Questions tagged [information]
For questions about the storage and transportation of information through different media.
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Preservation of knowledge in the event of apocalypse [duplicate]
I am trying to think of a good way for an effectively all-powerful organization to preserve humanity's knowledge for when the inevitable apocalypse happens so that, when the time comes for survivors ...
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How much information can humans transfer in five seconds? [closed]
Two persons can see and talk to each other a handful of seconds. How much information can they convey?
The gods host "hunger games". A huge TV-show where the universe watches a few thousands ...
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How do the Void Aliens record knowledge without perceiving shapes?
The void aliens, as the name implies, live in the void of space. This environment is rather lacking in important shapes, and so the aliens cannot distinguish objects by shape. While many inventions ...
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How do we destroy data permanently in a world where time travel is easily done?
When you delete data, you make it impossible to retrieve for all times in the future, assuming you have done it right.
However, the data still existed in the past. In a world set in the 22nd century, ...
user98873
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Can a Birch planet send information out?
Theoretically if a Birch planet is built around the event horizon of an ultra massive blackhole, if there was a planet or structure outside of range to experience time dilation, self maintained ...
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"Busted" from the past
Imagine someone claimed she was from Mesopotamia, one of the earliest civilization and had time travelled 5000 years into the future which is now our current modern day, she was completely naked so ...
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I'm making a tattooed repository of paramedical knowledge for a religious ceremony. How small can words be if they're tattoos made of cremation ashes?
I have a character. One of their parents died. Said parent was cremated, and then - by their own choice; this is a quasi-religious thing - their cremains were mixed into tattoo ink, and the character ...
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Where does a virtual being's data move in the physical world whether in a supercomputer or in the internet?
The virtual world is nothing new in science fiction and has had quite a few uses considering it's a fairly recent concept. Since the virtual realm isn't constrained by understanding of physics, it ...
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Can we represent all objects in the universe in a small cube? [closed]
Imagine this. An alien culture needs the information of all objects that are present in the universe. Could a cube with an internal structure be constructed so that all objects of the universe can be ...
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Preserving information for future humans
I'm conceptualizing a sci-fi short story. In it, the main character will find an obelisk type object which has been half-buried for who knows how long. Well, the answer is about 20,000 years. The ...
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How could publicly accessible information proving that a public figure is corrupt go undetected for at least a year?
How could publicly accessible information proving that a public figure is corrupt go undetected for at least a year?
Assume that the public figure is a moderately noteworthy politician (equivalent to ...
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Create a machine to detect a signal sent from the future [closed]
Suppose the inhabitants of my world wish to build a time machine capable of receiving information sent from the future.
It is only necessary to build the receiver; building the transmitter can be ...
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A Scientifically Plausible Platform-Independent Information-Destroying Monster? [closed]
I have dragons, unicorns, gryphons, whatnot. They live happily until the evil Monster Hunter Association shows up and starts killing them for sport. Well, it didn't happen yet, but I received intel ...
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How close can I bring a beam of light to a black hole before the information the beam contains is corrupted?
Given the following conditions:
Two space stations of insignificant mass (compared to what can affect the transmission of a beam of light) are separated by a distance of 100,000 light years.
With ...
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A dense and reliable data storage for human brainscans?
One idea, I like to think about, is resetting the world as a plot point/twist.
As this is a soft-reboot that restores the planet to the last known savefile, I think I can handwave most of it with ...
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How to perform important transactions over vast distances?
I asked a similar question on the History Stack Exchange, but it was suggested I might get better feedback here.
How can you guarantee atomicity of a transaction in a high-latency system?
High-latency ...
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How to get around speed of information limitations when remote controlling battle androids?
My story has a group of androids that have enough processing to split their focus and exist in multiple VR simulations, this will then lead to them
being able to control multiple battle droids in the ...
user69935
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Feasibility of Neutrino-based Energy Beings
I have seen in most sci-fi books and flicks about the existence of a special type of alien who is not even made up of standard biological composition, but more of a living mass of energy and ...
