, sylights, balconies, and rooftops would have to be secured. Not a huge deal, but it would change some things.
Perhaps the gov't could require a GPS system that would restrict the vehicles to designated "air roadspace", but of course then criminals would just use black-market vehicles that could go anywhere.
If the world didn't have some serious warning, and a few years to prepare, thieves would just have a field day. It would be anarchy.
... a scifi novel for you? *G*
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
A devastating security hole in Microsoft Windows that leaves the system wide open to any attacker.
In order to ensure the security of machines running Windows and to give Microsoft adaquate time to properly patch the bug I will not disclose details of the exploit for 20 years.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Make a time capsule and drop it off at sea. Program an inflatable lifter and an EPIRB to go off at the desired time.
What about a disease or -- hey, why not -- an ASTEROID that threatens to wipe out Earth. Surely telling everyone would induce mass panic, possibly injuring more people than the original antagonist.
But maybe, if you find some way to warm people to the idea that they could all die soon from some unknown force, several years in advance, when the shit hits the fan they could be more prepared psychologically to deal with it.
Likewise, a new energy source would be a revolutionary product, but the oil companies would squash it like a fly. Maybe you could introduce the idea of amazing new energy to people, show a few, and gauge their reaction. Then, when the time comes to release your amazing invention, YOU can be prepared with the right sort of marketing campaign, or publicity, etc. Maybe you need to wait anyway, for the right time, the right situation (or the right major crises) where you can make the most out of it all (ie: Sept. 11 and the flag companies).
Now, don't raise your eyebrows, we all know that there was capitalization on that crisis, and there will be on every other crisis to come. Of course, the most guilty party is the media. But anyway, just trying to make a point.
There ARE reasons maybe you should prepare society or yourself for the right time and to be in the right mindset for the release of an idea. Be it for profit OR safety.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
If you have discovered something that is so very earth-changing, then use a bit of judgement. If it will all be ok then let everyone know about it straight away. If it is really going to mess everything up and will destroy all life on earth then it is probably best that you take it with you to your grave.
Basically, it is a case of 'now or never'.
Alternatively, toss a coin and let the wonderful unit of currency make the decision for you.
What? Is that all you want to prevent?
I can think of a lot worse things than that.
But in any case, most of the word are non-slashdot mentality type people. No matter what you tell them, they're pretty set in their ways.
Not many people cared about the asteroid story when the news came out and if it were true that's one of the biggest things you can report. Nobody paid much mind and they went about their rut worrying about their much smaller problems.
No matter what secret you may have, I don't think you'll have anything to worry about by releasing it.
If he goes back in time and patents it then you won't reveal it when he was around so he won't have been able to go back and patent it.
Obviously they should hide it in the cornerstone of a building just like they hid that dancing and singing frog in the cartoon. When they tear it down, someone will find it; and when it causes them pain, they will hide it again in another cornerstone, to be found again, in a vicious cycle.
I got it.
All you have to do is launch some sort of probe that goes into some sort of orbit that is perpendicular to the Earths. (kinda like that asteroid that is supposed to collide with us somewhere in the year 2019).
Then if you are really good at math, physics, and the like, at some point in the future the two bodies will collide and your earth shattering secret would fall from the sky. And depending on the particular orbit you pick, you could specify the date at which your capsule would fall to earth.
If you only needed a year, you could just launch it so it kinda remains stationary in the Earths orbit, then when the Earth comes back around, it would run into it and fall from the sky
You might want to send a couple for redundancy and pray that your invention is important enough for someone to go look for it...
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, "Make us your slaves, but feed us." - Dostoevsky
OK, so you've located a celestial body some light years away. I think the nearest star system is four light years, right? And let's say the primary star or one of the planets (it does have planets IIRC) has enough metals to reflect something back this way.
You will have to blast - not merely a fuckload - but a metric fuckload of energy into, oh, I don't know, a magnetron the size of the Moon, with a waveguide longer than Stephen Hawking's attention span.
Now let's say that the celestial body bounces a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the EM radiation back to the Sol system (us). This is about as likely as shining a flashlight up at the moon when it isn't full and seeing it reflect, but bear with me.
Assuming the inverse square law doesn't turn your huge coded radiation pulse into a zillionth-watt squeak to be drowned out by other radiation sources far louder (like stars and quasars and so forth), you will now have to construct some kind of antenna array sensitive enough to trap the signal AND enough computing power to filter out all the background noise, or lease time from Areicibo and other "ear of the world"-type sites (assuming they have enough power to do it).
The data you transmitted would have to be at a nice, low bitrate, maybe one bit every one to ten seconds. Unless your invention is ultra-trivial, it'll probably take anywhere from weeks to years to transmit it and then receive it.
You'd be better off launching the schematics in a small spacecraft and program it to orbit the Sun for a few years, then intersect the Earth's path at the right moment.
if say
I figured out why transistors could only switch so fast, and it turned out to be a source of energy or,
Tri-secting a triangle was possible and coupled to something like pascal's triangle or,
I combined quantum mehcanics and an ESP drug that used to be discussed, but has strangely not been in the news for a while?
Then I'd post a question to as many people as I could asking about about how they would break it to the world without causing panic. Hmmmmm.
LOL
I could swear that the post was a homework question for a CS course... It's so typical for a professor to make up such an "intelligent" question...
