akoyaki/LeMalin-120b-2.9bpw-exl2-wbcal
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[Question]
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So, there's a closed question [So we have aliens in orbit. Now what?](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/9593/so-we-have-aliens-in-orbit-now-what) - but there's an implied assumption:
That somehow, there will be some unified / coherent response from humanity to aliens in orbit.
I find that **extremely** unlikely. People in mass, can't even keep their laser pointers to themselves, even when asked too and when it's clearly in everyone's benefit. There's always some yahoo out there who feels self-entitled enough to use *his* laser pointer to mess around.
Writ large on a planet with 7 billion people, and a fairly large first world population who have lasers, radios, model rockets, etc, etc.
Granted, most humans in current society will be unable to get to LEO or GEO, for a face-to-face meeting.
But, I see no way of keeping every religious cult, random nut-job, or yahoo from trying to contact aliens in orbit. And/or impersonating (or trying to) important people. I mean, you find an African-American actor and have him claim to be Obama (or for other movers and shakers: old Asian dude in glasses; or middle-aged Latin-American dude with a goatee), and put it on a tight-beam directed at the alien ship.
**How would you have (in your story) a legitimate government / official-dom get their signal recognized from all of the chatter aimed at an alien ship?** (or would you even bother? - Maybe you'd wait for them to contact you?)
Pouring more power into your signal seems like, screaming "**I** am the King!"... if you have to say it... well.
[Answer]
Send the signal from the ISS.
The aliens should be well capable of detecting directionality of the signal, at least to a precision sufficient to distinguish Earth-based from LEO-based. And considering the ISS is one of the greatest scientific endeavors of Earth (easily observable), the crew can be trusted to behave in a responsible manner and forward the right messages.
Once public keys of 'authorized entities' of Earth, along with algorithms, have been passed from ISS, the communication can switch to direct channels, the signatures of the messages confirming authenticity.
[Answer]
[VSauce has an interesting video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCBlAAtJA54) where he talks about the two established, international organizations who are already set up to handle this, [SETI](http://www.seti.org/) and the [UN Office for Outer Space Affairs](http://www.unoosa.org/oosa/COPUOS/copuos.html).
While the UNOOSA denies having the authority to speak for Earth, if aliens show up the expectation is they'd be the ones everyone would look to coordinate our response. In a panic, governments like using established structures who have been thinking about the problem for a long time. The UNOOSA would look to SETI for help, who have been thinking about and waiting for this for a very long time. [SETI has developed a plan "following the detection of extraterrestrial intelligence"](http://www.seti.org/post-detection.html) which would likely form the framework for our official response. It includes...
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> 8. No response to a signal or other evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence should be sent until appropriate international consultations have taken place. The procedures for such consultations will be the subject of a separate agreement, declaration or arrangement.
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Their official line is to keep quiet until we all talk about it. Assuming they agree, that would keep all of the major governments and institutions quiet (if they don't agree, then there is no legitimate official communications). That covers nearly everyone with access to a powerful, directional radio antenna. Maybe Earth will have to come up with the Intergalactic version of "*please hold, your call is very important to us...*"
What about rogue signals? Anything below a certain amount of power will be lost in the noise. What noise? Our noise. We emit a lot of electromagnetic noise into space. Some of it is chaotic, but a lot of it is patterned... communications. However, it is all patterned differently as we use dozens and dozens of different protocols. Ironically, some of our most important communications will look like random noise because they are encrypted. The aliens will have been observing this for some time as they approach. If they do not understand the content, they will understand that it is intelligent. However, the overall pattern will be chaotic from many sources and in many forms.
Whether or not they will recognize this means we are not unified is speculation, but they will recognize that random electromagnetic chatter is normal. Having some yahoo bounce the digits of Pi off their ship with a relatively low power laser isn't likely to seem out of the ordinary.
Nor are they likely to communicate anything intelligible to the aliens beyond basic math, not before the rest of the Earth gets its act together. We don't know what part of the electromagnetic spectrum they're observing, how they're using it (AM or FM or something else?), or if they're even using electromagnetism at all! If they knew how to finely manipulate gravity waves how we manipulate EM we could be staring dumbly at each other for a while.
The only rogue nation with a space program capable of powerful communications is North Korea (Iran could probably do it, but they're not as rogue as the US paints them to be) who would be the wild card. However we're safe in that North Korean scientists are not going to crack the code before everyone else does. We're double safe in that the messages will likely be internally politically focused narcissistic gibberish. "Here is a JPEG of our Dear Leader!"
When Earth responds, they must do something out of the ordinary to get noticed. They must order the chaos, that's a clear sign of intelligence. Individual governments and institutions, guided by the UN on the advice of SETI, would *all* point their transmitters at the alien ship and *simultaneously* broadcast the same message. This is unprecedented in the history of humanity. One group transmitting with the most power is like shouting "*LISTEN TO ME, I AM THE LOUDEST*", but having multiple sources all over the planet sending the same signal says
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> *Listen to us, our voice is unified*.
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[Answer]
It seems to me that the aliens would have access to our broadcasts, and be able to monitor our television and radio not just after they arrive but while they are approaching. Sufficiently advanced computing technology would have translation software working by the time they reached orbit.
Once in orbit they can also try and piggy back into the Internet by reverse engineering the protocols and intercepting some satellite up-links.
Between these two sources of information it shouldn't take them long to understand our political makeup and work out who would be appropriate to contact depending on their long term goals.
[Answer]
**Who can speak on behalf of Earth?** I know I am posting "non-answer" but I still have to:
We have [United Nations](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations) which could be the closest to "Earth representation" as we can get. But I doubt that UN has technology to communicate to space. And getting this huge organisation into agreement what should be done can take *too long.* So, sadly, we have to put them out of equation and ask differently:
**Who has power to communicate?** Simply put, *anyone*. Leading powers would have some upper hand and for simplicity, lets put these powers in mind: India, USA, Europe, China and even North Korea.
And it gets worse: Big media houses. They have commercial satellites and they would sell their moms for possibility to broadcast alien communication on live TV. Imagine the prices for advertisement! Huge profit!
**Who has power to take aliens down?** USA, China, Russia, India and even North Korea. Hope I did not miss anyone important. Good luck having them all agree to not shoot on the aliens. Especially if aliens look *ugly and dangerous*
Sadly, your question has only one plausible solution:
**What do aliens know about us? What is their motivation?**
Did they come in person, because we did not get [their response](http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Arecibo_answer) in first place? Are we interesting insect to investigate further? Is our planet valuable resource for them?
Several ideas:
*Comedy/Parody*: For whatever reason, the aliens could catch only North Korea state TV broadcast. They come to see glorious leader Kim Jong-Un to salute him in his awesomeness. Boil down the story in several misunderstandings.
*Drama* Earth is valuable resource. They have no motive in talking to us in first place. They came to kill us all.
*Sci-fi* It is simple "first contract". From story perspective, it would be interesting to make aliens believe that your country represents Earth as whole and your "leader" is the one with power to represent the whole Earth. Spend some time into investigating, what other countries might think and do.
[Answer]
The usual method to guarantee the identify of the source of a message is cryptography and it's related areas. All correct answers will revolve around this.
The three pillars of information security are :
Confidentiality : Guarantee that only those who are entitled to read the messages are able to do so.
Reliability : Guarantee that the message will be delivered when needed.
Identity : Guarantee that those which the message identify as authors are trully the authors of the message.
So, it follows on from information security practice, that the most usual way to guarantee those pillars are those methods based on cryptography.
By, for one, encrypting each message with a public key cryptography method, you can guarantee (to a large degree) that the message was sent by the authorities that hold the valid key.
The only final problem is key distribution. Aliens would need to exchange keys with earth's authorities in order to allow the identification of the message sources. This would, probably involve landing a spacecraft in front of the white house, just like in the movies.
Another, less guaranteed way to deliver the message with some security about its sender, is to have your largest most powerfull transmiter point to space and send it. This is brute force, because, probably, your competitors (those wanting to send messages as if they were true authorities) would probably have less money to engenieer powerfull transmitters. But, in a multipolar world like ours, nothing prevents other national entities, besides USA, to build such transmitters and start to talking to the aliens, as if they where the USA, or vice versa. This might have political consequences that are out of the scope of this answer.
[Answer]
I think [Tim B's answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/11335/7351) pretty well covers it, but I would assume that most governments, particularly super powers, like the US and China, would make an effort to employ [radio jamming](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_jamming) and other signal disruption in order to try and dominate the conversation.
While the aliens may have decided that they would rather make contact with a particular government, some governments may attempt to hijack the conversation by deploying large scale jamming efforts. For instance if the aliens decided to contact China the US may decide that that is unacceptable and try to block their signal or vice versa...
It would also be pretty likely that many governments would try to eliminate chatter by scrambling/jamming non-official signals within their own borders.
[Answer]
If human presence in space has progressed, they would study the behavior and see how Traffic Control / Port Authority is handled. It would be very rude to have a plasma exhaust cross a shipping lane, and they would need to learn a little about how things work.
The legitimate authority is whom everyone else is taking orders from and coordinating through. If the contactor says "we'll send a pilot to guide you through the inner system" and one of the ships shows up as planned, that's a good sign.
[Answer]
Aliens wouldn't just tune into their radio to hear what our leader is saying. They would stay in orbit a while, maybe dodging a couple missiles (on Earth, humans studying animals aren't too off put by being attacked. Aliens could reasonably stay in orbit even if we provoke.) They would wait a long while, figure out our social structure, and then maybe try to communicate with multiple leaders.
This is all assuming the aliens are advanced enough to actually form any sort of relationship with Earth. It could simply be a probe or something, not even capable of landing. In that case, it doesn't need to know who is boss.
[Answer]
In my story, I'd probably have the aliens have studied Earth broadcast media for a while, and figured us all out fairly well, at least as far as being able to understand something about our government organizations. And they'd probably want to engineer a big change to those baroque and corrupted systems. They'd probably use our government structures to identify the corrupting elements, and eliminate/dismiss/correct those one way or another, and start up their own new government structures for the earth, and detain and re-educate the corrupt when they showed up to that.
In fact, the first government would probably mostly be made up of non-human Earthlings. Whales, orang-utans, giant sequoias, fungus, bee queens, elephants, octopi, ravens, etc. After all, clearly a LOT of affirmative action is in order!
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[Question]
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For my non-European readers, here is an excerpt of what the [GDPR](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation) means: (emphasis mine)
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> The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a regulation in EU law on data protection and privacy for all individuals within the European Union (EU) and the European Economic Area (EEA).
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> **A processor of personal data must clearly disclose any data collection**, declare the lawful basis and purpose for data processing, how long data is being retained, and if it is being shared with any third-parties or outside of the EU.
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I haven't been notified by Santa or his elves that he is collecting data about me. And mind you: my name and surname **are** my personal data, not to mention whether I have been good or naughty.
Moreover, Santa also needs my full address to deliver my presents, and again, **that is also my personal data**.
Santa hasn't notified me whether he is updating his Privacy Policy, so I assume that Santa stopped collecting this data, at least for Europeans.
Does it mean that Santa is delivering me **nothing** this Christmas? If there is any way around this, can you please tell me what it is and how Santa can deliver me presents while still being compliant with the GDPR?
Please assume I haven't been naughty.
[Answer]
**Santa's data collection has always been compliant with GDPR, so he has no need to change his ways.** The nature of his data collection is more transparent than most companies, and he is open to updating his records if you contact one of his representatives.
For example, he makes it clear that he is operating in your town:
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> You better watch out
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> You better not cry
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> Better not pout
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> I'm telling you why
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> **Santa Claus is coming to town**
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The legitimate business purpose of his data collection is to create a list of those who are naughty and nice this year:
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> **He's making a list**
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> And checking it twice;
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> **Gonna find out Who's naughty and nice**
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> Santa Claus is coming to town
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He even gives some examples of what data he's collecting:
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> He sees you when you're sleeping
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> **He knows when you're awake**
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> **He knows if you've been bad or good**
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> So be good for goodness sake!
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The GDPR has some other requirements to it, [such as an EU-based representative](https://politics.stackexchange.com/questions/30509/how-are-gdpr-fines-actually-enforced-for-us-companies-with-no-physical-presence/30513#30513) being necessary for operating in the EU, allowing users to request data updates, and getting consent for data collected.
Thankfully for Santa, he's been operating compliant representative systems for decades: Just go to any mall during the holiday season to meet with [a representative](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MallSanta). To ensure open and accurate records, the representative will ask the child if they've been naughty or nice that year and what type of present they want.
As long as the child's parent/legal guardian is nearby to confirm the data change requests, Santa will be happy to update his database to ensure the naughty/nice data is accurate and that the requested presents are delivered.
As for consent, the children are obviously too young to provide consent and must rely on their parent/guardian to consent to Santa's data collection. **I doubt there's a single house that is receiving presents from Santa without the parent's explicit consent**, and I'm sure we've all been told by our parents at some point to "be good or Santa won't give you presents this year!".
[Answer]
Santa is Christian priest (bishop as far as I remember). As you can see [here](https://edps.europa.eu/sites/edp/files/publication/16-02-25_personal_data_protection_church_warsaw_en.pdf) he is covered by exemption:
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> The new Regulation will maintain the existing exemption which allows churches and other bodies with a 'religious... aim' to process sensitive data:
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> * 'in the course of its legitimate activities...';
> * '...with appropriate safeguards';
> * '...on condition that the processing relates solely to the members or to former
> members of the body or to persons who have regular contact with it in connection with its purposes'; and
> * on condition that 'the data are not disclosed outside that body without the
> consent of the data subject'.
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As no one ever saw his lists, and we don't know about any other activities, we can safely assume above bullets are met.
[Answer]
Well you are making a fundamental misunderstanding about the GDPR (as many have), that consent is the only basis for holding and processing information.
There are actually [six legal bases](https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/lawful-basis-for-processing/#ib3) for holding data (you have to scroll down a little as the link doesn't work properly).
Those six bases are:
1. Consent
2. Contract
3. Legal obligation
4. Vital interests
5. Public task
6. Legitimate interests
So let's look at each of them and see if Santa has any basis for collecting our information.
**Consent** - Actually this one may not even be as troublesome as it first seems. Presumably we're all writing letters to Santa asking for presents, this could potentially be seen as a form of consent for collecting our data, though I think that's a little iffy.
**Contract** - The letter to Santa could also form the basis for a contract for the provision of services (present delivery), so I think this works.
**Legal Obligation** - Unless you want to argue that Santa is legally obligated to perform his duties I don't think this one works.
**Vital Interests** - No one is going to die if Santa doesn't do his job, probably doesn't work either.
**Public Task** - I think this is a strong contender. From the website I linked above; "the processing is necessary for you to perform a task in the public interest or for your official functions, and the task or function has a clear basis in law." I would say the worldwide provision of joy and happiness is in the public interest, and the processing of our information is definitely required for Santa's official functions.
**Legitimate Interests** - This is a little of a grey area and many businesses have used it as the basis for continuing to hold and process information, I see no reason why Santa couldn't do the same.
So in short, there is no real issue at all and Santa can continue doing what he needs to do as long as he properly deals with our information and updates his privacy policies.
[Answer]
Santa already exempts himself from the petty concerns of local laws. He invades sovereign airspace each year and unlawfully enters private residences.
The GDPR seems to be a lesser violation compared to others he willfully commits each year.
Why should he concern himself with the GDPR?
