[espresso77]

As a thought experiment, assume you were downloading and printing on low acidic paper (or otherwise storing for the long term) the entire contents of Wikipedia for insurance against some near extinction event. Is there a way to allow future generations to correctly interpret the arbitrary text on a page into meaningful information with only using "the page" as a medium?

(I tried googling the topic, but I'm very lost as to even where I should start. The main question that I'm interested in could be summarized as, "How do we ensure our knowledge as a species/society is not lost in an unintelligible format?")

[Houshalter]

Well practically speaking you could just use images and then have the first book as a sort of pictionary with words and pictures that demonstrate them. Once they figure out enough words they can start to figure out other words that can't easily be explained by a single picture, and grammar can be worked out from there. Sort of like the Rosetta stone.

But this is useless to the post-apocalyptic hunter gatherer, civilization would have to be reestablished by then. And hopefully they at least understand the idea of writing words on paper and don't just worship it as a religious thing.

There has actually been work on doing that, attempting to mark radioactive waste dumps in a way even someone in a completely different culture from a distant future could understand. It's really interesting and there is pdf on it here: http://prod.sandia.gov/techlib/access-control.cgi/1992/92138...

If you are going to communicate with a completely alien civilization, that is one that can't even understand images, expressing information is even more difficult. My best guess is that you send a message with a really obvious pattern to it, then use that pattern as a basis for sending more information.

For example, send a ton of examples of simple code in a simple programming language, and their output. They can figure out what it means. Then encode your messages in the programming language somehow. Send a simulation of 3 dimensional space and little objects in it interacting, for example.

Somewhat related: http://lesswrong.com/lw/qk/that_alien_message/

[sejje]

A movie might work.

It could possibly be made future-proof by using a flipbook format, assuming we can find a suitably long-lived material to print on.

[Houshalter]

An animation of what? It would be much more difficult and take way more space for a flip book, and it doesn't contain much more information than a few pictures, let alone a book full of pictures.

[sejje]

I was thinking an actual film, which wouldn't be difficult.

I kept thinking about the "how to tell future people about radioactivity" example and I think it's hard to convey the actual effects, while it may be easy enough to convey that it's dangerous.

A movie would be much more apt at explaining what was there and what the consequences of irradiation are that a few stills.

[gnosygnu]

If you're interested, they update the calculation for printed pages here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_in_volumes. I think the estimate is for 1.9 million pages

Also, there was another page along the lines of what you're thinking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Terminal_Event_Manag.... Although it was an April Fool's day joke, it does give some idea of what's involved.

[lmm]

Once civilization recovers enough they should be able to reconstruct the language from just the corpus, a la Linear B.

For less advanced future generations, given the lack of a universal language I think the best you can do is store copies in many languages and/or translation dictionaries, and hope that at least one of them survives. http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/ is an interesting take on this.