Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Wikipedia to the Moon

meta.wikimedia.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 88 posts

Re: Wikipedia to the Moon

#31

Post by theoh »

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.

That's an interesting question. I don't know if Lincos, which is the most conspicuous attempt at creating a self-explanatory language for aliens, included any kind of compression. Self-explanatory compression seems difficult to achieve, though maybe once you have the motion of equality, you can start giving examples of equivalent plain and compressed texts.

Re: Wikipedia to the Moon

#33

Post by necessity »

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.

It's a symbolic act just like the Voyager was.

Re: Wikipedia to the Moon

#34

Post by Houshalter »

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.

Well hypothetically if the Earth was destroyed by grey-goo or something, the disc would still be there.

But the other answer is that it's much easier to find. Where would you put a ceramic copy of wikipedia on Earth to maximize it's probability of being found? Anywhere you put it could get destroyed, buried, or stolen. Who knows what will happen to it over the Eons.

This disc will be on the surface of the moon forever. Anyone surveying the surface of the moon for unnatural objects will find it. Although that might take some advanced technology, it would be easier than surveying the Earth.

And while they might find many artifacts on Earth, locating that single copy of wikipedia out of all the other junk we've left behind is a bit improbable. We haven't covered the moon with much junk.

Re: Wikipedia to the Moon

#35

Post by dr_zoidberg »

maaku wrote: post #22
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

For those too lazy to go read: biggest rocket available + very light probe = very fast travel

Another interesting read in this aspect is the Dawn Spacecraft, which had a big delta-v because of its ionic thrusters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawn_%28spacecraft%29#Propulsi...

Re: Wikipedia to the Moon

#36

Post by jsmthrowaway »

schwarrrtz wrote: post #28
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.

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 if you don't believe me. It's a mess up there.

Re: Wikipedia to the Moon

#37

Post by sparkzilla »

Houshalter wrote: post #12
sparkzilla wrote: post #3

Sending an archive of YouTube would be much more useful for any aliens that happen to drop by. YT comes far closer to The Sum of All Human Knowledge than Wikipedia.

I'm not sure that's correct. Wikipedia contains detailed articles on many very obscure subjects. Searching for such topics on YouTube usually gives disappointing results. Wikipedia is missing some material though. A better choice might be the google book project or libgen, which contains a ton of obscure books and scientific papers. But compressing it all to 20 GB would be difficult or impossible. Much easier than co…

That's my point: They're assuming the aliens want to know about detailed, encyclopedic subjects. But what if they just want to know about Kim Kardashian?

Re: Wikipedia to the Moon

#38

Post by [deleted] »

jsmthrowaway wrote: post #36
schwarrrtz wrote: post #28

Earlier 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…

[deleted]

Re: Wikipedia to the Moon

#39

Post by jsmthrowaway »

danielvf wrote: post #16
Houshalter wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant compressed. Text compresses really well.

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 to even approach the concept of an encyclopedic article describing something. Aliens might share knowledge by hitting each other with telepathic darts for all we know, having a completely different understanding and implementation of information, and words might require years of study on their part to comprehend. Even the golden record carries a lot of assumptions. What we know about the universe is not necessarily final, even with rudimentary things like information theory.

In the end it's a bunch of bytes, numbers really, on a disc. What are numbers, even? What if they have a totally different non-numeric system to quantify and explain their existence?

Think about finding an extraterrestrial storage device like this from our perspective. I'd safely predict 20 years before we even extract one byte of data, and a lot of that time would be arguing over it, probably. Although thinking about an alien Nobel ceremony for cracking the "extraterrestrial ceramic Wikipedia" is a pretty amusing thought.

Post reply on HN