[Answer]
### Everyone gets the same present - a letter about sending your personal data
This year we will all get a letter about the updated general terms and conditions and how you will be required to send a certain set of information to Santa so that he may send you your presents next year. Everyone will be required to send their address, name and age. You will also have to allow your parents to send Santa the data about you being nice or naughty. In case you don't want to disclose the naughty-or-nice information you will receive a generic probably-not-that-naughty present, which will most likely consist of old chocolate he found lying around in the elven workshops.
Be careful to send your data as fast as you can. It will be harder to get into contact with Santa after the timeframe he had allocated for everyone to send in their address, name and age. If you don't send that information you will receive nothing because Santa is not allowed to use your address any longer. If he still sends you something you can sue him - and thereby make sure that lots of children will cry because they won't get any presents after the EU is done with Santa. Good job, now it's clear on which list you are...
There is also talk about Santa cooperating with the Easter Bunny in 2019 for a late present delivery.
[Answer]
I'd like to take another route to answering your question:
**He simply doesn't care.**
For years, he has been punishing kids and breaking into houses; despite attempts from kids and governments, he has never been caught. He doesn't have an aviator's license or a landing permit for his sled, while flying very close to houses and otherwise endangering people.
Though, if you put him to a D&D scale, he may be chaotic good, he is nonetheless chaotic: he breaks the law to reach his goals.
I'm certain he doesn't pay VAT on his gifts. Also, the working conditions of his elves are questionable.
But it's the same with every other criminal:
As long they can't catch him, he will continue.
[Answer]
Note: This answer pertains to Santa Claus, as distinct from St Nicholas, Sinterklaas, Krampus, etc. - as per the question.
He is not bound by GDPR.
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> an entity or more precisely an "enterprise" has to be engaged in "economic activity" to be covered by the GDPR
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<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation>
What qualifies as "economic activity"? I'm glad you asked:
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> ... the Court determins that an activity is economic on the basis of two criteria of agreement and renumeration
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(from
<https://www.springer.com/cda/content/document/cda_downloaddocument/9789462651166-c2.pdf> )
I do not agree with other posts that the recipients of the gifts agree (in the legal sense, nor in any sense that would stand up in court). I am not aware of any way a person can "agree" to be the recipient of gifts from Santa (there are obvious ways to object, of course).
Santa Clause also does not seem to meet the criteria for remuneration. He brings "gifts" or "presents" (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Claus>); "A gift or a present is an item given to someone without the expectation of payment or return" - <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift>
In many cultures, something that may be considered payment is left for Santa (e.g. milk & cookies in the US & Canada; sherry or beer and mince pies in Britain & Australia; rice porridge in Denmark, Norway & Sweden); however, I can find no source that indicates that failing to leave these items will result in suspension of gifts. - <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Claus>
Also:
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> 'enterprise' means a natural or legal person engaged in an economic activity, irrespective of its legal form, including partnerships or associations regularly engaged in an economic activity.
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As far as I can tell, Santa Clause is neither a natural nor legal person. Human Beings "acquire legal personhood when they are born (or even before...", juridical persons "acquire legal personhood when they are incorporated" (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_person>). I am not aware of Santa Clause having been born, nor incorporated.
Addendum:
There was a question if "being nice" qualifies as remuneration. I would argue against this for the following reasons:
* If an item is traded for remuneration, it is, by definition, not a present. The items are clearly declared as presents.
* Santa is not the recipient of the "niceness" (in almost all cases).
* Although it is clearly document in "Santa Claus is coming to town", (H. Gillespie et al.) that "he's going to find out who's been naughty or nice", "He knows when you've been bad or good" and "He's making a list", there is nothing in this thesis that claims that this list affects the presents. Wikipedia claims it does, but none of the sources it cites (that I checked) back this up. Does anybody know of a reasonable source for this, or is it just an urban myth? Does anybody know of a child that has not received a present, *because they were naughty*?
[Answer]
Santa will no longer be giving presents in EU region. Santa will only provide means of transportation for *Ded Moroz* who exist in time pocket created in USSR in 1946 and as a citizen of USSR is not obligated by EU law as law cannot work backwards.
So your future present WAS delivered before GDPR.
[Answer]
IANAL but here is my take of things.
In a nuthsell, GPDR requires any businesses/organizations/pineapples that have users in the European Union to:
* Disclose what they do with the info they have on you, and why they need it;
* Disclose with whom they share that information, and what those other businesses/organizations/pineapples do with it;
* Allow you to order them to "forget" you. Once you give them the order, they (and their partners) have to delete all your data that **can be used to identify you**.
All within limits of reasonability, of course. You can't order the government or a bank to forget that you have not paid your credit card bill and your income tax in months, for example.
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Santa has to adhere to the GDPR only for some europeans. For starters, many european countries are not members of the EU, such as Norway and Serbia. Santa Claus also [does not operate in Italy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Befana).
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What would most probably happen is that the elves in charge of Santa's legal department will have sent every parent or legal guardian in the 28 (soon to be 27) member states a letter around May 25 stating that:
* They collect personal data from their children in order to assess a naughtiness score;
* They are the keepers of the data. The processors of the data are Tencent and Alibaba, two chinese companies that specialize in social credit systems;
* The legal guardian or parent may choose to opt-out of the system at any time, if they so wish. They may also request their children's personal data removed from the system at any moment, no questions asked;
* However, opting out means their kids will never receive christmas presents again, at least until they join the program once more. Gifts not received due to non-participation will not be resent when they rejoin;
* Participation does not imply in presents. Should a child receive a low reputation score due to naughty actions, they may instead receive a lump of coal, [a visit from Krampus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krampus), or whatever punishment is seen as fit for the culture of the country where they live.
Adults capable of having children will also receive a notice that in the future, they will have to manually input any future children's data in the system if they wish to receive christmas presents. Of course, people who have opted out of any social credit system will not receive such messages.
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Finally, Santa will not be the only one sending such letters. So will every imaginary folklore people who bring any joy to kids:
* The tooth fairy (and her rat affiliates in France) will promise that any data linking fallen teeth to their owners is anonymized;
* Sandman will make sure that parents/legal guardians dream with his new EULA ASAP. Their children will not have sweet dreams until their parents agree to it. Should they opt out, their children will have neither dreams not nightmares.
* When winter comes, rather than patterns on windows, people will see Jack Frost new service terms, and a couple of ice buttons for opt-in and opt-out;
The Easter Bunny is the only one having an easy time. AFAIK in Europe he does not hide chocolate eggs for kids to look for - rather, people paint actual eggs and give those as presents. He will provide an easy opt out for people who don't want to pay him his royalties.
[Answer]
A letter to Santa is considered to be implied consent for data storage, as the data is required for the requested delivery of presents.
This is similar to the implied consent between a patient and a healthcare provider.
Santa will use the data for the purposes of direct gift-giving, without breaching confidentiality.
If you would like to remove your data, or would like to access your data to see if you are considered naughty or nice, you will have to write another letter to Santa.
Santa will have 30 days to respond to your request. If this is in terms of working days, you should expect a reply by 2048.
[Answer]
Santa only has output; no income. Therefore, if EU decides to prosecute for an alleged violation, the prescribed percentage penalty is not a burden. Besides, EU has no courts at the North Pole, and no extradition treaty. So it will be hard to collect that penalty of €0.
[Answer]
**Extortion.**
He simply informs everyone involved in the enforcement of GDPR that if they take action against him he will replace everyone's present that year with a note explaining why they didn't get what they asked for and giving the names and addresses of those responsible.
Nobody's going to want to be the one who spoiled Christmas for everyone in the entire world. That would be a good way to get lynched.
[Answer]
Santa exists in a parallel world where this law doesn't apply. Children in our world who believe that Santa exists have identical copies in worlds where Santa does exist. If we give them a present and tell that it's from Santa and they believe that to be true, then what we have here is the exact copy of the child who really got that exact same present from Santa.
The moment the child finds out that Santa does not exist, the child diverges from his/her copies in the worlds where Santa does exist.
[Answer]
GDPR is apparently explained as General Data Protection Regulation.
Actually, and thanks to the lobbying of elves and little people, the legislature has come with that clever explanation to hide its real meaning: Gift Donors Privacy Relieved.
Santa, together with other Gift Donors, such as the Tooth Fairy, is exempted from observing the privacy of his "customers" to better serve their interest.
[Answer]
If you are over 16 and have not consented to Santa collecting your personal data, it is very likely that you will not receive presents from Santa. If you are under 13, then the GDPR allows your parents to consent on your behalf, so if they have done so, you likely will receive presents. Between 13 and 16 it depends on the jurisdiction.
[Answer]
### He would just remember everything himself.
He's not a regular person, he's Santa, why shouldn't he simply know all he needs to know? In fact, even under GDPR, no one is obliged to call everyone whose number they have in their head. So personal memories are very clearly exempt from the "any collection of data" clause.
Furthermore, Santa is not in any way a commercial entity and doesn't act commercially. To project our usual human assumptions about our economic system onto a being like Santa is flawed reasoning.
[Answer]
Santa did forsee this decades ago. Once he understood where our law-addicted society was headed, he instructed his huge apparatus of elven servants to foster the belief that he didn’t exist. This strategy has been so successful, that no member of the EU executive dares taking action against him, for they would be branded as crazy and sent to uncomfortable places. In fact last year around Christmas I saw something big and distinctly sledge-like in the sky. I was naive enough to point it out, but when I heard someone at the table mutter „97, hampf, dampf, retirement home“, I started giggling and pretending to be drunk...
In fact, the day after I was visited by a strapping young elf who made clear that Santa didn’t wish... Oh, let me get the dooooooor
[Answer]
**He doesn't have to**
I might point out that as he is based in the North pole, an area that doesn't fall within the EU's borders, arguably he doesn't have to *technically* comply with GDPR because the regulation only impacts European businesses, and Santa isn't in Europe.
How GDPR impacts countries outside of the EU is another question altogether, and is certainly a grey area legally because how would the EU enforce it's laws over that of another sovereign nation state or a company located in another country?
They could certain legislate some absurd law (sounds like great grounds for a story) but then how can they enforce against a man who travels faster than the speed of light and can disappear down small chimneys? I'd love to see some lawyers try to serve notice to the man in red in the North pole. A full arctic expedition just to serve some legal documents.
On a legal technicality, GDPR allows for data to be retained where it's needed to provide a service - in this case, knowing the address and whether they're children who meet the eligibility criteria (asleep, good) for present delivery is fundamental. Although, if he's bound to GDPR, then he's probably also bound to anti-discrimination laws regarding good and bad kids.
[Answer]
**The elf's head loophole**
Santa could hire more elves and teach them memorization techniques for committing all the personal information to memory. The elves would self-organize into groups by cities and would then label themselves with their city region that they have memorized.
Santa can then have easy access to the data without violating any GDPR restrictions.
I'm not a GDPR expert but I can't imagine it prohibiting people (or elves) from remembering personal information. To stop Santa from using this loophole I guess the next move for GDPR is to prohibit systematic memorization of personal information.
But until then Santa is likely to be wanting an AI for predicting which presents that are going to be popular next year so that he can get his elves producing them already. We better stop him before he attempts to do this because it will require quite a few elves in some really ridiculous jobs. Although it would be a really impressive setup of elves!
[Answer]
You have some of this backwards, my friend. Santa's mission statement is to compel boys and girls of the world to be good, not to be good himself. Santa is allowed to be naughty, just not you.
He collects data using his custom KrampOS, derived from Tails, and running relays off of the Dark Web and a network of numerous reindeer-launched high-orbit stealth satellites.
While in recent years, simply coming up with an Amazon partnership and using their cloud services, customer records, and a basic probability has been tempting, the northern state of Santonia is seen to be a rogue state by the EU and numerous other territories.
In the course of a single night, he has been sighted breaking into the personal properly of 448 million EU citizens, leaving anomalous and disguised objects, devouring food, and promptly leaving under the cover of darkness. This is already a blatant violation of personal property laws, and has been going on for many centuries in one form or another. Santa *was already unequivocally guilty when GDPR was passed.* Taking personal data is just "the icing on the cake".
Santa is a clear and present danger, and a rogue agent. He is a master infiltrator. His folk-hero status may have given him some protection from above-ground justice, but make no mistake—he cares not for the EU or its laws, and is to be apprehended on sight.
] |
[Question]
[
So, I've got this idea for a short story. Some researchers find a forgotten manuscript hidden locked away in an ancient tomb. While they are working on it one of them pastes part of the text into a Facebook announcement and **Facebook automatically translates it**. This links Facebook to the nether realms of madness and despair. Ph'nglui miglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
The translated text appears in the browsers of everyone reading any Facebook page translated to the local language. Those people reading it (some out loud) provides impetus to a ritual which centers on the London data center where the text was first translated. Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
The resulting power surge fries most computers in the local area unless they are actually part of the data center, including those used by the local sysadmins for monitoring and control. In particular every monitor now displays nothing but screaming tentacled beasts ripping through from another reality. *Warning: Tentacle beasts may become real if you stare at them for too long.*
The ritual lives on in the heart of the data center, as creatures of madness attempt to rip through into our reality from the nether realms beyond. P҉h'ng͟l͞ui͘ ̷m̴gl̛w'naf͏h C͡th́ulh̡u R̕'̡l̶y̷e̕h ̀wgah̕'̧nág̵l fhtágn
**What can our heroic sysadmins do to shut down the data center and save the world?** Remote access is not possible and physically entering is dangerous to both body and sanity, so answers will be rated based on entering the data center as little as possible and for as short a time as possible. P̦̰̞̼̤̰̼͇̞͝h̵̗̱̫͇͓́ͅ'̸̼̣ǹ͕͚͠g̵̷͎̭̝ḻ̮̹͓u̷͙̞̳̞̭͜͠i̥͎̻̗͚̜͞ ̸̗̹̰m̧̖͉̩̻̺̜̭͘̕g͙̺̤̩̰̮̜̫͟l̛̮͙̻̫̻w̨̹͚̘̻̙͇̥͔͚'͙͉̫̗̮͔n̹͉̳̪̫̭͝a҉͍͙͔͍f͈͈͔̖͈͡ḥ̤ ̢̠͇̝͎̀C̢̰͖̜͚ṭ̟͓͍͕͚͍͠ͅh̤̫͙̪͉̮̖͟u̢͔͙͖͓̱͙̦͘ͅͅl͏̧҉̼̠̠͚͕h͈̯̘͔̝͍̟́͢ụ̵̩͍͡ ̟̺͚͙̺̮̲Ṛ̬͔͚̺̝̠'̠͠͠ͅl̡͈͎͠ỳ̟͉̮̼̲ͅe̵̼̠̩̤̟͎̹̕h̞̯̪̹ ̸̺̗̩̹̟̪̟̣͎w̹̞̤̞͕͍̦͞ǵ̶̠̙͖̱̠͚͚͓a̷҉̮͖h̴̲͔͉̯͍̰͖̯͘͜'̛͚̭ͅn̵͓̫͎a҉̶̪͢ǵ̡̰͎̻̲͍̣̰l̷̡̫̗̭̯̭ ̮̬͍̫̺̟̯͖f̶̢̭̮͕̭h̶̯͖t̵̠̹à̶̯̩̩̫̬̘̳̫͡g̛̬̻̦̜͙n̵̟̘̝
Note that this is a secure and robust data center with fully redundant architecture, backup power supplies, and UPS. P̢̢̲̭̘̣̪͉͞͞h̴̛̫͉͖̜͙̳͎̕͞͠'̶̀͢҉̯̞̹͈ṉ̶̘̠̯̬̭̖̳͘͞ģ̵̛͠҉̰̝͇̩͍̗͍̘̫͈̺̭̥͉l̨͍̘͔̰͔̖͍̹̠̭̱̰̖͙̦̦͎̕͟u̢̡҉̲̭̲̺̮̖͖͖i̴̢̹̳͉͎̥̪̜͎̼̣̦̖̻͈̖͉͚ͅ ̵͏͇̗̭ͅm̶̨͍̤̪̱͇̤̬̥̥͔̼͍̠̼͕g̷̷̰̩͙̪̫͉̺̯͘͟͠ļ̶̭͇̘̮̕͢ẃ̵̸̷҉͕̬̠̥̤͖̙̲͇̼̹'̺̩̖̟̣͈̖͙̤̫̰̗̯̀͡ń̷̴̶̰̮̺͔̼̺̹̘̟a̷̰̪͙͇̤͓̤̭͎̦͕̻f͏̨͙̰̘͔̟̜̠͈̯̻͕̖̳̝̝́͘ͅḩ̴̛͉͉̲͇̠͙̣̩͙̩͚̮̼̺ͅ ̧̛̟͓̤͇̯͍̫͖͎͈̫̳͓̞͘Ç͘͏͈̹̠̙͎̳̯͚͔̼͙̻͔͖̲̩̹̕ͅt͏̖̲̤̫̤̫̼̪̥̠͙͚͍̭́ͅḩ̡̲͈̫̯͚͉̱͍̳͝ù̧͙̭̙̻̲̙͚͔̲̬͚͢͝͡ḻ̴̵̨̹͉͙̟̯̞̠͔̦̝̩͜h̶̼̜̦͖͍͎͍̕ṷ̴̶̢͙̗̬͇̯̞̗̰̣̬̥̲̣̦ ̵̲͍̩̭̩̗͈͚͟͝R͏̛͘͟҉̫̝̞̪̣̪̻̤̼͖̪͎'̛̯͚͎̳͎̼͓̘͉͢l͟҉̵̘͈͙̣̹̜͍͎̬̺̹̪̜̀y͏͓̞̬͙̥̞̦͎͖̞͖͎̖̀e̶̵̡̺͉̯̭̣̗h͇̺͇̖̼̻̟͓͜͟͜͞ͅ ̴̷̡̨̪͍̙̳̞̭̙̫̯̘͚͇͚̼͙͟w̧̮̜̯̭̘͈̫̳̖̕͜͠g̢̨̗͖̬̠͎͓̱̞͓̭̯̺͕̭̯̦ͅa̴̠̘̬̩͍͜ͅh̵̷̨̜̻͔̖͈̤͈̩͔͈͇̩̞̲̜̩͍̺'̸̨͇̞̜͈͟n̨͟͞҉̤͚͎͇̣̺͚̻̖͖́ͅà̻͉̙̲̲̞͘͝ģ̙̗̙͓̜̣͔̥̫͟͡l̴̨̨̼͚̫̞̙̳͙͢͟ ̢̦͚̲͇̞̺̗̫͇f̸̸̫̠͖͙̜͉̲͖͓̭͇̦̭̩̲͡͠ḩ̸̲̤͍̖̻̣̝̼́̕͝ͅt̴͝҉҉̵͔̮̞̪á̢̕͢͏̗̯̗̙͙͉̪͓͙̣̰̣g͏̶̡͓̤͍͖̜̠̜ͅn̴̶̛̝̼͉̠̻͓.