:)
:) You little brat!
...and the obvious answer he/she would be looking for is a dead-man's switch proggy that supports high encryption and/or will reveal both the key and the encrypted file after a certain time... hence you can have the key and encrypted file, as well, in different locations.. You can play around with this...
Bouncing off planets or other stellar mediums by whatever means... roflmao... no please... might as well write it on your forehead...
I still assume you're a student trying to be smart... so here! We helped ya...
Great ideas happen at 4am. Bad career moves happen at 4pm...
It is my belife that the point of this question was not so much how to propose this 'new idea' but rather if the bouncing of the signal is possible.
i.e. can you send a radio frequency aimed at some steller body, terminate the trnasmision of this frequency, (thus having a EMF wave somewhere floating around in space.) and expect this EMF wave to arrive back at its srouce after it has been reflected by the steller body. Basically the end result is to have a 'packet' of EMF waves in space and still be able to recive the 'packet' on the bounce back.
How much power would it take, how hard would it be to take into consideration planatery movement, steller expansion, things of that nature. Is it even possible?
Just encrypt the discovery with an algorithm that you estimate will take 5 years to brute-force (of course, this won't be exact, but you can base it on reasonable estimates about progress in processing power).
New decryption technology can always be potentially developed to break anything in a yet currently unknown way. And... if it was that important, you can't protect the information in a single way because it's in your brain. Someone can use social/psychological engineering or torture to get it out of you or recreate your past interactions to get clues.
If it is something you think governments or other people might like to suppress but that you think is still worthwhile publishing (maybe cryptography), use steganography, publish it via a public network, then reveal some of the keys later.
If it is something that really is harmful ("how to build a nuclear device in your basement", "how to make a killer virus from cheese", etc.) just don't publish it and don't tell anybody about it. Most of the time, if people know something is possible, they can easily recreate it even if you don't tell them how.
Let's say I could build a practical quantum computer and wanted to alert the industry in time to allow them to launch a multi-trillion dollar campaign to revamp the world's encryption system before I unleash my discovery upon it. What kind of evidence do you think I would have to provide in order to convince the world to take me seriously?
How many people have announced to the world that they've discovered a mechanism for cold fusion? And how many of those have you actually heard about? In order to get the world's attention, you need something solid--something like a working prototype or a verifiable algorithm. You need to provide enough information to convince a very large number of people that you actually have something--enough information to allow them to reproduce your result.
The question of how to hide the information is quite pointless. The information should either remain perfectly hidden (i.e. say nothing to anybody) or be released all at once. Telling the world about the discovery while at the same time keeping the discovery itself hidden gains you nothing and can cost you a lot if the wrong people start taking you seriously.
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea...."
RFC 1925
That is actually a valid question. What if you did make a discovery of a very large magnitude. Prime Numbers for instance. The first person most would think to contact would probably be the government, who if not stupid would wipe the discovery clean along with the discoverer and keep it to themselves. Same with energy. People in power do not want to have that power deposed.
What you really need to do is take a look at the discovery. Is it something that will benefit mankind. Cheap power might do that, then again it might lead to more gluttonous behavior from humankind. Factoring Primes, would have applications far greater than cracking encryption, and could put our species a few notches ahead in the long run.
So if the discovery is important, and can benefit mankind, bite the bullet and give it away. Find as many methods of distribution as possible without alerting anyone, and distribute it anonymously, simultaneously, everywhere possible. Then trust in mankind's ability to survive what ever upheaval follows.
Otherwise forget it, pat yourself on the back and go on with life.
Lots of people have discussed technical solutions such as encryption, etc.
Another method that might work is to encode the information into a DNA sequence, and place it in some kind of organism. Something simple that would not be likely to die out, such as rats or roaches would be best. Then warn the world about your discovery. An even better way would be to make some kind of virus which stays in the host, not doing anything, but containing that DNA sequence, and design the virus so that it spreads between people.
The only problem here is how you would let people know to look for this DNA sequence. But, given a virus robust enough to spread and survive, it wouldn't require any person or object which could be damaged/lost/destroyed.
This would be pretty secure, unless someone knew about the DNA encoding, and the data should copy itself more or less (use redunancy), so that it would be fairly easy to piece together with enough copies.
Anyway, you could probably assume that this data will be found eventually, whether you tell anyone or not, especially if it shows up in human DNA. But DNA is probably one of the most robust forms of information transfer available, as it has error correction, makes copies, etc.
Then, of course, you would have to kill yourself so that no one could torture the information out of you, but that's the cost of science.
This is actually a difficult and interesting problem, but it seems like no one tried to answer it very seriously.
It seems like the simplest way is to harness something cronologically predictable that is too big for people to mess with. I started thinking about ice floes (dropping a capsule into a glacial crack?) but I'm not sure those are very predictable. Many posters have pointed out the difficulty of the "bouncing" idea, but instead you could physically send something into space. It must be possible to launch a solar satellite that would intercept the earth in N years. This seems fairly risky though -- delivery is not exactly guaranteed.
It may be that there is a dependence between the probability of reception and the risk of early discovery. If the info is certain to be available, the security may be certain to be cracked. Isn't this the way the universe works?
