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Voyager 3
If we're going to spend the money anyway..... | |
The interstellar part of the Voyager missions included a disk with various information about our world on it in case an intelligent species happens to run across it. That way they could come say hi if we were still around, and at least know we once existed if we'd destroyed ourselves by then. A quick
summary of their progress -
"Voyager 1 will drift within 1.6 light years (9.3 trillion miles) of AC+79 3888, a star in the constellation of Camelopardalis. In some 296,000 years, Voyager 2 will pass 4.3 light years (25 trillion miles) from Sirius, the brightest star in the sky."
If we're willing to wait a couple of hundred thousand years for someone to open the time capsule the least we can do is make sure the information in it is current. The way to do this would be to create a Voyager 3 and park it in one of the two stable Lagrange points (L4 or L5). If it was solar-powered it could hang around for quite awhile. We could also send it updates as our civilization progressed.
Another thought - it could start beaming back information to us if it hadn't heard from us after a couple of thousand years. That way if we bombed ourselves back into the stone age we'd start receiving a steady stream of technological information to get us back on up on our feet faster once we'd got back to the point where we had radio again.
The disk up there now
http://voyager.jpl....raft/goldenrec.html
Our previous shot: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/goldenrec.html [longshot9999, Oct 11 2004]
BBC News: Noah's Ark plan from top Moon man
http://news.bbc.co..../nature/3635972.stm
Different tack recently proposed: create a DNA repository on the moon in case we are wiped out. [krelnik, Oct 11 2004]
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Annotation:
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That last part is the best bit of the idea - and would be worthy (for me anyway) of being a separate idea of it's own. Some repository of knowldege held in a safe location, out of reach of bombs etc that could be accessed after the dust has settled for when we step out blinking into the sunlight. [+] |
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Couldn't the internet be considered that way? |
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I like the restart industrial history part of the idea too. Any thoughts if we should broadcast all technologies at once or should we sequence the technologies? Should we limit the number of technologies so that they have the chance of developing along a different path to us? Then when they finally reach the probe, they find a few dvds stuck to the probe with velcro with all our knowledge. So giving them the chance to arrive at different solutions to similar problems. |
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Could we give them electricity before steam, glass-fibre before advanced metallurgy. What would be the most interesting sequence to select? |
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Or maybe just differential calculus and a few accurate log tables. |
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I'd suggest we start beaming technical and medical knowledge back in sequence along the critical paths of invention/discovery. Some of the less critical solutions could be left out there waiting for the revived generation to get there and find them (giving them the chance to arrive at different solutions to similar problems in areas we could afford to risk). |
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scuba - the internet would disappear between now and then if we bombed ourselves back into caves. |
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I know the Lagrange points have been investigated over the years, but I wonder if anyone has intentionally searched for small artificial objects in them yet. They may already be sitting there in quiet mode. |
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If we're communicating by radio, we probably can't influence whether they reach steam power or electricity first. And without two way communication, we couldn't control when in the lecture they'd start tuning in. |
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'A big shout going out to the Earthling Massive!. Hold it Down!' |
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Selkie - You're right about not being able to steer them towards steam or electrical power if we relied on radio to communicate. The best we could do that way would be to pick up the pace after they've invented radio. There's really two parts to the problem you pointed out though. |
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First, would it be possible for Voyager 3 to spot a pre-industrial culture while it was sitting at one of the LaGrange points? |
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Second, if it spotted signs of intelligence would it be able to decipher the language spoken by the new natives and steer them towards development? |
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The answer to the first question is probably yes. It could look for evidence of artificial structures on the surface - straight lines, clustered structures, pyramids, statues carved into mountains, etc... |
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The answer to the second question is more problematic. It would have to be able to observe the natives up close and deduce the pattern formed between their words and actions. If it was able to do that then the same lander that had been dispatched to do the listening could tell the natives what to do next (perhaps disguised as a rock or some other friendly inanimate object). It might have to perform some kind of religious ruse to get things going if it spotted the intelligent activity at an early stage. If it didn't find any activity until radio had already been invented though then it could make its presence known in a more scientific way. |
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Maybe it has already happened once, and there is a previous "Voyager" desperately trying to communicate with us. |
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Maybe Voyager 3 could project scientific diagrams (like the structure of an atom) into the new civilisation's fields. They could call them something like "crop circles". Don't know whether they could decipher them though. :) |
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[reap] excellent idea. I wonder why no
conspiracy theorists ever thought of
that explanation? The crop circles are
alien mathematical symbols being
burned into our fields from afar with an
anti-gravity force-field ray. The grand
unified theory has been there in front of
us for hundreds of years, and we never
noticed. |
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Isn't this what dogs have been trying to explain to us, for millennia? |
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Not my dog. He only scraped a third in theoretical mathematics. |
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Regarding the second problem, communicating the next technological steps the new natives should take. Instead of trying to learn their language and tell them what to do it might be better just to project a holographic image showing them what to do, at least in the early stages of their development. The holographic character should probably look like one of them and be the non-dominant gender to keep from scaring them away. We'd still have to either learn their language or teach them ours at some point in the future though in order to get across some of the more advanced topics. |
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(The more I think about this idea the more it drifts into the uncomfortable area of religion so I think I'll leave it as is for now and pursue other ideas.) |
