Delivering an Earth-Shattering Discovery? 620
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?"
Just make sure... (Score:2, Interesting)
Any others?
-Matt
Re:You likely already have the channels... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Credibility and procrastination, aka "crackpot" (Score:2, Interesting)
For example:
"I have discovered a source of energy that does not create light or heat, is infinitely renewable, and costs less per Joule than a stick of gum to produce. I can't tell you what it is for a few years, but I CAN tell you that it will throw everything into disarray (socially and economically)...you'd better start preparing."
The reaction of the world at large could be summed up in a single word: "Crackpot".
Nobody would take you seriously until you revealed the device (and thus "proved" your crackpot theory) -- then all hell would break loose as the energy mogul equivalent of the RIAA tried you keep people from sharing this cheap energy source with heavy political donations and an "energy bandit" media campaign.
Re:You likely already have the channels... (Score:3, Interesting)
Their single board computer (the Apple 1) wasn't a whole lot different than several others that entered the market at about the same time.
Apple's 'Great Success' came about because the Apple 2 was the exclusive platform for VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet, for it's first year on the market. Businessmen would walk into a computer store and say 'I want to buy a VisiCalc' not knowing, or caring, that the machine they were sold had an Apple logo on it.
Big loopy yarns of myth have been floofed all around to obscure this simple reason for Apple Computer's early success.
To wrap back to the discussion in progress and keep this from being off topic: there weren't any groundbreaking discoveries by amateurs at Apple when the company was starting. The BigBoard, the TRS-80 Model 1, and various other machines implement the same low-cost single-board design. It's important to make a distinction between 'groundbreaking discoveries' and 'marketing phenomena.'
Re:Right... (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, unless they were listening on exactly the right frequenct at exactly the right moment (and in the line of sight, if you choose to tightbeam it*), it won't them any good. After all, that tiny pulse of information is going away at the speed of light -- it's not like anyone could catch up with it.
Unless your earth-shattering discovery is a faster-than-light drive, of course.
* and you would tightbeam it, since signal spread will kill you with omnidirectional broadcasting, whereas simply diffraction spreading will ensure that any "tight" beam you generate will be big enough to hit a star by the time it reaches one, so it can be reflected...)
Re:If you figured out how to travel to the past (Score:1, Interesting)
It is more likely that for an infinitely large instant in time you will instantaneously be in both situations. After all, by travelling back and stopping yourself, you must have used the time machine. By preventing your creation, you cannot travel back. You cause a total paradox and the end of time in whatever dimension you are in. Mind you, the 'loop' isn't experiencable like a science fiction author would assume, it's an instantaneous occurance, so immediately causes the problem. Besides, nobody could possibly know it was occuring anyway, so even if it did repeat, it would repeat forever.
Now that's not a problem, since it's also entirely impossible for it to happen. How do I know? Well, you can't travel back in time. Just assume that and you'll be fine. More proof needed? Well we're all still here. If we're not the next instant, we know someone managed it, which I doubt they can.
And nobody talk about the universe being 'self healing'.
Time is a magnificent thing, and it is entirely dependant on everything around it, but it doesn't really exist in a linear fashion so there's no going back.
Confused sufficiently yet?
leak it (Score:5, Interesting)
social - philosophical side of the coin (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
Algorithm (Score:2, Interesting)
algorithm = blowfish; hard to optimize in hardware, nothing better than brute force known
b = number of key bits for which average brute-force time is "short" (12-168 hours), assuming a large distributed effort
t = average brute-force time for b bits
T = delay until message should be revealed
N = T / t
choose b, t, N so that 50 <= N <= 200
smaller N means smaller final message
larger N means less variation of delay
inner_msg = cleartext
for i = 1 to N publish final outer_msg, scheme, parameters, cracking program
Even if most people don't take it seriously, a few will. Of course then it'll take much longer. For T over a few years, factor in Moore's law.
Reflections on bouncing signals (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [syr.edu] 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 [pbs.org] 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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Wouldn't that depend on what you discovered? (Score:3, Interesting)
When you use a time machine you change history a little bit. These changes continue until one of the changes "uninvents" the time machine.
What if it's NOT "Just for Fun" (Score:2, Interesting)
to secure the rights
get the financing
pull together a company
to turn the discovery
into a profitable business model
If you don't... someone will.
Earth shattering discoveries are like that...
they create wealth
Bell Telepone,
Edison Electric,
Ford Motors
Linux
Sig: gotta light?
Send it on a ship with a long eliptical orbit (Score:2, Interesting)
Many of you are probably aware of the Voyager spacecrafts, and the laserdisks of information that were burned and then attached to them. Put your information on a CD (preferably more than one to reduce the risk of media failure), and attach to a probe that you send to an outer planet with a return orbit.
Basically the cost is in the CD (minimal) and the alteration to a ship that was going to go one way to be captured in a slingshot manuever and come back around in the appropriate timeframe.
one real possibility (Score:2, Interesting)
Launch a spacecraft with the information away from Earth. Inform the world of what you've done when the spacecraft is far enough away to be irretrievable with current technology. As technology advances, humans develop ability to retrieve spacecraft. There are two problems:
There is no solution to the first problem. To solve the second, you need to leave convincing evidence that retrieving the spacecraft will be worthwhile. Whether this is possible depends on your invention.
topic (Score:2, Interesting)