post-doomsday computing

In article <848civkipeeamuin2ibd6kda19ttksnlm0 RemoveThis @4ax.com>, Brian Inglis
<Brian.Inglis RemoveThis @SystematicSw.ab.ca> wrote:

> On Sun, 27 Jul 2003 23:40:08 BST in alt.folklore.computers,
> Tennant Stuart <tennant RemoveThis @argonet.co.uk> wrote:

>>>> One does have a crib, it's called physics & chemistry.

>>> Read (a translation of) a medieval or earlier science book
>>> written in Greek or Latin for a different cultural view on
>>> explaining a common subject. Now imagine all you had was the
>>> original text (no diagrams or equations) and there was no common
>>> culture or language to help with the translation: would you even
>>> be able to identify the subject of the book as science?

>> I'm not talking about medieval or earlier civilisations.

>> I'm talking about future generations looking back at us, or
>> we examining some extinct alien culture of about our level.

> You don't think we might look like archaic, quaint, and long-winded
> writers to future generations? You don't think an extinct alien culture
> might be quaint, weird, and, well, alien, to the point where it might be
> difficult to decide just what it's culture was based on?

Come off it, that's a totally irrelevant load of guff.

It's not a question of being quaint, but of having physics & chemistry.

We have physics & chemistry, medieval or earlier civilisations did not.

A future civilisation would have physics & chemistry.

Extraterrestrial aliens will have physics & chemistry.


Tennant

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In article <na.4a42084c1a.a806e0tennant RemoveThis @argonet.co.uk>,
Tennant Stuart <tennant RemoveThis @argonet.co.uk> wrote:
>No, the point is that when a civilisation advances to the point of
>achieving physics & chemistry, those principles are universal, and
>provide a starting point to decipher their writings. For example,
>there is only one set of elements, it's culturally independent.

Contrariwise, there's Vernor Vinge's idea (_A Fire Upon
the Deep_) of a cultural process in which societies develop
culturally and technically until they reach Transcendence.
Then they disappear. Nobody who hasn't transcended can tell
what happened to them, but there's a feeling they may just
not be operating in our space-time anymore.

Physics as we know it is only a hundred years old, with
recognizable precursors going back about 300. Chemistry has
a coherent molecular theory going back, what? 300? Before
about 500 years ago, everybody was talking Influences and
Virtues.

Of course, in terms of sending messages to the future, we
have to express ourselves using what we have. It would be
silly to express anybody else, and what we have is all we've
got.

Regards. Mel.
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I am dyslexia of borg your ass will be laminated
"Charlton Wilbur" <cwilbur DeleteThis @mithril.chromatico.net> wrote in message
news:87k7a1xp6w.fsf@mithril.chromatico.net...
> Brian Inglis <Brian.Inglis DeleteThis @SystematicSw.ab.ca> writes:
>
> > Every branch of science and technology creates its own jargon to
> > communicate more efficiently. Each jargon depends on the languages
> > in which fundamental concepts and ideas are communicated and on the
> > different paths taken during development of a corpus of knowledge in
> > those areas in which each language is used. [...] Without a
> > historical corpus in a subject, and ability to understand that
> > corpus, how meaningful would technical articles be which refer to
> > basic knowledge encoded as combinations of people's names, and other
> > information referred to using words which have common meanings,
> > possibly in a different language, but a specialized meaning in one
> > area of jargon?
>
> And even when we're talking about *our own species*, this is the case.
>
> Take historical music theory, as a for-instance. Ignore for a moment
> questions of taste and quality; the project is figuring out how to
> recreate the sound from the notation. With the vast majority of music
> written before the advent of recording, we're working with a *best
> guess* -- because "everybody knew" how violins or singers were
> supposed to sound, or the proper amount of tempo variation to use when
> playing Bach or Chopin.
>
> It gets even worse when you start talking about music before 1500;
> with the advent of keyboard instruments, the frame of reference for
> talking about music shifted from the voice to the keyboard. As a
> result, notation *changed* -- composers in the 15th century could
> write an F, and expect that the performers would alter it to an F#
> because the context required it. The performers, likewise, would see
> a written F and have no qualms about altering it to an F# based on the
> context. And this would not be seen as incompetence on the part of
> composer or publisher, or as hubris on the part of the performers; it
> was so commonplace, as a matter of fact, that remarkably few people
> saw fit to comment on it.
>
> In short, this is an enormous corpus of information, with volumes of
> material (scores) and metamaterial (treatises and commentaries)
> available, and a continuous oral tradition that goes back over a
> thousand years, and we can't say to a certainty what 500-year-old
> music should sound like. I despair of any communication with people
> in the 25th century, let alone the 50th.

