froginhotwater.com May, 2012What If page 2
When I looked in on the two outer galactic trainees the first one, Ttam, seemed a little agitated. "Explain that to me again, how did you erase a whole galaxie?"
"I didn't exactly erase it, I accidentally saved another one on top of it."
"How?"
"Look, it's no big deal. This is just the practice run."
"Yes but if we loose information then we have to rescan everything."
"You can't loose information, it's just been re-arrainged somewhere. We just need to figure out how to recover it."
"But if you overwrote the Planck bits then where are you going to look to recover it?"
Jaff doesn't like getting boxed in while arguing. "Aren't there traces, light waves carrying the information, neutrons with altered paths, gravitational anomalies? There must be something which can be decoded to find the missing bits."
"Let me know when you find it." I could tell from the expression on Ttam's face that he knew it wasn't there, once the planck bits changed states then there was nothing to go back to. Even if there were the temporal data would be lost, and there'd be no recovering the sequencing. Oh well, just one more check to put in place when they run the real backup. Plus since this is compressed data there is no room for errors, there's not enough overhead to recover missed bits, much less a whole galaxie. "What if there's people or animals on one of those planets and you just toast them like that. How are you going to sleep after that?"
"I know, I need to be more careful, and you're right, once it's gone it's gone. So how do we keep from doing this when it really counts?"
"This really counts, you've just increased our workload by quantum leaps. We need to put some protections in place so that once we've written a sector, it can't be overwritten."
"I'll work on it."
"Good, now where were we?"
"We were cross checking the alpha sectors while the beta sectors were getting written."
"Should we practice on blackhole frontiers? They're a lot closer than the edges."
"We talked about that. It's too unstable, and what if the blackhole changes or if something large gets sucked in? Then the planck surface will be disrupted for sure."
You can see how much trouble this keeping track of planck bits and galaxies and everything in between.
Sometimes though, I have to wonder if it's really going to work. Just because we save something for later recovery, what's to keep it from happening again? We're not changing the physics of it all. If two planets collide and wipe each other out, they'll still collide again if we restore them. It's just a matter of time. And of space.
Even on earth, if we save a copy of solar system and everything in it and then use it to restore the Yangtze River Dolphins, what's to keep them from going extinct again?
Some of the guys here talk about sending a message back in time, using a worm hole or something (like that would work, really?). But OK, fine, we'll send a message back. It can be any thing we want so that whoever reads it can prevent some terrible thing from happening the second time around, after we've restored things (by the way, the reader of the message will have no idea that the restoration happened, that's the way it works).
What should we say?
