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Civilization has begun, blossomed and fallen many times in
human history. It is also likely that many civilizations have
fallen with no record, because no one else was around to
write it down.
We know little of what happened on Easter island, we just
have the remaining Moai, with no idea
how they were
installed or what they were really for. Speculation is still
rife with regard to the building of the pyramids*, and
interestingly there's good evidence that they were covered
in writing in multiple languages, Rosetta stone-style until
the Rashidun Caliphate arrived and barbarically looted all
the stone to build Cairo. Anyhow, the pyramids did quite
well, but ultimately failed at storing information, what is
needed is something somewhat resistant to the lower
levels of civilization that like running about with pointy
things and destroying stuff.
A good example is something like the Nazca lines. You
won't destroy them, because you can't really see them,
that is until you get above them in an aircraft. They've
lasted a long time and seem fairly destruction-resistant.
What they don't do however, is convey much in the way of
useful information. What they seem to be is a series of
animal doodles, which is actually quite funny. Ultimately
they will just erode away, so we need a better system.
So, we need a big surface, well lit & easily visible and an
erosion-free environment where people won't just steal
parts or do some farming over it. It's the moon. The moon
doesn't do much most of the time. I mean, it's lovely, it
lights up the sky at night** and it makes the tides go, but it
could do more. Perhaps it's best feature is that it's
illuminated really quite brightly by the Sun, but the angle
means it's set against a black background, it's really just a
great billboard. Even a reasonable telescope will get
staggering detail of the surface, add in a good camera and
you can obtain a HUGE amount of optical information.
Except there isn't any information, just a lot of craters, so
let's change that with a fleet of Lunar rovers. The idea
would be to encode information at various scales. The first
scale, visible with the naked eye, would have some simple
info an early civilization might make use of: A diagram of
the Solar system, number of days/year & perhaps some
basic geometry. Then, a diagram of a telescope.
Once your civilization is building telescopes, they will find
the much smaller, detailed information: there's plenty of
space for significant mathematics and physics concepts***.
Before you know it, the nascent civilization will be filtering
light for IR&UV for additional layers of info, ultimately,
there will be an arrow pointing to a buried selection of
resources needed for the very pinnacle of civilization, such
as instructions on how to make a really nice cup of tea.
*Although, thinking about it... IS there much of a mystery,
or do some people really WANT there to be a mystery?
"How did ancient people with no iron tools cut and move
such massive stone blocks?" "Dunno, but the Greeks did it,
the Romans did it, even the Welsh managed at Stonehenge
and it was probably raining the whole time. Could it be
that people who built absolutely loads of stuff out of stone
got good at it? I mean, look at the wood construction &
carving in some Renaissance-era Churches, then try and get
a quote from your local joiner."
**Sometimes
***Although these formulae are really neat and useful, we
also know them to be wrong and incompatible with the
observed universe, this is as annoying to us as it is likely to
be to you.
FOGBANK
https://en.wikipedi...%20is%20classified. [bs0u0155, Mar 25 2021]
Cerne Abbas Giant
https://en.wikipedi...i/Cerne_Abbas_Giant [Skewed, Mar 25 2021]
Similar...
Guide_20to_20Rebuilding_20Society We've discussed this general idea before... [neutrinos_shadow, Mar 26 2021]
Shake and vac
https://www.bing.co...3&FORM=VIRE&PC=U316 [not_morrison_rm, Mar 27 2021]
Moon meteorite rate
https://www.forbes....on/?sh=444378e16f2b [bs0u0155, Mar 30 2021]
[link]
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Have you considered that life on earth is merely a self-renewing backup of tea recipes from some far superior extraterrestrial civilisation? |
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Tea, especially after something salty like a full English
breakfast, is quite obviously suspicious in it's greatness.
Maybe we should check in case the tea bush encodes Pi in
the leaf structure or something. |
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How would you tell if it was the tea DNA encoding pi, or the digits of pi encoding the DNA of the tea plant? |
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But dont you know that NASA says they lost the
technology on how to get to the moon!? |
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//But by the time we can engineer something on that
scale,// |
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It's not actually that hard. Just expensive. We have had
SUV-sized rovers running about on Mars for ages. They
even last for years and years, the moon is a lot easier -
more sun, fewer dust storms. All they have to do is drive
around raking the regolith into patterns according to GPS
(which apparently works on the moon). The key is getting
started before the ad people. |
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//NASA says they lost the technology on how to get to the
moon!?// |
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Ahhh.... if only politics and general human short-termism
could take a break from something. There's such a thing
as institutional knowledge, & perhaps more accurately
wisdom. There's such a thing as knowledge that lives in
people's heads and either isn't written down carefully, or
can't be. The end of Apollo & the end of Concorde were
big shiny, obvious regressions in human capability, but the
same basic process is happening constantly. We know it
happens, can we not budget for this at the start? Nuclear
has to budget for long term clean up costs, can't big
science/tech projects budget for finding a mechanism of
making the lessons learned stick around a bit longer? It
would end up being cheaper to pay a couple of old hands
to maintain a sort of working museum version of the
project? |
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When we lose this kind of knowlege as a project winds
down and the staff disperse, we only have to pay to learn
it all again. For example, "Fogbank" <link> |
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I'm into it. But what about the fact that the moon's orbit is
slowly decaying? If it crashes into the Earth, bye-bye backup.
