GregoryTarasoff
Temporal Novice
well, i'm glad that the numbers finally got verified. life in the mess hall just got a little easier for me.
OvLrdLegion,
your mathematician isn't particularly good at math. the factors are correct. furthermore, it is incorrect that an 800 digit number can be factored in weeks. i may have made several errors in this mission, but factoring too short a number was not one of them-- before i posted my first message, i was sure to confirm that 600 digits is well beyond the ability of anyone alive in 2006.
the simplest proof of this is something called the rsa factoring challenge, which apparently is some sort of giant competition where people try to factor large numbers in order to win cash prizes. in november 2005, for example, a group succesfully factored a number 193 digits long-- it took them five months using a group of eighty computers.
i expect therefore that the feat of factoring a 600 digit number in less than a day should be seen as a little extraordinary. granted, this does not prove i am communicating to you through time. you could reasonably conclude that i could merely have access to some sort of incredibly advanced computing technology which is just thirty years ahead of its time. nonetheless, this should set me apart from routine posters who have nothing but their own word to demonstrate something extraordinary is occuring.
the mathematician proposes an alternative method of proof-- that i could transmit to you a completed result from mathematics, such as a proof for some major mathematical open problem. this approach however has many problems with it and if you think about at it, you will agree it is untenable. the first problems are practical: such proofs are several hundreds of pages long, and they would be difficult to transmit and impossible for you to verify without the aid of armies of the world's best mathematicians working for many months. it would create far more publicity than we want and draw way too much attention to our project. by the time the proof was verified the bridge might have broken down.
the second problem is more subtle and i can illustrate it with a concrete example. i live in a universe where a mathematician named andrew wiles proved fermat's last theorem. now suppose i communicate with 1950 ad in some universe and transmit to it the copy of the proof. in this universe, andrew wiles does not prove anything, instead the proof was not discovered but transmitted into it. but according to my history, andrew wiles did prove it. therefore, i cannot be communicating with _my_ past. rather, my very act of transmitting the proof ensures that i am communicating with a parallel instance universe which is not a predecessor to my universe. and therefore, all the data i have gotten from that communication is essentially worthless. road will be in different places, people will be in in different places, all the details will be scrambled and different.
the whole point of communicating with the past is to communicate with your past, not with some parallel one. or if you are communicating with a parallel one, communicating with one as 'nearby' as possible, that is, one as similar to your own past.
so the idea of transmitting a complex mathematical result is a bad one. the factoring was perfect precisely because it was difficult yet trivial. similarly, the idea of factoring a 9000000 is a bad one-- even assuming we could do it, how would you verify such a large factoring was correct.
RenUnconscious,
yes, the more people who knew winning lottery number, the bigger the paradox. i hesitate to use the word paradox because there isn't actually a paradox-- the multiple universe discovery explains that. the 'paradox' is just a fancy simplified word to describe the discrepancy between your universe and mine. the physicists describe descrepancy in some equation that just involves the actual physical difference between the worldlines of every single quantum of matter-energy over their history-- it's a simply physics thing involving mass and temperature and etc, it's not a subjective human measurement.
that said, think about it-- the most efficient way to alter the most amount of matter and energy is by affecting the lives of intelligent creatures. if i transmitted the winning lottery numbers (assuming i even had them which i don't), and if those numbers came up, i'd instantly be talking to a world very different than my own past.
>Did I miss a world war or something? I thought WWII ended in 1945, when did WWIII happen.
world war three never happened. or if you prefer, it was won nonviolently by the nato nations.
>how old are you? If you dont mind me asking, what year were u born in.
i'd meant to get around to this. i am one of the younger members of the project which i suppose is why i'm bold enough to even attempt this mission that no one else believed in. i am 29 years old. i was born in 2006 ym, which is 2012 ad.
i know i've mentioned the era shift in some emails but i think this is the first time its come up in public so let me mention it. as you all know, when the new american republic was formed, there were huge informational purges that swept away everything about the old federal government and its social order. instead, the new republic was (and is) very rural oriented, very local/regional community-based, very frugal, very pro-military, very family-obsessed, and very very very christian.
as you might expect, there was a lot of change for change sake-- changing things for political propaganda purposes. anyway, one of the stupider decisions was that it was decided that the ad dating system wasn't 'christian enough'. At some point (i'm not sure if it's in your past or your future) they find evidence that the census that made jesus be born in bethlehem happened later than 1 ad and jesus therefore couldn't have really been born in 1 ad and therefore it was 'demeaning of gods plan' to date things for the wrong year. so, they changed to ym (year of the messiah) and it took quickly, because no one wants to give any hint that they are traitors or aren't christian enough.
this complicates both history and cross-time communications a little. it's simpler for our project because we can just use the ad system when talking about any year prior to 2011 ad-- what the government thinks of our dating system is the least of our problems. historians operating in the public have to convert though-- it considered a little dangerous and unamerican to even quote a year in the old system.
