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KEO Time Capsule To Remain In Orbit 'Til 52001 AD 262

Posted by timothy from the this-is-way-past-death-do-us-part dept.
cascino writes: "CNN is reporting that a French organization under the direction of Jean-Marc Philippe [KEO] is planning on launching a time capsule, called the KEO, next year that will contain electronic messages inscribed on CD's from people around the world. So what, you ask? It is planned to remain in orbit until the year 52001." But wouldn't DVDs hold a lot more data? Perhaps they would like my Visa statements. The cool thing is you can send up to 6,000 characters worth of what you think should be on there.
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KEO Time Capsule To Remain In Orbit 'Til 52001 AD More

KEO Time Capsule To Remain In Orbit 'Til 52001 AD

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  • Well, all those layers of abstraction will not really matter. It is really just like a cryptographic challenge, as if the writings are somehow encoded onto a disc. They will start by assuming that the data is written along the rings, indicated by it's circular nature. Studying the pits, they will realize that they are repetitive, and the proper character length will be conjectured, and then acted upon. Thus, all that is left is to crack the meaning of the characters, and eventually come to understand the language.

    It's not going to be that easy, but neither is trying to decipher a written language. It may be that in 50,000 years they will have no concept of a character based language, and as in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, they may use a language based upon glyphs, similar to Egyptian hieroglyphics.

    The computer abstraction is a rather minor detail, but I think that it more accurately shows how data was transported in the year 2000. We didn't convert things into writing, we used bits.

    All the specifics do not matter, as when you encrypt data, just moving it around and adding headers will not stop any decent cryptanalyst. The hardest part, no matter how the languge is preserved, will always be deciphering the language.

  • God *was* my co-pilot .. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    .. but we crashed in the Andes and I had to eat him!

    By the way, if you're wondering how he tasted?

    Sacra-licious!
  • And I am discouraged that you think there are better things to do with our time and money than hope, dream, and experiment...

    Dont' be, 'cause that's not what I said at all.

    What I said is, I think there are better things to hope, dream, and experiment with using this money.

    You didn't address the issue of it most probably landing in the ocean and sinking to the bottom (how would people know that it should be something retrieved?). And as to your other points, we've had GREAT difficulty deciphering things that are 5000 years old (and have no real way of judging our accuracy... at best, they are educated guesses that seem to 'fit' all available, if scant, data). 50,000 is HUGE. How much do we know about cave-man language? Nothing. And with the ever increasing pace of change, I think 50,000 years looking back to now will be EVERY bit as difficult, if not more so. After all, their references will be totally alien to us, and ours to them.

    As I stated, "Godel, Escher, and Bach" has an interesting section on decoding messages (done in the context of aliens trying to decode messages we leave for them ... which is very appropro simply because a human being 50k years from now will be truely an alien to us).

    Another poster posted a very excellent description of why digital media is totally the wrong way to go with this (too many layers of wrappers and encodings and 'frames of reference'). As I stated elsewhere, I think the only *correct* way to go with this would be titanium tablets with deep engravings, or something similar. The CDROM media and all the various encodings used are way too transient within the relm of human existance (only barely arrived here, and will be obsolete in our lifetimes). Better stick with something that has more staying power, don't you think?

    - Spryguy
  • 6,000 characters, eh? How many characters is the DeCSS source?
  • They could put the satellite inside a shrinkwrap licence with an NDA that expires in 50,001. That would say more about our society than any CD content...
  • It won't take 1000 years before some punk will haul it in for the fun of it.

    I suppose you could count that under "random debris".
  • I still maintain that hodge-podging together a bunch of publicly written babble in hundreds of different languages and encoding it on a CDROM using an arbitrary digital format might not be the best way of doing this.

    If you really read my post, you'd get that not only was I saying it was highly unlikely this project would end up serving any purpose, but that the way they're going about it seems to minimize it's success. I didn't attack the concept, but just the implementation.

    Using a more 'universal' language, like mathematics and pictures... and using something more concrege like engravings in titanium plates, would make MUCH more sense, and be MUCH more valuable to any eventually finders of this time capsuel. Wouldn't you think?

    What I'm interested in is exactly how the meta-data they're including in this project (for how to build a CDROM player and decoder) is being presented, and just how much of this meta-data there is. Is there enough? Is there enough meta-meta-data for them to be able to recognize and decode the meta-data, so that they can recognize and decode the data itself? Wouldn't it be easier to skip all the digital media nonsense, and just jump right into a tutorial on our society and ourselves?

    - Spryguy
  • "...if 300 years from now someone wants to *go* out into space,..."

    Note to self: When electronic copy of self gets into space in 300 years, epoxy a copy of self to that bird on my way outward. May as well put another copy of self where someone will find it.

  • Actually, anthropologists are generally more interested in graffiti and garbage than anything else.

    You just described the bulk of all the /. AC postings.

    -pf

  • > They will start by assuming that the data is written along the rings, indicated by it's
    > circular nature.

    Hopefully not. DAT data are written diagonally in a helical scan fashion striped across the tape. Making an assupmtion based on the form factor of the medium is not the best idea. It's possible that a future civilization will simply not think about the idea of actually mechanically spinning a storage medium, and will be looking for holographic data created by a laser striking the pits. Circular doesn't help.

