Apropos on the space-object proposal from Facebook, and the question about recovering the information: Could the object itself have a shape that encodes the information? I was thinking something like a disco ball, except perhaps cylindrical/oblong such that we had a higher expectation of spinning in certain directions; then our message could be encoded in binary as shiny/matte facets on this thing; as its twinkling pattern is observed over time, the entire message is reconstructed.
If we can do Durable Writing, we could probably also do Durable Ellipsoid.
For context, this is inspired by how we read information from optical disk technology, but irony is not lost on me that CDs are obsolete. This proposal has many obvious drawbacks, such as can we ensure that 500m years in the future, it spins fast enough to be observed as repeating, but not too fast to be confused as uniform?
A way-cooler-but-also-much-harder alternative would be to launch some really robust object into a slow-decaying orbit such that it crashes back to Earth after 500m years. Its internals might be stuff made up with two different contrasting materials that encode the payload, while the outside is just enough of a heat-shield to survive the journey back; additionally, it should probably also scream “Not Natural!” in some way, so that someone from 1900 looking at it can predict that it will fall in the next 100 years or so, and prepare to collect it “for science”. Hopefully, it won’t destroy any cities in the process. Reflecting on that, if future inhabitants have anything like human-like psychology, an alien artifact about to plummet to Earth is just asking to be shot out of the sky. But then again, why should they be human-like at all?
Apropos on the space-object proposal from Facebook, and the question about recovering the information: Could the object itself have a shape that encodes the information? I was thinking something like a disco ball, except perhaps cylindrical/oblong such that we had a higher expectation of spinning in certain directions; then our message could be encoded in binary as shiny/matte facets on this thing; as its twinkling pattern is observed over time, the entire message is reconstructed.
If we can do Durable Writing, we could probably also do Durable Ellipsoid.
For context, this is inspired by how we read information from optical disk technology, but irony is not lost on me that CDs are obsolete. This proposal has many obvious drawbacks, such as can we ensure that 500m years in the future, it spins fast enough to be observed as repeating, but not too fast to be confused as uniform?
A way-cooler-but-also-much-harder alternative would be to launch some really robust object into a slow-decaying orbit such that it crashes back to Earth after 500m years. Its internals might be stuff made up with two different contrasting materials that encode the payload, while the outside is just enough of a heat-shield to survive the journey back; additionally, it should probably also scream “Not Natural!” in some way, so that someone from 1900 looking at it can predict that it will fall in the next 100 years or so, and prepare to collect it “for science”. Hopefully, it won’t destroy any cities in the process. Reflecting on that, if future inhabitants have anything like human-like psychology, an alien artifact about to plummet to Earth is just asking to be shot out of the sky. But then again, why should they be human-like at all?