It's true. Amortizing an estimated $40 billion in cash reserves over 15 years indicates an after distributions and taxes profit in excess of $7 million per day.
It all sounds good until some griefer spends six weeks amassing a bunch of building blocks and the rare "Cone of Zeus", and constructs a giant phallus on the front of the spaceship.
Ironically, this is evidence [b]of the hellish power of social engineering ideas to mutilate society[/b], something of tremendous concern about incoming messages. Forget the silly "buffer overrun" crap -- "provable utopia" via distribution of plans to a few high-WOW-factor tech tidbits will do a lot to convince society to adopt the suggested course of action on politics from the aliens.
> Can you infect Egyptian papyrus rolls with a computer virus?
No, but words on an Egyptian papyrus roll can infect the papyrus roll readers with ideas.
> Of course, we can know: whether you can attack a computer > system through a particular choice of input data is a mathematical > problem; if it's not possible, it's simply not possible.
But proving it's not possible is the problem. To some problems, there are no solutions substantially better than "try all possibilities", which is impossible in practice for most systems.
And, of course, the most likely attack is "programming" the papyrus readers, not the papyrus itself. Quiet suggestions as to how awesome life would be, this, this, and this, of only you'd do that, that, and that, which actually causes problems x, y, and z.
Our own civilization shows every evidence that this is not the case, that there will always be power hungry people who will take advantage of their ability to yammer and get you to follow them.
But they know ways to exploit our ancient tech that we may not imagine, nor possibly even could imagine.
Proofs from Trek are accepted around here, so here's one: Remember the Next Gen episode where Geordi looks up in their database a way to see through ancient (i.e. TOS-era) cloaking tech? Or Data comes up with a solution to defeat the impossible-to-defeat Picard maneuver?)
We know lead pipes are a bad idea. We know gunpowder can be made from easily-available material (or at least easy-to-make via Roman level tech.) A well-crafted one-page document + a few months would allow any civilization contemporary to the Romans to destroy the Romans. Here's how to make/harvest charcoal, saltpeter, and sulfur. Mix in this ratio. Make a huge, honkin', thick tube with your crappy bronze, stuff it in followed by a giant ball, light and run. Reduce walls to rubble over weeks. Small versions with 1/4" pellets are nice, too, and can be carried around.
Iron, and maybe even steel, might be easy-to-describe, too, to say nothing of a steam engine.
Yes. It's the social engineering aspect of the message that'll be far more dangerous, and insidious.
Believe in the politics or religion, or not, things like communism, socialism, "long live the king!", "Jesus saves!", etc. are highly effective at spreading and molding society.
So a bunch of stories about how great galactic civilization is, and here's how we out here live, would be very convincing to mold the low tech society into something the aliens desire.
I can think of three Trek episodes where this happened accidentally -- Nazis, "Coms vs. Yangs" (Communists vs. Yankees), and the Vic Tayback Express, i.e. the 1930's mobster world.
> But remember, ordinary unmotivated computer and biological viruses are very common!
Biological, yeah, but I'd love to hear of an accidental computer one that was not malicious nor an accidental experiment that got out. (Not doubting you, I've just never heard of one.)
The closest I can think of that aren't malicious are emails of old wives' tales that quickly rise to meme status and live forever since someone's always passing them on via forwarding.
And that's the flaw in your B2-Bomber-argument. The aliens would be stuck with using our (extremely primitive) technology. We know pretty well how our computers work, and can figure out most ways to break/hack/crack them ourselves in a short timespan.
Gunpowder could have been produced from readily available materials, or at least the materials engineering they would need to send with the message is well within Roman tech levels, i.e. no big whoop.
From there, cannon to reduce the wall, just as happened to castles once cannon were actually invented 1000 years later.
And that's just one. God knows how many chemical compounds they could produce as part of readily available materials, distributed to their people, that then cause cancer or heart disease or whatnot, preferrably with a 20 year lag before symptoms.
> You also have a flaw in your reasoning that the > alien level of technology would be greater than ours. > It could be the same or even a little less. Radio has been around a bit.
Yes, but statistically it would not be. With a universe billions of years old, the likelihood an "at least radio" level of tech civilization being less than us, say, within 100 years earlier is very small considering there are billions of years after radio level tech that they might be.