    > All the specifics do not matter, as when you encrypt data, just moving it around and adding
    > headers will not stop any decent cryptanalyst.

    Recall, though, that most cryptographic analysis is performed based on known characteristics of the output -- frequency of letters in the target language, for instance.

    "Decrypting" a CD is much more analagous to trying to crack a one-time pad cipher, where you don't have any idea what the plaintext looks like, nor whether the output is even textual in nature. For all the analyzing party knows, the CD itself is just a random string of bits to be USED as a one-time pad in some ancient cryptographic system, or a sound recording of white noise (roughly the same thing, actually...).

    I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm just saying that it seems to be a very short-sighted way of trying to communicate to the future, putting a lot of unnecessary obstacles in the way of archaeologists. If we're designing a project explicitly for time-capsule use, the fewest possible layers of abstraction would seem to be called for. IMHO.


    --

  • What about non text data? ... line drawings...

    Use a simple vector format like metapost [bell-labs.com] which should be fairly easy to decypher. A gif would probably be dificult to figure out, and a jpg nearly impossable. For bitmaps, pnm is rather simple (asci art would probably be meaningless because they wouldn't know what a 00100101 would look like).

  • What method is in place for assuring the capsule will be opened in 52001 and not some other time? Does the capsule broadcast its presence in 52001 and announce that it is ready to be opened?
    ----
  • Okay I know the vaccum of space perserves everything so decaying really isn't a problem. But there is alot of space crap up there. What are the odds of something hitting a tiny time capsule? Or destroying it? Or maybe a space ship in a few thousand years might hit the thing?

    Hell some phsyco alien might seize it and hold it for randsom. Hopefully we'll have developped giant laser cannons to blow him away by then....
    [I've lost it I know.. :) ]
  • Some things never change...
  • You want representative? I sent off copies of the last two spams I received with a short explanation of what they were. If that's not representative of the money-grubbing weasels we've all become, I don't know what is.

  • To the ones who will eventuly read this. Please understand us, we think to live is to make others less importent. While we do try to change many of us never acheive balance and peace, with both the world and with ourselves. If what you believe is that we are in fact savages; than I pity the world that I live in. Because in the end that is the only thing that my generation could do. Live, Breath, and try to love. Although some of those came easier than the others.

    Peace be with you and may you live in boring times. D.F

    There thats it

  • I sure hope they won't use Word to create the files...;-)
  • If the *RIAA* has it's way, all the CD players will be SDMI enabled, and the aliens will have to micropay for each piece of info they want to read.

    It the MPAA were involved they would hope to god they got one of the early apex schematics, or the region encoding would simply thwart all attempts to view it.
  • 52001? I don't think there's going to be an orbit in 52001.
  • I can see it now... Today, we have problems with birds getting sucked into jet intakes. In 52001, there will be near-daily reports of orbital disasters as starvessels have their Bussard collectors fouled by one or two of the countless, pesky "time capsules" orbiting the planet.

    (We might have to use those giant laser cannons to destroy all the time capsules! ;)
    -J
  • I knew that was coming.
  • problem solved if we just give them a slab of rock with the blueprints for a cd-rom drive.
  • and promptly vomits in his helmet.
  • They'll start putting their crazy encryption on it and our future generations will never know what was going on!
  • Well, if it is indeed an experiement in hope, trust, and optimism, it has to be one of the most misguided and braindead and useless ones I can possibly fathom.

    Let's take this by parts, shall we?

    Let's assume that the CD media actually do survive 50k years in the harshness of space, and then survive re-entry. Where exactly do you think it's going to plop down? Probably in the Indian or Pacific Oceans... what if it lands in one of the deep trenches? Do actually think anyone in 50k years will NOTICE its re-entry, and be around to retrieve it? Even assuming there ARE human beings and a reasonably advanced civilization, are they going to care to spend whatever will be necessary to track, locate, and retrieve this thing?

    Let's assume they do, or by some miracle, it lands on land, near a population center (without killing anyone), and all the contents are recovered intact. Fine. Not bloody likely, but fine. THEN what? They have to figure out from hieroglyphics how to build a 20th century-based CDROM player from whatever materials and technologies they have on hand, learn how to decode all the contents, rediscover ASCII and "English", and THEN figure out what to make of all the obsolete ancient babble stored on it?

    Yeah right. I don't believe any of the above would be likely to happen, but that huge long string of required events? I can't think of much that is less likely...

    Isn't there something better we can do with our time and energy and money that would help us NOW, or our immediate progeny? Gawd, I hope so...

    - Spryguy
  • but lets send up DeCSS just to piss off the RIAA.
  • CDs/DVDs are a terrible medium for this. They should do the same thing as the Clock of the Long Now [longnow.org] does with their Rosetta Disk (life expectancy >10 000 years). Actually, the Long Now foundation is well positioned with such luminaries as Stewart Brand, Danny Hillis and Mitch Kapor on its board.
  • I can see it now. IN the year 52001, the world, who wants to learn about it's past, wil have one question...
    "Who is this Natalie Portman, and why is she naked, and pertified?"

  • Like the Rosetta Stone, the information will be represented in such a manner so as to facilitate the task of decryption.

