
Ask HN: How to send a message to a future species? - zw123456
For a fun weekend thought experiment... What if you were convinced that our species was going to become extinct let&#x27;s say due to climate change. But you are also convinced that another intelligent species will emerge on Earth, let&#x27;s say, 50 Million years in the future. How would you do it?
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ksaj
Think about what Earth was like 50 million years ago. It was the Eocene "New
Dawn" period. India was just starting to join Asia (physically, in the
tectonic sense). The Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction saw one or more asteroids
kill off most of the dinosaurs. Both North and South poles were forested and
Alaska was a rain forest. Grass was a new member in the evolutionary family
tree. Primates started appearing, and mostly dwarf species thrived.

If you think about what the fossils from this time period looked like, you can
pretty much guess what your message will look like to a future finder in a
similar time scale. What you can't guess is what any life form will look like,
because nearly nothing alive that long ago even looked like it does today. And
we should expect that in the same time period going forward.

Buildings from only a couple thousand years ago are barely recognizable until
we dig cleanly around them, and we can't even figure out half of the features
we find in them.

Imagine such longer time scales. The digging will be a _lot_ deeper. Tectonics
and natural flora cycles will ensure that everything we were has been ground
up and recycled repeatedly. It will be nigh impossible to find anything more
intelligible than the 50 million year old fossils we find today.

But all is not in vain. With how over populated the Earth is right now,
they'll find a whole lot of human-based crude oil to run whatever kind of
automobiles they're driving by then.

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rolph
Im wondering if the neanderthals and other pre humans had this idea, and
decided that concepts, and not absolutes should be displayed. we would
probably do better with symbols that somehow relate to the life experiences of
the reader. and create a cartoon of sorts that displays our daily habits, ways
of doing things, and establishes a time directive. such as what we did when
the sun is down, when sun is high, and sun setting.

most importantly, how we related to the world around us, and what we did to
it.

there are a lot of cave paintings, petroglyphs and heiroglyphs and
megastructures, that seem to do just these kind of things.

~~~
zw123456
There is nothing that we could leave on Earth that could survive that long due
to plate tectonics and anything on the moon would get covered over by moon
dust. The only thing that could survive that long would be a probe such as
voyager on a long elliptical orbit that had a period of perhaps sever hundred
years.

If such a probe existed, what would you transmit?

fibonacci sequence? PI ? Prime numbers?

~~~
ksaj
Elon Musk's car, which will undoubtedly settle into an orbit eventually,
unless it smashes into something big enough to obliterate it first.

Some day, a scientist will find that car and study it to see if they just
found LUCA.

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drallison
Life is likely to continue even if our species goes extinct. Encoding the
message and embedding it in our DNA would be an appropriate place.

