It turns out that something has been watching the Earth in minute detail since before the solar system was formed, down to a sub molecular level. It can give you the answers to any historical questions, but not things like what someone was thinking or feeling.
All the world’s problems have been solved, and the information is only used with the strictest privacy, e.g. you can only get information on living people with their permission, or if you’re a member of law enforcement solving a crime.
The question is, if you have a hobby, job, or other reason to research the past, like being a geologist or genealogist, would you take the answers, or would you prefer to do the research yourself?
For sure! History is the scientific study of the past using all available evidence. If new evidence showed up, we should absolutely use it.
Take the Dead Sea Scrolls. They are a huge cache of texts, many over 2000 years old, containing biblical texts and fragments. The Vatican tried to buy up and conceal them, thinking that they might contradict existing manuscripts. They only let approved researchers have very limited access.
To help the research, some of the scholars created a concordance - basically a list of words and how many times each appeared. A copy was leaked. It became the world’s largest Wordle puzzle and some scholars were able to essentially reverse engineer it into the original text. They published the results, even identifying some of the speculated variants. It was so accurate that the Vatican ended up releasing the original scrolls for study. There was no longer a point to concealing it.
Although the discovery was tremendous for the field, it didn’t end up ruining anyone’s religion. It just offered new insights into the composition and development of the Bible. Pretty cool.
I really want to know what the very first human(s) on the planet were up to.
I read an Arthur C Clarke book a few years ago, and it was based around a device that could see anything, anywhere, some sort of microscopic portal I think. One of the characters used it to look back in time following someone’s DNA, so seeing their mother, then their mother’s mother and so on, and eventually saw the intelligence disappear from the distant ancestors eyes. I’m wording it badly, but the idea stuck with me.
I’d love to know when that first spark of intelligence showed up, that separated us from animals, and what our ancestors either side of that divide did differently and similarly. I doubt that there would have been any significant differences at first, but those subtle differences could be fascinating :)
I think there’s definitely some cool things lost to history that could be answered:
Where did the voynich manuscript come from and who wrote it?
How did the romans make roman fire?
Where is Atlantis?
How did life come to be on earth?
Who was jack the ripper?
Did anyone see what I did on a may 16th 2011 at 7:16pm?
Those are easy:
A grifter.
The true Roman way.
Plato’s Republic.
Increasingly complex chemical interactions around thermal vents.
Some rich guy.
Nope.
Their name?
Their process?
Their geological coordinates?
Possibly?
Nice.
Did anyone see what I did on a may 16th 2011 at 7:16pm?
Wait, that was you?! 😱
No comment
I would take the answers. I would just consider this as another reason to explore other things.
Out of curiosity, what sort of things would you explore? I enjoy researching certain things, so having all the answers would spoil that for me.
as to my understanding, the thing/being can only answer how questions and will probably be poor at why questions.
knowing some event happened can be a step on explaining a more generic pattern to events. this could be one of the avenues of exploration.
I wonder how much something like that would answer the why too. As an example, if a person threw something across a room and broke it without an obvious reason, could you look at a complete record of their history, and the history of the people around them, and figure out the reason. Would you be able to see signs of anger building through the day and look back to the root cause?
It really depends on the goal. Some people’s goal on why questions just needs how answers. An example would be a question asking “Why does the balloon grow big?” and a probable satisfying answer is “because someone is blowing air in it”.
I would take the answer, but I also wouldn’t be comfortable with it telling anything about me or others to law enforcement based on its own personal opinion of what is corrupt or not, which is unlikely to line up with mine, and might well lead to things like right wing places arresting people for being LGBT+, or criticising the government, or women trying to leave the Taliban.
Ah, sorry, I didn’t think of that side of things. I was thinking more along the lines of it could solve things that everyone agrees is a crime, like murder.
My line of thought was more just would you want the easy answers, or would you prefer to have to work for them.
Definitely would want the easy answers. And even the definition of murder is divisive amongst people (is it ok in self defense? Is it ok if they make mocking cartoons of your god?), so do you need like 98% of people to agree it’s a crime?
