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.

[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.

[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 :)

[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 ...

[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.