Timeline for How to prove you're a time traveller from the (far) past
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
14 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jun 6, 2018 at 19:15 | comment | added | Ray | @LorenPechtel Modern technology makes it much easier to store information and to communicate, and will absolutely slow down the rate at which languages change, and especially the rate at which they diverge. But 19,000 years. Perkins mentions Shakespere, but that's recent; it's literally (the 1990s use of literally, not the 2000s one) Early Modern English. Even Old English, e.g. "Wé Gárdena in géardagum þéodcyninga þrym gefrúnon hú ðá æþelingas ellen fremedon" is only 1000 years old. Proto Indo-European is the oldest known ancestor of English, and it's still 13,000 years short of 19,000 | |
| Jun 6, 2018 at 2:49 | comment | added | Perkins | @LorenPechtel The word "Literally" (in the USA at least) became its own antonym less than ten years ago. There's a lot of classic written material freely available, and the majority of the population never reads it. We all have access to the most powerful learning tool the world has ever seen and we use it primarily to watch porn and cat videos. Nah, I expect someone 400 years from now will have as much trouble reading this as we do reading Shakespeare. | |
| Jun 6, 2018 at 2:15 | comment | added | Loren Pechtel | @Perkins I don't think the language is going to change much in the future. There's too much written matter basically fixing it. | |
| Jun 6, 2018 at 0:42 | comment | added | Perkins | @LorenPechtel For the same reason that, even though there were ways to forward convert things from old computer systems from the 60s and 70s, nobody bothered with it unless it was actually important. Most people can't read things written 600 years ago. Multiply that by 30. The odds of there being another dark age sometime in the next 19,000 years and archives of crap ebooks that only a few scholars can even read anymore getting dumped in favor of something more useful are probably pretty good. Make it a book of riddles with buried treasure discoverable by the solvers and it might persist... | |
| Jun 5, 2018 at 22:05 | comment | added | Loren Pechtel | @Ray The thing is, in the past books had to be preserved individually. I'm saying that with megapacks of books on pirate sites it has become far more a bulk thing. This means lesser works will be far more likely to survive than they would in the past. | |
| Jun 5, 2018 at 21:29 | comment | added | Ray | @LorenPechtel Admittedly, the technology for preserving literature is better than it used to be, but we're talking about preserving it for 19,000 years. By comparison, the oldest known story currently is Gilgamesh, at 3,000 - 4,000 years old. | |
| Jun 5, 2018 at 20:40 | comment | added | Loren Pechtel | @Perkins And why do you think there wouldn't be automated format conversions if old file formats grow out of date? Consider the program Calibre, an e-book reader and cataloger. One of it's options is to bulk convert files to another format. | |
| Jun 5, 2018 at 18:53 | comment | added | Perkins | @LorenPechtel that might work if nothing happens to the computer systems. If something does (which over the course of 19,100 years it very well might) then only stories people consider to be worth preserving will survive. The other problem is going to be that anything can be decrypted to anything via proper choice of key and algorithm, so they'll have to be able to recognize the algorithms used and not have broken them or it'll look like a fraud anyway. Public-key cryptography might do it for you though. | |
| Jun 5, 2018 at 2:41 | comment | added | Loren Pechtel | @Perkins You miss my strategy. I'm thinking of large collections of e-books on pirate sites. Get it into some of those. It's unlikely anyone is going to filter stories out of such a collection unless they are corrupted, it will only grow with time. Over on The Pirate Bay I find collections > 100gb. | |
| Jun 4, 2018 at 23:28 | comment | added | Perkins | The hard part is ensuring that a story gets preserved over that length of time. Most people these days haven't read the original Brother's Grimm fairy tails, let alone Chaucer. You'll have to become at least as famous as Plato or Aristotle to have a chance. | |
| Feb 13, 2018 at 21:46 | history | edited | Loren Pechtel | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Renderer was puking on what I did
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| Feb 13, 2018 at 20:10 | comment | added | Tektotherriggen | I love the idea of an coded message in a story! I had already thought of encryption (I updated my answer with those ideas), but that's a nice little twist. | |
| Feb 13, 2018 at 15:55 | history | edited | Loren Pechtel | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 207 characters in body
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| Feb 13, 2018 at 15:49 | history | answered | Loren Pechtel | CC BY-SA 3.0 |