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Wikipedia to the Moon

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Re: Wikipedia to the Moon

#21

Post by anonymfus »

Houshalter wrote: post #20
danielvf wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does indeed. However compression may cause problems for future beings discovering or understanding the data.

Perhaps, but surely some compression is reasonable. You could shorten common words to much shorter sequences of bits without losing any information. Any civilization capable of retrieving the disk should understand enough about information theory to undo compression. Instructions can also be explained in detail with pictures at the beginning, uncompressed.

Then any damage to these instructions will be critical.

Re: Wikipedia to the Moon

#22

Post by maaku »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #17
outworlder wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please note that the ability to "making to to " is all about Delta-V. Which varies wildly with payload size.

To be precise, it varies according to the equation: Delta-V = Exhaust velocity x natural log(mass full / mass empty). As the "mass empty" is very dependent on the payload size, it will indeed change a lot!

See for example, New Horizons:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons

Re: Wikipedia to the Moon

#23

Post by Houshalter »

anonymfus wrote: post #21
Houshalter wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps, but surely some compression is reasonable. You could shorten common words to much shorter sequences of bits without losing any information. Any civilization capable of retrieving the disk should understand enough about information theory to undo compression. Instructions can also be explained in detail with pictures at the beginning, uncompressed.

Then any damage to these instructions will be critical.

Copies of it could be distributed throughout the data. However I'm not sure what tolerance to damage is expected. How long is this disc supposed to last? How much damage will occur in that time? What's the tradeoff between compressing the data and it's expected lifespan?

Re: Wikipedia to the Moon

#25

Post by guelo »

If 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.

Re: Wikipedia to the Moon

#28

Post by schwarrrtz »

guelo wrote: post #25

If 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.

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.
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