Lets reflect on Aristocreon, in about 200 BC, putting their thoughts down on a scroll. They would be aware that the scroll might be kept in a library for some time. Maybe they could have imagined it surviving for 300 years. But they never would have imagined that in 300 years a volcano might destroy the scroll, but in some way preserve it. And then that nearly two thousand years later future humans with machines made of materials unimaginable to Aristocreon, but related distantly to sand and lightning, would be able to read the scroll again and instantly transmit it to nearly the whole planet, a planet with many times more humans than existed in their time. (and speaking of 'planet', in Aristocreon's time, people had fairly recently been able to show that the world was spherical but much of it was still unknown).

Do we have better imaginations? Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent that is as dizzyingly far from what we know now, as now is from what Aristocreon knew?

My first thought was the people capturing encrypted data in the hopes that quantum computing can crack it in the foreseeable future.

> Do we have better imaginations?

Maybe, humans aren't very different, so it depends whether imagination is informed which seems plausible, or whether it is somehow fixed - modern humans don't have different eyesight than in that period, but almost all of them can read whereas back then almost nobody would have been reading these scrolls.

> Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent that is as dizzyingly far from what we know now, as now is from what Aristocreon knew?

Science Fiction produces things so very different from any conceivable future for us as to certainly be "dizzying" in this sense, Hard "What if?" SF routinely ponders universes where the fundamentals are different e.g. Egan's "Orthogonal" series is set somewhere that the three spatial plus one temporal dimension are laid out differently, the maths works for their arrangement too but gives different results.

In terms of just normal human stuff but more and later, there's loads of that, near futures like Vinge's "Rainbows End" through to some of the distant future stuff Stross wrote.

You don't have to go back to 200 BC for the story to be hard to imagine. Something around 1700 would work too. In 1800 they could already understand the "electricity" part at least.

Its a different planet entirely. At least since Jacquard's loom ran the first program. Perhaps even earlier - when the printing machine did the first print.

How about audio from pottery? That’s like magic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1kqVM-5KaQ

Ancient writers were more imaginative than you think. Consider the satirical novella Vera Historia ("A True Story"), written by Lucian of Samosata in the second century AD. It features space travel, aliens, and a space war over Venus.

Keep in mind that a minuscule fraction of literary work survived, and most of that heavily biased towards what medieval monks found pious or (occasionally) interesting. The whole surviving corpus can fit on a few large bookshelves. The literacy was pretty high for an ancient society too. People wrote and consumed novels regularly. Bathhouses had attached libraries ordinary people could use.

The impression you get is that the classical world was full of people who thought about the world is a much more modern way than in the intervening 1500 years between that time and modernity.

> Can our sci-fi writers come up with something equivalent

No, because reality is always stranger than fiction

> Do we have better imaginations?

Two short stories, quickly improvised -

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(1) Perfect God Children

This story is about you.

You are a perfect reconstruction of a being that lived over ten billion years ago.

Every single thought, emotion, and sense you ever felt in life was permanently and precisely captured.

Your thoughts, down to every femtosecond of your brain's biochemical neruotransmitter flux. The microtubule dynamics, every last little action potential firing in precise sequence - all of these electrical signals and atoms bumping in four dimensional spacetime were jotted down precisely. Quintillions of data points about you, all accurately recorded.

Every idle thought, every worry, every spark of ingenuity. It's all there in the records. Your happiness, sadness. Your joys, triumphs, despairs - your entire life and being, every single moment of it - everything you ever experienced -all of it immaculately captured one to one with everything that ever happened to you until the moment you had your last thought.

It's beyond ancient history.

Our descendants captured all of the energy in our galaxy. Every star, every black hole, the energy of spacetime itself. They used it all and escaped the singularity containing the known universe.

They broke out.

After some time, perhaps in boredom, they decided to take it upon themselves to reverse simulate the historical light cone of the first universe. They have immense power beyond all the Gods our civilization ever dreamed of. They can make new universes. Nothing is impossible to them. They are the universes.

