Let’s say we had a way to distribute beacons around our solar system
(or beyond) that could survive for billions of years, recording what our
civilization has achieved. What should they be like?
It’s easy to come up with what I consider to be sophomoric answers.
But in reality I think this is a deep—and in some ways
unsolvable—philosophical problem, that’s connected to fundamental issues
about knowledge, communication and meaning.
Still, a friend of mine recently started a serious effort
to build little quartz disks, etc., and have them hitch rides on
spacecraft, to be deposited around the solar system. At first I argued
that it was all a bit futile, but eventually I agreed to be an advisor
to the project, and at least try to figure out what to do to the extent
we can.
But, OK, so what’s the problem? Basically it’s about communicating
meaning or knowledge outside of our current cultural and intellectual
context. We just have to think about archaeology
to know this is hard. What exactly was some arrangement of stones from a
few thousand years ago for? Sometimes we can pretty much tell, because
it’s close to something in our current culture. But a lot of the time
it’s really hard to tell.
OK, but what are the potential use cases for our beacons? One might
be to back up human knowledge so things could be restarted even if
something goes awfully wrong with our current terrestrial civilization.
And of course historically it was very fortunate that we had all those
texts from antiquity when things in Europe restarted during the
Renaissance. But part of what made this possible was that there had been
a continuous tradition of languages like Latin and Greek—not to mention
that it was humans that were both the creators and consumers of the
material.
But what if the consumers of the beacons we plan to spread around the
solar system are aliens, with no historical connection to us? Well,
then it’s a much harder problem.
tinfoilparachute 