    YM: "Like the DVD Content Scrambling System, the information will be represented in such a manner so as to facilitate the task of decryption."

    I bet the copyright laws of AD 52001 will be so harsh that even reading something in a language other than the national language of your Master State will be considered "circumvention" and actionable under whatever hyped up version of DMCA they've passed by then.


    <O
    ( \
    XGNOME vs. KDE: the game! [8m.com]

  • CDs? (Score:2)

    by Nafta ( 42011 )
    Won't they be obsolete?
  • Here is the message I included with the assumption that a) humanity will have destroyed itself and earth along with it or b) humanity avoided extinction and the world is a perfect place Loveless, by Ursula Rucker: As we await sister sun's arrival child star's you'll listen to my tail, triste As it was told to me by my sister afar Earth her name and this, this is her story Sister Moon, hear me now I fear my end too soon, too soon My wounds are deep gaping , unhealing can't believe, refuse to believe my children have no feelings for me see them sealing the fate of early death and destruction watch my foolish daughters and sons as they - kill me slowly - kill me quicker - kill me they've loved me as would an unfaithfull lover parttime and half assed now unmasked with their deciet no more sweet, sneaky thrill seakings tomorrow brings nevers and nothings ended days for my world and its unchanging ways now, apocolyptic truths of revelations hastens our omega my children's and mine each time my breath, skin and tears are polluted and poisoned by their careless games and toys and this is only the begning of my children's sinning my power is fading mother earth now a play thing for the ungrateful child so cold ten billion fold my tears I long for the once adoring embrance of my children their prayers, their care and tenderness has now turned loveless their embrace is now like an Anaconda's grip unmercifull and swift swift with the killing killing is a sport fun with fire in my wonderous rainforest reflect the neglect they have for their main source they slaughter their sibling blossoms and geese like the first murder of caine their pure sister oceans will never be the same due to daily spoil and brother sky's choke for oil refineries, factories, smoke the mother earth family is dying no use crying...now my power is fading mother earth now a play thing for my ungrateful child so cold ten billion fold my tears but I'll continue to spin until my curious homo sapiens offspring pay the price for their sins against my tainted tears, my breathless breath and once firtile skins my sorrows are many and murderous they kill and I kill one million plus I never wanted to hurt my children but my creator makes me take revenge it's the circle of life or at least...it was now it's the end no, no it's too late for repentence accept your death sentence I've given you all I can such beauty in life you'll never have again now it's the end now it's the end now it's the end now it's the end

  • They would probably be as useful.

  • ... DeCSS code :-)
  • I hope these people take into account the second law of thermodynamics which states (in part): "systems become more disorganised in time" In any system that is in temperatures above zero K, a form of wear and tear is always present. More wear and tear will occur the higher the temperature. Even high hardness solids at human comfortable temperatures slowly loose there form. Molecules are constantly moving (as in fluids like glass) or vibrating (in solids and also crystals). It is possible that with glass platters the pits could eventually level (eliminating its information content). Are there any mathematical models proving the life span of a glass platter for 50,000 years? CDRs should be out of the question because along with molecular movement there is also very slow chemical changes occuring. CDR substrates have different thermal properties from their acrylic media, they could literally warp right off in little flakes. I've had a number of CDRs do this to me (cheap ones, I'll admit). Hows that for a dead sea scrolls scenerio? They should be cutting data on laboratory grade sapphire. They should protect that disc with some super heavy duty heat shealding like a raybestos covered relfective dewar (a thermos bottle). Keep that disc cool and free of thermo wear and tear! Perhaps insead of some kind of ISO cdrom, maybe they should burn images of human readable text on to the disk. It should be as simple as possible for the 50,000s to read it. With just a microscope you don't need to know what: atapi is ISO is ASCII is You just need to know what the language is. Thats going to be hard enough right there. Scott
  • I don't think it will stay up there that long.

    We put that up in space and eventually mankind will forget about it (probably during the next US Presidential sex scandal or Survivor III). When commuter space travel becomes reality and we're all taking weekend trips to the moon in a space age version of a minivan, some teenage kids will park the van somewhere in orbit and have at it. A clunk will be heard on the door and after a sudden bout of panic by the teenagers thinking the space police caught them in the act, they retreive the item and and sell it on eBay as a valued antique...

    So how do we make sure it stays in orbit if someone happens to come across it in the future?

  • Re:CDs? (Score:1)

    by cra ( 172225 )
    I heard most CDs start to rot away after about 10-15 years, but I think that is mostly due to the "pollution" in our air. If you store it in vacuum (wich I believe you would if you sent something into space :-) ) it should last a lot longer. The effect of cosmic radiation I know not very much about.
    ---
  • Glass is not a almost solid fluid at all. It stays in place like any good solid. The original research into it was flawed and retracted some 8 years (I think) later after a NEW study came out that said just as many windows were thicker at the top than at the bottom.

    The thickness difference was caused by the way the glass was originally spun. The process was refined as years went by until they had almost square windows.

    As such, it won't deform in space unless some heavy particles hit it, but if it is protected well, bigger objects have a much better chance of destroying it.
  • I thought CDs were only supposed to last 25 years or so before they became unplayable due to chemical deterioration of the disc. OK so they've got better these last few years and they would use special long lasting CDs but 50,000 years a pretty long shot.

