Keeping a secret for four hundred years

[jack]

I won't say whether it exists or not, but much in Foucault's Pendulum much attention is paid to the implausibility of the idea there may be secret descendants of the Templars, putting a long-laid plan. Many other books (and conspiracy theories) have similar ideas.

How *would* you go about organising such a thing? First, a few background points.

* Obviously there are *some* secret societies. The masons actually exist :)
* If that helps the members out now, that's obviously a reason to do it.
* Or if they're following some religious purpose.
* Or if you want to shape the future of humanity.
* But would you want to found a society in order to benefit the N00-year-hence members of it? But that's what some fictional societies with a big secret seem supposed to do. (See 1984 for a philosophical discussion of maintaining a caste system.)

If you did want to, how would you do it? First, the parameters:

* Let's say you have a big secret you want put into effect or revealed at the next millennium.
* You want to prevent anyone finding out before hand, including the members.
* But want the secret to survive.

And, so, what:

* One technique is to simply write lots of instructions and bury them. They (hopefully) won't be found too soon and (hopefully) when they're found some people primed by rumour will follow the instructions.

That later point is when many stories are set: with the digging up of a mysterious treasure map and wondering who wrote it.

* Another is to found a small secret society, and trust the members to hand the secret down to the next generation. This is also popular, though fragile.

If too few people know, sooner or later they die at once, and the followers are stuck.

If too many, someone wants to go off, and grab the secret early.

Each man/group choosing a trustworthy successor can work, but they can't *always* be right. And over their life, they may stop caring.

And they can all be hunted down.

* What other tricks are possible? Perhaps estimate Moore's Law and release an encrypted message publicly, and rely on it being decrypted at about the right time.

* Have several groups with part of the secret, to meet at some point in the future.

It's tricky specifying when though. You can say "meet at this place, this time, this day, this year", and rely on statistics to make it robust. If a secret group has a 10% chance of dying out and 10% chance of going rogue, it has 80% chance of doing the right thing. Founding three such groups needing one other to decrypt the secret improves the chances to ~3% of two dying out, and ~3% of two going rogue.

But no "Machiavellian" secret societies anyone's tried to tell *me* about have been so clever.

Alternatively, try to specify a place you can't find in advance, eg. where the next [event] occurs, one month later. But clever groups trying to jump the gun might cheat, eg. by going to the *last* [event], on the anniversary, and hoping another group will think the same way.

* Found a religious order and tell them it's god's will.

* Launch the secret in a space probe designed to intercept the earth in N years.

* Lock it up and trust no-one ever considers trying to cheat mechanically.

* Hide it in a statue, church, or other long-lasting publicly visible place, with a clock designed to go off at the right time. Anyone looking before that won't know where, but at the time it'll be obvious to all comers.

* Similarly, you could hide it in a computer -- or mutation-resistant biological -- virus, designed to spread slowly and go off on that date.

Though none seem perfect. Does anyone have any better ideas?

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/vitriol_/]

For some reason, my favorite idea is also thoroughly impractical - encode the secret message using a method of encryption that you estimate will become breakable (given advances in crptography and computing power) roughly when you want it revealed. Of course, this relies on you being able to accurately predict the mostly unforseeable advances in a number of fields (which is almost impossible to get right for a year or so on the future, let alone centuries), but it still tickles me.

I think the most practical solution given the time periods you're talking about is something pseudo-mechanical. For instance, you can use a pivot with a counterbalance and a large amount of radioactive material to tip the arm at the date you want by calculating its change of mass due to atomic decay (you want it to give off alpha or beta radiation so it can't be detected). Assuming you use a quite large pivot and weights, and make them from stone or ceramics, it should quite happily function after a millenia or so.

You can then use that tipping arm to trigger *something* to get people's attention. Again, it has to be robust enough to survive a millenia or so unattended, so I'd probably go with a swimming-pools worth of oil in a nice stable container, and some means of the arm igniting it. The burning oil should provide enough overpressure to shatter a strategically-constructed weak spot, and create a nice plume of black smoke to attract attention. When they come looking, they should find a heavy, sealed box containing whatever you wish to communicate to future generations.