>So u are assuring us we will attack Iran. Then we have our civil war?
well, there's more time there than your sentence might imply, but essentially. of course, theres always a chance none of this happens in your universe-- good for you, bad for the project. but i wouldn't put a lot of hope in it not happening-- our whole entire project is built upon the assumption that we are talking with our past or a universe very very close to it.
but yes, iran will be attacked. but then you read the same headlines we download every day, how can you doubt that the ultimate outcome won't be an attack on iran. the writing is already on the wall for that issue.
>Tell us more about this project.
i can't give you precise details-- not because i don't want you to know, but because there's a good chance our enemies monitor these discussions. but the basic outline is obvious.
we communicate with the past for the same reason they travel to it. the downside about global information purges and mass deletions and book burnings and such is that one day you make wake up and wish you had some of that information you so patriotically destroyed.
i don't have to tell you that your time is an informational golden age. every kind of data you could possibly want, you have. elevation data with meter resolution for every point on the earth's surface. the precise location of every road, every house, every business. the wiring information for telecommunication nets. the protocols for every satellite communication. algorithms for practically anything you can imagine. satellite imagery of every point on the earth's surface. the results of scientific experiments. whole libraries of scientific papers and discussions. mathematics.
(and that's not to mention all the art you have. more films than a person could watch in their entire lifetime. more song recordings than any one person could listen to. any kind of food you want. on and on and on. my envy is great.)
in any case, it's hard to jumpstart a good science program if you kill all the scientists. the whole reason the nar is weak is that my entire generation has grown up with anti-intellectual indoctrination. in your time, everyone is literate, everyone is computer-literate, and every twelve year old boy can and does write their own computer programs it seems. try having a science program when you have a nation of fundamentalist farmers. it doesn't work. so they cheat. they go back to that sinful age of heathens because it turns out they shouldn't have destroyed all those computers after all. of course, the general public has no idea. if you went to someone in my time and tried to tell them time travel is possible, they first would believe you, and second would doubt why anyone would want anything from 2006.
now it may be i've overestimated my strength here. after all, the military is sending whole cars back in time while we rebels are sending only photons. but just because they have more resources doesn't mean they're smarter.
>You keep saying you need help, can you state publicly what help you are looking for?
I've told several people privately, so no, it won't hurt to say it publically. 'the project' (which has a proper name i'm not giving out for security purposes) has around 900 separate objectives that were all layed out and prioritized before we ever started. they all could fall under the heading of 'getting information from your time'-- nothing like trying to change the past or anything insane like that. the ones i'm working on here are in the botton 800. i'm a very unimportant person in the grand scheme of things, and the really big priorities are too important to risk on help from message boards people.
the project is limited by the bandwidth of the bridge (which was itself limited by the power source used to send it backwards in time). my own personal mission on this message board is to augment that bandwidth through a technique called caching.
we have scouted locations through the country that are known to be undisturbed for the interval between 2006 ad and the present. my mission on here is to convince people to purchase expensive datasets from various institutions, store them on optical or magnetic media, and place them in one of the pre-designated locations. if all goes well, in a year or two we send teams out to collect, and maybe we'll get lucky and someone will have done it.
keep in mind, right now, even though i know where the cache locations are, we have not disturbed the location. because if we had dug up one of the caches before the project began, it would have been empty, because we hadn't recruited anyone to place anything in it. but then, once the project began, my attempts to recruit people to place things in the caches would, you guessed it, result in forks, because in your universe the cache would be full, but in ours it would be empty. so the sequence is important: first we scout the location, then we recruit, then we check.
everyone is super paranoid about forks (or 'paradoxes' as you call them). i personally don't know if all this attention is as essentials as they make it out to be. maybe the cache are all filled, have been filled for thirty odd years, and all we have to do is go harvest them, even though the recruiting isn't done. i mean, how would we know? but i'm inclined to let caution prevail.
of course, the other trick in the cache harvesting will be logistical-- the security risk for the harvest teams-- as i've said, the military may be monitoring these communications. Any time travellers they've sent to 2006 might pose as a willing cacher, only to arrange an ambush and arrest whoever shows up to dig it up. travel also is much trickier in my time-- no more travelling from new york to la just for the fun of it.
