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Comment by m4rtink | Hacker News Reader

What if you end up with a picture of the record & everything else gets lost - that riddle will still work. Say the civilisation that found it collapses & leaves behind some garbled data, including a picture of the record.

Or even future human data archeologists digging through a mix of 20 & 21 century data heavily polluted by AI slop. ;-)

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I really wonder how future archaelogists are ever going to decode our timeline. Imagine a meteor strikes, civilization falls apart, and in 20,000 years they dig up a data centre. Even if they get the computers to work and the hard drives are still readable, everything will be encrypted.

Or maybe you just have what was stored in various nuclear shelters at that time ? That could be even more confusing!

In one unused shelter here in Brno the numbered stones of a medieval chapel are stored since it was demolished long ago. In another shelter in Prague you can find the complete archive records of the Prague 4 city administration.

Any aliens discovering this would inevitably reach the conclusion that humans had a lot of respect to both honoring their past & for comprehensive bureaucracy. So much indeed, that when the end came, they decided to forego the temporary safety of their shelters and let this legacy of their culture survive instead!

Making the data fault tolerant to the discovery by another civilization, its collapse and later rediscovery by another civilization seems a bit of a stretch goal. :)

Compared to a cold object being detected and then picked up from somewhere out in deep space?

That's the "discovery by another civilization" part, so yes.

Maybe you could detect the directional radio beam we used to talk to it first ? Would be likely doable with a stellar scale radio telescope array.

It was always a very long shot, regardless of who might be the recipients. Would we have been better off if it had not been done?

What if extraterrestrial "intelligence" didn't have a reason to "evolve" functional equivalents of a visual cortex. Even on earth where having vision gives a distinct evolutionary advantage over non-vision based living forms, species without vision far outnumber those with vision.

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