To be safe, we should slap some rockets on the moon and
send it off into deep space. |
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//fact that the moon's orbit is slowly decaying?// |
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That would be a great fact if it wasn't the opposite of true. |
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//That would be a great fact if it wasn't the opposite of
true.// |
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Don't mind me, just getting my daily quota of incorrect facts
out. |
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You want to scribble on the moon? |
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OK that's not what I was expecting. |
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I thought this was going
to be about a lunar bunker housing a really big server or
something. |
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//The first scale, visible with the naked eye, would have
some simple info an early civilization might make use of// |
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There's not really much you can scrawl on the moon in a
readably large font that would actually convey any
particularly useful information other than "Hey! look at
this!" |
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I suggest a giant smiley face. |
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That should make them look. |
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Anything else will need a telescope but at least that'll get
their attention in the first place. |
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Alternatively a rendition of the Cerne Abbas Giant, with a
bigger member, that should really get their attention, you
can have his left hand pointing to the start of the actual
text for when they get big enough telescopes. |
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I gigantic eyeball looking down, that'll get their attention. |
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Oh, and; "That would be a great fact if it wasn't the opposite of true." [marked-for-tagline] |
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//gigantic eyeball// the Cerne Abbas Giant giant still gets my
vote, two
gigantic balls, gotta be better than one. |
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The Man in the Moon came down too soon
And asked the way to Norwich. |
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D R I N K Y O U R O V A L A T I N E ! |
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"3001: The Final Odyssey" included a vault (Pico
Vault) on the moon built for storage of computer
viruses, which in the book is used for storing a
digital backup copy of some humans as one
consequence of the battle against the black
monoliths. |
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What if the monoliths are just a 12U 19" Rackmount server,
viewed by people who don't know a server when they're
looking at it? |
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This is fine until some meteor overwrites the first 5
digits of pi |
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"My God, it's full of Das Blinkenlights!" |
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//This is fine until some meteor overwrites the first 5 digits of pi// Holographic encoding? |
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All of the worst stuff could be bounced to the dark side. |
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Actually this is a valid concern because the moon's surface is not static long term. Over thousands of years the micro-impacts will obliterate any messages. Though eventually the sun will become a red giant and destroy the inner planets, and then finally there's the heat death of the universe, which solves all our problems. |
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By some bizarre accident, all the data gets
overwritten by shake and vac
advertisement.See below. |
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The information itself would have to be dynamic. Autonomous eternal moonrocks fighting the big fight. |
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[wjt] see my first comment on this idea. We have come full circle. Is this how it is meant to work? |
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// the moon's surface is not static long term. Over
thousands of years the micro-impacts will obliterate any
messages.// |
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Well, taking a look at <link> it is stable over a long time.
If you expect one musketball sized meteor per 750m2 per
millennium that's less than one comma per A4 sheet per
1000 years. That's better than any data storage I can
think of. Especially as impacts are obvious in form and
you could reasonably interpret around them. Plus, the
situation is getting exponentially better since the planets
are progressively clearing the orbits. |
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I will wholeheartedly support this idea on the proviso that it
is renamed to "Ex-Planetary Notes". (tee hee) |
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To mitigate against the risk of data loss from micro-meteor
impacts some redundancy of storage needs to be built in. In
the same way that RAID configurations of hard disks provide
good levels of redundancy and resilience to data loss, RAIM
configurations of moons will do the same for this mode of
data storage. The only remaining question will be about
which RAID model (RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 2, ... , RAID 6)
should be used. |
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//that's less than one comma per A4 sheet per 1000 years// |
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So like the spec of fly doodoo mistaken for part of a word
that
adjusted the meaning of the descriptive for Mary from
one meaning a young woman or girl to that meaning a
virgin
in
early translations from a Hebrew text to Latin? (which may
just be an urban myth of course but it nicely demonstrates
the principle). |
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A mere comma can potentially change the course of
religions, or even
start them. |
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Minor things can have major effects, |
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//Skew, ed// So, if [Skew] is merely the editor, who is the actual author of this comment? We need to start investigating. |
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It's an urban myth. Carry on. |
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It has all the hallmarks of one, never mattered enough
to me to be bothered check, still a nice example
though, even if it's not :) |
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I'm not certain you're going to be condensing data to a size 12
pixel font. And musketballs moving at incredible speeds can
leave craters much larger than them. |
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//RAIM configurations of moons will do the same for this
mode of data storage. The only remaining question will
be about which RAID model (RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 2, ... ,
RAID 6) should be used.// |
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There's an air(vacuum)-gapped backup on Tycho. |
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//And musketballs moving at incredible speeds can leave
craters much larger than them.// |
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This is true, it looks like a more or less linear relationship
between crater size and impact speed, but I maintain
that A: meteorite impacts aren't common and are getting
less so. 2: An impact crater looks like an impact crater,
anyone sophisticated enough to be looking at the smaller
stuff isn't going to be misled. If you shot a hole through a
book, you'd know well enough that the hole has destroyed
some information, you're not going to misinterpret it,
rather try and work around the missing info, or
reconstruct it from context. |
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We need to have [Alterother] return to the Bakery so he can
shoot musketballs through books and report back. |
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//We have come full circle//
Yes, 3.141592653.... but should throw up a little cross logic of life, making a Q. |
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