OvLrdLegion,
your mathematician isn't particularly good at math. the factors are correct. furthermore, it is incorrect that an 800 digit number can be factored in weeks. i may have made several errors in this mission, but factoring too short a number was not one of them-- before i posted my first message, i was sure to confirm that 600 digits is well beyond the ability of anyone alive in 2006.
the simplest proof of this is something called the rsa factoring challenge, which apparently is some sort of giant competition where people try to factor large numbers in order to win cash prizes. in november 2005, for example, a group succesfully factored a number 193 digits long-- it took them five months using a group of eighty computers.
i expect therefore that the feat of factoring a 600 digit number in less than a day should be seen as a little extraordinary. granted, this does not prove i am communicating to you through time. you could reasonably conclude that i could merely have access to some sort of incredibly advanced computing technology which is just thirty years ahead of its time. nonetheless, this should set me apart from routine posters who have nothing but their own word to demonstrate something extraordinary is occuring.
the mathematician proposes an alternative method of proof-- that i could transmit to you a completed result from mathematics, such as a proof for some major mathematical open problem. this approach however has many problems with it and if you think about at it, you will agree it is untenable. the first problems are practical: such proofs are several hundreds of pages long, and they would be difficult to transmit and impossible for you to verify without the aid of armies of the world's best mathematicians working for many months. it would create far more publicity than we want and draw way too much attention to our project. by the time the proof was verified the bridge might have broken down.
the second problem is more subtle and i can illustrate it with a concrete example. i live in a universe where a mathematician named andrew wiles proved fermat's last theorem. now suppose i communicate with 1950 ad in some universe and transmit to it the copy of the proof. in this universe, andrew wiles does not prove anything, instead the proof was not discovered but transmitted into it. but according to my history, andrew wiles did prove it. therefore, i cannot be communicating with _my_ past. rather, my very act of transmitting the proof ensures that i am communicating with a parallel instance universe which is not a predecessor to my universe. and therefore, all the data i have gotten from that communication is essentially worthless. road will be in different places, people will be in in different places, all the details will be scrambled and different.
the whole point of communicating with the past is to communicate with your past, not with some parallel one. or if you are communicating with a parallel one, communicating with one as 'nearby' as possible, that is, one as similar to your own past.
so the idea of transmitting a complex mathematical result is a bad one. the factoring was perfect precisely because it was difficult yet trivial. similarly, the idea of factoring a 9000000 is a bad one-- even assuming we could do it, how would you verify such a large factoring was correct.
RenUnconscious,
yes, the more people who knew winning lottery number, the bigger the paradox. i hesitate to use the word paradox because there isn't actually a paradox-- the multiple universe discovery explains that. the 'paradox' is just a fancy simplified word to describe the discrepancy between your universe and mine. the physicists describe descrepancy in some equation that just involves the actual physical difference between the worldlines of every single quantum of matter-energy over their history-- it's a simply physics thing involving mass and temperature and etc, it's not a subjective human measurement.
that said, think about it-- the most efficient way to alter the most amount of matter and energy is by affecting the lives of intelligent creatures. if i transmitted the winning lottery numbers (assuming i even had them which i don't), and if those numbers came up, i'd instantly be talking to a world very different than my own past.
>Did I miss a world war or something? I thought WWII ended in 1945, when did WWIII happen.
world war three never happened. or if you prefer, it was won nonviolently by the nato nations.
>how old are you? If you dont mind me asking, what year were u born in.
i'd meant to get around to this. i am one of the younger members of the project which i suppose is why i'm bold enough to even attempt this mission that no one else believed in. i am 29 years old. i was born in 2006 ym, which is 2012 ad.
i know i've mentioned the era shift in some emails but i think this is the first time its come up in public so let me mention it. as you all know, when the new american republic was formed, there were huge informational purges that swept away everything about the old federal government and its social order. instead, the new republic was (and is) very rural oriented, very local/regional community-based, very frugal, very pro-military, very family-obsessed, and very very very christian.
as you might expect, there was a lot of change for change sake-- changing things for political propaganda purposes. anyway, one of the stupider decisions was that it was decided that the ad dating system wasn't 'christian enough'. At some point (i'm not sure if it's in your past or your future) they find evidence that the census that made jesus be born in bethlehem happened later than 1 ad and jesus therefore couldn't have really been born in 1 ad and therefore it was 'demeaning of gods plan' to date things for the wrong year. so, they changed to ym (year of the messiah) and it took quickly, because no one wants to give any hint that they are traitors or aren't christian enough.
this complicates both history and cross-time communications a little. it's simpler for our project because we can just use the ad system when talking about any year prior to 2011 ad-- what the government thinks of our dating system is the least of our problems. historians operating in the public have to convert though-- it considered a little dangerous and unamerican to even quote a year in the old system.
