question: receiving messages from powers

Michael Wiik (mwiik@messagenet.com)
Wed, 03 Nov 1999 12:21:53 -0500

I'm at a loss to imagine how communication can exist between powers.

If evil powers exist, how can you protect yourself from viruses/trojan horses possibly encoded into a message? Here and now, I doubt most people check their mail for letterbombs, but in this case the price of failure is only one human life and maybe collateral damage. Once we're powers, we might have a whole legacy to look after, and the price of failure might not be just mere death but an infinity of hellish torture (spanning multiple universes) for multiple copies of ourselves and loved ones spawned for some evil darkside-extropian mind experiment (see archives).

So say you're a power cruising thru space and you come across a derelict spaceship sending distress signals (or maybe a planet full of miserable peasants praying for salvation). How do you know that it isn't a trap? Wouldn't it be prudent to just ignore it, and possibly move away from it at near-light speed, dropping antimatter space-mines behind you all the way?

Even if you reduced the message/derelict/planet to its constituent atoms, how can you ensure it isn't a clever trap constructed by some much more advanced but evil power?

Maybe the Earth's core isn't full of deadly nanoweapons to ensnare powers that come to visit, but it could be, and isn't that enough?

-Mike

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Michael Wiik Principal Messagenet Communications Research Washington DC Area Internet and WWW Consultants http://messagenet.com mwiik@messagenet.com
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