Encode the binary describing your invention/discovery in the way in which the bricks in a building are placed - either different colours or having some bricks further in or out. Then, in your will, you reveal the deencryption techinque (or even just the fact that the message is there).
Of course, if the building is condemned before you die.....
Insanity is contagious. - Yossarian
Hire a lawyer, give them the documentation on whatever, and tell them to deliver it to the NY Times science writer (or whomever) in some amount of time.
Think "Firestarter", or "Good Omens."
Things are always more credible when delivered by a lawyer.
Ahem... while I have a hard time coming up with any discovery that is likely in nature to require such safeguards, I would point out that a rather sensible way of ensuring the secret does exist.
Many of you are probably aware of the Voyager spacecrafts, and the laserdisks of information that were burned and then attached to them. Put your information on a CD (preferably more than one to reduce the risk of media failure), and attach to a probe that you send to an outer planet with a return orbit.
Basically the cost is in the CD (minimal) and the alteration to a ship that was going to go one way to be captured in a slingshot manuever and come back around in the appropriate timeframe.
"Being a nice guy, you decide to warn the world now and give everybody a few years to prepare before revealing the discovery."
Unless a profit's involved, almost no one prepares for anything they already know, much less something they don't know.
Because he did not wish to be burned at the stake, Copernicus delayed publication of his theory until after his death.
Giordano Bruno had been burned at the stake.
Galileo had similar difficulties getting his ideas across. He waited until he was an old man but he was also tried for heresy, and fortunately he had great fame as a scientist. In the end he gave 'em the finger.
Would this have anything to do with Stephen Wolfram's announcement that the world is a computer program?
Can you imagine God getting a BSOD?
I hope at least it's not made by Microsoft.
find two people that you trust but are not close. Give them an encrypted cd and set up a dead man trigger by email with the decryption scheme. Prepare a presentation with a demonstration, then call a couple news agencies and get a crowd of people. Present it and dont let there be any confusion.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Use a Verifiable Cryptographic Time Capsule (VCTC) to send the information into the future. See the paper on Encapsulated Key Escrow at:
h tml
http://www.cs.ucsd.edu/users/mihir/papers/escrow.
Let it go now. The world needs a good social upheaval. Its only a matter of time until we force ourselves off this planet anyway.
Seal it for X years until we need it. Then open it up X years from now. It will prove that in 2002, you had this idea, but sat on it.
Or apply to the US Patten Office, and wait 20 years for them to approve it while everyone else rips off your invention like Gilbert Hyatt did when he invented the Microchip.
Probably the only realistic solution will rely on a group of humans to release the information for you. Give uniquely encoded copies of the information to a few dozen individuals, not telling them what or why you are doing this. Make it so that several of the people are required to actually decode a complete usable document.
Then drop a few million bucks in a Swiss bank account, and get several independent lawyers to hold keys to it (several of which are needed for access). Encode the final necessary key in the document itself.
Guarantee any individuals which wait until the ordained time to decode the document a fragment of these funds, and any who try to betray this zero dollars.
Also guarantee some of this money to each of the lawyers who follows your instructions, or none to those who betray it. Lawyers can be reasonably trusted on one thing -- their greediness. (At least if you find the right set of laywers.) So they will serve as an excellent means of check-and-balance against one another, as each will be looking out only for their own interest, and will accordingly act to prevent the others from taking unfair advantage. At the very least they can be relied upon to keep the document encoded until the due date -- then they may try to make off with the funds themselves if they find the means, but that should really be a minor point relative to the big news.
Even if this earth shattering news is purely hypothetical, this could make for an interesting sci fi novel. Perhaps it's already been written.
joel
Probably a clever advertisement for a new movie about time travel and paradoxes and all that goodness.
Of course, it couldn't hurt to email the addresses and ask (with a throwaway account, of course - damn spammers.)
There was an old British law written many years ago when the automobile was first becoming popular. Horseless carriage manufacturers pressured law makers to create a law that required all automobiles to have a person CARRY a flag ahead of the automobile! This was done under the guise of public safety.
Disruptive technologies are the key to progress in a technologically advanced society. When a disruptive technology is introduced it is typically fought by the "old guard"...companies that have built their very existence around old technology, and will use every means to keep that existence.
Let's say you develop a "transporter" technology that could reliably and safely move objects to anywhere in an instant. Would you wait to release the technology? Your invention would cause global turmoil...over-night your device would destroy the shipping business, the automotive industry, the oil industry, the airline companies, most businesses that service those industries and many others.
But think of the benefits...lower pollution, eliminate traffic accidents and deaths, more free time for people who travel alot...etc. It would be unethical and irresponsible to not release this technology.
-ted
I consider any electronic medium for the storage of absolutely critcal data over a long period of time over a dynamic system (ie; one that always must be "on") a very risky investement. Computers crash. E-Terrorism will probably be greater threat in the future. It'd be pretty easy to reek havok on a network backbone with an emp bomb. Hell, even simple things like the power going out. Fine, there are backups, but my point is it's way too volitile. Poof. There's goes the AI, parts of it or a corruption in the data it's carrying. I'd stick with damn near anything non-magnetic in nature, personally, for a greater chance of getting "there" intact.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
... or at least some reasons, why it would make sense to time the relese of information in such a way. Also that person(s) might hide their information for all the wrong reasons, maybe a crisis he predicts could be averted, given enough time, maybe the upheaval will be even greater in X years time, maybe someone else already discovered what he found and puts it to the wrong purpose ... so i think someone who considers to go to great length to delay informing the world about the facts he learned should also consider if holding back that information is really the right thing, and if the mechanisms he chooses to release the information are appropriate.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
I don't wanna seem like a dick, but I think I've got a good idea for the next 'Ask Slashdot' question:
How the fuck do you guys pick the 'Ask Slashdot' questions?