    Anyhow, given the problems they have stopping sattellites crashing into each other these days, what are the odds that the capsule would stay up there for 50,000 years in one piece. They'd have to put it at lunar type distances to have any real degree of surety that it would survive. Why not just put it on the moon?

    Or how about making a load of them and sending them out into space in all directions attached to ion drives and Bussard Ram Jets so when we finally get around to colonising space we can pick them up as we go past in our FTL generation ships. Also keep a few copies down here and move them to the lastest recording medium as and when they come about.

    Stephen
  • You're absolutely right, which is why they should put (hard-anodized metal) records in the time capsule like they did on the Voyager (?). Any society with enough technology to retrieve the space capsule would be able to figure out records.

    Then again, I guess they could try to include a solar powered CD player and schematics.


    Refrag
  • Sure it is. The USAF must know something about it that they're not telling us. Maybe thats' what was going on at area51: testing the flight characteristics of colors. Yeah, that's it.

    Anyway, "That's not flying, it's falling, with style!" - Buzz Lightyear

    -----
  • There won't be a Y60K bug, the next problem with storing years would be Year 100,000.


    Refrag

  • C++ for spoken language? (Score:3)

    by Lemmy Caution ( 8378 ) on Tuesday August 29, 2000 @04:18PM (#818116) Homepage
    Great. One run-on sentence, and you have a stroke.
  • This might sound dumb but, is this really the source for it ? I mean, is that it ?!?


    until (succeed) try { again(); }

  • Well, for our "ancestors" to get hit by this object, WE would need to send it back in time. I think you mean "descendants."

    -17028
  • How true. But funny!
  • What if they stumble on this thing in the year 20,000? They could open it 22,001 years too early! Wouldn't that be a bitch?
  • It's arrogant for the current humanity to assume that sentients of the future would be less capable of interpreting messages than we are capable of transmitting them. Do we really think we are the peak of human existence? I bet the Greeks thought so. Or perhaps the Mayans. Look, it's cyclical.

    The only assumption that it's necessary to make is that there will be sentient life at the time. If there is, it's not really relevant what stage of the Enlightenment/Dark Ages cycle that they're in. If they're all just digging in the muck, they'll ignore it. If they're at a point where they are capable of initiating a decoding project, they can.

    Either way, the more interesting aspect of it happens now. What does today's humanity feel is important enough or trivial or funny or insightful enough that it should last some unfathomable amount of time? What does humanity feel should be communicated? Graffiti? Threats? Religious tracts? Politics? Science? Love? Music? Art? Code?

    For us, right now, what it amounts to is tossing a bottle in the sea. We have no way of knowing that it will survive, find a destination, be picked up, read or cared about by anyone. But everyone feels they have something to say. Why not say it?

    What would you say?

    ---
    "The Constitution...is not a suicide pact."
  • i thought that standard cd's have a life of about 15 years, of course, the less you handle it, the longer it lasts, but a cd designed for a 15 year life cannot last for 50,000 years... and then you have gold cd's... 100 years, maybe you can stretch it out a couple more hundred years. if anyone is out there to read our message in 50,000 years all they'll find is some obsolete technology with silver platters of an unrecognizable array of 1's and 0's.
  • That will also be the year Windows finally works properly, with all those years of backwards compatibility . . .

    :)
  • "don't CDs go bad after about 100 years or so?"

    Dye based burned CDs do, I don't know about gold burns. Regular CD data is pressed glass, so if they use those they might be fine. I say might because except at most extremely cold temperatures, glass eventually moves a little (This is why windowpanes in very old houses are thicker at the bottom. Really.). Given that in an Earth orbit the casing for this thing will get plenty of sunlight, it might be warm enough for the glass to shift a little. Over 50,000 years, that could make the disc unreadable.

    Of course, at the same time, it is also likely that the plastic around the glass would hold it in place, at least if the plastic fills in the gaps between the tracks in the glass.

    Perhaps someone that knows more about the materials used in a CD could comment further on this?
  • So just how long is the decss source? :)


    Simon
  • "Duck!", Would be more useful.

    Really. Isn't there enough space junk?

  • We don't know exactly how prehistoric tools were made or how large monuments (pyramids, stonehenge, Easter Island statues) were constructed. However we can do the equivalent thing today with modern methods. In 50000 years it might be easiest to read a CD by taking a picture of it with an ultra high resolution digital camera and having pattern recognition AI do the rest.
    --
  • fun to find someone who has the exact same thought at the exact same minute. But damnit, he stole my Karma! And I was about to get a Karma of 0!
  • That just makes things worse, doesn't it?

    Now who or whatever finds the object has to not only figure out how to decode the CDROM itself to find its content... but now has to decode different alphabets and grammars and languages and syntaxes -- which means they first have to recognize that there ARE multiple laguages and grammars and such represented in the data! It just adds to the increasingly improbability of this thing ever meaning anything to anyone in any way.

    - Spryguy
  • "We have just received a small platter from the year 2000! I wonder what it's for? Hmm, It could be for storing information, but that's silly! Who would ever store information on easily scratched or broken plastic disks? It must be some kind of coaster, or ornament..."
    ----
    Oh my god, Bear is driving! How can this be?
  • Cobol, indeed!