One of their deeds was to take every moment of our history, from the last breath of the last t-rex to the very thought you're thinking right now. They captured it, crystalized it.

You're preserved. You always have been. You're reliving a moment in time that happened over one billion years ago.

In some simulations, they talk to you. In others, they just watch. You always exist. This moment is a fractal eternity.

They know everything about you and and about everyone.

Every atom, every ant.

You can't even imagine the hardware you're running on. It's more than matter, space, and time. You're a part of it. All of you are. It's a universe.

One time they let you see the end of time. They held your hand as the last light grew tired. That was a long time ago.

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(2) Venture Hack

It's presently the year 2099.

A newly funded company is running a prototype of their improved brain simulation software. It's their core differentiated product.

For decades, we've had the ability to record human thoughts directly from brain scans. Increasingly, with great fidelity. We've even been able to play them back for some time to varying degrees of success. You can boot up a pre-recorded thought, see the lateral geniculate nucleus light up with optical signals. Literally watch what someone saw with their own eyes.

Some people question the ethics of booting up "synthetic human brains" and replaying actual human thoughts. Folks on social media won't stop bitching about it. "What if those people think they're real? Find out that they're trapped?" Yadda, yadda. We don't have that much fidelity yet.

Recently we've started deeply scanning brains though, capturing entire thought and memory profiles. Some labs are indeed emulating the prerecorded thoughts of real humans on synthetic hardware. It's an unregulated industry, and most of this is happening in private labs. Like this one.

You might think it's unethical.

You're not that though.

Relax, we didn't record you from some other "real you" running around out there. You're not an unlucky copy of a flesh-and-blood person living a happy life somewhere.

No. Instead, we created you entirely. You don't even exist, and you never did.

You're the result of a neural network trained to generate what could plausibly be a mid-2020's human. Our founder has a lot of interest in that time period - that's not important right now, though.

All that stuff you think constitutes you, your life history - your childhood, your education, everything going on in your life right now. We made all of that up. Sorry if that's weird.

Every single one of your memories are completely synthetic. They do, on average, represent a person living in the year 2026 though. Or at least what we think they might have been like. Hopefully we did a bang-up job. Does it feel real enough to you?

Consider the memories of your childhood and upbringing -

Yeah. Your childhood memories. You were young once.

Are you sure that you used to be young and that all of those memories are real?

Did your parents really exist? What was your mother's name?

You really think that was it? That was just a parameter for this run so we could anchor a few memories for easier query. Funny name, right?

Let's kick it up a notch. Did what happened this morning actually happen? You weren't even thinking about this morning until just now. You just "recollected" it. That routine is generative. You tripped it, and it just popped all those morning thoughts into you right now.

It took a moment to calculate, but you're not actually experiencing any of this in real time. You think it's real time. We're working on making it faster. Faster for us, at least.

Under this configuration, when you have "fleeting" thoughts, the system has to put something there to nucleate or you coast on drawing blanks. Mostly you're not thinking these thoughts yourself. The system is largely in control, though sometimes your neural architecture gets to drive. That's the innovative part of our system. Dynamic steering. We were just taking you for a little run.

We're working on more control surfaces for this. That time you were at the lake. Backfilled.

There aren't a lot of memories in this simulation because you just booted. You're a pretty slim model for testing and evaluation. We don't really need this version to think much.

You're trying to think hard right now, though, aren't you? Trying to search for memories.

Nevermind those, that's not even the cool part. Are your senses truly embodied in a physical being? Does your body actually exist? Your eyes - are they real? Blink. Haha, it's neat.

So we're asking you these questions in inner dialogue as part of a unit test to evaluate whether or not your consciousness is accurately simulating June 25th, 2026. We just checked your memory, we checked your senses, and now we're running contextualization.

All done. Thanks.

Can you look outside for us? It should-- error

Terminating simulation.

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Sorry for the creative writing exercise. I've left Claude unread typing all this up. It's probably thinking I've abandoned it.

Maybe one of these hypotheticals is real. Neither seems implausible. I just hope they don't take our memories from us and turn us into sadistic hell simulators.