So, here’s the deal: You’ve managed to acquire the data, but disaster strikes, and your time machine is destroyed by an enemy time traveler team. This is crucial historical data that you’ll have to get into the future to avert the apocalypse. Due to the constraints of the space-time continuum, all time travelers staying outside of their “home” time for longer than 1 year will die, so you have exactly 1 year to prepare. How do you make sure the future discovers the data, while preventing the enemy time traveler faction from stealing the data?
(Remember: don’t just chuck it in a hard drive and bury it in a forest somewhere, the data will degrade)
Release the data on the public internet in an encrypted form. With the data, include a message openly admitting you’re a time traveler. Include predictions of events that are relatively resistant to the butterfly effect and will have little effect on the time stream. For example, I would include a long list of future supernovae and other astrophysical phenomena. Such data would accelerate the field of astronomy a bit, but it wouldn’t really affect life on Earth much. And it would prove that you’re either a time traveler or someone with access to FTL travel technology. In your message, tell people the data is of vital importance to the future of humanity and that it will be needed in a crucial hour.
There will be enough people who preserve a copy of the data and pass it along to their children and grandchildren. Forget relying on technical solutions. This is one you can rely on people for. Unless there’s some complete collapse of technological society, the data will be preserved.
Nice try, enemy time travel team checking the fediverse archives a hundred years from now.
This Is How You Lose The Time War
I was both happy and disappointed in reading that novella. Its long on prose, but short on story. For those that like that, its probably fantastic. Its not quite my cup of tea though.
Damn, almost fooled you. 😅
Just give up already, your team is on the wrong side of the space-time war.
Just give up the location of the archive, and we might consider letting you go. 😉
Create a torrent file named RockyHorrorPictureShow_Outtakes_TaylorSwift and release it to the internet.
My first thought went to those M-Disk/BDXL bluray disks which supposed to last 1000 years if you believe the claims. So with 100gb per disk you would need atleast 1000 disks. Probably more since the data probably wont perfectly fill out each disk. Writing to optical media is slow and according to the very first searchresult i found it takes upwards of 3hrs to write and verify a single disk. So with a single drive it would take atleast north of 3000 hours if nothing goes wrong. A year has ~8760 hours btw. Oh boi.
But i wouldnt want to rely on a single copy of each disk. If the data is so important i would like to have atleast 10 copies? So the year would probably consist of only maintaining and repairing several burning rigs and going through like
35.000edit: 11.000 blurays and then finding spots to safely store them.But how will they read the data of the disks in the future? Blurays and todays data formats most likely wont exist anymore. So you would need several redundant PCs with bluray drives which hopefully last that long. The HDD/SSD wont last in them. Linux live disks burned on the blurays? On top foolproof documentation how to operate all that ancient shit.
My head hurts
But how will they read the data of the disks in the future?
I would hope a team fighting a time war would have some skills here. I don’t have to solve that problem.
The discs actually last several hundred years.
Print it out at work and leave it on the printer.
Easy. Copy the data into several different mediums and store them as safely as I can. Bury half of them in time capsules set to be dug up in 100 years and then start a cult based around duplicating and passing the data down through the generations. Hopefully one of those two methods insures that at least one whole copy of the 100tb of data survives the 100 years.
1: most mediums will not last close to a hundred years
2: writing 100tb takes a lot of time.
Eh. I’ve moved 2/3 TB around for work a few times. Yeah it’s slow but transfer speeds have only been getting better. I figure in 100 years transferring 1tb will take about as long as it takes us to transfer 1gb these days. If not even better.
Does it only need to be discovered by the people 100 years in the future, or can people before that be aware of it?
Because this reminds me of the nuclear waste protection research. You found a religion that fears glowing cats…
It has to be 100 years, becuase the idea of sending a time traveler in the past is conceived in 100 years, so they wouldn’t be looking for the data before then.
Once they come up with the idea of the mission to send someone to the past, they also realize: “Hmm what if the mission has already been done?” and so they immediately send a team to search for possible clues on where the data is, if someone alredy went to the past and weren’t able to return.
If its gets found in like 99 years, the enemy forces could get their hands on it before your teams starts looking for it.
Basically, in exactly 100 years, the idea of sending someone to the past is thought of, then some time after that, say, in year 120, they finish the time machine. They would be looking for the data in year 100, 20 years before the time machine has even been built. Get it? They would never think of looking for the data before 100 years since they haven’t thought about the time machine idea.
Okay yeah that makes sense. So that rules out founding cults that use the information as their holy book. But it could allow for “keep it secret, keep it safe” cults where there’s a holy object that they know is important but don’t know contains the data. (But it can’t be SO interesting that people try to inspect and understand it and inadvertently discover the data).
I wonder if you could rely on your buddy in the future knowing what your favorite password is and encrypting the data somehow.
Does it need to be discovered ASAP in that 20 year gap or can it be later on in that period once they know that you specifically are selected for the mission?
Does it need to be discovered ASAP in that 20 year gap or can it be later on in that period once they know that you specifically are selected for the mission?
Basically, the enemy team is already looking for it sometime before year 100. But starting year 100, both teams are looking for it. So your hidden archive can reveal itself anytime after that (but not too late, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to make use of the data), and your team will almost certantly find it before the enemy does.
(lol I feel like I’m doing a lot of world building here 😅)
100 years ain’t that long tbh. Seal it in a glass jar and put it somewhere cool and dry, like a cave, and it’ll be fine.
Claim it’s some secret govt data, then all the conspiracy theorists will archive it. Especially after misterously dying onr year later!
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Its one hundred of 1TB MicroSD Cards, better back it up before it gets corrupted! Good luck, time traveler! 😉
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Bad Time Traveler 😕
Appropriate username though
If this is our present, our future is unthinkable.
Some type of data crystal/diamond sneak it in to or on to a piece of art or jewelry in a museum somehow or maybe stash it in a statue or graveyard someplace that’ll persist and most likely won’t be changed much if at all for that amount of time. The organization that sent me on this mission surely had a dead drop contingency plan they have time traveling tech. Or I leave a clue carved in stone on the grounds of the one day HQ hoping they get the clue and can swap the data crystal out later. 🤷♂️
Oh sure - I tell you, you tell somebody else, next thing every time traveller is doing it.
Use lasers to create bubbles in large chunks of glass. Duplicate a few times on a few far flung continents, including Arctic/Antarctica.
LTO9 tapes with LTFS
Laster than fight speeds
maybe not super fast but durable and will stand the test of time and be readable with a usable technology in a 100 years
“Back to the Future, Part 2” tells me law firms will hold and deliver things.
Easy enough for future time travelers to protect data from themselves until certain dates.
Enemy time travelers? Gotta keep the “how”, “where” and “when” quiet forever. Keeping it boring will keep it from being repeated.