    We all know that while we don't know what computers will do then, or what the language will look like, it *will* be called Fortran . . .
  • There won't be a Y60K bug
    I think you assume that too much will change in 50K years...
  • I wonder what would happen if we put DeCSS on one of those cds? Would MPAA have to send lawyers to take this satellite out? Or would lawyers be on hand to sue our decendants when they opened this thing up in 50,000 years? :)
  • Perhaps I'm stating the obvious here, but isn't it a whole lot easier to secure a storage facility on earth?

    Before you give me arguments about space being a vacuum and preventing decay, think about a few things. It costs a lot to launch a satellite, and keep it in the atmosphere. We haven't tested satellites staying in the atmosphere anywhere near that long. You've got serious radiation and equipment problems. If the equipment fails, then the orbit slowly decays and like fried bacon there goes your CD's of data.

    I'm sure there are plenty of time-capsule projects on earth right now (didn't some tv channel do something around Y2K?). However, those do not get nearly the publicity as the coolness factor of space. Face it, it'd be easier, cheaper, and probably more reliable to get a safe location on the earth. Bury it in the ocean, in a mountain, or something. Put it at the bottom of the big crater in Arizona (right in the middle). Make it transmit a radio signal when it's ready to be opened, or make it very public knowledge where it is, put it in history books for others to read. You can store more stuff, you've basically got unlimited space. It can be airtight, in several layers, to have similar benefits to space. It can be fireproof, or perhaps taken care of by an organization for a few hundred/thousand years, which checks up on it every decade to make sure it's still intact. I dunno, space is cool, but orbit doesn't seem perfect to keep something preserved - too many problems.

    On another thought, why not launch it onto the moon and embed itself there? Then it could transmit in 50,000 years, and probably be relatively untouched. It won't go away, will only be subject to radiation and not orbit problems, and faces a much better chance of staying put. Now that'd be cool.

  • #include <stdio.h>
    #include <stdlib.h>

    int main (int argc, char* argv[])
    {
    printf("Hello, future!\n") ;
    return EXIT_SUCCESS ;
    }

  • Hope they also plan to include a manual that describe the data structure of all those optical pits and valleys.

  • When I was a student and a sound tech I was a member of the Audio Engineering Society (AES) which had a technical journal. There was an article around '97 that had a study of cd failure rates. 5% of cd's developed errors over a test that was suppose to simulate 10 years.

    Vacume smacume, what about radiation and extreme temperature shift? I think this is a cool idea but they better be using something other than standard cd's.

  • What about that diamond with water, air, earth, and some human blood? I can see it now, all of mankind is wiped out by a 50,000 year old common cold.
  • A: ...and now the historic occasion when B here will read the first message retrieved from the capsule.
    B: 42
    A: ?
    B: That's all that's there. The number 42.
  • "When this thing falls, it may fall to an world barren of humanity. Not because we blew ourselves up, or got hit by a comet, or any number of the zillions of ways we could be wiped out as a species, but merely because we don't need the world anymore."

    I damn well hope so. I want to get bored and make baby universes or something. Someone get Stephen Hakwing to stop wasting time on faster than light travel and have him work on that idea!
  • Wow...they started planning this 50,000 years ago?

  • Several futurists have speculated on what the human race will look like in the future, and they have come up with:

    • Larger heads to hold larger brains, with facial features moved downward.
    • Smaller bodies, as machines take over more of the work.
    • Larger eyes to see more clearly. With the way the human skull is constructed, this may result in a teardrop shape created by the eyeball and the upper eyelid.
    • Vegetarian digestive systems as the health fad gains momentum.
    • Excessive cuteness: only the cutest babies will be cared for by The Man, meaning only the cutest babies get to pass on their genes.
    In other words, we'll look like the figurines [preciousmoments.com] you buy at Hallmark.

    Make sure to take this into account when designing content for the space capsule's CD-ROM collection.


    <O
    ( \
    XGNOME vs. KDE: the game! [8m.com]
  • Heh. Your assumption here is that indo-european
    language conventions will survive longer than
    digital encoding conventions. I see no reason to
    think so. If we found a slab of rock with charac-
    ters written 50k years ago, with no relation to
    any modern language, we'd never decode it. How do
    you think egyptian language was decoded? They found
    a slab where message was written in both greek and
    egyptian (written when one of Alexander the Macedonian's heirs was a pharaoh there). Before that, nobody was even close. That's even though whole damn egypt is covered in engravings, and language is still alive (I think). And, that's something like 2500(?) years since it was widely used there to engrave. If they want them to easily learn the language, they have to leave drawings, alot of them. Every word in the dictionary with a visual illustration. Engraved on stainless steel. These guys are probably hoping that either conventions of encoding will survive (which is a bit silly, if they do, why not full archive of the internet?), or that posterity will be much smarter than us.
  • Sure, the earth has lasted for billions of years, but I think 50,000 years is way too long for this time capsule to be out there -- at least for a first attempt (at least I *think* it's a first attempt). I don't think it'll last... and if it does, I doubt that it would be more useful to whatever is on this planet in 50,000 years than it would be to the inhabitants of this planet in 1,000 years.

