On Fri, Mar 02, 2007 at 01:04:46AM +0530, Devdas Bhagat wrote: > > Industrial Revolution, its called. Or perhaps evolution. > > Or in this case, intelligent design?
I presume the idea was tongue in cheek. DNA doesn't like dead luggage, especially in primitive critters with a high mutation rate. When civilisation crawls back from nuclear glass, it will first find those gas cylinders full of microfilm, welded shut and buried in the Oz outback (it doesn't take Long Now, some invididuals are doing it just fine on their own) than first learn how to do large-scale DNA sequencing, and finding a funny sequence in some obscure bug (but, most likely the sequence will be lost, see above). The advantage of microfilm (you could also use photosensitive glass, which crystallizes around photonuclei at close to glass transition temperature, or a gold foil, but putting information on precious metal is a Really Dumb Idea) is that it takes sunlight, a lens (buried with the carrier) and a primate eye to read it. As to density, dry DNS might be dense, but if you factor in the solvent and the reader biomachinery, molecular memory will run rings about it. And there's just nothing beating like encoding things as crystal lattice defects -- but the random access latency will be just horrible -- but if you ablatively scan the surface, the streaming rate could be killer. A relativistic matter pellet stream, intercepted and decoded at location is completely unobservable (unless you unfortunate traveller happen to be perforated by it, causing some packet loss, hopefully catched by transmit redundancy, since the ACK to retransmit is a bitch at lightyear latency, which is Vint's next job (I thought cerf-volant was a dragon, but it's actually just a kite, while Drachen means both a dragon and a kite in German) and is probably the most efficient ways to signal (or travel, for advanced peoples it's the same thing) across interstellar distances. As to SETI, SETI even hasn't figured how to read line of sight laser, especially if it doesn't happen to point your way. -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
