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Comment by atomi | Hacker News Reader

There is also one of my favorite talks tangentially related by Lawrence Krauss. He explains that eventually a civilization exploring the universe around them will only see it's own galaxy and likely believe that's all there is. We are living in an extraordinary time where we are still able to see other galaxies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo

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I can imagine scientists in a couple billion years debating whether the historic records of other galaxies existing should be believed or whether one should dismiss them as crazy religious texts someone faked a couple million years ago...

(obviously by then we'll probably uploaded ourselves to computers and turned into totally different beings from what we are now, but the problem of trusting historic data still exists)

Finally, an actual use case for a blockchain!

I know you’re joking, but I’m genuinely wondering, would that actually resolve the problem of (then) ancient forgery?

Our proof-of-work difficulty is trivial compared to what’s possible a few thousand years from now. So for people a million years from now to trust our records, they’d also have to trust people a thousand years from now not to simply have forged our part of the blockchain, which might be trivial for them given their hash power.

Spoiler: the energy to power all that hashing is where the other galaxies went.

So what could be out there that we can't see anymore? Or even more though-provoking, what could be out there that we can't see yet?

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