    I also think it would be more useful to *include* a playback device (rather than a manual for constructing one) as well as a suggestion that, if this message is received, *then* you try something longer term (and include this data with it, adding to it whatever you think is appropriate).

    Also, I don't know what the plans are, but I sure hope they have some major electromagnetic disturbance being transmitted in conjunction with this satellite's de-orbiting; something to get the attention of the planet's inhabitants.

    Just think, 1000-2000 years ago there's sure a lot of information that would be interesting to historians today. 50,000 years ago? The human race was almost unrecognizable, civilization didn't even exist (did it?), and there would be some very disappointing holes left in history in the meantime.

    Think about it. Is there *anything* madmade in the world at all that has ever survived near that long. The oldest manmade things I can thing of are about 5,000 years old, and hard to find (and piece together) at that. Sure space might not weather away at an object, but the atmosphere is also protective. This satellite will be subject to super-high-speed micrometeorites and solar effects etc. for thousands of years.

  • Anyone remember the old Honda motor bike commercials? Children are walking through a museum of the future, and they come across a motorbike:

    Curator: And here we have a motorbike -- people used to ride them for fun!

    Children: Fun?? Ffffuuuunnnn...

    Child (UK accent): But why would anyone want to ride a motorbike for fun?

    Curator (slow, puzzled voice): We ... don't ... know...

    It was pretty funny in a bizarre way.


    --

  • Yeah, I haven't seen OOG for a while. I kind of miss his posts as they were sometime funny and sometimes insightful in an OOG type of way. My fondest wish was for somebody like cnet or wired to write about a /. story, and for them to quote OOG.

    Hell, I also miss MEEPT!!! who was probably the original of the true original ppl here. Defender of MS, writer of obscure posts, and the poster boy for /. flames. Oh well, I guess that Sengan is back (Rambus story today). We should set a pool to see when ppl start flaming him again.

  • Here is my message exactly, think about it! I am gonna get picked up by time travellers soon! "Hey, if you could please travel back in time to 12:30AM EST Aug 30, 2000. Go to (my address) and pick me up I really wanna know what the future is like!"

  • "Morlocks" is one of the two future races from H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (which I've mirrored [8m.com]). Morlocks look like orcs from Tolkien's LotR. Their main diet is people of the Eloi race, who look like those figurines [preciousmoments.com] your wife/sister/aunt collects.

    But all this may be OT, as the time traveller from the story went past AD 52,001 all the way to AD 802,701.


    <O
    ( \
    XGNOME vs. KDE: the game! [8m.com]
  • I remember hearing that CD-ROMs of commercial manufacture only have a lifespan of approx 100 years. CDR and CD-RW only have a lifespan of 5-7 after burning. How are these going to be useful in 50000 years? Coasters of the future?

    LK
  • I'd be more worried about Lunar Modules and stuff like that or capsules filled with monkeys (or monkey corpses). They'd be much bigger than a time capsule.
    "Aw dammit, we have to about the mission. Damned monkeys!"
    And our starships would most likely be contructed in space. But those vehicles that get you to our space station / space port might have a hard time. Might be like rush hour traffic or a futuristic version of "Frogger".
  • Will the folks from the future know that we thought in terms of 8-bit bytes? Will they remember ASCII or UTF-8?

    simple solution to that problem:

    1. man ascii | lpr
    2. Take printout to local engraver, engrave contents of printout on gold sheet (satellite costs >10^7 dollars, cost of gold lost in noise, weight negligible if you make the gold nice and thin).

      Oh, and while you're at it, you might get your engraver to add crucial bits of the various CD recording standards.

    3. Place gold sheet in satellite.

    If you see what archaeologists can figure out with stuff just dumped around randomly, I have do doubt that the archaeologists of 50,000 years from now will be able to figure this stuff out.

    I still like the idea mentioned in a past Slashdot story of engraving stuff really small onto (metallic?) discs. That way all you need is a 1800's-era microscope to get useful information.

  • Language data formatted to be put on a cd surely does not work like a one time pad. A one time pad is truly random, while the point of this cd is to show the patterns in the language. A cd, no matter what data is put on there, with the possible exception of random noise, will have patterns to it.

    We are in a pickle, but any method of preservation that does not encrypt the data can be thought of as essentially the same: no plain text, no sense of the output.

    But it will take a long time to decipher any method we choose.
  • Anything could happen in 50,000 years. We've all seen sci-fi movies where future inhabitants have completely forgotten about the beginnings of earth civilation and have no clue how many years have passed.

    Then they get this time capsule that opens and says, "It's been 52,001 years since the birth of Jesus Christ!" Of course, if it gets to that, then the response will be, "Jesus who?"
    --

  • I suggested this for the Source Code contest. It didn't win :-(

    Gerv
  • Wrong, 50000 years from now, future inhabitants of Earth will recover this capsule as it plunges into a desert somewhere (it deorbits in 50000 years, right?) - and the Wintel employees (because 50000 years from now, Microsoft OS (Windows) and Intel have merged, and taken over the government, and every other corporation, so every human is an employee) open it up and see the shiny DVD disks. One of them absently tries to insert it into the 3.5" floppy drive on his 733 MHz P9million, with ISA slots and UltraSuperMegaATA hard drive, but it won't fit.