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I know it's been done, but the monolith style of teaching less developed cultures seems like the way forward. An idea, or a nudge doesn't have to be made by handing over the instruction manual; rather it could be done by illustrating a possibility, or highlighting an otherwise invisible or unknown phenomenon. |
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Would make an excellent plot point for a book / movie / whatever, BTW. |
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"and park it in one of the two stable Lagrange points (L4 or L5)" |
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Well, if we're going to spend the money we might as well park three in Lagrange points. I figure while L4 and L5 are stable, being bowl shaped, they are also easilly targeted from earth while L2, although being saddle or valley shaped and thus unstable, is behind the moon and would take a bit more to hit with a rocket or missle of some sort. |
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And while I'm going with the idea of someone wanting to kill these "Voyager" probes off, why not put one in a comet type orbit so that it wil come by earth every few hundred years and stay far away from our fun and silly war games. |
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Or put several so that one would come past earth every hundred years and broadcast a "hello, is anybody out there" Pink Floyd-esk message and recieve and Pink Floyd-esk reply of "IS anybody IN there" |
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(note: mrdalillama has been listening to too much of "The Wall") |
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[MrDaliLlama] should definately invest some time in 'Meddle', by far the best Floyd album out there - and coincidentaly enough, containing a rather apt set of pings...However, I digress. |
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Mr [RayfordSteele] is definately onto something - of course there's the whole 2001 thing, and notions of aliens seeding the planet and coming down and teaching us to whip slaves hard enough to build massive triangular structures. BUT nothing I can remember in the realms of fiction suggests that WE should leave behind knowledge for OURSELVES. There's Leibowitz's Canticle, which is a reasonable, but rather bleak vision of the future - but I like this alot because of its skewed optimism. |
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The problem is going to come down to language and symbology. It is almost impossible for us to understand messages left for us by anyone on the planet from 1000-10000 years ago, without very specialised knowledge. Given our propensity for using increasingly unstable and specialised data storage methods I doubt we'd leave too much of use. |
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Remember punched cards? Anyone got a working reader, out there? How about 8" magnetic media? 5.25"? LS120? 78rpm records? Yet stone carvings, parchment and papyrus scrolls are quite decipherable thousands of years later, if you know what you're looking at. |
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Post-apocalyptic data recovery methods are likely to be limited in scope. I seriously doubt that DVD players will be common, or working. |
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I've often wondered what information would be most useful and beneficial if I were suddenly dropped in the 10th C AD. |
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The easiest way to teach would be through pictures showing someone doing what we want to teach people how to do - making tools, a wheel, arched bridge, mill etc... Once the civilization was advanced enough to require language in order to underdtand concepts we'd have to provide not only the data but the medium we want them to use to retrieve it. Since we won't know their language ahead of time, our computer will also have to be able to create a translation program on its own (which is beyond us at the moment but we'll get there). |
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If I were suddenly dropped back into the 10th century I'd want to know how to build electrical systems from scratch in a variety of environments. Electricity would give me the foundation for a lot of other products. The other thing I'd want to bring along is some medical knowledge, preferably enough to move me along the continuum from primitive to modern times. |
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A side issue - would the civilization restoring program be set up to apply a litmus test for emerging intelligent species, i.e - homo sapiens get help, neanderthals don't? |
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For long-term storage media, a player for a record (whether it's a 78, 33.33 etc) can be rigged up pretty easily. The problem is how to transmit useful knowledge in a sound medium when you're not sure what language (if any) the people listening are going to understand. |
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Pictures on stone tablets could do the job, but it would be very difficult to convey any more than the most basic instructions. (Imagine how one would explain, in pictures only, how to create gunpowder, or a voltaic cell for example) |
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Why would you feel it necessary to teach people to make gunpowder? |
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...They might want to blast their way into some concrete bunker, to collect supplies. Or possibly, for them to gain a technological advantage over their neighbours (should there be any) through the use of violence.
It's going to happen one way or another, and it's probably better to get it over with straight away, rather than have everything drawn out over centuries.
If a small group of people had a HUGE technological advantage over everyone else at the beginning of our civilisation, perhaps we wouldn't consider ourselves to be as bloody a race as we do. |
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Nah, after visiting countries with large amounts of underpriveleged and a few elite running the show, I doubt that would do it. |
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Relatively simple tech knowledge I would want to take back, with me:
Penicillin & sulphur drug manufacturing
Anaesthetics and analgesics
Disinfectants
Microscopy
Steel & Copper refining and basic metallurgy
Glassmaking
Concrete
Textile manufacture
Electromagnetics
Aerodynamics
Basic calculus, physics & chemistry
Rubber vulcanisation
Cartography
Stirling heat engines
Papermaking
Fertilisers & agricultural hybridisation
Animal husbandry
Printing and binding
Photography
Wind-based power generation
Radio |
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Things I would leave behind:
Petroleum fractionating
Weapons development
Internal combustion engine
Modern political science
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Of course, you would also have to be careful of feudalism and religion. They were pretty powerful forces, during the 900s. |
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It wouldn't matter what information you provided/witheld, people would use their new knowledge to subjugate their fellows. The alternative would be to ensure that everyone had the same access to the information, and thus were on a level playing-field. This would require some special delivery mechanism - perhaps huge diagrams drawn out in reflective dust on the moon? |
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It would have to be made clear early on who we were and why this information was left behind, lest those discovering it were to believe it was some gift from the gods. This could stifle rather than encourage developmental thought. |
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On what technologies to reintroduce, I'd certainly like to see more Zeppelins next time round. |
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