Seriously, I've submitted at least two questions that were so much more worthwhile than this one it's not even funny. I've asked questions about the anti-virus industry and whatnot, and some nutball wanting to warn us that he's figured out how to cast spells gets the front page. Sheesh.
It's really easy. Put it in a manilla envelope, write "TPS Reports 08/2002" on the outside. Create another envelope, label it "TPS Reports 10/2002". Seal 'em, put them both on your desk. When you die, someone will have to look at those TPS Reports. Unlike your swingline stapler and the printer, noone will bother it, so you can safely leave it on your desk, but in the event of your death, someone will open the October TPS Reports wondering WTF Octobers reports were already done for, and find a reference the August TPS Reports which should have already been filed. Then, the cats out of the bag.
I think the question is whether you can keep your mouth shut when the I come to visit with my little docor bag. I think you will be singing whatever you have to announce...
If you have something earth shattering there might be people interested in finding out what it is. And you'll be drawing a lot of attention by announcing it. Any encryption or way of hiding you message will only be as good as your tolerance of pain is high. Better just keep your mouth shut and not tell a single soul.
If you have an earth shattering discover, chances are that a delay wouldn't do much good to prevent any social or economic upheaval.
Just announce it and watch the fun now.
I would start with a simple proclaimation:
"All your base are belong to us!"
You're forgetting something: The illicit drug trade is the biggest and most successful pyramid scheme ever, comprising a full 8% of the global economy. Imagine if you discovered a new drug that is so good that it makes cocaine and heroin look like caffeine pills and could be made in minutes with common ingredients found at any grocery store, 7-11, Wal-Mart or whatever. Imagine all the drug cartels collapsing and then the CIA folding up because there are no more drug cartels to get in bed with. Would you keep it a secret, or tell the world?
for prime number N, factors are N and 1.
*note, this amazing technique works for all primes, no matter what the size.
This sig intentionally left blank.
Anyway, once you got that settled, you need a -mobile.
If it's got to do with time, you've already talked to Dr. Who, and you're 'way ahead of me, so never mind. Except this: for your time-mobile needs, get an American style booth, avoiding any style that could be mistaken for a pissoir. Americans make that mistake too often anyway.
If it's about power (gigawatt kind - the other kind, and the babes, come after), immediately contract with Enron to distibute it. They'll love it, and you will not need to warn anyone about universally available free power for a long long time.
If it's a drug that could make everyone love their neighbor and themselves without any side effects, it will be illegal in a minute. Don't even try to release the formula unless you can engineer side effects of compulsive acquisitiveness.
Politicians will be in a quandary though. They don't need the side effect, and the main effect would be too much of an identity crisis. This means they will probably not go for it. Instead, expect your life to become spooky, and your invention classified, with some research started on using it a weapon of mass affection. With luck you'll get a job out of it.
If it's a spritual discovery, that's another thing. Only about one person in 50 million will draw the combination for being capable of this, so there's about 5e9/5e7 = 100 or so candidates. But half of those are babies or too young to have gotten there, so hey, there's only like 50 of us around.
But we're pullin' for ya.
Be good.
How about a true, working aphrodisiac. There is no such thing currently--Viarga isn't--but the first person to invent it will be a trillionaire either legally or illegally.
I have recently proven P != NP and put it in a secure computer. To get to the solution , you need to answer its M challenges, each is finding the shortest TSP path to a random graph, in polynomial time. (Every graph in each challenge is guranteed unique so you can't cheat. ;) ) My hope is someone will pass the challenge within the next 10 years and see my earth-shattering discovery.
Just tell me what it is and I'll announce it, I don't have a problem seeing the world in havoc, moreover I'm looking forward to it (and it's not too far away anyways).
So one way or the other you might as well reveal it yourself or have me reveal it now and get it over with...tomorrow is still another day.
What did you discover that is this important? Did you get a couple of weeks of supercomputer time somewhere and calculate the actual meaning of life, the universe, and everything? Are you worried about revealing to us the information because it isn't 42?
At least for the geek community, that could be the single most crushing realization in history. Except possibly the discovery that Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds are really long lost twins separated at birth. That could be pretty heart wrenching.
By the way, I'm just kidding.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
Write a science fiction story, start an urban legend, or create an e-mail hoax that foreshadows the discovery.
This way, when it is revealed, they will have at least thought about it, and some crackpot organizations will be prepared.
The trip to the moon, Larry Niven's "organlegging," and the "Good Times Virus Hoax" come to mind (foreshadowed Melissa in 1994)
Launch a spacecraft with the information away from Earth. Inform the world of what you've done when the spacecraft is far enough away to be irretrievable with current technology. As technology advances, humans develop ability to retrieve spacecraft. There are two problems:
There is no solution to the first problem. To solve the second, you need to leave convincing evidence that retrieving the spacecraft will be worthwhile. Whether this is possible depends on your invention.