    "damn Mac shit" he'll mutter, and toss the whole lot.

    if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
  • You're right. Instead lets send up pyramids covered with stone engravings. They're out of date, but at least we know they've withstood 5,000 years worth of punishment on earth.
  • I hope by 52001 we'll be using some alternate source of propullsion, otherwise it'll be just sad.

  • Jean Marc Philippe's Website (Score:4)

    by waldoj ( 8229 ) <waldo@@@jaquith...org> on Tuesday August 29, 2000 @02:16PM (#818233) Homepage Journal
    Is here [libertysurf.fr].

    -------------------

  • Freenet/Gnutella? (Score:3)

    by sulli ( 195030 ) on Tuesday August 29, 2000 @02:16PM (#818235) Journal
    Here's a better libertarian idea for all you fuck-the-man types out there. Someone could write a tool to capture the most popular items on Freenet and/or Gnutella, regardless of content, and post these on the satellite website. These would certainly be representative of our era, in some respects!

    sulli

  • 50000 years worth of orbital decay. I wonder if they've taken everything (Solar radiation pressure, changes due to lunar tidal erosion, random debris) into account. Probably the first two, but certainly not the last. If we remain spacefaring, what are the odds that this thing won't have a head-on with some space junk in the next 50K years?

    The idea of free text space for all is wonderful. I'm thinking about adding something myself... and this really would be a boon to anthropologists if, say, all electronic historical records were to be wiped sometime in the future.

    What is the structural composition of a CD? Would it break down in (presumably) vacuum under the influence of solar and stellar radiation? In less than 50,000 years? That could prove a problem, if it is the case.

    Anyone else suddenly think of the gold disks on (I think) Voyager when they read this? Sort of the same idea, except across time instead of space...

    What about non text data? Can't we get an allowance for (under 6Kb) graphics in here too? (OK, so that's a little small for photos, but I'd like to try diagrams, math in geometric form, modern physics stuff that might require line drawings...)

  • The last word (Score:4)

    by Michael Woodhams ( 112247 ) on Tuesday August 29, 2000 @02:22PM (#818260) Journal
    If you want to have the last word in an argument, this would be a pretty good way to do it.

  • Re:CD's are a bit out of date, aren't they? (Score:5)

    by bvarro ( 169663 ) on Tuesday August 29, 2000 @02:29PM (#818268)
    From the KEO FAQ [keo.org]:

    Even if the satellite survives, how do I know my message will?

    The CD-ROMs on which the messages will be stored underwent exhaustive testing in July 1998 at the National Grand Accelerator of Heavy Ions (GANIL). The CD-ROMs were exposed to the equivalent of 50,000 years' of cosmic radiation in GANIL's particle accelerator and passed with flying colors. Despite the heavy exposure, the disks remained intact and legible.


    How will our distant descendants be able to read our messages?

    It's obvious that today's state-of-the-art technology in data storage, the laser reader, will be obsolete and totally forgotten by then. At any rate, it would be impossible to include one in the cargo due to its prohibitive volume and innate fragility. We are therefore currently drafting a "user manual" using simple symbolic images to explain how to construct a CD player so as to be able to access the content of the disks. Like the Rosetta Stone, the information will be represented in such a manner so as to facilitate the task of decryption.

  • They're going to have to build one hell of a radiation shield to protect CDs for 50000 years.
  • Actually, anthropologists are generally more interested in graffiti and garbage than anything else. [hmco.com]

    (Don't blame me... Slashdot is screwing up my links!)

  • Apparently, the satellite will contain specially designed glass discs that have been tested to withstand 50,000 years worth of cosmic rays. This article [space.com] states that they will be DVDs, though the official KEO FAQ [keo.org] says that CD-ROMs will be used.

    Apparently, there's also going to be a 'library' of world history and current events, portraits of a diverse group of people, an astronomical clock showing when it was launched, and an artificial diamond containing samples of seawater, human blood, air, and soil.

    Can anyone else tell that the initiator of the project is an artist, not an engineer?

  • DeCSS? (Score:3)

    by ehintz ( 10572 ) on Tuesday August 29, 2000 @02:54PM (#818283) Homepage
    Get a group together, put the DeCSS code on there... ;-)

  • In 52001, the inhabitants of Earth will capture a sattelite and take it to Outpost Headquarters where paleologists will unlock it and find inside small platters of glass....

    "Look," they will say, "perfectly preserved glass platters that our ancient ancestors used for record-keeping once! And they're remarkably well preserved!"

    Many years are spent, graduate students (if they still exist in 52001) come and go having completed dissertations on the decoding of the Orbital Glass Platters, thousands will wonder what the ancients used to think were important. Eventually they manage to decode some of the Ancient Tounge, with a mere 50,000 words in it, barely enough to fill a single memory cell in one of the millions of cockroachbots that comprise a part of the Human galactic ecosystem.

    Once the initial progress is made, it is only a matter of seconds before a fully aware translator is coded, compiled, and executed to start the drudging work of making sense of the Ancient Glass Platters. Word spreads out from Earth through the networks of spaceborne miniroaches via radio, until thousands of years later the full content of the platters spreads throughout the Human galaxy. Our decendents will wonder at the strange and quaint sense of humor of the ancients, who were just beginning the age of mass communication and intelligent robotics.

