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)
Oh sure - I tell you, you tell somebody else, next thing every time traveller is doing it.
Print it out at work and leave it on the printer.
LTO9 tapes with LTFS
Laster than fight speeds
Nice try, enemy time travel team checking the fediverse archives a hundred years from now.
This Is How You Lose The Time War
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. 😉
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.
How experimental are we going? There’s some cool research into laser etching data into crystal cubes. That should be very stable, but I don’t know how you’d get to the tech.
I don’t know how you’d get to the tech.
Steal it from the enemy time travelers, obviously. 😁
Setup a company who’s job it is to maintain the data. They make money by offering the same services to others, but their main aim is the preservation of this 100TB. Only people passing stringent security checks will know of this special mission. Enemies from the future will be scared away by a sign on the door reading “BEWARE OF THE TIGER”.
They will run massive NetApp arrays and redundant ZFS pools. They will rotate disks out periodically and migrate onto newer technologies as and when. Backups will be taken, verified and tested monthly. Basically it’s Backblaze but running for 100 years.
BEWARE OF THE
TIGERLEOPARDEnemies from the future will be scared away by a sign on the door reading “BEWARE OF THE TIGER”.
🤣
Perfection
Create a torrent file named RockyHorrorPictureShow_Outtakes_TaylorSwift and release it to the internet.
10 encrypted mdisc addressed to the good guys buried in as many 100year time capsules as possible.
alternatively just give it to the time traveller sent to retrieve you.
alternatively the future needs this data because you failed and you need to accept this is how things always happen.
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
Seems like it would be feasible to purchase a few hundred of those drives and then store them in vacuum sealed containers all over the place.
I believe that worst case after 100 years, the worst that future data restorationists would have to do is replace some rubber belts, Maybe rework a connector or two.
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.
I set up like a million dead drops, craigslist entries and graffitti telling the other time travellers to come pick me up where I am. As long as one makes it I will get an instant pickup materializing next to me instantly and can carry whatever server rack I’m salvaging inside their DeLorean or TARDIS or whatever. Bonus points, I get to survive. Extra bonus points, let’s go to the place the other guys jumped me and bootstrap their asses into the curb.
I get that the idea is chatting about how to preserve data, but time travel breaks every premise if you think about it for two minutes.
What if the enemy time travelers get to you first?
There is no first. Time travel! Just keep going back. Hell, screw telling my future friends about coming to pick me up, tell them to tell me where I got jumped so I can avoid it and I don’t even have to be here in the first place.
I will Primer the crap out of this situation if there are time machines. I will Primer the crap out of every situation if you let me have a time machine.
Okay, so there are flaws with this. There is first. Because it depends on whether in the future, the good guys or bad gouts see the communications first. If the bad faction of time travelers see the message first, they could come destroy the data. You could hope that the good guys see it later in the timeline and undo that by rescuing you with your data but there is still a circle effect going on. The bad guys can still counter the good guys and vice versa. An endless undoing/redoing cycle.
You place X amount of messages, but it is not specified how many enemies versus good time travelers there are. So it is impossible to know who will see one of your messages first, starting the cycle. Even getting the data to a safe place, someone in the timeline along the way can see your messages and go to a place to stop you from securing said data. It would be never ending. The idea is to let the good guys know without the bad guys if you go that route. If you rigged the messages cryptically and they ended up asking a question that only the good time travelers would know, giving them say a location to rescue you for this plan to work.
No, it doesn’t matter. There are infinite good and bad guys. They all can spawn a second before each other until the big bang. You can assume the friendlies aren’t complete morons and have set up some encrypted comms, although presumably that itself is in its own time loop of decryption and re-encryption itself, since you effectively have infinite time to both track down and decrypt any code.
The real answer is time travel makes no sense.
The real answer is that time travel to the past is never possible.
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 😅)
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.
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!