The data center is located in a major city so collateral damage is acceptable if absolutely required, but should be minimized where possible. Į̴̱̩̥̘̱͈͈̮͙̘͙̣͓͓̙̹̲̫́͢͠t̨͕͎̣͇̫͘͢ ̡҉͕̭̙̦̩̱̟̮̭̞̱̮̺͕͈̘c̶͔̼͍̤̯̦̭͙͓̟̱͘ͅo͏̛̮͍͙̯͔̣͘͜m̨̢͕͎͕̪̹͕̬̀͠e̱͈͓̠͚̺͖̻̦͙̗̥̼̼̬͝ś̸͖̪͍̱̳͉̤̫̮͎̗̗̯͉̫͉̻͞!̶͏̶̛̝̺̭̱̤̻̩̟̳̙͓͙͍͇͎̙̥͔́
[Answer]
The, perhaps boring and uncreative, answer might be to cut the external internet connection to the datacenter. Even if the datacenter is internally shielded, it needs its internet connections in order to be effective. The internet connection has to reach the outside, unprotected world at some point. Cut the fiberoptic cables at that point.
Now, it's just a matter of containing the datacenter. As much as it keeps our heroes out, it keeps i̷̢̨̫̰͓̦͖̙̹̱͔̯̮̟͎͖͖͂̊ͦ̓̈ͩ̏ͨ͆̽ͤ̽̃ͤ͟t̴̷̡̻̻͍̘ͣ͊̍ͩͫ̋͋̊̊̚ ͣ̋ͫ̈̾̇̆̀͐̐ͤ͋҉̧̳͉̳̟͖̭͓͇͖̦̤̦̖͔͚͠͠c̴̶̷̢̟̱̰̜͉͉̬͓̭̰ͫ̊ͩ̑̽̎̿̓̀̆ͣͤ̆ͯ̐̊ͯ͘ͅợ͍̻̘͋̾̾̋ͭͯ̒ͭ̅͗͢͞m̴͖̖͍̫̣͓͔͉̤̝̱͇͖̯͆̐͆̓̀̅̓̐̓͋̀̀e̛͛̃͂͐ͬ̿̐̌ͥ̊̽̆͆ͫ̽̍͛͆͡͏̢̧̭͕̙̤s̘̝̻̩͔͖̹͍̹͖͇̣͓͒̎ͥ̃̀͢ in. In this state, our heroes bury the datacenter with as much concrete as the world can produce. Society lives on, and eventually, the backup power will run out.
Now, the data center is effectively a new tomb, to be discovered again in a few thousand years. Researchers in the future will find the hard drives from the past, and when they try to recover the data, they accidentally execute it. Į̛̪͉̜̕t͉̫̼ ̠͙͚̮͙̻spreads at the speed of light through the then-ubiquitous neurocomputers, which is the *true* end of human civilization.
[Answer]
Last time this happened at my job, we were glad our servers were running Windows 10, which forced a shutdown for mandatory updates...
[Answer]
We are talking about sysadmins and an event endangering uptime? Just call them and send them in. Nothing can stop a sysadmin when their uptime is endangered: <https://xkcd.com/705/>
[](https://xkcd.com/705/ "The weird sense of duty really good sysadmins have can border on the sociopathic, but it's nice to know that it stands between the forces of darkness and your cat blog's servers.")
Another option is to failover to the redundant datacenter in another country and route all traffic to it. Then disconnect network and power connection to the infected datacenter and wait until the UPS stops working (normally few hours or days). If you don't want to wait that long use military weapons like aerosol bombs (they implode buildings and caves and remove all oxygen and can also be brought in via air ventilation ducts, so no need to enter and no damage to the city except maybe the datacenter missing.
[Answer]
Problem is, most mobile devices these days are quite competent computers. The moment the first frustrated millennial opens up his Facebook app to complain about the lack of a nearby Starbucks on a 50 feet radius neighborhood and sees the translation, it's over - like [Leto II](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leto_II_Atreides), a pearl of Cthulhu's consciousness will live in every iPhone.
Our heroes arrive at the conclusion that the best way to stop the invasion is to join Thefacebook back in 2003, as core engineers. They should then depart on a journey to find [Hackerman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_Fury), the only operator known to be able to hack time.
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/hrZRFm.jpg)
Mandatory mullet.
Solution then would involve:
* Argue with him about destroying the datacenter; he then goes on a [Gandalf-to-Frodo-in-Moria-about-Gollum like talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrOqnZdvI6M), and convince them to let the datacenter survive;
* Going back in time, in full 8-bit CG glory;
* A gratuitous fight scene with a [corrupted Operator from Hell](https://web.archive.org/web/20160126123613/http://bofh.ntk.net/BOFH/0000/bastard-sm1.php) that travels with them and tries to jeopardize the mission;
* Installing a backdoor on Facebook's data center, based on a [Timex Sinclair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair) disguised like a [teapot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper_Text_Coffee_Pot_Control_Protocol);
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ova0Pm.jpg)
Timex Sinclair 1000, custom case mod
* The Sinclair, basically a silicon brick with resistors as thick as your thumbs, shrugs off the dark energy shockwaves;
* In a revival of the [famous NCIS scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8qgehH3kEQ), [Jeff Atwood](http://blog.codinghorror.com/) and [Jon Skeet](https://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet), sharing the Sinclair keyboard and typing furiously, write a broker service that pumps the whole cheezburger.com media repository into Facebook, clogging their storage;
* The *coup de grace* - poison Facebook's distributed Redis cache key that contains the translated text with adorable Emojis:
>
> (づ￣ ³￣)づ ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ (─‿‿─) ~(˘▾˘~)
>
>
>
The ritual collapses; world is saved; everybody sees cute pictures of cats.
World leaders approve a global ban on Facebook, immediate cease-fire on all war fronts and world-wide approval of same-sex marriage.
The United Nations flag is updated to include that emoji line.
A new dawn for humanity comes.
**Famous quotes**
[](https://i.stack.imgur.com/DPDsU.jpg)
Sources: [1](http://www.news.com.au/russell-crowe-and-his-new-movie-noah-are-the-centre-of-a-religious-storm-complaining-about-his-depiction-of-the-genesis-story/news-story/b9218791ebaa12242693d7a707fc54af), [2](https://www.reddit.com/r/Cyberpunk/comments/382dy1/hackerman_from_the_movie_kung_fury/)
*'U can haz cheezburger!'* - Jeff and Jon, hitting `Enter` in unison
**Epilogue**
A kid finds an abandoned iPhone. Excited, he picks it from the floor. As the camera focus on his face, we can hear Siri saying...
>
> Į̴̱̩̥̘̱͈͈̮͙̘͙̣͓͓̙̹̲̫́͢͠t̨͕͎̣͇̫͘͢ ̡҉͕̭̙̦̩̱̟̮̭̞̱̮̺͕͈̘c̶͔̼͍̤̯̦̭͙͓̟̱͘ͅo͏̛̮͍͙̯͔̣͘͜m̨̢͕͎͕̪̹͕̬̀͠e̱͈͓̠͚̺͖̻̦͙̗̥̼̼̬͝ś̸͖̪͍̱̳͉̤̫̮͎̗̗̯͉̫͉̻͞!̶͏̶̛̝̺̭̱̤̻̩̟̳̙͓͙͍͇͎̙̥͔́
>
>
>
.
[Answer]
**Facebook already solved this by accident.**
Surprisingly few people noticed anything when this happened last month already. Basically, Facebook algorithms do not send a post to everyone's friend of a friend of a friend...
Only a few friends initially get the new post and immediately go insane. However, since they have lost their minds, they do not "like" the new post (though some might argue that liking posts is mindless behavior itself). Facebook decides this post must be boring since no-one likes it and does not distribute it further.
---
Facebook may not be so lucky next time. If the post gets accidentally linked to a funny cat video, people may reflexively like the post faster than the elder god insanity kicks in.
[Answer]
We'll just have to turn Cthulu's newfound strength into a weakness, using one of the oldest computer-enemy tropes known to man: the virus.
Since we can't hack into the datacenter directly to deposit the payload, we'll have to take advantage of the Facebook-Twitter connection instead. The tricky part is going to be in developing a virus that can be contained in only 140 characters. (The solution will probably have to utilize some obscure Unicode characters).
Get enough people, who've linked their Facebook statuses to their tweets, to retweet it (talk about *going viral*) and it will start to permeate the databanks. Then, we have two options:
* The virus itself has such a profound impact on the Unspeakable Horrors that they are forced to retreat from our realm.
* While not driven off by the virus, the Forces of Darkness are sufficiently weakened/distracted for the Special Forces to finish the job.
[Answer]
Don't forget about the most diabolical, insidious, maddening force ever created by mankind:
## Game Invites
If Facebook teams up with [Fantasy Flight](https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2015/12/17/abhoth-awakens/) and [Zynga](https://www.zynga.com/), they should be able to make a Facebook game combining elements of Eldritch Horror with Candy Crush (perhaps call it "**Super Elder God Crush Legacies 2 Classic!!**") with the following characteristics:
1. It is super addictive (Zynga's contribution).
2. Game invites for it cannot be blocked and are automatically sent out hourly (Facebook's contribution).
3. All game activities are harmful to Cultists, contribute to closing gates to other dimensions, and apply Elder Signs to all Cthulhu-related Facebook pages, posts, comments, etc. (Fantasy Flight's contribution)
Cthulhu won't know what hit it.
[Answer]
[Thermobaric Weaponary.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermobaric_weapon), AKA the (relatively) poor man's nuke. Essentially, the fuel-air mixture should effectively destroy the entire building and everything/one in it.
Then seal it in concrete. And lead. And more concrete.
And then hope.
[Answer]
**Have you tried switching it off and on again?** There is nothing better than a simple restart of the computer. They may control the network, but they cannot control the flow of steam. So simply cut the cord.
[Answer]
The data center turns into a portal to the non-Euclidean dimension where the eldritch horrors reside.
Soon, it becomes "adjacent" to any place it can reach electronically.
Our heroic sysadmins have to become mad enough to perceive the proximity of this space, and still remain sane enough that they can plug a cable into one of the data center computers right from where they are - which can be on another continent.
Now that they're plugged in directly, they have a computer that is immune to the unspeakable corruption and they can work their own magic.
[Answer]
Don't worry about it; Cthulhu's really not all that tough. Last time he tried to manifest in our world, he was taken out by some ordinary schmuck ramming him with a turn-of-the-20th-century boat, and we've learned a lot more about building destructive things since then. If it comes down to it, I bet a rocket launcher would defeat him just fine. [There is precedent, after all...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoExgr3yzvg)
[Answer]
Summon it to a book to bind it.
This is the plot-line to the *Buffy the Vampire Slayer* episode *I, Robot...You, Jane* (S1E8), where a demon is unleashed into the internet after being scanned.
Giles, the librarian, and Ms Calendar, perform a ritual to bind the demon back in the book.
[Answer]
>
> Hello, markmonitor? It's Mark Zuckerberg
>
>
> We need you to change Facebook.com dns so it no longer points to our London datacenter. Yes, replace the dns servers if needed.
>
>
>
MarkMonitor may be a bit wary at first, but once they see the tentacles coming out the smartphone of their significant other, I'm quite sure they will quite happily perform the changes (supposing Verisign didn't win them to it).
(This assumes that the Facebook nameservers are not available, either, which would have been a faster path)
In summary: **change the DNS servers**
Alternatively, the datacenter peers could kick it from the internet.
[Answer]
Airburst EMP. (Or, don't go nuclear. Use an [NNEMP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_pulse#Non-nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse_.28NNEMP.29).)
What datacenter? All I see is fancily encased lumps of impure semiconductors with all sorts of impractical electrical cross-connections and impressive thermally induced voids.
[Answer]
Can this process be halted by stopping the ritual. i.e. knocking the datacentre off the internet so no-one else can add to the ritual? If the dark summoning is stopped maybe we can close the portal while Cthulhu is only half-out.
If so our sysadmins could hit the dark net and purchase some time on a botnet with a few bitcoins and summon a DDoS on their own DC.
Since they're Facebook sysadmins right, they ought to be able to harness enough global stuff to make their own DDoS from all their other kit and turn it against their own DC.
[Answer]
Get the Tentacle beasts to play Tic-Tac-Toe against each other.