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Can secrets/information be a feasible currency in a fantasy setting?
In a generic fantasy world, there exists an island community in which the inhabitants are freely provided food, board, and entertainment. Their only use for traditional coin is to trade with passing ...
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How can an implant erase memories without causing irreparable damage?
The government has a procedure that employees undergo when working on special projects regarding experimental technology. These scientists are taken to a clandestine site where they will not be able ...
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How can I help to verify somebody is from future?
I want to help people to verify they're from future (if they are, of course). For this I publish some facts/numbers on my website, dayly or weekly or whatever, so that a time traveller can remember ...
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How can I spread content from an ancient text without governmental supervision? [closed]
I am a social justice warrior on a crusade against my nation. For decades, I have watched our leaders ruthlessly expand their power under the guise of "protecting democratic interests around the world"...
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How to erase the cultural memory of post-apocalypse survivors
I'm writing a story that takes place after the decimation of almost all of humanity, and follows a group of survivors who, some time in the future, have formed new societies. Let's say the apocalyptic ...
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Review of the Archetype / Trope of an Arch-Fiend [closed]
Sorry to see an excellent question deleted as possibly too broad. I believe this to be answerable.
What are some examples of the tropes/archetypes used in the "arch-fiend"? Specifically, an ...
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Is it plausible for a controlled press to work in an authoritarian regime under my circumstances?
My story is set in the near past, right before internet become widespread 80's to 90s. The paranoid regime strictly controls the press, and any journalist without license is trialed and executed by a ...
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Vigenère cipher with a regularly-changing key
There's a plot point in my current piece that involves some encrypted radio messages to/from a hidden lab and corporate headquarters, some time in the 1910s. In-universe, the corporation's board of ...
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Julius Caesar with a one-time pad
Julius Caesar used a substitution cipher (now called a Caesar cipher) for sensitive private and military correspondence. The cipher involves shifting all of the letters in a message in one direction a ...
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How scientifically plausible is implanting knowledge directly into a human's brain? [closed]
Is it realistic to think that, given the inefficiency of conveying information to another human through verbal or written language, it may one day be possible to "download" knowledge directly into a ...
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Sharing digital data on physical medium
How can one store digital data in a manner readable without a computer?
To pose a more concrete frame around the question, let's assume we can transport some limited amount of mass into the 1950s and ...
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How do I manage memetic infection while time traveling?
Time travel works...just invented, by you. The tests prove it!
After many conversations and significant planning, your epidemiologist significant other has approved your plans for time travel, ...
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How to overcome transferring information over mental link that changes specific details?
There is a world not too different from our own, at a technology level not too different from our own, with a population similar to our own. Recently, scientists have discovered (by chance in an ...
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How far would information about a criminal spread in Medieval times?
One of my characters is an assassin and mercenary. He's killed plenty of nobles and participated in a couple wars all across the continent. For the story to work, I need other criminals to know who he ...
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How do I have a Dictatorship keep its dictator out of international headlines?
How could the dictator of a poor to middle-income country without any mineral wealth nor strategic position, stay out of the headlines of the big western media?
The assumption is that the dictator ...
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Which knowledge would be most likely to be lost if one needed to make back up of human knowledge in hurry?
Imagine a situation in which a small group of people, not working for any gov has good reason to think that civilisation (as we know it) is going to be destroyed soon. As usual as in such situation ...
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How to visualize orbits
There are spaceships. They have powerful and efficient engines, but not powerful and efficient enough to ignore gravity or delta V issues.
Sometimes they battle each other in complex systems (like a ...
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Can this FTL communication, based on quantum entanglement, work?
Editorial Note
This is a canonocal question meant to cover all possible specific questions that fit the schema, as well as the fully general “Can quantum entanglement be used for FTL communications?”
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The Information Desk provides all sorts of Information; how did it work?
I am wanting to build a world with a strong retail presence, and became interested in the Information Desk at Selfridge's.
This was not the simple standard store information desk, where you ask ...
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