"OK everyone, I've discovered how to time travel! Now I'm going to go one year into the future and then reveal the entirety of my discovery to you all, thus giving you a chance to adjust to the idea." *zap* "Hello eve --" "Your under arrest for violating section 10.2 of the Time Travel Act" "What?" "Don't you know?" "Know what?" "We made time travel illegal."
Drop a capsule with the information on Mars. As Mars exploration intensifies, capsule is found and the information retrieved.
Come to think of it, there's no need to drop it on Mars. There are plenty of deserted places on Earth. Bury it on some uninhabited island, and put a device with it which will start to emit interesting signals after enough time passed. Some country's satellite will probably pick it up then and someone will be sent to investigate.
Split the secret into two pieces such that both pieces are illegable unless re-combined. Then encrypted both halves. Create 100 difference copies of the split, encrypted message. A trusted third party would then ask you to reveal/decrypt either the left or right halve of the message 99 times, leaving one, undecrypted message. Store this message in a safety deposit box with instructions for decrypting....wait....vola.
They have been proven as the most effective way to keep important discoveries from the public for at least 20 years.
The ______ Agenda
Put it in the foundation of an expensive building. Make it public knowledge that valuables are hidden in the foundation, but not enough to make it profitable to destroy the building to retrieve them. When it's time to demolish the building anyway, someone will remember the valuables in the foundation and will look.
You seem to act as though if certain people found out about the THING, then the person responsible for the THING (you, possibly, if your question wasn't hypothetical) might get "dealt with", a.k.a. "disappeared."
If you've got something amazing, but are afraid of others either taking it over to hide it or to further their own agenda, then chances are you already know that you've got a tough road to travel.
But, to try to leave some mark for someone to find later on? It seems you want the world to find out about IT, whatever IT is, and the risk of IT being lost in this is quite great.
I'd say, go for publicity. No matter what. Whatever you do, make sure a LOT of people learn about it, and learn the truth. Make sure a lot of PhD's, CEO's, etc know about it. Cuz if a lot know about it, then there's less chance for the secret to die with you, or to be taken the wrong way.
What would actually interest me more then encrypting the discovery: Where to go with it once i think it's ripe for revealing? Who should I show it to so it can be distributed/mass produced/ put in use?
will propagate over the globe in minutes. There's no chance that every copy could ever be removed and
it will always be "around" on some website, cd, archive, etc., etc., etc.
http://tinyurl.com/3t236
this article sucks. use the god damn us mail.... that should give you enough leeway.
Its simple. Just put it on a probe-type spacecraft, send it on a trajectory that will slingshot it around a planet far away enough that it will take as much time as you want to get back. Then, when it returns into earth orbit, have it send out the discovery via shortwave radio, so anybody with he right equipment on the surface can receive it.
Since such a plan has a great feeling of suspense to it, capturing enough attention so that by the time of the announcement there would be plenty of people listening wouldn't be a problem.
I have an invention that really isn't going to get noticed unless I get millions of dollars worth of free marketing. Can you tell me how to get millions of people interested in my idea?
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
I've actually wondered about something similiar, suppose a didaster of some sort is about to happen. (A theoretical 10th planet shows up wreaking havoc every say, 3600 years, and you want to tell the next generation of whoever they may be about it, so that they can prepare or something.)
Suppose this "disaster" makes the oceans move so that what is now land is water, what is now water is land. Changing the face ot the planet.
Where would you put the archive so they can find it? How do you preserve it? what if they (next generation of intelligent life) don't speak english and percieve of us as "an ancient people with no intellect"
What is the perfect time capsule?
Are so few people questioning the premise of the hypothetical, "I doubt you have anything...", or misc. jokes.
What if he really DOES have something that is seriously worth considering? C'mon people, if you found something like this, what would YOU do? Use your collective intellect and generate some credible responses.
1. I'd locate an expert at ethics and ask the same question. They can probably help with defining the framework around the question without actually pulling it out of you. Those types are really good at dealing with the hypotheticals. They could probably assist with assessing the human implications of the information. Although at some point, even an ethicist is human, and may attempt to convince you to share it "just between you and me". Pull out of the Slashdot borg if you fail to get any substantive feedback and hit the ethicist borg.
Wasn't this on the Onion.com recently? A whole group of govt. officials killed themselves and it was kinda funny. But now that I think about it...what was the location of the recent spate of military servicemen killing themselves and families?
If the inventor is truly unwilling to take responsibility for the consequences of the 'invented' by releasing it during his/her lifetime, then the device should never be released and should be un-made with all the ingenuity that went into its initial manifestation. Otherwise, the reluctant genius must work up the courage and step forward. It is not always easy to bear the attentions of the world, but it is merely one of the many challenges any person must face if they are to enact great change upon the times in which they live. As for those in the past who had courage such that they could fully bear the challenge that their brilliance laid before them, they have my thanks, empathy, and deep admiration. I, for one, am more than ready to go off into the galaxy in one of those 'build-it-yourself' kit-starships. :)
You know, When a concept is "reduced" to Hollywood, it is almost trivialized to the point that it is no longer considered feasible. Case in point: Terminator. Why couldn't that scenario be a reality? In fact, if computing power does nothing more than proceed as we've seen it do in the past, eventually, processing power could easily develop into AI. It's not just a matter of if its most definitely when. And we do need to think in terms of geologic scale not just next week. We are already seeing unmanned drones flying over enemy camps. These will shortly be capable of startling activity within our lifetimes. What will be the environment when our children's children are making decisions in the world? I'm not really paranoid, it's just that no one seem to be talking about this.