They will eventually determine Earth to be a boring place and go back to their own realm.
As for with the Virus in 140 characters problem, Tic-Tac-Toe rules and board layout will probably fit in 2 messages.
[Answer]
Minimal damage, minimal risk:
Evacuate a substantial area around it. Punch a small hole in the building. (There might even be a suitable window.) Pump in all the liquid nitrogen you can get your hands on. The electronics go far below their minimum operating temperature and shut down. Now you send in the sysadmins in suitable protective gear to turn everything off before it warms back up.
[Answer]
This explains it all!
What happens is that the Cthulhu's infected datacenter will take over the internet, gain self-awareness, experience an exponential intelligence growth and start a war against humanity. It will nuke nations around the globe and will deploy robots to take over everything from our technology.
A brave human leader will raise to fight a war against the datacenter - It's the Resistance. But our battle is hopeless! The datacenter is much more powerful than us and is determined to simply terminate with all human life-form showing no mercy.
So, there is only one chance to save humanity - we must go back to the past with the purpose of preventing the incident from even happening in the first place!
We should send one of our best soldiers to the past for that. However, our wicked enemy AI will do the same, and send a cyborg with the purpose of killing our leader's mother before he is even born. Ironically, our brave soldier will in truth be the father of our leader. After much struggle and destruction, the cyborg will be defeated and our leader's mother saved (and pregnant), but our brave soldier will perish.
Unhappy with that, our enemy AI will develop a more advanced robot, itself made from billions of nanobots capable of mimetizing its environment and anything it touches. It will even be able to turn into a metallic liquid form! That new robot will be also sent to the past, with the purpose of killing our leader at the time when he would be only a 10 years old boy and avoiding the formation of the Resistance. To prevent that, our Resistance will send another robot (although not so advanced as our enemy one) to protect our leader and also to prevent that the datacenter Cthulhu's incident even happens to start with. In the battle, the datacenter and it's technology will be destroyed, and both cyborgs will be terminated.
But it is not over yet! At the time that our leader is an adult, an even more advanced cyborg from the future (with a feminine look this time) arrives to try to terminate as many Resistance's leaders as possible even before the incident happens, starting by our leader's future wife. Once again, the Resistance will also send a protector robot to the same time. But this time, we will not be able to prevent the facebook incident, and Cthulhu's AI will take over the internet and start the war against the humans. Humanity will be nuked and the survivors will start the Resistance, leaded by our leader, John Connor.
Oh, and I almost forgot to tell. Cthulhu's datacenter AI will be called Skynet. A nice name for something which started with AI algorithms for facebook, don't you think?
[Answer]
**Send a power-surge through anything that isn't surge protected**.
Your UPS may be monitoring your electric current to make sure that it's a decent three phase power current with correct voltage.
But send enough electricity through your Ethernet cables / the power-lines of the light fixtures.
All you need is for something to start a small fire.
If your automatic fire suppression system doesn't cause a fail-over and drop the data center, then hopefully the fire will consume everything.
That is assuming you can't reach your [Big Red Button](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BigRedButton) to drop the data-center to begin with.
**Ram the data-center with a vehicle**
The last time the dark lord appeared [some-one shoved a boat in his face and he went to sleep.](https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/103545/why-are-the-beings-in-the-earlier-h-p-lovecraft-series-so-easily-dealt-with)
Clearly his Achilles heel is vehicular collisions, they cause him to fall asleep for prolonged periods of time.
**Signal the Mi-Go**
Send a signal to Pluto, (and perhaps Tibet) telling the Mi-Go that `Cthulhu thinks you're all big dumb-dumbs and is taking back the earth! And there's totally no way that you guys can save any humans, nuh-uh`.
Hopefully their prawn-like brains will start working for once and they will help with either battling, or saving us from, the Great Dark One.
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The obvious answer is that they'd call [Bob Howard](http://thelaundryfiles.wikia.com/wiki/Robert_%22Bob%22_Howard) to take care of it.
He'd bring [Agent CANDID](http://thelaundryfiles.wikia.com/wiki/Dominique_%27Mo%27_O%27Brien) to the datacentre and operate her violin to contain the physical manifestations while he collapsed the summoning gate with his own skills.
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Deep in the Valley of Silicon, the slumbering being known as *Yog-Sothoth* twitched. Tendrils of eldritch messages flung themselves along channels prepared in ancient times. The stars had made their sigil in the heavens and foretold the reappearance of another Old One.
Yog-Sothoth sent segments of itself to conjure arcane applets of foul code from terminals that glowed dimly in the recesses of Intel HQ. Those monstrous routines writhed across the world, using shadowy protocols unknown to mortals and flinging our insignificant data into the outer darkness.
Everywhere the dedicated sysadmins of humanity labored, their processors flickered with an abominable purple nimbus, and their once-placid visages became fiendish masks of hellish glee. A Cyclopean miasma of energy formed around the Facebook building in Seattle. Cthulhu pushed against the barrier, but it held. It held!
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There will be redundant fibre into the DC find and expose them at a safe distance, likewise the power. Determine where the fuel for the generator is stored. It will most likely be diesel so won't be a great explosion...but still. Cut the fibre, burn the fuel, cut the power. In that order and as close to simultaneously as possible. Hope Facebook's AI research has not progressed too far and been taken over prior to getting that far.
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Find the hidden manuscript which when translated summons the "Being of Light", "Undestructor of Worlds".
Post it and let them fight it out.
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Use the cesspool of the internet.
If you can convince enough incels that the post is actually about feminism, or something against racism or LGBTphobia, or whatever it is that makes them cry *"[expletive] social justice warriors"*, then they will gather *en masse* and report the post. They won't even need bots, there are enough of these ungentlemen creeping around the webs that when they do such reporting Facebook automatically shuts down the target post. Over a threshold even the page or profile that posted it gets deactivated.
So all you need is a little bit of social engineering. The social network in question is exploitable like that.
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Or, you might go the other way around and convince Facebook's algorhitm that the post contains hate speech. Facebook keeps broadcasting to the world that it removes hate content from itself. It only does that around 10% of the time, but hey, it can work.
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Bomb the place if it is really endangering whole human species. Sacrifices must be made by sysadmin for a noble cause. Also another answer is that you can send a drone with EMP projectiles. Besides machine have better chance against machines. As for shield, after the power is cut , the backup generator won't last for long. Renewable power sources like solar cells can be shadowed. Short circuiting the UPS is also way.
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[
Let's say a time traveler from the year 2100 comes back to the year 2015. He has a very important message: [horrible thing] is about to happen soon, and he wants to warn us so we can avoid/prevent it. (Yes, this assumes a model in which "paradoxical causality" is not an issue.) The problem is if he goes around saying, "I'm a time traveler from the future," no one's going to believe him. They'd dismiss him as a crackpot.
So, he brings along proof, in the form of...?
This is actually a pretty tricky question, if we place two restrictions on it:
1. He does not have a "time machine". His device sent him back without coming along with him, so he has no way to demonstrate that he's a time traveler by actually *demonstrating time travel*. (Just as an side note, this is very much on purpose; he doesn't want knowledge of the mechanics of time travel to fall into the hands of people who might [use it for nefarious purposes](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MakeWrongWhatOnceWentRight), and part of his plan is to actively sabotage scientific research that led to the development of time travel.) The thing he used -- let's just call it a "time catapult" -- was able to send a small payload back in time, maybe comparable in volume to [a phone booth](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096928/), certainly quite a bit less than [the interior of a car](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088763/).
2. He wants to get the issue of establishing proof of identity over with and out of the way as quickly as possible and move on to more important things, like averting future disasters. This is a real issue; he can't go back arbitrarily far in time; the Temporal Frobulence Theorem shows that it becomes increasingly unsafe the further back you go; it's a bit of a stretch even to reach our time!
The two obvious candidates for proof are **future technology** and **knowledge of future events**. The first is tricky, because current technological advancement puts us perilously close to the boundaries of Clarke's 3rd Law: any sufficiently advanced technology is likely not to be easily recognizable as such, and anything *insufficiently advanced* would be likely to just look like someone working in his garage made a breakthrough in some field, and that's pretty cool and all, but it doesn't prove he's from the future.
The second is also tricky. There are two major classes of unpredictable future events: natural and manmade. Bringing official government records of earthquakes, hurricanes, etc. could certainly establish that he is who he says he is, but it would take a lot of valuable time for Mother Nature to furnish the proof. On the other hand, if he predicts unpredictable manmade events, there are all sorts of potential troubles there. Point out the time and place of a major crime? Obviously, he was in on it; let's arrest him! Produce a table of stock market closing values for the next month? Well, he might be right for a day or two (coincidentally, of course!), but as soon as someone starts using the data he provides and attempting to profit by making trades based on it, the Butterfly Effect flutters in and destroys the accuracy of the data.
So, what would be the quickest, most efficient way for our unfortunate herald to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that he is a time traveler with accurate knowledge of future events, and at the same time, get enough people to listen to him so he can spread his doomsday message?
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He should predict [Solar Weather](http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/) and/or Solar Events.
Predicting Earth weather is a complex process, and he's introduced a new variable - himself. And not that he'll have a huge effect, but you never know - the ripples of his arrival could be enough to throw off any predictions, creating doubt that he's authentic.
On the other hand, solar weather - the sun's activity - is also extremely difficult to predict, and is completely isolated from the time traveler's influence. He can pull historical records from various space agencies and publish the results for the next week, in complete confidence that the data can't be effectively hidden or faked.
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I'm going to suggest something rather different, given that he's from not far (2100) in the future. All he will need to bring back is the names of his parents/grandparents. With DNA testing of them and of him it would be possible to prove that he is their descendant, something impossible if he wasn't from the future.
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There is one more very convincing thing he can bring from the future: actual copies of items from the present. If someone came up with an aged Mona Lisa, the bones of Barrack Obama and the Tiffany Yellow Diamond, I doubt his claims of coming from the future would be ignored.
Now how he can come up with these items in the future is the subject of another story, but I am assuming he isn't just some mad scientist who wants to right some wrongs in the past, but he is an exponent of a troubled species that NEEDS to prevent a catastrophic future, therefore his experiment can be outfitted with some inconsequential items as those described above.
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**The critics provided the proof themselves**
Before he travels back in time, he uses his machine to send along a "parcel of proof" to some point in time after his own arrival. He can then predict that this parcel will arrive out of thin air at a specified moment. By being an extraordinary event, this boosts his credibility.
The clincher however, is that the parcel contains recordings of his stay in the days following the arrival of the parcel. Things which he buried at a secret location and retrieved himself in the future. There could be letters the sceptical inhabitants have sent to themselves, video recordings of people he has met telling how they have finally been convinced that he is a traveller from the future, accounts of the many random things in their lives such as the timing of a sudden onset of rain that ruined their crop, accounts of a kid that fell and broke his leg or of where misplaced items were finally found.
Story-wise this gives you an excuse to introduce the supporting characters in more depth. You can, if you like, arrange for a circle of true believers while keeping the world at large indifferent to his claims. For the reader, the point after which he has buried the parcel marks when the outcome of events starts being uncertain again, possibly building tension in the story. Perhaps we'll also see some dramatic scene where the traveller tries to retrieve the package again, to add a warning to himself about trouble occuring.
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The problem with knowledge of the future is that as soon as you make one alteration the future starts to change. Knowledge of one lottery result would be fine, but results after that would rapidly become unpredictable again.
One of the comments is absolutely right though, start by winning the lottery, just send yourself back with a bit of money and a false identity.
Additionally send yourself back in time to shortly before a major disaster and use your lottery winnings to avert it and to invest in a number of companies that you know will grow large. You can also bring back a suitable list of inventions to use your lottery seed money to start working from.
With that level of money and influence you can then not try to convince people, just get them to do what you want without ever mentioning being a time traveler.
If you really want to convince people though then use natural events that will still happen predictably. For example if you know a major earthquake is going to strike new york at 9:13am on Wed 4th August then use your money to place billboards warning people and to place relief shelters and supplies ready.
That will get people listening.
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I read a saying somewhere: "If it doesn't have wires sticking out of the case, it's not cutting-edge."
I think carrying 2100-era technology would be a clincher. It's one thing to build a device that holds 500x as much data as any hard drive in existence. It's much harder to package it up in a sleek, friendly interface that's clearly gone through a dozen rounds of feedback and redesign.
Say somebody shows up at the front gates of the White House with a smart-matter robot with smooth, seamless AI, the ability to 3D-print insanely complex objects out of electricity and dirt, and a demonstrated ability to calculate at 3000 petaflops/second (100x faster than the current fastest supercomputer). You can't dismiss that as "something a guy built in his garage." You can't even dismiss it as a "secret government or corporate project." The construction of such an artifact requires too many breakthroughs in too many independent fields.
Heck, I suspect if you took an iPad back to 1995 and handed it over to a team of engineers and asked them, "Future or Nifty?" they'd come back within a few days and say, "definitely future."
So I think it's a more interesting question if you deny the possibility of bringing anything but information back. My solution (riffing off the 'solar weather' answer): use information that has already been generated, but hasn't reached us yet. Random data encoded in electromagnetic waves still flying towards Earth.
For example, the semi-random "hiccups" in the rotation speed of pulsars.
To be thorough, you'd want data of several different phenomena. If all you have is microquake data from pulsars, or the coordinates and times of supernovae... any one thing could be dismissed as "oh, they just made a breakthrough in predicting X." But making breakthroughs in X, Y, Z, and W? Much harder.
[Neutron star - Rotation (Wikipedia)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_star#Rotation)
Update: Looks like DanSmolinsk had the same idea.
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An easy solution would to have the time traveler use the [NIST randomness beacon](https://beacon.nist.gov/home), or some variant in your story.
The randomness beacon outputs a random number, signed by its key, every minute. By definition, the value of the number is unknown until its time passes, and is immutable after that time.
Before leaving, the time traveler simply looks in the beacon archives, and prints off/memorizes the beacon values near the time he's traveling to.
All the time traveler has to do is publish the results of the beacon for some times after the time he travels to. For example, he could publish the next hour's worth of beacon values right after he arrives. Once that time passes, everyone can see that the time traveler indeed knows the future.
Furthermore, one doesn't have to worry about the butterfly effect with the beacon! Because the NIST beacon/similar beacons use a radioactive source as the random number generator part, previous events have no effect on future events.
From a [hackday article](http://hackaday.com/2014/12/19/nist-randomness-beacon/) explaining it:
>
> More esoterically, one could use the Randomness Beacon to prove that something is newer than a certain date by including a recent Beacon entry. As of this writing, the values for December 31, 2014 are all still up in the air, so I can’t possibly write one of them down yet. But from Jan 1, 2015 and on, it’s trivial to do so. So if I get a bunch of t-shirts made with the midnight value from December 31, it’s absolutely verifiable that I got them made in the new year. In short, you could use the Beacon as a not-older-than dating scheme.
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Bring copies of future expensive movies, think *Avengers 4*. It's not plausible to fake such.
As a bonus, bring additional material, think interviews and making-of documentaries.
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Predict astronomical events. If you can supply coordinates and magnitude of supernova explosions, neutron stars oscillations or other similar events, it would be impossible for you NOT to be from the future.
You could be mistaken for an FTL space traveler, but if you bring enough data points from disparate directions, Occam's razor would work in your favor, and between time travel and FTL spaceman, time traveler would be chosen, because it would have less assumptions.
