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

Vaporware

[donutello]

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.

Wouldn't that depend on what you discovered?

[bons]

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.

Use Moore's Law

[solarrhino]

Encryt it with enough bits, then throw the key away. As processors continue to get faster, the time required to brute-force decrypt will drop. You can use Moore's Law to estimate when such a decrypt is likely to occur - though if your secret is big enough, you'll probably guess low. People can be very clever if they put their minds to it.

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.

Why bother?

[jandrese]

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.

Upheaval is overrated

[Fizzol]

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.

Great Question

[philipkd]

(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.

Oh, great

[robson]

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.

In which case would that actually make sense?

[gotan]

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).