...or some other fast prime-factoring scheme you should start by solving a couple of the prime-factor-contests out there. That would lend credibility to your claims.
Then you could have trusted agents (friends etc) who agree to release the details of your invention at a specified time. You could also post an encrypted file describing the invention to usenet and have them post the keys. See the other comments for specifics. Just beware of all the worlds three-letter-agencies, mafias and large corporations closing in on you (and your friends) at once...
So here are my attempts.
- Someone else suggested something like this, but I'll state my version... use a cryptographic scheme which produces a number of keys, some or all of which must be used in combination to retrieve the original message. Probably just some of them would be best. Give the keys to a number of high-profile parties in a very public way, making sure to choose people for whom it would be a publicity disaster to divulge ahead of time. I was thinking of religious leaders, but the other poster suggested civil liberties organizations, which is another good idea. Anyway, a critical aspect of this scheme would be to make sure the public would react negatively to early news-breaking. If it was a free-energy scheme or something, there would be too much outcry and your trusted parties would be pressured to divulge instead of the other way around. Of course, you could always lie about the contents of the message -- once it was revealed (on time rather than early), if it was important enough nobody would blame you for lying.
- A variation on the EM-bounce idea. Launch a spacecraft (did I mention this is kind of an expensive option?) and have it fly away from Earth in a straight line, then broadcast the message at the appropriate time. This would only fail due to interference (someone overtakes your spacecraft and extracts the data or destroys it), mechanical failure of the craft, or failure to receive it. I think mechanical failure is the biggest problem here. You could generate enough publicity to guarantee someone would be listening when the time came, and you could give your spacecraft a difficult-to-predict course so that a pursuer (even with more advanced tech) would have a hard time catching it.
- Others have suggested time-lock encryption schemes, which seem like a good idea. My variation on that, which would take some ingenuity but is a cool idea anyway: fashion a computer program which constantly alters its own code, and which will (given enough time, as determined by Moore's law) eventually output the secret. Care would have to be exercised to make sure that inspection of the program would not make it possible to guess the output without running it. But from what I know of Turing machines, I think this might be theoretically possible. The main problem is that it might take as long or longer to design the program as it would to run it, which may or may not be a problem depending on your scenario.
- Obscurity. Place the secret somewhere publicly accessible but obscure. Bury it in a hole. Put it on a web page, add that page to Google's cache, and then delete the original page. Something like that. The problem here is retrieval. Nothing is suggesting itself to me, so I guess this is at best a partial solution.
- Find a healthy person and gain their trust. Give them a copy of the secret (or the key to unlock it, or whatever), but don't let them know what it is. Have them place it in a safe deposit box, to be opened in case of their death. Arrange with a reliable hit man to kill that person at a particular time in the future. Or implant a subdermal time-bomb at the base of their skull or something. You get the idea here. The main thing is to make sure there's no connection to you.
- Find some way to include the secret, or its key, in a set of sealed government records which are to be unveiled at some particular future time. Kind of like the JFK assassination case files or something.
- Revisiting some of the above ideas, you could simply hide a broadcast device in an undisclosed location, and set it to begin broadcasting the secret at the specified time. If you could figure out how to stick it on the moon or something that would be even better.
Eh, running out of ideas and nobody's gonna read this anyway, so I guess I'm done.My deviantArt site
Very simple:
Encode the description of the discovery in a short sentence. Transform the sentence into a large integer - to make sure that it really is your discovery, sign it. The larger it is, the longer it'll take to discover it.
Anounce this to the world: "an integer in the range 1-.... contains a description of my discovery. Look for it". After enough time, scientists on earth will find the integer, together with your earth-shattering discovery, and your signature.
the three sea shells?
>suppose you've made an Earth-shattering discovery that, when revealed, will cause massive social upheaval
Duh. Government knows we're being visited by other intelligent life and doesn't know how to break the ego-shattering news to us. =)
(But really. If such news WERE true, how WOULD it be "safely" revealed to everyone at once??)
99% of people would milk it, get rich rule the world or whatever until someone noticed, then your discovery would be out
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
he'll use at least a lifetime to figure out what to make of it.
That's approximatly what the patent system was originally about.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html
Comment removed based on user account deletion
One new revolution in thinking a year, at least.
If the world of our children is even slightly recognizable, we need to do more.
No, I'm not kidding and this is not a troll or flamebait. Get all the whacky tech out there and into production, if it really exists. Crush all existing dominant systems, and then in a year or so, crush the new ones that arose.
The more challenging the world is, the greater the expectations we place on ourselves, the higher our performance.
Stability is for evolutionary dead ends.
"Avast! Prepare for the rodgering!" THWACK! "Arrr.. me nards.."
There's meant to be an earth-shattering 'KABOOM'.
MrCreosote Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump! "You're right! There isn't enough room to swing a cat in here!"