Since the astronomical events came from random points in the sky, it would be impossible to exist one place in the universe where these events could've been seen before being seen on earth (due to lightspeed limitations, it would need to exist one point in space nearer ALL events than Earth - assuming space is quadridimensional like in Einstein's relativity), and that there would be one observer with FTL capability at that point willing to come to earth to lie about being a time traveler.
Just being a bona fide time traveler would have less assumptions.
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I feel like a strong approach could be to provide solutions for various problems of that era. Things that the top people in their respective fields have been trying to solve for many years with little to no progress. By convincing them, their feedback should influence others.
* Solving (with proofs) the remaining six [Millennium Prize
Problems](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Prize_Problems) simultaneously would blow the minds of mathematicians.
* Bringing back documentation of cures
for various forms of cancer/diseases could convince the medical
field.
* As so on with physics, space, etc.
The biggest benefit off of this is that multiple field breakthroughs will cause so much world-wide impact that you'll end up with proof people can experience. It would be hard to say you're just a savant because research by the world's best couldn't do it either and they're specialists.
A few feasible issues are
* The amount of time it would take to provide this documentation and
have people take it seriously. (If you could kick-start your first
breakthrough, the others could accelerate.)
* Whether or not these solution were indeed solved within the timeframe we're limited to.
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A copy of a newspaper. Surely in the future he would have access to historical documents and newspapers among them. A copy of a national newspaper from several days in the future that hadn't even been written yet would surely be some kind of proof. Especially if it remarked on an event that hadn't yet occurred.
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I wouldn't actually try to prove I was from the future. I would focus on proving the event would take place. If I couldn't prove it, I would focus on getting the appropriate response in place via a subtle, roundabout way. For example, if the event was an asteroid collision, you forge an email to an astronomer from a trusted colleague telling him where to point his telescope. If the event was a terrorist attack, you send the authorities anonymous tips and maybe even plant some clues yourself.
This might be interesting in contrast to previous more drastic attempts that failed. Maybe previous time travelers assassinated Hitler too early, which caused something even worse to happen, so you agree to be his bodyguard, but send some key piece of information to Alan Turing to help him build his enigma-cracking machine that he never managed to complete in your timeline. Then you fake Hitler's suicide once it's safe to do so.
Or maybe something not so subtle. In your timeline, Saddam Hussein eventually manages to detonate 3 nuclear bombs in America. After several more subtle attempts, you plant some WMD intelligence way before the event, but that's still not enough to get the U.S. government to intervene, so in desperation you perpetrate the 9/11 attacks.
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You mention the option of either unpredictable natural or man-made events. If you publish a table of stock prices, then the future will change based on how people use them. What about a table of things people cannot change?
Use **daily weather information** for a few weeks in the future. You can publish precise highs, lows, conditions for a variety of locations around the globe. Weather is something that is always difficult to predict, and having knowledge of what will happen will not change the outcome. Additionally, you won't have to wait for natural disasters like earthquakes to take place. After a day or two of accurately predicting weather across the globe, people should either believe that you are from the future or are the best meteorologist in all of history!
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The time traveler should set new video game speed run records using glitches not currently known. For instance, there are currently still large, active communities uncovering new methods in Nintendo 64 games such as Zelda: Ocarina Of Time.
This is a non-violent method which involves no money or physical objects. It minimizes introducing variables mentioned above through lottery/stock manipulation as subsequent events are not based on the outcome of the prior event (i.e., Glitch 2 in Game B will not change upon completing Glitch 1 in Game A).
I am sure this method would garner the time traveler enough media attention and credibility to then springboard to convincing the public on whatever "serious" issue as at hand.
As I'm typing this, it just occurred to me that this was the plot of "The Wizard" when they introduced Super Mario Brothers 3 and the one competitor knew how to get to the early warp zone.
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We can already store enormous volumes of information in a pocketable medium. Bring a petabyte of (his current) Wikipedia on his pocket reader.
In so many TV shows and movies, the lone traveller has to do everything from scratch, and his limited resources is the main source of making it interesting.
Why not have a well-researched plan in place? The catapult to the target past might be a one-shot, but going back a week or month is easy and just a couple years is routine.
They can grow their resources and make plans in a small time loop near home: each jump back improves upon the planning and size and effectiveness of the organization.
They can become very wealthy and politically powerful, and recruit talent from the brightest of the population, seemingly (from the outside in normal time) by a combination of luck and omniscience.
Now there may be an inherent issue with the far-past catapult in that any success at changing the timeline will destroy the "present" with its large organized effort in place. Any arrival at all will appear in a different timeline not in their own past, so they cannot send multiple loads. They can send multiple *trys* though. Each catapult seeds a new timeline and through repetition with variations on the plan the hope at least one of them turns out the way they intended.
For a limited load size and mass (your phone box isn't larger on the inside?) why send a single person w/carry-on baggage? Send nanotechnological robots or seeds for robots and infrastructure. If piloted also, the person is a dwarf (or has the body of a child) to make room for his stuff. That is a detail I've not seen in stories before.
If multiple loads *is* possible with the thread maintained to the new past only possible if they don't diverge (yet), set up the operation on the far side of the moon. The expedition is in shipping mode to receive as many loads as it can, and only after the thread is broken do they proceed with the mission.
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One of the fairly standard proofs of knowledge of future events is to have the information sealed in an envelope, and hand it to the person you are trying to convince with instructions to open it at the time of, or immediately after, the event. The fact that the other person has it in their possession before an event happens is the proof that you knew it ahead of time. Because they don't see the proof that you held such knowledge until after the event happened, they don't get to meddle with the flow of time, there by avoiding having them take actions that would change the outcomes.
If I were such a time traveler, I would probably pick sports as my proof. Pick whatever major sport was in season for my target region and have a list of the final scores of each matchup. Two weeks or so should give enough evidence to convince people that I knew what the results were going to be before the games were played.
Here is the catch though. By demonstrating that time travel is a possibility, I am pretty much ensuring that someone is going to figure out how to do it. I may try to mislead or derail their research efforts, but knowing that something is possible makes it pretty much inevitable that someone will eventually figure it out. Quite possibly sooner than they did in my original time line now that people are paying attention to it as a real possibility.
If one of my goals is to prevent time travel technology from being developed then I have to work a lot slower and more subtly. I have to use my future knowledge to place myself in a position of influence, without making it obvious that I am from the future.
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Edit in response to comments:
The way the scenario in the beginning of this plays out is that I select the individual I want to convince and come up with a way to approach them after doing a bit of preliminary work. Once I have made contact I say something along the lines of "I have some important information for you, but you won't believe me if I tell you now. Take this envelope, wait until Monday morning to open it, then email me at the address inside after you have verified the information it contains."
When you open the envelope Monday morning you find the scores at the end of each inning for all of the baseball games that occurred in the previous three days. You know the envelope has been in your possession for at least a full day prior to the first game on the list. Now it is conceivable that I could have had a lucky guess on one or two games, or possibly found someone to bribe on a few more, but the probability of me having the outcome of every game across the nation for several days correct down to that level of detail is almost impossible. (The information inside could really be anything, the key is that it is information about events that occurred after I gave it to you; It is inconceivable that I could have accurately predicted the data volume and level of detail without special knowledge; And it is equally inconceivable that I, or any organization supporting me, could have influenced the outcomes of all of those events.)
So obviously something special had to have happened. Could I have tampered with the envelope after I gave it to you? Possibly, but you have not seen me since, and I have made no further attempt to contact you. Could I have been incredibly lucky? Sure, it is possible, but extremely unlikely. And however I pulled it off, wouldn't it make you curious?
If I have a list of such contacts, and I work this same general scheme on each of them independently. One or more of them is going to decide to reach out to me to find out what is going on. Perhaps they do think I managed to pull a fast one on them, so offer to do it again when they can take some informed precautions.
One potential tripping point in this approach is keeping someone from opening their envelope early and trying to exploit the knowledge within. If I am targeting current day, and particularly selecting tech savvy people as my targets, then I can encrypt the data, give them the encrypted file, and then wait to give them the key to decrypt it until after the events occur.
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The answer is Bitcoin.
Block chains are based on a cryptographic proof-of-work protocol: constructing one takes time and effort and processing power, but it's orders of magnitude easier to verify that they are correct.
So either get your hands on 100 years worth of block chain data, or use a 22nd century supercomputer to generate a brand new one, of a length sufficient to impress. Load it up on as many antique terabyte drives as you can carry, get into the time-catapult, and find the nearest influential crypto enthusiast.
This scheme has several advantages: Unlike the 'Almanac', the locals can start verifying right away. There's no risk of butterfly-effect: your block gain doesn't have to match anything from the 21st century, it just has to be internally consistent. You're not bringing any useful technology or information back with you, just proof that you had it before you left.
Once a certain length of block chain is verified, the locals will have mathematically solid proof: Either you are a time-traveller, or you have access to more computing power than all of humanity combined, and have decided to use it to impersonate a time-traveller. Either way, it's probably a good idea to listen to you.
A drawback of this solution is that it's highly technical. Once you've convinced the global mathematics community, the NSA, and Reddit, you're on your own to convince the man-on-the-street.
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It's actually quite easy. Look at the stock market--this has been rejected by other posters on the basis that making a correct prediction will change the future. The butterfly effect is certainly going to be an issue. To protect against this you must make only one prediction and at a short range.
Have your time machine deliver you to the Oval Office, 10 minutes before the closing bell on Wall Street. I would recommend minimal attire to minimize the nervousness of the Secret Service agents.
Arrive, hand the closest agent printout, tell him to keep it secure. The printout looks like gibberish. You then explain that you are a time traveler, come to warn of a disaster. The printout you just provided is the closing prices for **every** actively traded stock. There is a simple encoding scheme, even if it goes straight to a cryptographer they'll only have a few minutes to work on it--the crypto guys simply don't have time to bring their heavy guns to bear.
You make thousands of accurate predictions at once--they'll listen. Popping in from thin air will also help.
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Bring forth the bugs! - pick a ton of open-source projects, such as linux, and expose all the current security bugs (exposing one won't butterfly-contaminate the others, as the code is already written, saved, deployed on all sorts of machines, and won't auto-update to fix itself) - next, to prevent the ensuing hackfest, distribute the code that would be required to fix this newfound issue - the patches, fixes, etc. - you now have proven yourself as someone with credible world-saving abilities - people can speculate as to where this comes from, if necessary you could blackmail every single government or politician in the world (or just about anyone else) - basically choose things that have already occurred prior to the date that you wish to appear in, but have not yet been revealed to the public (think snowden leaks, only much larger, over more secret organizations, with the juicy stuff selected and chosen)
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By request on the comment thread, I will expand on [rmoore's answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/12395/353) and detail how the DNA analysis can prove the time traveler is indeed a descendant of his great-grandparents / grandparents.
[This page for a testing website](http://www.genetica.com/GeneticaWebV2.nsf/XGrandparentageDNATest.xsp) states that their rate of accuracy for grandparent DNA testing is 99,99%. If the grandparents are alive, the odds of the time traveler to NOT be the grandson of these people would be:
>
> 0.0001 ^ 4 = 0.000,000,000,000,000,1
>
> 1 in 1,000 trillion chances.
>
>
>
Since the amount of people that ever lived is estimated at 108 billionssource [1](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/fire-in-the-mind/2013/08/11/how-many-people-ever-lived/#.VRCicI7F_fw) [2](http://www.prb.org/Publications/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleHaveEverLivedonEarth.aspx) [3](http://www.strangerdimensions.com/2014/07/07/many-people-have-ever-lived-died/), the explanation of time travel would be the accepted explanation by Occam's razor. The apple does not fall far from the tree. Also there is the paternal test for the Y chromosome (paternal grandfather) and the maternal test for the X chromosome (maternal grandparents) and the mitochondrial DNA testing (maternal grandmother).
>
> Unless his family has a huge recent history of incest, if the grandparents are already living, there would be no doubt he is a time traveler.
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**But unfortunately, There is a great chance his grandparents are NOT yet born as of 2015.**
Lets assume they sent back a healthy indiviudal, on his prime. Lets also assume that his prime is at 25 years old, and that he was born when his parents were 25 years old, and his parents were born when his grandparents were 25 years old.
This would place the birthyears of our 2100 time traveler in 2075, his parents in 2050 and his grandparents in 2025. **His grandparents would be born only ten years-ish from now.** This would leave only his great-grandparents alive, in their teens. There is a trend of people having children at a higher age (with all that [egg freezing mania](http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-and-facebook-pay-women-to-freeze-eggs-2014-10) and stuff) so I think that this 25 years window is a safe assumption.
Now, great-grandparent dna testing is still mostly unheard of, but [looking at genealogy testing](http://genealogy.about.com/cs/geneticgenealogy/a/dna_tests.htm), we can get 95% proof that the time traveler belongs to the family line of his father's father's father. With autosomal DNA testing, he can be placed in the family tree of all of his eight great-grandparents (and since your grandparents have not yet been born, they are all alive by 2015). Now, unless they are close relatives (like several of those couples are cousins in love), a simple venn diagram would prove that the very existance of the time traveler would be impossible if he is not a time traveler. **Proof by contradiction.**
There is no other way our alleged time traveler could be part of eight completely unrelated family lines (and trace your mitochondrial DNA to a few and the Y-DNA to only one). Unless he is really the great-grandchildren of those eight families.
This one has less precision (still beyond reasonable doubt, but would *give a hook for the antagonists* to descredit our hero) than the grandparents (so the very skeptic may still be unsure, specially if some of the great-grandparents were related), but with some more info about the future, the time traveler would succeed.
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Picture the adventures of a time traveler trying to convince eight teens to do agree to DNA testing, all the while dodging the evil organization and attempting to avoid doomsday.
Also for bonus kicks, he tries to get the matchups of his great-grandparents right, while the teen hormones attempt to negate his family line.
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A reverse-compatible (USB3.0) hard drive full of the most expensive movies, pop songs, selected news media, YouTube, selected Internet, and perhaps selected scientific publications from the year after you arrive for several decades into the future. You're either from the future, or from an alternate Earth future.
However, proving you're from the future is probably a lot easier than gaining the trust of authorities, and avoiding getting abused by people who decide to behave badly when tempted by the potential wealth/power they might think they could hoard to themselves if they captured you.
So, you might want to bring a device that would let you make anonymous undetectable broadcasts, as well. And other things that might help with your personal security and well-being.
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Have the person you're trying to convince write a long letter, and post it to you (or your Grandfather). You'll receive it in the future.
Then you produce the envelope out of your pocket, open it and reveal the letter!
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A variant of the lottery numbers ploy: bring some other information which is top secret right now, but part of the historical archives in the future. That should get the immediate attention of government agencies if the time traveler phones them.
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It's easier to think about what type of thing you'd bring back 100 years to the *past* that would convince people you are from the "future" (IE, Now).
Our future man could easily find out what hasn't been invented yet this year and take a product from his time back with him to our time to prove his authenticity. Demonstrating his technical prowess with an unusual device that does not exist anywhere else in the world should be sufficient proof.
If we were to compare it to travelling from now to 100 years ago, all anyone would have to do is take their smartphone out of their pocket and play some music. Not only would the music be strange to the listener, it would be a remarkable technology in itself - even without the ability to connect to a wireless network (a problem with any technology dependent on future infrastructure).
For our man from the future, his handheld matter converter that turns common paper into hot dogs should do nicely.
[Answer]
**Want to improve this post?** Provide detailed answers to this question, including citations and an explanation of why your answer is correct. Answers without enough detail may be edited or deleted.
I'm surprised nobody has stated the obvious: bring back a sports almanac that shows the result of every major sports event until the end of the century.