OK, so it's overcomplicated and still imperfect (it relies on no one happening to dig at that spot, and people still living somewhere nearby in the future), but it doesn't rely on a fallible secret society, and most importantly, no one needs to know where it is or even that it exists at all until it goes off.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I agree with both :)

[simont]

Estimating Moore's Law: as I mentioned last year, Arthur C Clarke attempted this with a thirty-year planning horizon in "2010", and was out by a factor of perhaps five. Over thirty times thirty years, I can therefore only assume that someone with the same skill at prediction (at which Clarke has generally been no slouch) would suffer an error factor of 5³⁰!

Another problem with leaving your encrypted message is that you have to find some way to be sure anyone will care about decrypting it. I mean, if Jesus had left a strongly encrypted message, we can be reasonably sure that there would have been people trying like crazy to crack it even before they had any real idea of how to, and that the message would probably be decrypted slightly before the moment when the Moore curve first made it reasonably feasible to do so; but if instead of Jesus it had been some completely unknown random in 30AD, or 1030AD, or even 1730AD, we might very well not have given much of a hoot, and might be concentrating most of our attention and CPU power on the latest distributed.net challenge for which there was an actual cash prize to be won.

[http://users.livejournal.com/vitriol_/]

Well, yes, the encryption is idea is utterly ludicrous in the long term, it just amused me :)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Indeed. It seems a promising *sort* of solution, since it solves (a) keeping it secret and (b) keeping it known. But I know using current cryptography isn't anywhere *near* accurate enough.

And you do need to *also* found some kind of cult that will keep people interested, but that doesn't need to be secret or restricted, so we've reduced it to a simpler, widely considered problem :)

[rochvelleth.livejournal.com]

Time travel! :)

The thing is, I can't quite see how someone would want to make X known 1000 years later unless they had a way of knowing what 1000 years later would be like - how could you even predict that *anything* would exist 1000 years later, never mind that there would be a situation in which you desire your special X to become known. Therefore, I conclude that only special people with some way of knowing what will happen 1000 years later will want to put such a plan into action. Ergo, being not such a person, I don't know how they would implement the plan.

Seriously though, the motivation seems more important than the plan itself to me. Because, if I'm right about the kind of person who would want to make up such a plan, then I suspect they only exist in fiction anyway :)

[simont]

This is a good point. It seems most likely that the reason you'd want your secret to become known in 1000 years was because you knew one specific thing about that point in the future, which had direct bearing on the secret. Therefore, your means of arranging that people found out at that point would probably end up being directly related to the nature of that specific thing, and/or the secret itself.

For example, if what you wanted humanity to know in 1000 years was that a dirty great asteroid would be hurtling dead-centre towards Earth and require some tricky celestial snooker to deflect it, then you wouldn't bugger about with secret societies or trickily encrypted messages; you'd encourage the building of Spaceguard observatories and fund initial R&D into pieces of cue chalk the size of New Mexico.

(This is a poor example because (a) such an asteroid would have no particular need to be kept secret until 1000 years hence, and (b) you wouldn't have any reason to have found out about it that far in advance of the rest of the world anyway; but it illustrates my point nonetheless, and also allows me to use the line about the cue chalk :-)

[rochvelleth.livejournal.com]

:)

Perhaps in a society where there's an ingrained sense that the fundamentals of that society won't have changed in 1000 years' time?[1]

Implausible scenario:

So, maybe this asteroid is going to hit Earth at a known point a long way into the future, and let's say that the person who knows this envisages a way of protecting some parts of the Earth from the impact while leaving the rest to be wiped out (insert some Dr Who style science here). Now, it happens that the society in which the person lives is opposed by another society, their sworn eternal enemies, and so this person desires that they one day be wiped out by this asteroid. So the person chooses the 'found a small secret society, and trust the members to hand the secret down to the next generation' option, so that there is already a means in place of protecting his society from the impact (the sect having put all the contingency plans in place by the time of the impact), while the enemy are destined only to find out when it's too late, to torment them just before they die.