Before you pre-announce, create a device that can transmit your discovery. Perhaps a cellular-enabled computer in a rugged enclosure. Bury it. Not just anywhere, mind you. Find a place where erosion is predictable. The marshlands of Louisiana come to mind, but drilling into an iceburg would work well too. The device should be designed to float to the surface and transmit the data when it is freed.
Another option is to release some silly Outlook trojan that has the data encoded within. Set it to go active when the time on time.windows.com matches some pre-set time. (This avoids incorrectly set clocks, and is the sort of network query one would expect from a windows box.)
Get a programmer with a wireless phone manufacturer on your side. Hide the code in the firmware for a wireless phone. The phone will transmit your data to both the owner and anyone else in the phone book. To avoid an overload, the phone should wait a unique time, perhaps based on a number derived from the owner's calling habits.
Hide it in a mass-produced media product. Many films and albums have used a password based web component for extra hype. (Swordfish and Wu-Tang Forever come to mind) Why can't the next Brittney CD have an ECD with several hidden features, each unlocked with a password... Including your little innovation.
Have Steve Jobs announce it at MacWorld. Oh wait nevermind.
Everyone thought a terrorist nuke would go off in a boat, just off Manhattan. Instead, it was just a couple of airplanes. The Doom idea was in people's heads, but they didn't do anything.
People still use Microsoft Windows. Think about that. Do you really think you can warn people about something, who still use Microsoft Windows? Preparations always happen after the disaster.
Either deliver the goods now, or be dismissed as a crackpot when you try to warn.
Sounds like this discovery is sure to threaten the status quo. I wouldn't give the wealthy bastards who rule the world's so-called democracies the lead time they need to suppress, control or destroy the thing before it can do them any harm.
Why not launch a probe with an overide for cnn or one of the other tv networks sat signals (Falun Gong in China recently did this from earth, pissed of the gov't pretty well). After it transmits your warning, have it make a break for a planet/moon/astroid where it could crash until the US|Chinese|Russian space programs could get to it. Mars would be good for two years, Europa would take about 6 years, I think. Just make sure it has a fairly strong beacon that would survive the crash and wait for NASA to go get it and retransmit. The competition should get all three of the big space programs in a fight to get there first, ensuring that your message would at least be pursued, if not distrubuted, not sure how to pull that one off.
09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0
Send it to the Dell Support Team... by the time they get back to you, you will already have solved your problem...
Build a device that would house the message on a banner, have a timer and anti-tampering systems.
Hide the devices in populated areas where it won't be noticed. For example; the backs of highway signs, roofs of buildings, subway tunnels, highway medians, bottom of ponds, above the ceiling tiles in a library, etc.
On the day of revilation, the banners pop out.
or, let Verisign help.
Get a few websites prepaid for a few years. Get a few domain names. Encrypt the discovery using an ip address or three as the key. On the release day(s) a few of the websites submit a change of ip command to verisign. Then the sites with the info can get the key by resolving the domain name.
just publish it!
.pdf and .ps files the world is progressing. They will save us ;)
Controlled information to controlled groups has a destabilizing potential. In my opinion the more open a technology is the less destabilizing effect it has, and the more useful it is to the human race. An example from the other extreme is the Fussion/Fission technology. What is more destabilizing? A-bomb technology with 7 countries or just one monopolistic country! In that context, atleast there is conscious social effort to bring the threat down when all 7 know what response they would get if they use it?!? Would country A consider giving it up when it knew it was the "only" country possessing it? Chances are it would use it often to keep its advantage!
One could argue what if one such "technology" lands in the hands of an extremist group (you can think of many, i dont want to get into that)- agreed this is possible but think for a moment that these groups are products of "closed" information in "closed" groups. The "discovery" which motivates these groups is totally logical and beneficial in their own minds. They donot discuss it, they donot disclose it, they donot "democratise" their discovery. Its the closed loop of information that keeps them going. So we have to be careful about the advantage/disadvantage of a technology is itself a moot point. What is one man's advantage is another man's disadvantage. So maybe in your mind the technology has a certain advantage/disadvantage but in other people's view it maybe totally contrary- and probably true as well. Opening and disclosing your discovery will trigger further research and further improvement.
From a personal point of view, i am doing my PhD - details of which are irrelevant here - but i can openly admit that it would not have been possible without "Google"! I am sure many will agree that it is the openness of information which has contributed more to the "critical mass of knowledge" than anything else. Thanks to all those
Voltaire: God is dead.
God: Voltaire is dead!
Supose that someone in the CIA that has since retired wants to reveil that he was the one that shot Kenedy years from now (to avoid his family being subjected to whatever). Politician's who want to reveal secrets long after they are dead. There are lots of examples of delayed release that would be applicable and useful.
What is needed is a way to encrypt the info with long keys and release the decryption keys at a predetermined future date. One could setup servers on various parts of the net to release pieces of the key. That way if someone were to track down one of the sites with the info it wouldn't compromise the secret.
Perhaps creat a service where you would store the info after the subscriber encrypted it with a key that had a future relase date. You would need to pregenerate all the keys needed for say the next 200 years. Publish the encryption keys. Breakup and securely store the decryption keys. Every year the "next" decryption key gets released and the stored info could be viewed. Since some of the info stored would be very tempting for some powerful people to destroy/reveil early you would have to find a very secure method of storng the decryption keys. One of my favorate idea involves sending probes into space that would transmit the keys at the right time back to earth. You would want at least two for redundancy.