Actually, there are modern real examples of lost technology. Super high fat content diets to help control seizures was a developed tech last century that was forgotten for fifty years. I think that Lorenzo's Oil was a similar story.
> We know pretty well how our computers work, and > can figure out most ways to break/hack/crack them ourselves in a short timespan.
"Here ya go, Romans. Plans for nice lead water pipes to everyone's house!"
It's a bad example, but there ya go. (And some historians believe lead pipes in the houses of Romans helped lead to what used to be called idiocy, helping to the decay of the civilization.)
Why bother differentiating? Why not just torch any civilization they come across?
If the other guys are good, nothing to worry about.
If they're bad:
1. Other good guys frighten them, and need to be exterminated 2. Other bad guys frighten them, and need to be exterminated
Why differentiate based on level of tech? All you're doing is taking a risk by putting off the inevitable conflict.
The only reasonable possibility is that they're bad guys, and are afraid of others, good or bad, who are ahed of them technologically, because an attack might very well fail, so why try? But if that's the case, and they determine they are lagging behind the civ. they just discovered, then they would also realize the handwriting is on the wall for inevitable conflict vs. a superior new foe, good or bad.
Actually, the "virus" part in such a SETI message might very well be a social engineering enterprise. As suggested in Contact, maybe they do "fax down these plans; we poor saps build the thing and blow ourselves to kingdom come."
That's a much more realistic scenario, and will easily "get out into the wild", no matter how isolated such computers (and personnel) are kept.
It's similar to building a perfect jail -- regardless of how physically secure it is, as long as the captive can talk to the jailer, there's an escape possibility.
Think Silence of the Lambs. Now multiply it by ten billion years of experience and testing.
Nah, this code-based virus is a chimera. It's the social engineering content of the message we have to worry about.
It does, however, reference 3001: The Final Odyssey, in which evil genius hackers in an insane criminal asylum, build code that will do this; however, the story also suggests Bowman gives them some limited info on how the monolith builders' computers worked.
> Frankly, I'm more worried about some phishing malcontent then I am > about the Grays, but maybe that's just me.
Frankly, I'm more worried about the government keeping the signal to itself than about it getting out in the general public. The design for a hyper-intelligent AI that can be enslaved by someone in power to use it to gain control of the Earth, or, hell, just a personal force field and ray gun, for god's sake.
Study after study showed that, once you took into account the cost of additional training, and of lost productivity, that Macs were actually significantly cheaper than PCs to the company.
Well, remember when the aliens tried to kill us all on July 3rd a few years ago? Yet because they had a collective mind race (or at least a psychic race where no one could hide thoughts) they never had any problems with computer security.
And need I remind you, because of that, it sucked to be them!
Mr. Thatcher: Kane! You lost $391 million last year! How long do you expect to keep this up?
Kane: Yes, I lost $391 million last year. I expect to lose $391 million this year. I expect to lose $391 million next year. You know what, Mr. Thatcher? At the rate of $391 million a year, I'll have to close this place...in two hundred and sixty years!
I have looked into this a couple of months ago -- and ran away screaming at all I had to do to migrate to BIONIC.
I've got the Seti current client. I should just have a button to push. I shouldn't have to re-create accounts and step through all kinds of crap that only a programmer would love, or think up and would embarass the hell out any programmer with GUI/HMI training in the 21st century.
Yes, I know they're largely a volunteer organization. And that affects my observation just how? If they wanna have lots of people, they've gotta move some ass to make it more user friendly to switch. I care not that the underlying mechanism of distributed computing is changing.
Oh, wait! I forgot. As long as the socialist dream of lording over the entire planet is met, then it'll be impossible for a neighboring society to advance past us and "loot Rome" (or Washington, London, and Paris).
Yep, what a world to desire -- nowhere to escape to so no one can possibly supplant you.
Slashdot Mirror
It's true. Amortizing an estimated $40 billion in cash reserves over 15 years indicates an after distributions and taxes profit in excess of $7 million per day.
> My friend's solution? Death camps. Round up
> the sick, the lame, the infertile, the ignorant,
> the useless, the unproductive and execute them.
This works. It's just not nice, which is why civilized societies don't do it.
It all sounds good until some griefer spends six weeks amassing a bunch of building blocks and the rare "Cone of Zeus", and constructs a giant phallus on the front of the spaceship.