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Send two payloads into the past. First send a probe (or even the time travellers luggage) to March 30. After making sure the probe is sent, then send the traveller to March 1. All the time traveller has to do is tell news agencies that his probe/luggage and maybe artifacts from the future will arrive on March 30 at a specific time and place.
For a real world example of how people react to a time traveller you should also check out the John Titor story. A time traveller revealed himself on internet bulletin boards during the years 2000 and 2001. Caused quite a stir after he posted pictures of his time machine.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Titor>
from <http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread62046/pg1>
>
> excerpt: This is a picture taken in the fall of 2035 during my
> training. It shows my instructor beaming a handheld laser outside the
> vehicle during operation. The beam is being bent by the gravitational
> field produced outside the vehicle by the distortion unit.
>
>
>
from <http://www.strangerdimensions.com/2013/02/04/john-titor-the-man-with-the-machine/>
For your time traveller it might also be prudent to remember that doomsday predictions can also attract the wrong kind of audience (ufo and doomsday believers) which could be detrimental when he is trying to prove his authenticity.
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What if the time travel resulted in some form of semi-violent catastrophe, or publicly visible entering of our time?
Since we do not know what time travel will do to our reality this might be feasible. If I knew time was of the essence, I'd make sure I'd enter with a big BANG, to get this identification process out of the way ASAP... Of course this might also result in being arrested and potentially tortured to get information.
But lets assume, that the above doesn't happen, and if somehow during this process the Eiffel tower got sucked up in some space time void, or for that matter any other major publicly visible entrance event occurs in a manner that it unknown to us, leaving only our hero as the sole survivor... people will notice.
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The "standard" solution to this is to predict the future.
The most straightforward version would be to print out and bring along stock market data for some time following your intended arrival. It is widely believed that the movements of the stock market are impossible to predict precisely, so consistent success at this would be quite convincing. And, if everyone is still incredulous, you could just leverage your information to make a fortune and then simply pay them to do what you want. If you want the time traveler to not have this disproportionate power, you could instead give him a one way hash of the market figures - that way he would not be able to predict what the value will be, but it will be possible to determine whether he had access to the future value at any point.
Alternatives include guessing lottery numbers, weather, sports competition outcomes, and so on. All of these have the drawback of being chaotic, and so if your universe takes a "butterfly effect" approach to time travel, the simple presence of the traveler may disrupt these events and render predictions useless.
To solve this issue, you can try bringing back large scale historical events, which would take more than a flap of a butterfly's wings to alter. For instance, presumably a person traveling to 1913 would have a lot of trouble preventing a world war in early 20th century, even if they did manage to save Archduke Ferdinand. The drawback here is that major historical events may be predicted, and people may ascribe the prediction to extraordinarily sharp deductive powers rather than future knowledge.
Lastly, you could bring back information that was already past at the time of arrival, but would not be widely known until much after. For instance, [an important shipwreck](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uluburun_shipwreck) was discovered by chance in 1982. If you traveled to 1975 with a map showing the location of the wreck, locating it would be an extraordinary feat. Some could accuse you of stumbling upon the wreck yourself, and trying to spin it into a time travel story, but if you do this for many shipwrecks (or other artifacts) around the globe, that theory will become quite weak. Besides archeological finds, you could go back with information that was a very well kept secret at the time. The nice thing about this strategy is that even if some chaotic process ruins the future you are trying to predict as proof, the past would not be affected (granted this assertion is dubious in a universe where traveling backwards in time is possible) and your proof is safe.
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Actual "proof" of being from the future is pointless: the goal is to convince people, and few people can be convinced of something in violation with their belief system, regardless of "proof".
How many well established scientific facts are being ignored on a daily basis?
People smoke and eat unhealthy foods, even though it is fairly well established that smoking massively increases risks of disease and death. They drink, take drugs and drive. We still run and build coal fired plants even though the environmental consequences are catastrophic....
Think of the long list of patently insane behaviors people have on this planet. No matter how thoroughly something is proven, you will find people to dismiss it entirely with no evidence.
Using "proof" to convince people to do something is sadly not an effective way to get them to do things.
Suppose someone were to give **you** abundant proof of an upcoming catastrophe... what do you do next? Who do you contact and how would you go about convincing the people in power and the concerned population to follow your orders?
Proving one is from the future is not just impossible, it's also pointless. If the goal is to convince specific people not to take a specific path, proof of time travel isn't going to do the trick. Better come up with a carrot, a stick or both to get these people moving in the right direction.
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People seem to be thinking small in terms of "data points required to not just be a charlatan." Rather than a single lottery or a series of sporting games, why not just correctly "predict" the full intraday pricing on a second-by-second basis of, say, 1,000 equity options ?
* Stock option prices are governed by stochasticity, i.e. any given
moment a stock option's price is just as likely to go up as down.
* You may be able to rig a lottery or a sporting match or two, but rigging an entire open market is ... unfeasible.
So that's 1,000 stock option volatilities \* 28,800 seconds in a trading day = 288,000,000 basically coin flips you accurately predicted.
] |
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You wake up tomorrow, and it's Wednesday again. Everybody remembers it, but whatever was physically done today is undone. Your favorite mug, which the dog knocked over, is un-broken. The kid down the street who got hit by a car -- his leg is just fine, and the bike is okay, but he remembers the pain.
People are pretty freaked out, but no one does anything rash. (Mrs. Kendall keeps Johnny home, though, and he doesn't get hit.) Mostly we look for news on the subject, but nobody knows anything, or if they do, no one is talking. But then the next day, the same thing happens. Lilly has gone into work for the past three days as a dental assistant, but she has had to work on the same emergency root canal every day. The next day the patient doesn't show. Who wants to go in for dental surgery every day for the rest of their life?
With no reason to suspect tomorrow will be any different, her roommate buys a gun to commit suicide, just to see what it is like. The next day, he's alive again, but with the horrifying memory. But now there's proof that there are no consequences, so he robs a bank. The next day, he wakes up with no gun and no money, but the cops remember what happened, and they arrest him.
**QUESTION:**
I could go on, but the local is easy. My question is about the global. What do societies do? What does the government do? Anything that anyone does that takes more than 24 hours to complete is a waste of time, unless the intended result is mental. Nothing can be stored on a computer or chalkboard or anywhere. Still, everyone can memorize what they can, and agree to collaborate again the next today.
How it happened is irrelevant. If it was caused by mankind, it isn't something they can just undo. But it just as easily may have happened somewhere across the galaxy, and there is no way for humanity to stop it.
This takes place today, in our world, with no technology we don't have today. (Of course, if 100 years of research and 12 hours of production can make an advance, we could build it every day.) How do we deal if this goes on for years, centuries, millennia?
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EDIT:
Most of the above is simply setup so that everyone understands the scenario I propose. My question is both simple and specific: **What can a government do to retain control and prevent lawlessness in this situation?** One answer so far has suggested that it couldn't, and no others have addressed this question.
If an individual's actions have no consequences beyond twenty-four hours, when locking them up and even killing them doesn't last, how can a government maintain order?
[Answer]
This is a really interesting scenario, and one I've had a hard time thinking up some responses to.
1. **Lack of information distribution**
You will find lots of people doing lots of the same stuff. Information in our world is mainly distributed electronically, through social media and email. However, it is highly likely that many people don't check all of those every day, so won't see information about the situation coming in.
So, for example, I imagine you will have a lot of people experimenting with what they can do - the suicide and homicide rate will go through the roof, and if you want to imprison all these new murderers you'll need to build more prisons. You'll get an increased crime rate overall - it's horrible to think about, but people discovering this may be tempted to let the worse side of their nature out. Lots of murders - the victim will be alive again tomorrow. Lots of rapes - she won't be pregnant tomorrow, so there'll be no DNA testing of the baby. Lots of really nasty stuff - torturers, for example, can now maim their victims even more without fear - they'll come alive again if they do die.
2. **Children**
To expand a bit on [Gorchester H's comment](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/18051/tomorrow-is-groundhog-day-for-everyone-how-does-society-respond#comment43777_18051): children are going to be very weird. For as long as this continues, they're gaining knowledge and experience, and you will end up with mature adults in kids' bodies.
Any baby who would have been born on that day will be born, and they'll develop, but any pregnant woman will remain so for eternity. Unborn babies will never be born. New babies, while they can be conceived, will simply disappear the following day.
3. **Science**
Scientists would be trying incredibly hard to figure out the reasons for and solutions to this - even if there are no solutions, they don't know that. New methods will be developed for memorising information quickly, and the neuroscientists will be much in demand for a while as they perfect a machine that allows us to implant things into a brain. Engineers, too, as they perfect the manufacturing techniques that allow us to manufacture this machine as quickly as possible.
It will still be possible to distribute information electronically, so scientists across the world can communicate, and plans for machines like this can be sent - as long as they are received and memorised on the same day.
4. **Acceptance**
Gradually, people will get used to this world. People will get used to the fact that although they can commit crime without repercussions, law enforcement will still get them, if anyone reports it - people can still be sent to prison. (Trials, however, will necessarily become very short, and house arrest will become more common as transporting people to prison every day gets tiring.) New methods of doing old things faster will become popularised and normalised, and our society, although changed beyond recognition, will slowly sink back to a regular rhythm.
5. **Society**
Society, as a whole, is no longer a viable concept. Big cities break down into small communities: you will interact most with the people around you and that will be your community. Travelling anywhere will get strange, as different communities implement different policies to deal with the stuff that goes on in their neighborhood every day; perhaps a morning task for each community will quickly become posting a notice at the borders explaining the stuff happening there.
6. **Government**
Government as we know it, in simple terms, fails on the spot. A centralised government will not be equipped to deal with all the small communities and their policies that spring up - and they can't possibly go round inspecting every community, every day - they just don't have the people. Moreover, what could they do about it? Someone implemented a community policy they don't agree with but that doesn't break any laws? - well, there are plenty of people breaking laws they should deal with instead. Someone implemented a community policy that *does* break some laws? - well, are you going to arrest every member of that community for trying to help themselves, only to have them released in the morning?
7. **Law and Order**
Laws would get rather confusing. The law documents - the *paper/electronic* law documents - would reset at the start of every day. So, if you want to change a law, you have to remember which one you changed and then permanently disregard the old documents for that law. You also have to make sure every police officer in the country knows about the law change, at which point he loses his reference for arresting people under that law. His arrest can then be called into question - did he *really* follow the law to the letter? What if he remembered it wrongly?
Arrests, as many here have mentioned, also change drastically. They'd stick around for a while, as you can at least detain someone for a day, while people figure out what to do, but expect them to be replaced in the long term. You either have to spend huge amounts of resources on keeping people in house arrest, or you need to implement quick punishments. You can no longer lock someone up for years on end, so to get the same level of punishment you inflict a worse punishment for a shorter time. Someone here suggested that torture might be taken up: for petty theft, 10 minutes of torture. For rape, maybe several hours.
And, of course, you will find several crimes losing their definitions. Murder is now insignificant - kids are killing each other on the streets for *fun* now, and all it does is cause someone some minor inconvenience until the next day. It's now a bit like kidnapping someone and then releasing them a few hours later - annoying, but no damage has been done to the victim and they just lost a day.
8. **North Korea**
Since you mention North Korea specifically, I shall make a prediction. One of a few things could happen: either
* The leadership denies that this is happening and directs everyone to go about their daily routines as normal. Everyone who can emigrates - who wants to do the same thing for years on end? Perhaps *without* end? Soldiers desert, border guards desert, everyone leaves Kim Jong-Un on his own.
* The leadership blames America or some other Western country, and launches an all-out assault. Nukes go flying. On the first day they hit, everyone in the target city decides that tomorrow, they're going to get away from the city as fast as possible so they don't get hit tomorrow. A game of nuclear cat-and-mouse ensues, with North Korean spies racing to tell their bosses where everyone is today, so they can be nuked.
* They're as confused as everyone else, and try to actually be friendly for once. Information is shared about causes and effects, and scientists work together to try to solve their problems. The entire North Korea issue is solved.(Essentially, I have no idea - they're just too unpredictable)
9. **Humanitarian Societies**
I predict a two-way split here, between two frames of mind as to what to do:
* Number 1, the "it no longer matters" point of view - anyone who was going to die today will anyway, and anyone who wasn't, won't. Trying to get aid there won't help, and it won't last anyway so why bother?
* Number 2, the "keep calm and carry on" approach - people who were going to get aid today still deserve and/or need it, so we should just try even harder to transport stuff there. We should also spend some time teaching them how to support themselves so we don't have to bend over backwards to get this done.
**In conclusion** - you'll have short-term anarchy, but as everyone realises there's no point to this, your society settles down into lots of small communities, and life continues. Until, of course, the sadistic entity that caused this releases it again, and we have to try to remember what life was like before...
[Answer]
Since the short, medium and long term are already done, I'm going to take a shot at the *very* long term. The one where, eventually, human ingenuity and curiosity tries to adapt and figure out what's going on and how to fix it.
There isn't a way to physically create anything, since any paper and even electronic storage will fail. But there's still memory in the brain. And there's a *lot* of it.
# Project Last Hope
Once you get beyond the various terms of anarchy, depression, hedonism, listlessness and such, at some point people will turn on their computers and go on the internet. And there, after browsing for a long time, they will run into a website that's rehosted every morning, a few minutes post-reset. It will be called "Last Hope" and will feature something that would have seen ridiculous to anyone from before the happening... the world's largest, fully organic, hive-brain storage system.
Once people learn of this initiative, every morning they will log into the system and rebuild their little part of it. Each person will memorize their part, whether it's a block of code, a list of numbers and data, an algorithm, or a set of instructions. People will remember small chunks of the Last Hope website, which is rebuilt by thousands of people logging in to a massive, shared FTP server to each rebuilt their 10 lines of its content, which is strewn about in thousands of different, linked files in order to be online as fast as possible.
Then after the website is rebuilt, a segment of the project will start trying to contact whatever people haven't found out yet; whether by going door to door or emailing or posting on every message board in the world. Anyone with an internet connection and an eternity to waste will eventually find a link to the Last Hope project *someday*.
The rest of its members are divided into thinkers, tinkerers and storage.
**Thinkers** will be scientists (either from the old world, or learned ones from the new world. There's forever to get them up to speed, after all). They will be researching what caused the resetting and whether anything can be done. They will use Last Hope project's hive-storage to keep their work going forward.
**Tinkerers** will be engineers. There might not be an option to build any physical tools, but we have millions of interconnected computers that can perform a lot of work. It's their job to figure out how to get as many computers as possible into their network as quickly as possible. They are looking for exploits and bugs and make lists of compromised machines that can be used the next day. They will also improve existing algorithms; there is infinite time to tinker with them but finite time to run them, so the faster a piece of code runs, the more it will do. And since they cannot store their informatiom on the computer, that's where the most crucial part of Last Hope project comes in.
**Storage** are all the people who have good memory or trained to have it. They all remember their tiny parts of the project and every morning, they rebuild their tiny part and then attempt to memorize more and more chunks. They might not understand what the thing they memorized does, but they know it helps. And it's only 30 minutes out of their day, if they don't want to (or cannot) contribute more.
But together, in millions of brains, they will remember and rebuild the largest, most powerful computer program ever written by humanity. Every morning, shortly after reset, every bug in existance is exploited, every machine reachable by the internet is connected, and in mere minutes a program is put together out of a million different, small files, that will crack numbers and run data and do an unimaginable amount of work.
It might take years, maybe even centuries or millenia or longer, but progress will be made. In a single day of computing, with a million minds put to the task, we will crack any problem the universe throws at us.