And then insert a plot in which members of the secret sect 1000 years later have divided loyalties, etc, etc, and you have a novel :)

[1] For real examples, see think ancient Rome, the Third Reich, etc.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. It's a cool novel.

A racial motivation might make more sense. The longest any recognisable widespread culture's survived is probably ancient China?[1] But white people, black people and yellow people will probably be in much the same place in 1000 years.

[1] Some *expect* to last forever. But the absence of anyone doing it makes me doubt the competence of anyone expecting that to form a complex and reliable plan. Eg. if you think Rome will last forever, just tell the Emperor to pass down the secret :) I guess they might be gambling: *if* this culture lasts, they want to protect it.

[rochvelleth.livejournal.com]

The longest any recognisable widespread culture's survived is probably ancient China?

Ooh, well, that's a good question... It depends what you mean, I suppose. I mean, if you take Christianity as a natural progression in terms of cultural unity, then the Roman world is still going strong (dialects of the language still there, the culture still there, the sense of western unity still there, the legal system still there, etc.) :)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yeeees.... OK. But anyone wanting to take out those parts of roman culture with a Giant Fucking Asteroid (TM) [1], wouldn't achieve anything by flattening Italy *now* :)

[1] Fucking Asteroid is metaphorical fwiw :)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I do love the "pieces of cue chalk the size of New Mexico" line. (Though I agree the asteroid isn't a good example of something to keep secret.)

Hmmm, what *would* be -- potentially some massive new form of power? Imagine if the stars aligning gave some sort of cosmic power that could be used for great good or great evil (tm). You might want to bank on a small group of people exploiting it for good rather than telling everyone. I admit that's not a *very* good example

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

That was the premise. Maybe you get lucky and find out *one* thing, but that doesn't mean you know any more than anyone else about anything else.

Yes, the premise is kind of stupid, but it makes an interesting problem, and I'm curious to know if secret societies founded or fictionalised around such a premise are stupid because the author wasn't inspired enough (or was writing about characters who aren't) or because it's inherently impossible.

What kind of mathematician are you to refuse to consider a hypothetical problem... wait, sorry :)

[rochvelleth.livejournal.com]

Linguists don't deal with hypothetical problems - the nearest we get is proposing a hypothetical solution (I mean, a third factor not actually known to exist kind of thing) ;)

I'm sorry, I always take things back to the beginning. I'd say the authors all missed a trick by not explaining why the hell such a secret society would be founded (if they didn't explain, that is - but I can't quite imagine a good explanation).

Well, I think the solution is to try to make something known in 1000 years' time and see if it works. Of course, *we* probably won't have the satisfaction of knowing, but someone else will :)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

:)

I'm sorry, I always take things back to the beginning.

:) Don't worry, that's probably a good and analytical habit. But I sometimes narrow the focus, not the first bit, but to a self-contained other bit.

In this case, it seems very likely there *are* no good reasons for it, thus the question is hypothetical[1]. However, considering how to set up such a society, I think is also a very useful exercise, and might possibly be relevant elsewhere.

[1] ie. That the question is obviously negative, so might be amusing, but we all agree in advance on the likely answer so don't have to spend brainpower considering it unless we want to.

FWIW, in Umberto Eco, it's more about the people investigating and imagining the society, so these questions aren't properly addressed -- because its mainly considered by dilettantes, so of course they think about how it should work rather than whether it would work. (*Have* you read Eco? I can't remember, I know you'd love that too!)

In Da Vince Code, they want to safeguard Jesus' secret until humanity is ready for it (I think?) and rely on the guardians to be paragons of virtue. Other books consider this approach in a less dumb way :)

In various other stories, a group is seeking some sort of power, and not deliberately delaying, just haven't got there yet.

