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

81–88 of 88 posts

Re: Wikipedia to the Moon

#81

Post by Houshalter »

mc808 wrote: post #59
jsmthrowaway wrote: post #39

Earlier 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…

> Think about finding an extraterrestrial storage device like this from our perspective. Let's suppose the aliens already did this, but instead of a small disc, they wanted to send a message that no intelligent being could miss. Over a short span of 150,000 years, they redirected a bunch meteors into the moon in a pattern that encodes the last few digits of pi in a simplified resonant-fractal numbering system, which…

> the last few digits of pi

There is no last digit of pi.

Re: Wikipedia to the Moon

#82

Post by Houshalter »

vacri wrote: post #75
Houshalter wrote: post #8

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.

> I downloaded the entire English wiki 4 years ago The linked article makes a big point about it not just being the English wiki, but 300 languages instead.

Yes, but with 20 GB, you could fit the English wiki and then still have 8 GB left for other languages, which tend to have smaller wikis.

Re: Wikipedia to the Moon

#83

Post by mc808 »

Houshalter wrote: post #81
mc808 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Think about finding an extraterrestrial storage device like this from our perspective. Let's suppose the aliens already did this, but instead of a small disc, they wanted to send a message that no intelligent being could miss. Over a short span of 150,000 years, they redirected a bunch meteors into the moon in a pattern that encodes the last few digits of pi in a simplified resonant-fractal numbering system, which…

> the last few digits of pi There is no last digit of pi.

Well of course not if your number system doesn't even exhibit fractal resonance in holistic projective encodings, given the angular momentum of the universe.

Re: Wikipedia to the Moon

#85

Post by tamana »

Intermernet wrote: post #72
gcr wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

NASA's Lunar Impact page is at http://www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/news/lunar/#.VxmMxvl942...

How do "Earth-based observations of the dark portion of the moon" work?

Is that the dark part of the light side, where the sun won't overexpose the video?

Re: Wikipedia to the Moon

#86

Post by Florin_Andrei »

tamana wrote: post #85
Intermernet wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NASA's Lunar Impact page is at http://www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/news/lunar/#.VxmMxvl942...

How do "Earth-based observations of the dark portion of the moon" work? Is that the dark part of the light side , where the sun won't overexpose the video?

It's as easy as night versus day.

Flashes from bolide strikes are actually easier to see on that part of the Moon where it's night. Where the Sun is above horizon on the Moon, the ambient light is drowning out any light-producing events.

Re: Wikipedia to the Moon

#87

Post by therealidiot »

jespersaron wrote: post #66
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.

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 witho…

I've started using M-DISC Blu-rays for my backups, which are supposed to last for quite a long time. I don't know how long they will actually last in real-world conditions, but I'm hoping its long enough that if I ever need them, they'll still work.

As for preserving things for future generations, I don't know of any good storage techniques. The problem with M-DISCs and other mad-high-density digital storage is that the readers will (most likely) be completely unavailable long before the all of the discs have degraded.

Perhaps we should engrave our data in 2D barcodes, alongside some readable instructions describing how the data can be decoded... Wouldn't have anywhere near the density of optical, magnetic or flash storage though. The whole situation does "worry" me a little, I agree entirely about future researchers not having much to go on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC

Re: Wikipedia to the Moon

#88

Post by tracker1 »

dzdt wrote: post #79
tracker1 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wonder how much lead you'd have to wrap an sd card & reader in for it to be "safe" for space travel.

If you want as much protection as Earth's atmosphere provides, 25 inches. At least that gives as much mass in between the card and space as the atmosphere does. (1 atm is about 30in of mercury, lead is 11/13 as dense as mercury...)

But it isn't just about mass, there's density to consider... we aren't sending up computing devices into space wrapped in 25 inches of lead... so I'm guessing that far less is actually needed.
Post reply on HN