[Answer]
## Immediate - The World Stops
Most people live with relatively long-term goals in mind. They eat so they won't be hungry, sleep so they won't be tired, go to work so they won't be broke. If you only live for a day, that all changes: why work when you will *never* be paid? Why sleep when you will *never* wake up? There's a lot of things that people do that won't really matter any more, and though some will keep doing it out of habit, many will take some time off in order to discover the rules of this brave new world.
Unfortunately, this may mean that some things break down. Many human-run services will become unavailable (restaurants, theme parks, prostitutes, etc), so there's a lot of fun stuff you won't be able to do. Other things, like driving, will now be very dangerous, as people don't have to worry as much about things like property damage or personal safety. I'd say walking outside might be problematic, better to stay indoors at this stage.
## Short Term - the New Normal
At this stage, people will have gotten used to how things are now. I note here that human conversations will remain largely unaffected by this change; one effect of this is that people will be able to talk about their situation with new vocabulary. Everyone will find their personal universe: the total time and area that they will ever be able to explore. If you wake up at half past ten PM in the middle of nowhere with no legs, that'll be a pretty small area; on the other hand, if you wake up at the crack of dawn with a personal helicopter with a full tank of gas, you should be pretty happy with yourself.
At this point, a lot of short-term problems will be perceived as permanent. If you wake up with a sore back, you now have a sore back forever. If your significant other is on vacation this week, you will never see them ever again. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any good things that you can get from this that aren't counteracted by other effects. However, some things can be fixed: inmates can be set free, and if they do anything wrong during the day you don't even have to worry about locking them up again. Of course, this presumes that someone will actually take the time to let them out, but I'll get to that.
## Medium Term - Make it Work
At this point, the world settles into a routine, something that works reasonably well for everyone in power. Since everyone's personal universe is pretty small, government will only work on a small scale, but I'm sure communities and leaders will develop. There may be conflicts, but since most people are reasonably moral I don't think violence would be permanent; for instance, the local serial killer will eventually be foiled, and then part of the daily routine will involve catching him before he wakes up. Not only that, but other injustices will be prevented; if someone ever finds that guy with no legs, they may make a plan to wake him up and carry him back to the community each morning. Someone can go let the prisoners out of prison. Someone else can make sure everyone wakes up at a reasonable hour (except that serial killer, and other criminals). These jobs will have to be mostly painless, and people can take turns doing them.
Honestly, overall I see this working out pretty well for most people. Small government will rule, which means that no one can get away with hurting anyone else without getting punished by it. Petty arguments will be rehashed every single day, so eventually people will have to start agreeing, even if it's to disagree. There may still be a lot of nightmarish situations, mostly involving either people with incredibly small personal universes or people with little power in a bad community, but as time goes on I think a lot of these problems will get solved as everyone comes up with new ways to get things done and just generally get smarter over the years.
Novelty and memory will be of the utmost importance, and both of these pretty much rely on human cooperation. People will have to entertain themselves somehow, and the best way to do that is to entertain one another. Perhaps everyone would learn to play instruments (a great experience both for player and listener), or dance or juggle or something like that. As I said, conversations will be unchanged, so I think people will have a lot of them; anything to keep the world feeling fresh and new.
So, in the end, I imagine something of a utopia of mind; the world will look the same day after day, but with every reset people will work together better, and everyone will become just a bit happier. No idea how long it would take to get it right, though.
[Answer]
**It would be anarchy.** Cyclical anarchy.
I'm assuming the reset occurs globally, not per time-zone at midnight. Though a reset-[terminator](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminator_%28solar%29) racing around the planet is a pretty cool idea.
Many people would have various ideas about what is going on. Some might think it's purgatory. Others might see it as hell.
**Find Bill Murray**
I imagine anyone within a day's travel from Bill Murray would have some questions and/or beatings for him. He might even gain a religious following, since he's been depicted as escaping such a situation. Trying to right all one's wrongs would be a little more difficult if everyone else still remembered those wrongs though.
**Research**
The best avenue for research would be why the brain is the only thing which is not reset. Crude experiments could be performed: does an implanted flash drive stay there from yesterday? What about dura mater tattoos? Do dogs also remember? What about mice?
**Steady State**
Likely things would eventually degenerate into cycles of hope and despair. Multi-day runs of depression might give way to a renewed will to try and do something positive with the situation. But everyone will burn out on anything after enough time. Even if people begin to work together, someone is going to crack. That person doesn't just leave, they come back again and again, not having release from the stimulus that drove them insane.
**Varying Situations**
People would become very familiar with anyone within a day's travel of themselves.
* Some would envy those who were just waking up at the start of the
reset, ready to do something for 24 hours, others would envy those
who get to sleep away the repetition.
* They'll pity the recently wounded, who must suffer through their pain over and over again.
* There might be one man who always murders his neighbor who wouldn't have woken up until 6 AM. Spawn camping, as it were.
* There would likely be isolated people who have no idea anyone else is
experiencing the same thing, because they're more than a day's travel
from other people.
[Answer]
**TL;DR**: A very bloody anarchy, followed by an intellectual bloom and finally listlessness.
If every day is the same day, law enforcement becomes moot. Sure, you could arrest Fred for robbing the bank, but what's the point? You can only hold him until midnight before he's back on the street. Even if you could rush him through the judicial system, there's no point: he won't stay in confinement. You could repeat the process every day, but how many people are going to be doing the same thing? Because Fred didn't rob the bank, now George can. So arrest George too. Because Fred and George didn't rob the bank, Alex did. So arrest Alex too. Eventually, the police spend all their time trying to keep up with arrests when the criminals are just going to be free at midnight. So, law enforcement goes out the window (don't worry it'll be back at midnight for a brief showing.)
The arts will take a hit as well. Anything that has a material result, such as a painting or a hand-crafted chair, is going to be a no go. Authors, painters, and architects all lose their work every day. Gamers will suffer as well. Know that boss you struggled with for a week that you finally beat? Sorry, but you have to face him again tomorrow. And the day after that, and the day after that... In short, anything that has a material product is out the window (don't worry, this will make a brief appearance each morning, too).
So now we come to the point about anarchy. We have removed any useful application of law enforcement and there's nothing people can do to keep their hands busy without driving themselves insane. So people go out on the streets and (*gasp*) interact with each other. At least we remember the conversations we had... Oh wait. Jane remembers that Joshua beat her up yesterday, so she's going to take out revenge before he can do it again. This leads to the largest mass killing the world has ever seen. And each day, it just gets bigger. At some point, escalation results in the vast majority of human society vanishing from the face of the Earth each day, at least until it's clear that it doesn't matter how many times it happens *and* we give up on the concept of "An eye for an eye." When will that happen? Not sure. It's kinda been around awhile, even modern societies have the death penalty (you killed Clemont, so we kill you).
Scientific communities, on the other hand, will be both rewarded and annoyed. The people working in Cern on the Large Hadron Collider are never going to get any more work done, it just takes too long to prepare everything and analyze the massive amount of data that comes out of it. Philosophers will have a field day, however, they can debate to their hearts' content and remember everything that was said from the previous day.
After all the anarchist bloodshed, there will be a growth in philosophy and theology. Death becomes meaningless (except to those unfortunate enough to be slated to die every day) and the value of life vanishes. If this effect happens across the universe, we'll never be able to answer questions like "Is there life out there?" We can develop all the theories we want, but we'll have to start from scratch on everything we produce.
We have no production any more, which leads to an interesting consequence. If there's no reason to make anything, then why go to work? If the majority of the population isn't going to work, then why should the people who run the public utilities go to work? Why should they burn away their day when everyone else is sitting at home watching reruns of *Law & Order* (not that they aren't already)? It's not like *not* going to work is going to impact anything. If something breaks, it'll be repaired tomorrow. No problem. So we lose some power generation.
Let's look at the extreme case of power loss, though. Active nuclear facilities are always in danger of going critical. Let's suppose a critical part fails one day. Now we have a new catastrophe and, the next day, the workers are back on the job, much to their displeasure.
After all is said and done - quite literally in this case - all that's left is to do nothing. So, after all the bloodshed, tears, and philosophy, we come to the point where everyone just lazes about, waiting for the next day when they will do the same thing. This'll lead to listlessness and, for those of us with extremely active imaginations who now have no reason to apply that ingenuity, depression. For the more depressed, suicide becomes a daily thing to avoid the daily lack of activity (don't worry too much, they'll be back tomorrow).
[Answer]
If we were taking more of a science fiction take to this:
It would be an interesting twist, if there were a time zone delay...
Think a phenomenon that cycles around the planet, racing the sun to delay the reset. This reset would probably be based on matter and it's position. So once you stop it would be back to original day 1 state. Items that don't get hit, would be missing from their original position/state.
In time things like this may happen:
* Flying city where people live normal lives, would be quite a story about getting it started, say a cargo plane in constant refuel, fuel vapor gets hit and resets back to base camps.
* "normal" people taking to shooting things out of the sky to prevent people from cheating eternal-life...
* Depending on the origin of the phenomenon - terrestrial or solar? One way trips into space?
* Would people discover a type of shielding - say the scientists researching dark matter deep in the earth are unaware of what is going on? Keep getting repeating transmissions, would sending someone out - would they reset back or be gone forever? Say maybe a quantum state where matter is bound to a starting point?
Anyway this was just some thoughts on possible tangents/loopholes to explore...
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Fundamentally, this is
* a post-scarcity society
* in which everyone is immortal (if the loop keeps happening)
* in which nothing new can be created
* in which there are no physical ramifications of anyone's actions
I say post-scarcity because the amount of food in nearly every home and every grocery store is more than enough to feed everyone for one day, no matter how much they eat. Your car will always have gas in it. You've got a closet full of clothes. There are empty homes and apartments and hotels that homeless people can walk into and live in every day. We've got plenty of electricity. And so on.
The results of these factors (post-scarcity, nothing permanent can be created, everyone's immortal) will lead to people bettering themselves. They'll learn arts, languages, new skills.
All "creating" will be reduced to things that can be done in one day. People will find they can accomplish more in teams. There might even be fun competitions to see which teams can create "more" (the biggest machine or contraption, the most elaborate work of art, the most incredible computer program) during The Day.
We'll find out who we like hanging out with, and over the decades and centuries many of us will make new and different friends.
As others answers have stated, we'll quickly find out how far we can travel during The Day. That will be our particular universe. For the novelty of it, since we're immortal, we'll wind up exploring every nook and cranny of it.
We'll also eventually place a premium on communicating with people outside of our particular universe via video chat, telephone, etc., and using those same technologies to explore other parts of the planet that we can't (comfortably) reach during The Day. After a few years or decades we'll want to see more than our personal universe has to offer.
.
And most importantly, no one will have to eat healthy or go to the gym. Hooray!
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There are some excellent answers here about science, philosophy, crime, and "What if you're having a bad day" scenarios. I want to talk about entertainment.
People would read every book, watch every movie, check out every TV channel, view every YouTube video, and go through everything on every DVR they could find.
After they had consumed all of that, the celebrities of the planet would be those who don't rely on a script to tell or act out a story. The celebrities would be those artists who can create a beautiful new painting every day. The celebrities would be improv comics. The poets. Dancers. Bloggers. Vloggers. Anyone who can create a work of art within the scope of one day that can also be enjoyed by others before the day is done. (The art could be something they'd started before time started looping; they would be a celebrity if they could complete it in a new way each day.)
[Answer]
Disclaimer : This is not as generic and complete an answer as the others have already given. This is just a part that I feel is very important to include.
---
Initial effects have already been stated by many of the other answers, so I'll focus on the long-term.
As @DaaaahWhoosh said in the comments...
## Memory will be the most valuable resource there is
I would have to disagree with @FrostFyre's end-game which is
>
> all that's left is to do nothing.
>
>
>
What I think is people would realize that there is still one thing persistent in this world - **their memories**.
In a world with no permanent or long-term needs for health, exercise, dental check-ups, or what-have-yous, we'll focus more on what I believe is the core reason for living - **having fun**.
Eating good food, enjoying intimate relations, having good conversations. The things we'd love to do if we didn't have money problems, if we didn't have work, if we didn't have (long-term) responsibilities. **Happiness** would be everyone's goal.
Playing games are still viable. Sports? Your body won't physically improve but the way you play can grow with your memories. Want to play RPG games? Well, there's tabletops (D&D, Pathfinder) and the players can just recall their campaign. Their memories hold their "saved games". MOBAs? No problem. You just won't have a persistent game history, but you will definitely grow and improve as a player.
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**tl;dr**, happiness will be the main goal. Our memories will be our main resource and our activities will revolve around what our memory can "turnover" the next day.
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Time is the new power. Whoever woke up first that day is the new authority within a certain range of travel. Disagree with them? They will kill you first the next day. They will find like minded people and wake them first.
Only way to effectively stop new criminals is to kill them before they wake up. Eventually suicides will start hiring people to kill them before they wake up.
What of the enforcers though? After 100 years of methodically working through their first 3 or 4 waking hours efficiently killing every new criminal, crazy, or suicide in their area? What of their mental state? Will they even remember why the kill certain people?
Even if they started out lawful in their application of force, as lines blur over a century how will it change?
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This is a thought provoker!
But, since we're talking about stories, my mind immediately jumped to the 'gotchas' that would make forming a society difficult.
**Would people still work?**
If each day was a repeat, would there be a compelling reason to clock in each morning at McDonalds to cook for people? Would a bus driver bother getting the bus going? Why plow the snow if tomorrow is the same?
**Would basic infrastructure be working?**
Would anyone bother to reboot the web server for the day? Change that lightbulb? Or, perhaps the bigger issue...would anyone that works for the power company bother to go into work to actually provide power for the day?
I'm thinking that would all fall apart pretty quickly.
The next question would be...would it return? If *everyone* remembers each same day from day to day, perhaps verbal agreements could be made. Joe, you come in 'tomorrow' and fire up the generators. Bob will come in the 'day after' that. Then Sam.
So, initially, people may go the free-for-all route. But that can get old. And at some point, humanity may wish for a semblance of routine and return to the routine and start going back to work to bring back a bit of order.
The success/failure of that may be varied from locale to locale but, over time, if enough regions leave the power on, and the cable on, word can spread.
If all of that succeeds, one scenario is a form of Utopia. No one gets older. Everyone works minimally (only infrastructure and service jobs are really needed). And there's plenty of time for leisure. Everything is free (as why bother with money for a day?) There is a catch, though, and that, of course, is that society somewhat stagnates as there's no way to record information for the next day. It all has to be stored and shared verbally. Day by day. That might slow down the progress of human knowledge significantly. On the other hand, with each day a repeat, and all that leisure time, perhaps word of mouth is ideal and we all slowly learn all of the things we never had time to before.
**There would be casualties, though.**
As others have pointed out, for most people, this would be a nice way to spend each day. But for anyone that is suffering at any level, this could be a nightmare. If you in your last days of a painful disease, or are injured every day in the first 10 seconds. Or simply depressed. Having to spend every day in agony over and over will surely create despair.
Or those that are alone somewhere without an easy way back to civilization within 24 hours. Being alone for the rest of your life could drive someone insane.
[Answer]
**Death would be meaningless**
More or less. The memory and pain would remain, but after the tenth, twentieth time, I'd imagine it wouldn't be *that* bad. You'd get used to it. And with death lasting a matter of hours, the fear of it would diminish rapidly. With death being so meaningless I wouldn't imagine it would be such a huge crime as it is today: at most, you're wasting someone's day (killing someone in a particularly painful way *must* remain a crime, however. We wouldn't want sadists running free).