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

Hmmmm... Secret societies - and not-so-secret ones - survive because they have stable membership and effective indoctrination.

We'll start with indoctrination: the society must instil each of these beliefs into the initiate:

1. That it is desirable and useful to be a member;
2. That the hierarchy is to be respected and obeyed;
3. That loyalty and secrecy are essential, and all who fail in this must be cast out.

There also needs to be ritual - verbal ritual, which must be learned by rote and passed down. This is safer than sacred texts, which can be destroyed - or worse, copied and published. Also, the effort required to memorise the rituals is a continuing test of loyalty and commitment - and promotion in the hierarchy is achieved by accurate performance of thse rituals, thereby selecting a core cadre who are good at preserving the canon.

[cjwatson]

I'm reminded of two things: firstly, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant marker project ("This place is not a place of honour"); secondly, Hari Seldon of Asimov's Foundation (who of course just calculated what his successors were going to do). I'm not sure if there's much connection there!

Has anyone written decent SF about any of the recent time-capsule-type projects? Pioneer, Voyager (let's please discount the first Star Trek movie), the WIPP, NASA's space broadcasts, the thing where they stuck a time capsule in a satellite whose Earth orbit was designed to decay in 50000 years ...

[simont]

But Seldon exactly didn't just calculate what his successors would do. He also established a secret society to keep them on track and guard the plan!

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

But I always felt that was a retrospective bodge; I assumed the first foundation books weren't written with that in mind. (Though it occurs to me I don't know if that's true.)

[simont]

At least two of the early Foundation stories do specifically mention the Second Foundation, long before it begins to have influence on the main plot. They also mention several times that no psychohistorians were included in the staff of the First Foundation, raising the obvious question of where they all went instead.

I suppose it's possible that Asimov didn't decide exactly what the Second Foundation's role ought to be until later in the series, but he certainly thought of it right at the start, and it seems likely to me that he at least had some idea of what he was going to use it for.

[mooism.livejournal.com]

Any plan that involves meeting up in a certain place at a certain time will probably fail in the face of war, flooding or pestilence.

If you have prior knowledge of some astronomical phenomenon, say you’re a time traveller who knows when and where supernovae are going to occur, you might leave instructions for incrementally deriving the message from astronomical observations.

A particular sort of time traveller might try to establish a secret society to last a thousand years just to see if it could be done. It’s more challenging than teaching a dog to jump through a hoop.

will probably fail

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yes, exactly. The *most* elementary precautions would be to have a backup meeting place, say, that place every year, or another place in case the first is in the middle of a natural disaster or sunk into a sea or something. But no, many examples of this seem to involve "Day X, come hell or high water (literally!)" I mean, even if the *originator* doesn't think of it, you'd think the meeters could work out for themselves to come back a year later!

If you have prior knowledge of some astronomical phenomenon,

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yes, indeed. I was trying to think of something like that.

But it's inherently very difficult, because your knowledge of what's happening in the sky is based on... astronomical observations. And anything visible to three billion people at once is hard to keep secret :)

Re: If you have prior knowledge of some astronomical phenomenon,

[mooism.livejournal.com]

Your instructions for deriving the message, you make sure they remain secret.

Re: If you have prior knowledge of some astronomical phenomenon,

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I meant, wouldn't everyone know as much as you about where the supernova was going to come. I hadn't realised we were postulating a traveller able to go *back* in time.

just to see if it could be done.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yes, that would be cool. But you only do see if you come out the other end. There might be a few people who would do it for the thrill, but I don't know.

OTOH, if you had some cold sleep device for yourself, that *might indeed* be a very very very good reason to want someone to wake you up on year X, but not before!

Re: just to see if it could be done.

[mooism.livejournal.com]

If you’re a time traveller, you just jump forward a few centuries and see how they did.

Re: just to see if it could be done.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yes, true. Though then you can also cheat, and just keep trying and resetting everything until it works :) (Depending on the time travel paradigm, and whether you're actually satisfied by that.)