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?"

Comments

Re:factor large primes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Think about the factors of a prime number-- AKA the number itself and 1.

Spaces bounce not an answer

[jeffpostcn]

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.

Rivest on Time-Lock Cryptography

[Bingo Foo]

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?

Re:Vaporware

[Floody]

Amway doesn't work, never has and never will.

All MLMs are pyramid schemes, in sheep's clothing. They can never work because they ignore the single most important business factor: suppy and demand, specifically market saturation.

In order to for a business venture to be successful, it must determine with *enough accuracy* (enough depending on competition, profit margin, etc) how much product the market will bear in a given sales cycle. Product produced (or procured) over and above this magic number is loss (i.e. you're oversaturating the market). This magic number is never infinite, because in any given market it can be guaranteed that not everyone will buy the product.

MLMs pay no heed to this, and have no control or decision making process which determines where the market saturation point is. Thus they all inherently oversaturate and fail, at least for all except the top levels of the pyramid.