They have 20 GB? I downloaded the entire English wiki 4 years ago (just the text of articles, not photos) and it was 12 GB.
Now it's ~55 GB uncompressed and as you said that's without images, audio, and more.
So go with the four-years-ago version.
Wikipedia to the Moon
61–70 of 88 posts
Re: Wikipedia to the Moon
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nah, the aliens are bound to have tons of post-doc archaeologists looking for faculty positions.
Besides, you have all the character bios for the full Marvel universe(s)... I'm only half being sarcastic, as I've gotten lost in some of those articles trying to figure out who someone is... while I'm not sure of the encyclopedic value of those articles, they definitely have some entertainment value. For that matter, it may be worth clarifying fictional characters from those that are historic, or based on historic e…
I do sometimes wonder what the future people are going to make of the hundreds of thousands of words of argument over en-dash, em-dash, hyphen and minus.
Mexican-American war had twenty thousand words of discussion over what dash to use, and that knowledge isn't transferable even to other dashes used in title on WP.
Here's 15,000 words on dashes. The result? No concensus.
Re: Wikipedia to the Moon
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
This disc will be on the surface of the moon forever. Or until a meteorite hits it.
It's true. The surface of the Moon is a lot less peaceful than it seems. If you process the image, you can tell the affected area from a single meteorite strike is much bigger than the crater itself: http://www.astrobin.com/full/220884/0/
Has anyone compared the surface of the moon over time? We can count how many meteorites have hit the surface since we've been taking pictures of it, and we can also probably assess the actual damage they've caused.
Re: Wikipedia to the Moon
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
This disc will be on the surface of the moon forever. Or until a meteorite hits it.
It's true. The surface of the Moon is a lot less peaceful than it seems. If you process the image, you can tell the affected area from a single meteorite strike is much bigger than the crater itself: http://www.astrobin.com/full/220884/0/
[deleted]
Re: Wikipedia to the Moon
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
It does indeed. However compression may cause problems for future beings discovering or understanding the data.
Keep in mind they have to understand the text and image encodings. The concept of glyphs themselves, even. Words. Language. Bytes (why 8 bits). Bits. Knowledge expressed as sentences. How to read the media. Compression would be just another thing. There's a pretty big hurdle to comprehension even without compression because we are thinking in human terms. Imagine all of the prerequisite human knowledge you overlook t…
You could do something like the Rosetta disk, where you just physically engrave the glyphs.
http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/
Of course then you need to work out what the language is actually saying, but plain "glyph retrieval" can be done with a desktop microscope and some time. An alien that operates in a roughly human way (has eyes, language, linear writing) would probably understand that it encodes meaning, even if it ends up like Linear A and undecipherable.
Re: Wikipedia to the Moon
#66If an alien makes it all the way to the moon with the tech to read the disc why wouldn't they hop on over to Earth where there would be much more data? When Carl Sagan did it it was much more evocative because Voyager will be traveling for thousands of years into deep space.
Surviving artifacts are not a very good and coherent source of information for future archeologists, alien or human. After all, we are still kind of unsure about construction methods of Egyptian pyramids, which are less than 5000 years old.
And past civilizations at least seemed to have cared much more about longevity of their creations than we do, we can not even store our digital photos reliably over a decade without active replication. Without projects like this, future researchers will have to put the whole picture together using only plastic bottles and broken vinyl records :)
Re: Wikipedia to the Moon
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Besides, you have all the character bios for the full Marvel universe(s)... I'm only half being sarcastic, as I've gotten lost in some of those articles trying to figure out who someone is... while I'm not sure of the encyclopedic value of those articles, they definitely have some entertainment value. For that matter, it may be worth clarifying fictional characters from those that are historic, or based on historic e…
I do sometimes wonder what the future people are going to make of the hundreds of thousands of words of argument over en-dash, em-dash, hyphen and minus. Mexican-American war had twenty thousand words of discussion over what dash to use, and that knowledge isn't transferable even to other dashes used in title on WP. Here's 15,000 words on dashes. The result? No concensus.
Memes, too. "You mean ancient humans argued as an interconnected species over the color of a dress?"
I'm waiting for the meme that conclusively starts a war. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 72 point Impact. That'll be a fun one for future history books to explain.
Re: Wikipedia to the Moon
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
The moon is much less dynamic than the earth, which could be covered in jungles or ice or something that makes it difficult to detect the (former) presence of intelligent life. IMO it's plausible that aliens might find artifacts on the moon that would then prompt a more in-depth exploration of the earth.
The zillion artificial satellites and other crap and debris orbiting the bigger, lusher body is probably a hint to said explorers, even with atmospheric orbital decay and perturbations over a long time scale. Earth orbit is our calling card for some time, even if we all die. Especially if they have decent midrange sensors to display nearby craft, Earth will look like a swarm of bees. Run any orbital debris simulator…
That's a good point. Found an interesting article about this:
> Orbits tend to decay over time, at a rate determined by the initial altitude. Anything above 2,000 km will take millennia to return to Earth, while satellites further down might take centuries or decades.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...
Re: Wikipedia to the Moon
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
The zillion artificial satellites and other crap and debris orbiting the bigger, lusher body is probably a hint to said explorers, even with atmospheric orbital decay and perturbations over a long time scale. Earth orbit is our calling card for some time, even if we all die. Especially if they have decent midrange sensors to display nearby craft, Earth will look like a swarm of bees. Run any orbital debris simulator…
That's a good point. Found an interesting article about this: > Orbits tend to decay over time, at a rate determined by the initial altitude. Anything above 2,000 km will take millennia to return to Earth, while satellites further down might take centuries or decades. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...
There are faint, faint wisps of Earth's atmosphere a fair distance out, which is the big part of an orbit's challenge. Perturbations from other bodies nearby (notably the Moon), deformities of Earth's gravity, and even solar weather and tiniest fractions of gases are other contributors on a long-enough time scale. Micrometeorites would probably be the big risk over time for our orbital monument to humanity, and I would expect Kessler syndrome, as dramatized in Gravity, to actually happen over a long enough period without human existence. (Hell, even with us around it's a possibility, but not as depicted in the film. It'd be slower. Some say it's already underway.)
Distant orbits might decay away from Earth given enough time and certain circumstances, oddly enough. A return to Earth is not guaranteed.
Re: Wikipedia to the Moon
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Keep in mind they have to understand the text and image encodings. The concept of glyphs themselves, even. Words. Language. Bytes (why 8 bits). Bits. Knowledge expressed as sentences. How to read the media. Compression would be just another thing. There's a pretty big hurdle to comprehension even without compression because we are thinking in human terms. Imagine all of the prerequisite human knowledge you overlook t…
You could do something like the Rosetta disk, where you just physically engrave the glyphs. http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/ Of course then you need to work out what the language is actually saying, but plain "glyph retrieval" can be done with a desktop microscope and some time. An alien that operates in a roughly human way (has eyes, language, linear writing) would probably understand that it encodes meaning,…
That's a very inefficient way to store the data. You couldn't fit all of wikipedia onto one of those disks like that. I would only do that for the instructions, and pictures would be better than glyphs. Or pictures next to words, so they have at least an idea on how to decrypt it.
Once you introduce a few words, the rest may be decipherable from context, especially with such a large corpus. E.g. certain words will cluster together often, and once you know one, you can guess at the others, which lets you guess at others, and so on.