>So u are assuring us we will attack Iran. Then we have our civil war?
well, there's more time there than your sentence might imply, but essentially. of course, theres always a chance none of this happens in your universe-- good for you, bad for the project. but i wouldn't put a lot of hope in it not happening-- our whole entire project is built upon the assumption that we are talking with our past or a universe very very close to it.
but yes, iran will be attacked. but then you read the same headlines we download every day, how can you doubt that the ultimate outcome won't be an attack on iran. the writing is already on the wall for that issue.
>Tell us more about this project.
i can't give you precise details-- not because i don't want you to know, but because there's a good chance our enemies monitor these discussions. but the basic outline is obvious.
we communicate with the past for the same reason they travel to it. the downside about global information purges and mass deletions and book burnings and such is that one day you make wake up and wish you had some of that information you so patriotically destroyed.
i don't have to tell you that your time is an informational golden age. every kind of data you could possibly want, you have. elevation data with meter resolution for every point on the earth's surface. the precise location of every road, every house, every business. the wiring information for telecommunication nets. the protocols for every satellite communication. algorithms for practically anything you can imagine. satellite imagery of every point on the earth's surface. the results of scientific experiments. whole libraries of scientific papers and discussions. mathematics.
(and that's not to mention all the art you have. more films than a person could watch in their entire lifetime. more song recordings than any one person could listen to. any kind of food you want. on and on and on. my envy is great.)
in any case, it's hard to jumpstart a good science program if you kill all the scientists. the whole reason the nar is weak is that my entire generation has grown up with anti-intellectual indoctrination. in your time, everyone is literate, everyone is computer-literate, and every twelve year old boy can and does write their own computer programs it seems. try having a science program when you have a nation of fundamentalist farmers. it doesn't work. so they cheat. they go back to that sinful age of heathens because it turns out they shouldn't have destroyed all those computers after all. of course, the general public has no idea. if you went to someone in my time and tried to tell them time travel is possible, they first would believe you, and second would doubt why anyone would want anything from 2006.
now it may be i've overestimated my strength here. after all, the military is sending whole cars back in time while we rebels are sending only photons. but just because they have more resources doesn't mean they're smarter.
>You keep saying you need help, can you state publicly what help you are looking for?
I've told several people privately, so no, it won't hurt to say it publically. 'the project' (which has a proper name i'm not giving out for security purposes) has around 900 separate objectives that were all layed out and prioritized before we ever started. they all could fall under the heading of 'getting information from your time'-- nothing like trying to change the past or anything insane like that. the ones i'm working on here are in the botton 800. i'm a very unimportant person in the grand scheme of things, and the really big priorities are too important to risk on help from message boards people.
the project is limited by the bandwidth of the bridge (which was itself limited by the power source used to send it backwards in time). my own personal mission on this message board is to augment that bandwidth through a technique called caching.
we have scouted locations through the country that are known to be undisturbed for the interval between 2006 ad and the present. my mission on here is to convince people to purchase expensive datasets from various institutions, store them on optical or magnetic media, and place them in one of the pre-designated locations. if all goes well, in a year or two we send teams out to collect, and maybe we'll get lucky and someone will have done it.
keep in mind, right now, even though i know where the cache locations are, we have not disturbed the location. because if we had dug up one of the caches before the project began, it would have been empty, because we hadn't recruited anyone to place anything in it. but then, once the project began, my attempts to recruit people to place things in the caches would, you guessed it, result in forks, because in your universe the cache would be full, but in ours it would be empty. so the sequence is important: first we scout the location, then we recruit, then we check.
everyone is super paranoid about forks (or 'paradoxes' as you call them). i personally don't know if all this attention is as essentials as they make it out to be. maybe the cache are all filled, have been filled for thirty odd years, and all we have to do is go harvest them, even though the recruiting isn't done. i mean, how would we know? but i'm inclined to let caution prevail.
of course, the other trick in the cache harvesting will be logistical-- the security risk for the harvest teams-- as i've said, the military may be monitoring these communications. Any time travellers they've sent to 2006 might pose as a willing cacher, only to arrange an ambush and arrest whoever shows up to dig it up. travel also is much trickier in my time-- no more travelling from new york to la just for the fun of it.
