Message from the future

other than being rather poorly written and sounding contrived as hell, i think the circularity is a nice touch. however, they slip up here: surely the authors must realize that they DID try to avert the disaster, and failed. you cannot change the past: something either happened or it did not happen.also, 12 monkeys was a good movie.This message has been edited by arachnophilia, 09-30-2005 05:10 AM

---

אָרַח

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:

yes, i did. fixed now... it's 5 am and i'm on little sleep. and i tend to leave endings off words or omit short words when i'm tired. (or screw up gender in hebrew class...) because logically they can't or didn't. if they did, the disaster would have been averted, and there would be no prompting for them to send us back technology. this is logically impossible, of course. the only possibility is that they did not, for whatever reason. cause some internet goon wrote it, obviously. maybe they were manipulating the information in his brain. i don't see a problem. i don't understand the nature of this question. what do you mean "start?" there's no "first draft" of history somewhere. we get the message, die, get found by alien who send the message. circular causality is perfectly logical. well, evidently we're not going to. but even still, the virus is not effected by the message (unless i missed something). so either we get the message, save 11 people, who send a message that's forwarded (backwarded?) to the past, and then we all die; or we don't get the message and all die.either way, the end result is the same. the message hasn't actually done anything but cause itself. well, no, not again. like i said, there's no first draft. it's going to happen, period. because it did happen, period.

---

אָרַח

Yup - see the title of the sub-thread ^^^^

My head hurts...It seems I better limit myself to the invention of new logical fallacies instead of this nightmare of contradictions

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.

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.

Well, if you insist I would say that we've all got better things to do than thinking about this, lol.Unless we can jump into another parallel universe somehow, we're busted anyway no matter what we try! Staying ignorant as long as possible might be the best solution.

Naw, it isn't supidity on your part, CS: I am often guilty of telegraphic speech--sorry 'bout that.In response to the aliens' warning, we built a settlement--one settlement--on Mars; it was destroyed by an asteroid strike. Thus, "all our apes in one dome" like all our eggs in one basket.As for the tax cut angle, my point was that we are presently struggling to figure out how to pay for recovery from disasters because Bush has spent six years cutting taxes on the wealthy, when the disparity in wealth between the haves and have-nots was already greater than ever. If this trend continues, perhaps we will only be able to afford one dome...

Joke circulating on the web:Rumsfeld is delivering his daily briefing to Bush and the Cabinet. He finishes by noting that, "Three Brazilian soldiers were killed yesterday.""Oh, no!" exclaims the President, "that's terrible!" and buries his face in his hands. The Cabinet is stunned by the unaccustomed show of emotion.Finally, Bush looks up and asks, "How many is a Brazilian?"Edit: typoThis message has been edited by Omnivorous, 09-30-2005 11:30 AM

You can't be absolute with everything. Even our laws are up for debate now and then.Here is a scenario. What if they went through a debate and the alien judges decided that they could only send a short one way message? 2 reasons: (1) They want to do something to help but (2) their prime directive prevented them from interfering too much.Here is another possibility. What if they decided that their prime directive was too strict and that interference was out of the question, but a small group of aliens decided to go ahead anyway with sending the message and only had enough time to send a short one way message before being caught?Remember the star trek voyager episode where Chakote (sp?) and Harry Kim in the future sent a message back in time to prevent voyager from crashing and killing everyone onboard. Why didn't they just use the technology to open up a chat with the voyager crew? Why didn't they just tell them exactly how to get back home? Wanna know the answer? Guess you'd have to watch it to find out. Sure it's possible. Just have your wife tie you up, tape your eye lids open, and start watching all the episodes at once over and over. So, are you saying that we should never consider not knowing the unknown to be a possibility when approaching a problem? You're getting a little creationist-like there.

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.

You forgot to reply to my other possibility. Yes, they did, though. They even explained in that episode how voyager could have gotten home safe and sound.

Do we have to save the animals this time?