Stranger_On_A_Train:
I personally prefer to store my most important work as references to the appropriate string of digits within a transcendental number. For instance, I once embedded the entire text of King Lear in Gelfond’s Constant. I won’t tell you where to start looking, but I will say it is somewhere after 10[sup]31[/sup] digits.
I think you’d be lucky if the length of the reference was any shorter than the length of the text. If your reference degraded you might find it pointing to a Danielle Steele novel.
Todderbob:
What about making the text increasingly smaller, with the intent that the smaller the text, the more advanced the technology.
How to build an A-bomb, for instance, should probably be buried in the ultra fine print, where how to purify water, make penicillin and the concepts of the scientific method could be right on the index.
Yes. Put the A-bomb in the text requiring scanning tunneling microscopes.
Kinthalis:
Wasn’t this a Star Trek episode? I think some scientist/archeologist told Picard about finding a buried message on the DNA of several species. Apparently some alien civilization seeded various worlds with their genetic material (which explained why there were so many humanoid races), and embedded a message in the DNA structure.
I think it was a brief hello and please help each other out since you’re all related to each other through us.
I think it was: “Be excellent to each other.” Or was that Bill and Ted?
Stranger_On_A_Train:
But DNA is ultimately fungible. Although you can embed it in the apparently functionless nucleotide sequences, this may interfere with replication, and you would have to have numerous alleles so that historians can make a statistical analysis to figure out the original message.
I personally prefer to store my most important work as references to the appropriate string of digits within a transcendental number. For instance, I once embedded the entire text of King Lear in Gelfond’s Constant. I won’t tell you where to start looking, but I will say it is somewhere after 10[sup]31[/sup] digits. I once stored a critical term paper in an Einstein-Bose condensate matrix, but it collapsed into randomness when I accidentally spilled a cup of tea on it.
Stranger
What if they use Base Four?
Another advantage of putting it on the Moon is that you can make it easy to find. Dig a huge bullseye into the surface and it’ll remain visible for a very long time, and I expect that any human culture even one that has lost all knowledge of our conventions would look at the center of a bunch of concentric circles.
Kinthalis:
Wasn’t this a Star Trek episode? I think some scientist/archeologist told Picard about finding a buried message on the DNA of several species. Apparently some alien civilization seeded various worlds with their genetic material (which explained why there were so many humanoid races), and embedded a message in the DNA structure.
Yes, but the idea is older than that. For example, I recall a novel called Neverness where there was a message hidden in the “junk” DNA, engineered into it by a superior being. The message as it turned out was important information on how to go about becoming a superior being.
The D.O.E. needs long-lived messages that don’t rely on English . (Perhaps someone has a better cite for info on that project.)