801–810 of 825 posts
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I recall some scifi where some Diety/SuperAI left 'commandments' for humanity carved into giant monuments made of diamond. I presume that was considered the only thing that would survive deep time.
Eschaton in Singularitys Sky? "You shall not meddle with the lightcone of the recursive time-travelling super-intelligence you created?"
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My favorite weird theory is the "Siluran hypothesis," which states that our industrial revolution was not the first. There are some events in sediment that look like what our industrial revolution will look like. (many millions of years ago, so yes, reptiles)
Yes. Trying to grasp a time span of one million years feels impossible, in the context of development of culture and technology. It seems quite unlikely to me that we are the first such development on this rock.
Go to a big legal firm that's been around for at least a few hundred years. With them, set up a trust with a sufficient endowment to be run indefinitely (barring total societal or economic collapse), with the mission of maintaining this specific website in accessible format (including updates and format shifts as necessary). It will be expensive, but this general structure is already used by various organizations wit…
You get clues from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies
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Short story where SETI programmers turn new message hunting code on archived files and it detects a message in the human genome rather than in radio signals from the cosmos: https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/sftriple/gpic.html ( https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/252832/short-story... )
I really wish someone would make a good sci-fi movie around stories like this. No space lasers or wormholes, just high concept stories
My grandpa had an old record player that included a "16 2/3 rpm" speed setting (33 1/3 divided by 2) which was apparently used for 2-hour spoken word performances (think audiobooks, comedy shows...)
Any recent format for storing video, audio, and even text is lkely to be undecipherable in a matter of decades.
Sure, we can play Dungeon (1975) today with relative ease. Most won't. But what about all the other games that probably survived but nobody knows about, because they weren't historically significant enough?
This probably goes for any cultural articact music, writing, paintings.
It becomes lost, if not physically, then in the giant volume of knowledge that exists in the world, but nobody knows about.
A poem, in an ASCII file, on an obsolete file system, in some disk image with an operating system for an architecture not produces in a hundred years, that could be emulated by an emulator for another architecture no produces in a hundred years, now residing on some medium, on some machine, somewhere, all will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
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That assumes language will continue to evolve the same way now as it did 1,000 years ago. Back then everyone couldn't read and people were separated. With mass media that's no longer the case.
Compare your texting to 18th century personal letters. I don't disagree, but language will still evolve significantly. Perhaps our developer docs will come to be seen as some kind of rare "Formal English" (I mean, it kind of is already) and the rest of communication will be in ... emoji??
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Short story where SETI programmers turn new message hunting code on archived files and it detects a message in the human genome rather than in radio signals from the cosmos: https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/sftriple/gpic.html ( https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/252832/short-story... )
I really wish someone would make a good sci-fi movie around stories like this. No space lasers or wormholes, just high concept stories
If you don't mind them being shorts, there are some good sci-fi stories on the Dust and Omeleto channels on YouTube. e.g. this "One Minute Time Machine" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBkBS4O3yvY - has just two people, a bench, and a Time MacGuffin.
Or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOwKExagzdQ - "The Tunnel Ahead", 15 minute short set in an overpopulated world.
I do feel that many include space because it's fun and can be CGI modelled, or time travel because it makes for a cheap sci-fi plot, and if you rule those out you get things like The OceanMaker ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWCGK4nneeU ) which I didn't like so much because nothing really happens. Whether there are more concepty ones with more nuanced plot, they probably didn't catch my eye to watch.