    "What," they will wonder, "is 'first post' supposed to mean?"

    The Tyrrany Begins.... [fearbush.com]

  • They might decipher English...or they might start with one of the many, many other languages that contributions have alreday been added in. The project started in France, has support from many European agencies, and has already received messages from >120 countries.

    Not everthing begins and ends in the US, and not everything is written or spoken in English -- Yes, that's true, technology exists outside the Ameri-bubble!

  • This is one of those cases where digital media are the wrong answer to the question.

    Consider these scenarios. 50,000 years from now, our descendants uncover a long-buried city. New York, let's say. They find many inscriptions carved into rock and marble and metal, and can recognize this as language and start to work on it. There's almost no abstraction -- visual symbols encoding meaning. A direct long-lasting representation of our words and thoughts. A difficult exercise, but one with clear and direct input data.

    Up in space, space, however, another group of descendants finds an orbiting collection of CD media. What are they? There's no telling. Closer inspection reveals that the surfaces of the discs contain microscopic pits in ordered rows. Aha, the ancients have recorded something in binary on here. But the effort grinds to a halt, right there.

    How do they even know what the pits represent? Is a pit a 0 and a flat space a 1? Or vice versa? Or is the disk encoded in that skip-bop format where a pit means flip-the-bit and a flat space means don't? Or vice versa? Or something altogether else? Does the bitstream start on the outside edge and read inward clockwise? Does it spiral from inside to outside edge, reading counter-clockwise? Where does it start? Where does it end?

    And then, suppose they guess right and get past that part. Then they have have 0110101010010101010101001101101010101010101010... for days. What is it? Which bits of this are significant meaning, and which are meta meaning? Is there a format-specific header? How long is it and what does it mean? Are the data written into a filesystem, and if so, which parts are inodes or FAT tables or the like? How do they extract the actual significance from the housekeeping data?

    And suppose again that they somehow guess correctly, or that it's all just written out as raw data, and the above questions are somehow moot. What format? ASCII? Unicode? Will the folks from the future know that we thought in terms of 8-bit bytes? Will they remember ASCII or UTF-8? Will there be endian issues? How will they know to try to read it as text, as opposed to JPG or MP3 or any of an arbitrarily huge number of other formats that may not have even been invented yet?

    All of these layers of abstraction are taken care of for us by our digital toys, but people in the future will almost assuredly have no idea about the layout of the physical CDROM format and ASCII and ISO9660 and all of the layers and layers of stuff they'd have to weed through just to get to the actual LANGUAGE on the CD that we're wanting them to take the time to decode.

    Somehow I'm still sold on the letters-carved-deep-into-rock encoding scheme as the best way to talk to the future.
    --
  • Write your message in COBOL.
    --
  • First off, I must state that having any type of time capsule (space based or otherwise) endure for the extent of time that this project is proposing is very ambitious to say the very least. However, should this craft beat the odds, dodging the ever-growing amount of space debris, meteors, and other obstacles constantly in orbit around the Earth, it still must overcome the natural deterioration of the medium (a Compact Disk in this case) on which the data is placed. As unlikely as all of this is, let us suppose for a brief moment that it did.

    Hypothetically speaking, when the craft is recovered in 52001 by whatever intelligent race occupies the Earth at that time (yet another variable, you had better hope the evolution and extinction of species is on your side and an intelligent race is present, otherwise game over...), what is potential that they could ever decipher something as complicated as the English language. We would be far better served to send something a bit more universal such as a visual media or something based on mathematics. Programming code, pick your favorite flavor, would even be more desirable considering much of the underlying principles are rooted in mathematics and the use of variables.

    Only under these extreme and diverse circumstances do I believe that such an undertaking would be of any benefit and do more than simply confuse the receivers of this package.

    But hey, what do I know... J

  • Graffiti from Pompeii, 79 AD:
    I wonder, O, wall, that you have not fallen in ruins from supporting the stupidities of so many scribblers.
    Slashdot post, 2000 AD:
    I wonder, O Slashdot, that you have not crashed from supporting the stupidities of so many scribblers.
    CD ROM, 52001 AD:
    I wonder, O space capsule, that you have not fallen into the sun from carrying the stupidities of so many scribblers.


    Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
  • I think the most peculiar part of the whole project has to be the wings. The FAQ [keo.org] answers this question:

    If it is a passive satellite, how can it beat its wings?

    To enable its wings to beat, KEO uses a leading-edge technology: shape memory alloys.
    These are metallic alloys which are able to assume different shapes according to different temperature ranges and revert to these shapes each time those temperatures are reached.
    In this instance, we are exploiting the difference in temperature between shadow and sunlight, so that during its orbit around Earth, KEO will naturally spread its wings when it is touched by the sun's rays and fold them when it re-enters the Earth's shadow.
    So no form of energy is needed to make KEO's wings function.

    I can't believe they're making this thing beat its wings. Surely, the time spent figuring that part out could have been better spent. Plus, won't that make the metals break down more quickly and effect the orbit and generally cause other problems?

    Although, perhaps it will intrigue our target audience enough to make them take a look at it.

  • You are aware that corrosion of aluminum requires oxygen, right?

    Remember, this is going to me in a vacuum, so these CD-ROMs might survive a whole lot better than you think.

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