"Most development projects don't need hard real time." -- Microsoft
Are we sure missle defense is one of them?
Ironically, this is evidence [b]of the hellish power of social engineering ideas to mutilate society[/b], something of tremendous concern about incoming messages. Forget the silly "buffer overrun" crap -- "provable utopia" via distribution of plans to a few high-WOW-factor tech tidbits will do a lot to convince society to adopt the suggested course of action on politics from the aliens.
> Can you infect Egyptian papyrus rolls with a computer virus?
No, but words on an Egyptian papyrus roll can infect the papyrus roll readers with ideas.
> Of course, we can know: whether you can attack a computer
> system through a particular choice of input data is a mathematical
> problem; if it's not possible, it's simply not possible.
But proving it's not possible is the problem. To some problems, there are no solutions substantially better than "try all possibilities", which is impossible in practice for most systems.
And, of course, the most likely attack is "programming" the papyrus readers, not the papyrus itself. Quiet suggestions as to how awesome life would be, this, this, and this, of only you'd do that, that, and that, which actually causes problems x, y, and z.
Our own civilization shows every evidence that this is not the case, that there will always be power hungry people who will take advantage of their ability to yammer and get you to follow them.
I.e. it's not evolving out of society.
But they know ways to exploit our ancient tech that we may not imagine, nor possibly even could imagine.
Proofs from Trek are accepted around here, so here's one: Remember the Next Gen episode where Geordi looks up in their database a way to see through ancient (i.e. TOS-era) cloaking tech? Or Data comes up with a solution to defeat the impossible-to-defeat Picard maneuver?)
We know lead pipes are a bad idea. We know gunpowder can be made from easily-available material (or at least easy-to-make via Roman level tech.) A well-crafted one-page document + a few months would allow any civilization contemporary to the Romans to destroy the Romans. Here's how to make/harvest charcoal, saltpeter, and sulfur. Mix in this ratio. Make a huge, honkin', thick tube with your crappy bronze, stuff it in followed by a giant ball, light and run. Reduce walls to rubble over weeks. Small versions with 1/4" pellets are nice, too, and can be carried around.
Iron, and maybe even steel, might be easy-to-describe, too, to say nothing of a steam engine.
Yes. It's the social engineering aspect of the message that'll be far more dangerous, and insidious.
Believe in the politics or religion, or not, things like communism, socialism, "long live the king!", "Jesus saves!", etc. are highly effective at spreading and molding society.
So a bunch of stories about how great galactic civilization is, and here's how we out here live, would be very convincing to mold the low tech society into something the aliens desire.
I can think of three Trek episodes where this happened accidentally -- Nazis, "Coms vs. Yangs" (Communists vs. Yankees), and the Vic Tayback Express, i.e. the 1930's mobster world.
> But remember, ordinary unmotivated computer and biological viruses are very common!
Biological, yeah, but I'd love to hear of an accidental computer one that was not malicious nor an accidental experiment that got out. (Not doubting you, I've just never heard of one.)
The closest I can think of that aren't malicious are emails of old wives' tales that quickly rise to meme status and live forever since someone's always passing them on via forwarding.
Gunpowder could have been produced from readily available materials, or at least the materials engineering they would need to send with the message is well within Roman tech levels, i.e. no big whoop.
From there, cannon to reduce the wall, just as happened to castles once cannon were actually invented 1000 years later.
And that's just one. God knows how many chemical compounds they could produce as part of readily available materials, distributed to their people, that then cause cancer or heart disease or whatnot, preferrably with a 20 year lag before symptoms.
> You also have a flaw in your reasoning that the
> alien level of technology would be greater than ours.
> It could be the same or even a little less. Radio has been around a bit.
Yes, but statistically it would not be. With a universe billions of years old, the likelihood an "at least radio" level of tech civilization being less than us, say, within 100 years earlier is very small considering there are billions of years after radio level tech that they might be.
Actually, there are modern real examples of lost technology. Super high fat content diets to help control seizures was a developed tech last century that was forgotten for fifty years. I think that Lorenzo's Oil was a similar story.
> We know pretty well how our computers work, and
> can figure out most ways to break/hack/crack them ourselves in a short timespan.
"Here ya go, Romans. Plans for nice lead water pipes to everyone's house!"