have you read 3001?
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"Deathwalker" <ian-lincoln.TakeThisOut@blueyonder.co.uk> writes:

> have you read 3001?

No, I haven't. I stopped about halfway through _2061,_ convinced that
the brain eater had finally gotten to Clarke.

Charlton
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Erik Max Francis <max RemoveThis @alcyone.com> wrote in news:3F2439B0.C3961493
@alcyone.com:

> Larry Elmore wrote:
>
>> But they were almost certainly not writing to be understood by someone
>> who doesn't know their script, language, culture or history. They're
>> not
>> deliberately trying to obfuscate, but except for children's tutorials,
>> people almost always assume a truly vast amount of background
>> knowledge
>> is already known by the intended audience.
>
> "They"? We're talking about the general case of the possibility of
> decoding messages based on their contents only, not particular messages
> from the past.
>

The assumption is that you can identify a thing AS a message. When you
tried to decode the binary string way up in this thread, you already knew
several things as a head start:

from your own previous knowledge as well as popular culture (like
"Contact") when you see a binary stream you automatically think "this is a
message".

it was posted as part of a Usenet discussion, hence probably related to
the thread.

from the thread context, it was probably meant to make a point.

Then you started applying various techniques to it, found some regularity,
and went from there.

But in the far future, a savage finds a CD-R marked "trip to Grand
Canyon". Even if he CAN decipher the written text, how is he going to know
that it means there is a movie file saved on it?

Fine, that's a poor example; the CD-R with a movie of a trip is not meant
as a message to the savage, or to anyone really. But my point is that the
recipient of the message may have no way to realize it even is a message,
and not just a shiny thing. Particularly if he's not expecting any
messages ....


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"... VB is essentially the modern equivalent of vulgar Latin in 13th
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Erik Max Francis wrote:
>
> jmfbahciv DeleteThis @aol.com wrote:
>
> > A culture that lives in high pressure may not have science that
> > makes assumptions that involve zero or negative pressures. A
> > culture whose mathematical tools do not include calculus, may
> > not have advanced science or technology. It certainly
> > wouldn't be able to decypher any calculations about QM or QED.
> > A culture whose complete store of knowledge is in electronic
> > bits will not be decyphered by a culture who has banned
> > all electric study.
>
> It is quite possible to come up with scenarios where an alien
> civilization would just be too alien to communicate with us. By
> definition, you'd never be able to talk to such an alien, so pointing
> them out is moot.
>
> Look, you made a claim that physics and chemistry weren't the same
> "everywhere" (with the obvious implication being that "everywhere" meant
> everywhere you might find an alien intelligence capable of
> communication). That claim was wrong; move on.
>
That claim is *not* wrong. Just because our "local reality" has
the elements and physical laws as it does...this does *not*
preclude different laws of physics say, in the middle of a
"black hole". If you believe that our reality is all there is,
IMHO you are thinking way too small...

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Charles Richmond wrote:

> That claim is *not* wrong. Just because our "local reality" has
> the elements and physical laws as it does...this does *not*
> preclude different laws of physics say, in the middle of a
> "black hole". If you believe that our reality is all there is,
> IMHO you are thinking way too small...

We will not be communicating with any beings who live in a black hole.
It would be a rather one-sided conversation.

Bob Kolker
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On Thu, 31 Jul 2003 14:04:53 -0700 in alt.folklore.computers,
Erik Max Francis <max.RemoveThis@alcyone.com> wrote:

>Charles Richmond wrote:
>
>> That claim is *not* wrong. Just because our "local reality" has
>> the elements and physical laws as it does...this does *not*
>> preclude different laws of physics say, in the middle of a
>> "black hole". If you believe that our reality is all there is,
>> IMHO you are thinking way too small...
>
>I explicitly disclaimed my comment; read it again. Are you thinking
>it's likely that you're going to find the writings of an alien
>civilization _in the middle of a black hole_?

