Delivering an Earth-Shattering Discovery?

Posted by Cliff on Saturday August 10, 2002 @04:16AM from the don't-panic dept.

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?"

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Re:If you figured out how to travel to the past by SN74S181 · 2002-08-10 04:43 · Score: 0, Offtopic

Well, considering that the 'time machine' concept is really sepearate from the 'parallel universes' concept, if you make a change that causes you to not invent the time machine, *foop* you would cease to exist in the form that travelled back. In other words, you wouldn't be 'trapped in the past' you would just suddenly cease to be there.

I would propose that it's likely that we've all done this an infinite number of times. Then again, I am drinking cheap WalMart 'Mountain Lightening' this morning, instead of proper Mountain Dew so my proposal may have it's flaws.