It's a bad example, but there ya go. (And some historians believe lead pipes in the houses of Romans helped lead to what used to be called idiocy, helping to the decay of the civilization.)
Why bother differentiating? Why not just torch any civilization they come across?
If the other guys are good, nothing to worry about.
If they're bad:
1. Other good guys frighten them, and need to be exterminated
2. Other bad guys frighten them, and need to be exterminated
Why differentiate based on level of tech? All you're doing is taking a risk by putting off the inevitable conflict.
The only reasonable possibility is that they're bad guys, and are afraid of others, good or bad, who are ahed of them technologically, because an attack might very well fail, so why try? But if that's the case, and they determine they are lagging behind the civ. they just discovered, then they would also realize the handwriting is on the wall for inevitable conflict vs. a superior new foe, good or bad.
So again, why differentiate if they are evil?
Actually, the "virus" part in such a SETI message might very well be a social engineering enterprise. As suggested in Contact, maybe they do "fax down these plans; we poor saps build the thing and blow ourselves to kingdom come."
That's a much more realistic scenario, and will easily "get out into the wild", no matter how isolated such computers (and personnel) are kept.
It's similar to building a perfect jail -- regardless of how physically secure it is, as long as the captive can talk to the jailer, there's an escape possibility.
Think Silence of the Lambs. Now multiply it by ten billion years of experience and testing.
Nah, this code-based virus is a chimera. It's the social engineering content of the message we have to worry about.
**** Mild spoiler ****
It does, however, reference 3001: The Final Odyssey, in which evil genius hackers in an insane criminal asylum, build code that will do this; however, the story also suggests Bowman gives them some limited info on how the monolith builders' computers worked.
> Frankly, I'm more worried about some phishing malcontent then I am
> about the Grays, but maybe that's just me.
Frankly, I'm more worried about the government keeping the signal to itself than about it getting out in the general public. The design for a hyper-intelligent AI that can be enslaved by someone in power to use it to gain control of the Earth, or, hell, just a personal force field and ray gun, for god's sake.
Study after study showed that, once you took into account the cost of additional training, and of lost productivity, that Macs were actually significantly cheaper than PCs to the company.
And that bought Jackvs Sqvatvs.
Nah, we can always open our bag of tricks and actually build a cobalt bomb "continent buster".
Well, remember when the aliens tried to kill us all on July 3rd a few years ago? Yet because they had a collective mind race (or at least a psychic race where no one could hide thoughts) they never had any problems with computer security.
And need I remind you, because of that, it sucked to be them!
Well, good old Gordo Cooper's got the wrong stuff as far as aliens go, too. So there is precidence.
Nah, it's all about the bastards lining up to be the, for one, the ones who welcome our new ant overlords.
Hell, if Christians are lucky, the aliens won't arrive and smash all their idols and make them worship new gods.
If we're lucky, they won't be foolishly worshing any leftover caveman day ignorosavage fantasies about how the universe came to be.
If we're lucky.
Very lucky...
Mr. Thatcher: Kane! You lost $391 million last year! How long do you expect to keep this up?
Kane: Yes, I lost $391 million last year. I expect to lose $391 million this year. I expect to lose $391 million next year. You know what, Mr. Thatcher? At the rate of $391 million a year, I'll have to close this place...in two hundred and sixty years!
Cue horns: wah wah wah wah waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh
I have looked into this a couple of months ago -- and ran away screaming at all I had to do to migrate to BIONIC.
I've got the Seti current client. I should just have a button to push. I shouldn't have to re-create accounts and step through all kinds of crap that only a programmer would love, or think up and would embarass the hell out any programmer with GUI/HMI training in the 21st century.
Yes, I know they're largely a volunteer organization. And that affects my observation just how? If they wanna have lots of people, they've gotta move some ass to make it more user friendly to switch. I care not that the underlying mechanism of distributed computing is changing.
And yet, the two best games ever, Sacrifice and Total Annihilation, had one expansion pack between them and no sequels.
And no, TA: Kingdoms doesn't count.
Oh, wait! I forgot. As long as the socialist dream of lording over the entire planet is met, then it'll be impossible for a neighboring society to advance past us and "loot Rome" (or Washington, London, and Paris).
Yep, what a world to desire -- nowhere to escape to so no one can possibly supplant you.