Comment by areoform | Hacker News Reader

Comment by areoform | Hacker News Reader

Our civilizational message in a bottle, the Voyager Records and Pioneer Plaques will outlive their power sources by an incomprehensible amount. The record is estimated to survive for more than a billion years. The power source for less than 40 before it is rendered unusable.

The message will travel onwards forever, cloaked in dark, dashing the hopes of any recovery. Of bringing joy to alien beings. Of giving them certainty that they certainly weren't alone in the universe at some point in their past.

What if we could create something, some undefined means to generate a pulse ever X years for more than a billion years? Is it possible to make a billion year battery? Oxford's Electric Bell at a cosmic time scale? Could human ingenuity create a device that would make our next message in a bottle more discoverable for those beings who do not exist yet?

Is it possible for humanity, with current technology and scientific knowledge, to transcend its cradle and create something that functions for billions of years?

Sending pulses that are detectable for even just a couple light years requires surprisingly high power (unless it's a very tight beam, which would be rather pointless for this purpose). That would be a huge challenge with fitting it on an interstellar probe. Our best bet would probably a geothermal setup powering a radio beacon, located on Mercury or Mars; or maybe on a moon that is heated by high tidal forces.

We could also try engineering something similar to natural nuclear reactors [1], powering up a radio beacon once water rises high enough every couple of years. That might run for a million years or so.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto...

Maybe you don't use radio waves at all: https://patents.google.com/patent/US10361792B2/en?oq=US10361...

This certainly seems interesting, but I don't understand what it's saying. Is it a way of encoding a message into the motion of objects? How do you even make that detectable?

Why not use a passive solar heliograph, e.g. a spinning cubic or dodecahedron mirror? That should last for a million years or more.

At that stage you are having different considerations.

And first contact is probably less scary if you can build mega structures in the orbit. Vanity mega structures if its sole purpose is to announce your presence to the universe.

To draw on some well-founded sci-fi concerns, the dark forest hypothesis would be that it is not a good idea to announce one's presence to the cosmos without preparation.

https://blog.usejournal.com/the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-un...

I’ve never liked this reasoning:

> A civilization that wishes to continue expanding across the universe will need to compete for the limited resources with any other intelligent life

If a civilisation has the ability to travel across to different star systems, then going to war over a single planet’s resources makes little sense when they probably have the ability to manipulate and craft matter, at will, at the atomic level.

The problem with crafting individual atoms at will is that eventually you run out of atoms.

Any society whose primary mindset is competing for resources will off itself long before it gets to affect anyone else. If you don’t transcend that primitive instinct, you’re already doomed.

Thing is, humanity (or whatever comes next) will need a way to survive the death of its sun.

Yes we take the risk of stumbling on something so alien that it wouldn't perceive us as worthy of preserving, or that their means of communication could destroy us, but given the alternative is extinction anyway, it's worth a try.

And let's say we're long gone and no other specie picks up where we left off, at least we give a fighting chance to the other species of our planet to get rescued by something else.

Wouldn't the microparticles wear away the record and plaques?

Maybe a solar sail probe which slingshots from star to star?

This gives me "The Inner Light" vibes, easily the best episode Star Trek TNG ever created.

You can easily do periodically transmissions for infinitely long with a finite power source, as long as you transmit less often than 1/t. I imagine the tricky bit would be making a power source with no parasitic losses. Maybe a high-temperature super conducting loop.

> You can easily do periodically transmissions for infinitely long with a finite power source, as long as you transmit less often than 1/t.

What does the 1/t part mean? As far as I can understand it means if your power source lasts 10 years, you need to transmit not more than every 1/10 = 0.1 years. Which doesn't make sense. More generally, periodic transmissions forever will emit infinite power so how could a finite power source power that?

I think GP is trying to construct a geometric series by doubling the wait time after each transmission. Of course that doesn't work: If your battery holds 100kWh and each transmission takes 1kWh then you can make 100 transmissions, no matter how you space them out.

However in the same spirit you could do periodic transmissions, but half your transmission power each time. Assuming no losses anywhere in the system that would allow you to make an infinite number of transmissions with a finite power source (since 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + ... = 2). Of course if you half your transmission power each time the transmissions quickly become pointless, so this is of somewhat limited use.

It's not infinitely divisible, quiescent power draw will limit you in any case.

Just a shorthand to indicate that it needs to decay faster than the harmonic series

Simple solution, Create a probe that travels to another star, harvests resources, self replicates, sends our pulse, continue on to next star. Should have the whole galaxy covered in a few billion years.

I think some bit von-Bobby wrote some books on it.

Von Neumann probes (self-replicating): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft#Vo...

Bracewell probes (~strong AI communication probes): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracewell_probe

I making reference to Bobiverse. A book series about a programmer who is uploaded to a Von Neumannn probe. Good series

Ah, I wasn't aware of that series; I'll add it to my potential list. I did catch the "von" part of von-Bobby though. :)

90% great series. The last 10% is the author very clearly being sick of writing it and invoking a deus ex machina to instantly solve the big problem.

So sick of it that there's two new books in the series coming out, one this month?

Welcome to the economics of scifi/fantasy publishing. It's really hard to get people to start reading a book set in an entirely new world, but if you succeed once and they like the book, they are very likely to purchase new books in the same setting.

This is why all genre books are parts of trilogies, most of which get abandoned after the first or second book, (because the market just wasn't there, and the publisher just didn't want any more books after a flop), or which get extended well past any desire from the author or good sense simply because people keep purchasing them, the author needs to pay their mortgage and their new books not set in the established universe keep flopping.

I think Stross went into this at length at a panel in some con I was in.

Did you read them? You really don't think there was a radical change of pace near the end with plot points being instantly resolved all over the place with resolutions that sometimes not only didn't match the buildup but sometimes didn't even seem in keeping with character traits?

Yes, and re-read them in the past couple of weeks since the new ones are coming out.

It didn't feel out of place to me, sure some story arch's got wrapped up, but others opened up.

If this went onto say 9 books like that it would have a pacing similar to The Expanse where every couple of books there's a new "villain" or challenge. I'd much rather have that than something like Expeditionary Force where one storyline seems to be dragging on forever.

where every couple of books there's a new "villain" or challenge. I'd much rather have that

Agreed.

ExForce has a hell of a deux ex machina at the end of the most recent book as well.

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