Message from the future

Here is an interesting little story I found yesterday.{Added by edit: Apparently the site no longer exists, but I was able to retrieve the text from cache, so I cut and pasted it here. The only strange thing is that I could have sworn that the year 2010 was mentioned in the original on the site, not 2005. In my cache, it's 2005. I must be mistaken.}{Added by edit: The message has disappeared. Is this what was meant with the message being "lost soon after its appearance"?}This message has been edited by Parasomnium, 29-Sep-2005 02:39 PMThis message has been edited by [omitted], 30-Sep-2005 05:38 PMThis message has been edited by Parasomnium, 30-Sep-2005 10:32 PM

I'm sorry, I'll check it.
Thanks.

I've updated it.

quote:

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It took a while before the message was taken seriously...

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I don't know, it doesn't say, does it? It says "very soon after it appeared on the internet". I've googled it and not found it. Maybe EvC is now the only place where the text is preserved, who knows? First, from what I read in the message, I gather that after it was lost, it was transmitted as a sort of folklore, an urban legend if you will. Some details may have been lost to them.Second, they would have to know what mistakes were made. If they did everything the same, then history might repeat itself, so something would have to be done differently.But what exactly? Apparently they died before they could think of anything and let us know in their message.It's up to us, I'm afraid.

Probably. They wouldn't want to rely on only one person who could read the language of the future, would they?

Could well be, Crea. But then, a movie might also be a very effective way of making the message heard...

Yes, that's all I found.This message has been edited by Parasomnium, 29-Sep-2005 10:40 PM

I read your link and the only similarity I found was this:

quote:

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Thanks to an experimental system called Exordium, the Conjoiners are receiving messages from the future, warning them of the danger that humanity is in.

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Did you perhaps mean "poorly written"?Jacen already addressed some objections in a generic way, but maybe I could have a go at some of them too.Why not more info? Perhaps because sending it back to the past is very costly, and the aliens are already doing us a very big favour by sending us even this short message?Why not give us the technology? Same as above, plus: the aliens may have been able to study our history and think it might not be wise to give this technology to such an agressive species. Thinking that saving us was worthwhile may be very magnanimous of them.Why not more details about the plague? Maybe the aliens edited that part out, because they see another solution and want us to figure it out for ourselves? Only if we could do that, would we be worth saving?How to send a message to the past? The aliens say they can manipulate information in the past. Why would they say it like that, if it comes down to connecting to computers in a conventional way? Maybe they have developed something radically different. Or maybe they are being deliberately oblique? What if they are simply able to send someone back in time who can post a message on the internet, but they don't want us to know that?Circularity: One thing that bothers me is that, if this message is real, then we are bound to go wrong. Why else did we get this message? The message only gets sent in a scenario where things go haywire. We received the message, ergo the message is sent, ergo things go haywire.Supposing it's not a hoax (although I'm quite sure it is), then how could this cycle ever start?It's when we don't receive the message that everything is OK. If we don't receive the message, then we don't act upon it. So maybe we should do nothing? The problem with that is of course that we are not in the situation of not having received the message. Not receiving the message and doing nothing is not the same as receiving the message and doing nothing, is it? Therefore, we cannot be sure that doing nothing is the solution.Anyway, it seems that whatever we do, it's going to go wrong (again?){edit to fix spelling and grammar}This message has been edited by Parasomnium, 30-Sep-2005 11:59 AM

Jacen, from now on I will always remember you as the guy who coined the funniest word ever: "brazillion"When I saw it I nearly fell off my chair laughing. I have thought of a definition too:

No, please do contribute. Some completely novel way of looking at it might be just what is needed here. You are good at that kind of thing, I'm told.

Why is that? If we don't know what "manipulating information through time" means, then how can we possibly know how long it takes the aliens to do it, for any amount of information?

So are you saying that we should do as little as possible? And to ensure just that, we should have stayed ignorant as long as possible?

A causes B causes C causes A? That's all very well, but there has to be a beginning. Before we received the message, was this cycle going on? I'd say no. But now that we have, it's started. We have A. And A was caused by C. But C hasn't happened yet. So how can it be the cause of A? How can we have A? I'm not so sure about that.