Will you ever reach the middle of the black hole?
Doesn't time dilatation imply that it takes longer as you
accelerate faster towards the event horizon?
Or have I mixed up SF plots with hard science?

Thanks. Take care, Brian Inglis Calgary, Alberta, Canada
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fake address use address above to reply
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Brian Inglis wrote on Fri, 01 Aug 2003 02:32:26 GMT:
>
> Will you ever reach the middle of the black hole?
> Doesn't time dilatation imply that it takes longer as you
> accelerate faster towards the event horizon?
> Or have I mixed up SF plots with hard science?

Nothing special should happen, if you jump in big one, that is
not rotating and has no electric charge. Well, until you hit
the singularity. Too bad, you can not tell us about it.

Karl M. Sring
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I am dyslexia of borg your ass will be laminated
"Charlton Wilbur" <cwilbur DeleteThis @mithril.chromatico.net> wrote in message
news:874r12vok7.fsf@mithril.chromatico.net...
> "Deathwalker" <ian-lincoln DeleteThis @blueyonder.co.uk> writes:
>
> > have you read 3001?
>
> No, I haven't. I stopped about halfway through _2061,_ convinced that
> the brain eater had finally gotten to Clarke.

well the guy who got knocked into space in 2001 gets found in 3001 and
thawed out (he was several million miles from earth by this time other side
of the solar system or even further. He has a great deal of trouble being
understood and understanding others. Ends up doing a great deal historical
corrections for them.
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In article <0vuVa.8902$uu5.828@sccrnsc04>
bobkolker.DeleteThis@comcast.net "Robert J. Kolker" writes:

> Brian {Hamilton Kelly} wrote:
>
> > (Still waiting for Etruscan to be deciphered; as was Claudius, and it had
> > been dead for a far shorter period in his time.)
>
> Is that the same Claudius as in the t.v. series - I Clavdivs-?

Errm, yes, of course. (Although it was an excellent book by Robert
Graves some decades before the TV series was made; the latter was
actually based upon Graves' _two_ books, "I, Claudius" and "Claudius the
God".)

Claudius was actually a great scholar (in a dilletante-like fashion).

--
Brian {Hamilton Kelly} bhk.DeleteThis@dsl.co.uk
"We can no longer stand apart from Europe if we would. Yet we are
untrained to mix with our neighbours, or even talk to them".
George Macaulay Trevelyan, 1919
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In article <CbDVa.9392$Vt6.3634@rwcrnsc52.ops.asp.att.net>
ljelmore DeleteThis @comcast.net "Larry Elmore" writes:

> The problem we face with Etruscan is almost the opposite of the problem
> posed by Linear B. With Etruscan, we know their alphabet, we know many
> words (if mostly personal and place names), but we know next to nothing
> about the language or its grammar, except that it's definitely not
> Indo-European.

Hmm, thinking of a language spoken in Europe that is not Indo-European,
has anyone tried to see if there are any parallels with Basque?

--
Brian {Hamilton Kelly} bhk DeleteThis @dsl.co.uk
"We can no longer stand apart from Europe if we would. Yet we are
untrained to mix with our neighbours, or even talk to them".
George Macaulay Trevelyan, 1919
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bhk RemoveThis @dsl.co.uk (Brian {Hamilton Kelly}) writes:

>In article <CbDVa.9392$Vt6.3634@rwcrnsc52.ops.asp.att.net>
> ljelmore RemoveThis @comcast.net "Larry Elmore" writes:

>> The problem we face with Etruscan is almost the opposite of the problem
>> posed by Linear B. With Etruscan, we know their alphabet, we know many
>> words (if mostly personal and place names), but we know next to nothing
>> about the language or its grammar, except that it's definitely not
>> Indo-European.

>Hmm, thinking of a language spoken in Europe that is not Indo-European,
>has anyone tried to see if there are any parallels with Basque?


Tried and failed, yes. Basque and Etruscan both stand as isolates,
languages without known parallels, despite extensive study by the
linguistic community.


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