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

factor large primes?

[Francis]

Hell, I can already do that.

int factorLargePrime( int largePrime ) {
return largePrime;
}

Re:factor large primes?

[Virtex]

No, you got it all wrong. The story said "factor large primes *in seconds*". Yours works in microseconds. Better to do it like this:

int factorLargePrime( int largePrime ) {
sleep( 2 );
return largePrime;
}

Re:factor large primes?

[jcoy42]

Dude! She's hot- come on, type in the rest!

Um...

[awx]

why? What have you done now? Why are you asking such an interesting question whilst chosing to remain anonymous?

Obligatory Simpsons Quote

[I Love this Company!]

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.

Re:You likely already have the channels...

[GigsVT]

And just how much equipment does it take to develop a new algorithm that could change the way the world works?

I take issue with your statement. I mean a lot of research comes from constant refinement, with billions of dollars poured into it, but these days, everyone has access to thousands of sources of information in theousands of fields for the price of an ISP account.

I'd argue that there is an effect that would make really groundbreaking discoveries more likely to come from an amateur. If something really is groundbreakingly simple to implement, then by it's nature it is something that can be discovered with little resources.

Insert obligitory reference to Apple Computer, and I rest my case.

to serve man....

[Anonymous Coward]

For example, could you bounce an electromagnetic signal describing the discovery off a celestial body several light-years away?"

that is a really stupid idea. do not, i repeat, do not give the information to an alien race first.

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.

leak it

[selectspec]

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.

social - philosophical side of the coin

[lingqi]

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)

I'll get me towel

[Subcarrier]

an Earth-Shattering Discovery

Look, it's the Vogons, isn't it?

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?

Reflections on bouncing signals

[Anonymous Coward]

For example, could you bounce an electromagnetic signal describing the discovery off a celestial body several light-years away?

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!

Advanced AI

[JohnPM]

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.