Message from the future

How would you send a message to our internet from the future? How exactly could you get two computers to handshake? Why send only a short text message and not, say, 100 gigs of data on the infection?I'm not dismissing this out of hand, because I don't believe that "time travel is impossible" is a scientific conclusion, but more prosaic technical problems with data transmission to infrastructure in the past, especially to a digital, packet-switched network, lead me to believe that this is most likely a funny hoax and not actually contact from the future.Posting stuff to the internet requires a two-way link. And if the link is two-way, why wouldn't the future aliens stick around to chat with us?

Then they've already violated it. Significantly violated it. I'm not sure it would be possible for me to increase my viewership of those shows. The argument from ineffability doesn't go too far with me.

Because it wouldn't take any more transmission time to send 100 gigs of data than to send the message that they did send. That's the part that doesn't work for me - it wouldn't have been harder to send 100 gigs than to send less than 1k of text.Your possibility is the one that I already had anticipated in my reply. I know the answer. It's because the writers didn't know, yet.

I don't think a precis on the data avaliable during the time of the coming plague violates the Prime Directive any more than this note does. If they were trying to skirt a Prime Directive-type law, the note they sent would have been far, far more vague.If you're gonna take a moral stance against a law, you take a big stance. You don't half-ass it. Did it happen that way, when the series ended? I love SG-1 but Trek never did it for me. Worst science-fiction on television, if you ask me.

I can think of several types of time-travel where the size of the data is irrelevant to transmission time:1) Time-transmission works not by syncronizing two separate time flows but by retroactive "editing" or direct changes to the universe at a discreet instant in the past - like making changes to one frame of a movie, the change appears instant to us here in the past.2) Time-transmission works by dropping off the data stored to some kind of digital storage device, like a small flash drive. Since you have to send the whole drive for it to work, it doesn't matter if the drive has 1k of text data or 512 mb of PowerPoint slides on the infection.There's other indications that bandwidth was not an issue - for instance, when transmission time is a premium, the first thing you don't do is use an intercaps character set; if you restrict to all upper or lower case letters and limited punctuation, you can cut an entire bit off of every character.Instead, they sent an extra bit of data per character in order to have appropriate punctuation and capitalization. As short as it is, the message is too long and too "frilly" to have been sent under a situation where data transmission was a premium. It's much more likely that the limiting factor was our end, and there's a number of places on the internet that could accept a 1 gig file transfer, or 100 gigs, or whatever, about as fast as they could accept a < 1k file.