The only people who can keep secrets are dead.
You're forgetting something: The illicit drug trade is the biggest and most successful pyramid scheme ever, comprising a full 8% of the global economy. Imagine if you discovered a new drug that is so good that it makes cocaine and heroin look like caffeine pills and could be made in minutes with common ingredients found at any grocery store, 7-11, Wal-Mart or whatever. Imagine all the drug cartels collapsing and then the CIA folding up because there are no more drug cartels to get in bed with. Would you keep it a secret, or tell the world?
Illicit drug trade is most certainly NOT a pyramid scheme, it's functionally much like a legit business (although completely underground). Drug trafficers are NOT attempting to build "mini-pyramids" underneath them, nor do they care about how many levels exist. They have specific functions to perform (i.e. production, distribution, end-sales), just like a regular business.
And like any business, the following distribution rules apply: the fewer distribution layers that exist, the better (i.e. cheaper, better quality, etc).
The analogy also falls apart because illict drug trade is NOT a single organization, by far. The dealer on the street selling to end users does not work for the cartel that is producing the product, in fact he probably doesn't even know who they are.
You might want to hire some patent folks before making the anouncement.
The current state of IP indicates that no matter how new and earth shattering your discovery, there is a good chance that HP or Unisys has a vague patent that covers it.
Just a word of caution, do the smart thing... Keep it under your hat and for Pete's sake GPL the thing.
Your problem is not un-solvable but it is difficult. Most of the suggestions that have already been posted rely upon technology to too great a degree. Technological distribution is fine if you want to do it now. Now being today and maybe about 5 years into the future. The problem is technological change. If you want your information released more the a few years into the future, how can you be sure your information will be recognizable or usable. Think about someone planning to do this 15 years ago and planning to release this on CompuServe.
Your best bet would be to involve large organizations (so you have a chance that they will still be around) but in such a way that they do not know what they are doing or what part they are playing in your 'master' plan. For example, contract with Western Union to deliver a number of packages 30 years from now. Also contract with 5 or 6 large law firms to do the same thing. Have all of your packages delivered on the same day to 20 of the largest law firms that exist today as well as 20 of the larger non-profits like the ACLU, NAACP, other groups interested in individual rights, freedom of speech, etc. Diversity is the key. You want to ensure that at least some of the places you pick today are around tomorrow (future). These packages would contain a cover letter and your 'discovery'. Write your cover letter in such a way that each organization knows that they are not your only choice but do not say who the others are. Explain what your idea or discovery is and who or what should be done with it.
There is no guarantee that this will work but it is probably your best bet. Good luck.
I have to use this cause I can't afford a real sig...
Any earth shattering discovery has already been made by Wolfram.
a little revolution now and again is a good thing!! - so says Thomas Jefferson
/. community would put some more serious consideration into this thought, it is quite a worthy one... yet you jest and joke that 'some average guy would _never_ come up with anything like that' ... ha!
... think "A Beautiful Mind"
I believe our society is well in need of another upheavel, I feel our complete socio-economic systems needs a bit of a reformation... but people dont like change!!
I do wish more of you from the
how about some college drop out? someone who works in a job as unrespected as a patent clerk? could he/she change the world? You better believe it! And all these movies like "Chain Reaction" and the possibilty of "free energy"... I feel it is possible, someone already may have discovered it... but would it throw our entire world into depression as fossil fuel/oil based industries and the economies with them collapse?
I say we need some revolution like this, something great and new to change the way we think... a change for the better, we are definately in need of that. Our economies and societies may take some restructing to adjust to the change, but they will recover... just as they always have. Thank GOD we have the Internet... lets not let it become some MSN or GOV controled 'net though... their interests may not be in "whats best for the community"
peace
Didn't this already happen with that 'Segway' thing?
Umm...that truck would be a Toyota Tundra. The "TRD" refers to the optional the Toyota Racing Development off-road suspension.
Just wanted to clear things up.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
- Evelyn Beatrice Hall
What happens if this earth-shattering discovery is a form of encryption that could never be broken by any computer, either in use to day or in the future, and you encrypt the code for said encryption with said encryption format. What happens to this earth-shattering encryption format when you delete the code for it and forget the password to the encrypted code?
"Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect." Linus Torvalds
Attach it to a deep space satelite made to look like an ordinary space rock, throw it into a wide orbit and when it gets back on a scheduled date it will broadcast your secret to everyone by unfurling a giant space banner which can be seen by half the world. If you are worried about technical failure, send out more than one in different directions with different broadcast methods.
Bill Gates himself is submitting stories to slashdot!
(For those of you who haven't read his The Road Ahead, the earlier prints contained a phrase about a "breakthough in factoring large primes" making current encryption obsolete.)
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Encode it into the "garbage" bits in your own DNA. Then, assuming you have decendents (unlikely, if you are a regular /. reader) the information will always be around. Remember, according to scientists, about 85% of the data in your DNA serves no usefull purpose -- maybe there are ALREADY messages in there!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
If you did discover something like that,
nobody would belive you anyway.
I get tones of emails anouncing most amaizing
discoveries daily.
For example, people are claiming that they can
help you loose weight, reverse aging and grow
certain parts of your body for just $19.95