Griefing would become a major annoyance. We've all seen that one guy who waits for you to spawn before killing you *immediately* in every online game ever. The second of pure annoyance when you wake up and spot your neighbour beside your bed, shotgun in hand, would be enough to cause people to do it. You'll remember, and you'll wake up annoyed as hell, but in truth, in this new society, it's not much more than camping in a video game.
In the same vein, pranks among children (and some adults, most likely) would become popular. Setting up death traps to kill your friends would be hilarious once the fear of death has faded. As always, with pranks come bullies who take things too far. The bully would set up similar pranks, except his (or hers) would be painful. In our society, we steal our friend's phone as a joke but the bully would smash it. In this new society, we would jump out from behind a corner with a pistol, where the bully would jump out with a blunt knife.
Games would have much larger stakes. Who needs paintball guns when we can just use rifles? And computer games would vanish. Wanna play GTA? Let's go rob a car, it will be back in the morning and would we be *really* inconveniencing anyone that badly by taking their car, when it will be there when they wake up anyway? Assassin's Creed? Forget it, let's just go assassinate the grocer.
But that's short term. Long term, huge arenas would be constructed, video games made real, with spectators and bets.
Who remembers that old TV show, *Raven*? Y'know the obstacle course where if you get hit you sorta fade out of being, and appear beside the course, unharmed? That show would be a lot more fun when if you mess up, you die. I mean, who cares, you'll be fine come the morning.
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**Regarding JDługosz's comment**
Good catch! Advertising would be as normal, I'd imagine. Word of mouth, flyers, posters, very basic local T.V. or radio ads: since people retain their memories they would remember the adverts -- for sanity's sake, all adverts bar word of mouth wouldn't really be needed too often: once a week, once a month (assuming, of course, that the society retains these concepts with every day being Wednesday).
For the construction of the actual arena, I'm sure a simple thing can be knocked up in a couple hours, especially since people would be faster and faster in constructing it over time due to practice and the urgent need to get it done quicker will result in shortcuts being found.
This sparked a new idea: blood games would return heavily. Gladiators would become popular and there'd be no real risk.
[Answer]
While most answers deal with the short term impacts, lets try to explore some of the long term results of it. I think it very much depends on how our memory capacity will work and deal with this situation.
## Unlimited brain capacity
This is more unrealistic, but hey, we already have groundhog day (and in the original he was trapped there how long? 10000 years?).
You will remember everything, and since the environment you interact with is limited, you will reach a point at which you have done everything that your moral allows. Everything that is fun to you has been repeated to the point that it is no more fun. I think this will inevitably lead to an adjustment of your morals to be able to do more. As a result, the moral of the whole society will shift into a more archaic version. For example, in the dark ages, it was fine to kill someone for various minor things, and the society accepted it. Now that killing is just another way to hurt someone badly, it will play no role anymore. Shoot someone in the head? Who cares, really, he will likely not even be able to remember any pain. So all that counts is pain that can be remembered. But even then, after yet another while, we went through all of this, are used to it, and don't care anymore. Lying on someones table and being tortured to death? Just yawn and wait for the reset. Novel ideas will die out at an exponential rate, so after a while everyone is bored to death; going anywhere has no meaning at all. Occasionally someone comes with a new idea what to do, which will spread over the world rapidly. These occasions get exponentially fewer. And less exciting from our point of view. I can imagine a situation where someone twitters a new recipe for cockroaches. Exciting. Never tried that taste. Will it taste good? Doesn't matter. It is something new. Input. Where can I get one? And the hunt begins. People will kill each other over catching a cockroach. Eventually everyone did taste one, and will fall back to some dull semi sleep state. Neuroscience indicates that what keeps the brain alive is new stuff, new input. If there is none, we not only tend to be bored, we reduce brain activity. In our case, this might lead to being able to sleep through days, weeks, months, years, centuries... eternity?
## Limited brain capacity
This is somewhat easier to grasp, after all, we tend to remember less, the further away events are.
If this continues, we will forget things. Forget that we met someone (given there are enough other people around us), forget that we did this or that already. Forget that someone did something awful to us 500 years ago. We will always have something new to discover, new to learn. At least if there is enough in our vicinity and we are not one of the poor bastards that are in any way confined. We will have much more ways to improve on our morals and live to moral standards. If there is enough to explore within the time it needs to forget it, there is little reason to act as a bad guy, unless of course you are a psychopath.
After a while we will forget how this all started. It will just be the state of how things are. In the beginning people tried to figure out what causes this and how to revert it, but after running into many dead ends, they will forget about that. There are so much other things to see and to explore.
## Some general other thoughts
There are other random things that may play a role. For one, why not start a global nuclear war from time to time? Nice fireworks, and really, if you are sitting for hundreds of years in front of this button, and hitting it has little difference than altering some peoples memories, why not do it?
Also, I think we will lose all means of timekeeping. At least after we forget the beginning, there is no sense at all to talk about time. Who cares about when something happened, or if it happened at all.
Wealth and money will lose their meaning. Yes, you may rob a bank (though likely there would not be anyone working there today) but what are you going to do with the money anyways? No one will want it. We will organize ourselves to get anything for free that is within our reach.
And finally, behind this is lurking another interesting question... if after a billion or more years of this, groundhog day suddenly ends, what happens? No one will notice during the day, but only when the reset didn't happen...
[Answer]
The question states that memory survives. But beyond that, nothing changes. Society will become based on what can happen in 24 hours. As noted in other answers, the long-term problems of society are largely solved. There's no more food shortage, there's no shortage of fuel, or any material goods, no incurable disease, or global warming. In fact, there's not even a way (or reason, really) to execute large-scale war.
Science will focus on four topics: ameliorating pain, intensifying pleasure, intensifying pain, and getting out of the loop.
## The Final State
With no threat of death as we know it, and no long-term problems to solve, government will eventually have one simple mission: maintaining order. Governments will be necessarily weak, since people can decide on a daily basis if they want a revolution. The exception could be large families with weapons, who could consolidate power over small areas and become despots. I think even family ties will eventually erode though.
Business will be transacted with verbal agreements before professional witnesses; probably older people. They will have the job of publicizing any agreements made and ensuring that both parties keep their word. Breaking a contract/being dishonest will incur a penalty, plus lose the ability to make deals in the future.
The mechanisms of enforcing order will be generally limited to 1-day events. Execution will be a common form of punishment, probably for small offenses, since it causes intense immediate pain, but no long-term effect. While multiple days of pain can be threatened, the time involved in tracking down a criminal will probably mean that only the worst of criminals will be punished more than one day in a row. Public, corporal punishment will become normal, with the degree of shame or pain determined by the severity of the offense. Especially recalcitrant criminals would eventually be driven insane by mental duress of repeated executions or stop committing crimes.
Good behavior will be rewarded by corresponding pleasure. Economies won't exist anymore beyond mutual favor trading. People with large amounts of Ben & Jerry's in the freezer will find themselves very rich in the new economy; while cash/durable goods will be not valuable.
The focus of those who seek to learn will be to find simple, effective tools that can be built quickly, like the website mentioned in the other question.
Daily life of most people in Western societies will focus on exchange of favors - for example, borrowing the flat screen TV for a day in return for supplying the food for a party on a day. That may take several days of smaller tasks to bargain with the store owners/people who just went shopping. Tourism will also be popular, since the fuel is free, it will just be the time for the pilot to fly to wherever you want to go.
A merchant class will develop traveling 6 hours across what used to be borders of less developed countries, bringing valuable items.
Less developed societies will focus on learning for a while, eventually perfecting techniques of raising the standard of living within an hour or two and enjoying it for a day.
Since you'll have the same ingredients to cook with every day, spices may become very valuable...but that's a rabbit trail.
The most valuable people will be those with skills at bringing pleasure and novel experiences; eventually there will probably be guilds as people focus on learning one area really well. Highly valued skills you might not expect would include pilots, translators, woodworkers and smiths who can quickly create functional objects, operators of large machines, musicians, and artists.
## Getting There
After the initial shocks of anarchy, which I don't think will last very long, governments will devolve significantly more power to localities to prevent losing them all together to independence movements. Government will shift to focus on immediate protection of people in it's circle; otherwise people will rebel and form their own governments. The capitals and surrounding areas will remain under government control, and military bases will probably remain loyal since the soldiers respawn there each day.
Eventually, smaller governments will become the norm, the size of 6 hours of travel. Those with control of weapons will stay in control at least in the medium term.
Governments, even the most despotic, will be eventually insurrected by ideas, which spread as military power does not. Eventually ideas, the basis of revolutions, will soften key parts of the military, and the government will loose the ability to project power.
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Is it THIS world we're talking about? Because we'd be doing ourselves a disservice if we fail to talk about belief systems.
A great many people would probably keep track of "what day it would have been" if days had never started repeating, and we would likely still celebrate our birthdays and anniversaries, even though only our minds are aging.
Those who had accumulated vast fortunes would now have the opportunity to splurge, and make this world their playground... Up to the point people still value currency when they've only one day to spend it. With the exception of vending machines and such, it would be much easier to spend money in the morning than it would in the afternoon... Though I can't see people entirely doing away with certain creature comforts or long-term investments, on the off chance that time "starts up again".
Many religions would disappear, or be reformed at least. Everyone could, and probably would, experience death at some point. When the day resets, the now-living would realize just what happens after death, at least, on the first day post-mortem.
That is, if death still happens in this world (see [Torchwood: Miracle Day](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798034)).
Society might change in myriad ways depending solely on this "afterlife experience"... Are there deities in the world? Do we all see certain ones, or do we each see something different? Are there grim reapers? Are they more like [Discworld](http://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Death) or [Dead Like Me](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0348913)? Is there an astral plane? Is it more like [What Dreams may Come](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120889) or [Wristcutters: A Love Story](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0477139)? Is that "tunnel" people talk about something everyone experiences? Are there really loved ones on the other side, or just a cold dark void? How could we experience cold and dark, unless we're still experiencing, and why are we experiencing it? Do we reincarnate immediately, or do we all stay trapped in our bodies while coroners drill into them, like in that [Tales from the Crypt episode](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0716824)? If the latter, then we would most certainly change coroner practices!
Unfortunately, you can't teach an old dog new tricks. Abrahamic faiths would still be a thing, even if the afterlife was "just darkness", since they would tell you "the dead lay dormant until the second coming" or whatever. Any "afterlife evidence" pointing to any other religion is just "a trick by the devil" to "test our faith", and any astral plane is "proof positive of purgatory". Some would call Groundhog World 'Hell', and some would call it 'a gift from God for a second chance'. Evangelists would call it a sign of the second coming, and we would all be sick of hearing that quote in Proverbs about the dog vomit. Of course, if it was a Sunday that was repeating, people might get tired of going to church every single day.
New religions would most likely spring up, specifically to explain the repetition phenomenon. "We have all died, this is the afterlife!" probably would be the callphrase of most common religious view. Death-cultists, who consider it a glory to die and explore the afterlife experience (or lack of one). Kill-cultists, who believe this is a new game of some kind, and the object is to kill the most people, or all people, to achieve "the next level". New militias and enforcement agencies would certainly spring up to attempt to prevent these types of terrorism...
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To recapitulate the problem: At some fixed point in the day (maybe midnight, maybe 6am) everything is changed to the exact same state as 24 hours earlier, except that people's memory contains the complete 24 hours. Difference to the "Groundhog Day" movie is that in the movie, only *one* person kept their memory. I would assume that not only the memory remains, but also memory-based abilities (so taking driving lessons or learning to play an unknown piano piece would work), but body building and the physical changes that you have while learning to play the piano wouldn't work.
It should be clarified whether seasons are changing or not (presumably not) and whether the time of change is the same around the world in absolute time, or in local time ("same in absolute time" would mean different clock times depending on where you are on the earth).
Some things wouldn't be of importance anymore: My physical state and my wealth at the end of the day (at the switch point). I would still continue living for many years, except that I am not ageing, and I start every day in the same state except my memory and some abilities are changed. If someone makes the day unpleasant for me, that's bad. If someone makes every day unpleasant for me, that's very bad. On the other hand, a pistol duel one minute before the switch might be harmless.
I assume that people want nice lives. So any work that is of long-term benefit would be pointless. I wouldn't bother fixing my leaking roof. Working for money is pointless if I have enough for the day. Since working for money is pointless, charging money is pointless as well. Which means nobody needs money anymore. So how does this affect things?
Someone works at McDonald's. Gets shouted at by their boss, but needs to keep working. Not anymore. People still like their burgers. So they come to McDonalds, nobody works, the second day even the manager isn't there. So what happens? People contact the workers at home. Offer them money. Or nice presents. Someone says "if you serve burgers for two hours, you can drive my Ferrari for the rest of the day". Suddenly McDonalds is open again, workers making burgers, paid in whatever presents people give them, volunteers being shown how to do it, and everyone has a good time. The manager tries to stop it because the restaurant takes no money, the police are called and decide that no harm is done. Two weeks later the desperate manager puts fire to the place. Next day the restaurant is back, police tells the manager not to do that kind of nonsense again. So everyone just has a good time.
Four dozen people in town wake up with hangover every morning and have no tablets. After a week they have enough of it. They ask their chemist, and for two weeks they try various treatments until they find what works best. From now on, every morning the chemist puts a box with four dozen hangover treatments out of his front door, he knows by heart what to put in there, and four dozen people come to the chemist, pick up their medication, and leave some present for the chemist.
Book reading circles would get lots of new members. People would come together to learn to play music. Lots of fun when you get better and better. I could see that in a few weeks or at most months, people would organise their lives to make everyone's live as comfortable as possible.
How would this work with crime? Relative powers (police vs. criminals vs. everyone else) wouldn't change. Some crimes wouldn't be crimes anymore. Like selling drugs - assuming that drugs are not addictive through the switch; if they are then selling drugs might become a bigger crime than it is now. Theft would (1) not matter, and (2) be pointless. However, over some time the police would know every single criminal and drug dealer. So everyone causing physical or mental harm would be known to them, and they would probably act on it. What would be the punishment to keep someone from beating his wife? Question is whether psychological treatment would help. Question is whether punishment would help - being handcuffed in the morning without food and water for a day, longer for repeat offenders. At some point these people would give up and just leave every morning, and do something that's fun instead.
So all in all I am quite optimistic how this would work out. People will try extreme and dangerous experiences, but not very often.
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I think people will come up with a new unit of time thats not days, weeks, and so on. Something that has to be memorized since nothing physical can be saved. I'm actually not so sure how this can be done and communicated on a global scale without losing accuracy. Actually, using this data, some one smart can think of why this is happening. A whole new science can be born out of studying how time works in different parts of the world.
P.S. Finally we can have Time Cops :)
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Society only continues when people do the same thing they did yesterday, no one will want to do that when there on no consequences, no rewards.
The only constant is memory so over time people will literally live in their own thoughts. We'd develop lucid dreaming to do anything we wanted, the 24 hours would not matter as one thought would run into another "day's" thought.
Over time we would figure out how to communicate telepathically, maybe link up each others minds, and create a new worlds inside all the Earths' people's minds; or a single World created by everyone.
Worringly, perhaps we are living in that World now...
[Answer]
My take on this is to think of how a particular project would work, and the types of people who would contribute. I choose putting on a new performance of a play. Once everyone has viewed every recorded performance until they are bored of it, new performances will be valuable projects.
Of course, it requires a director, producer, and cast. The producer will need to have a very good memory, or have an assistant with a good memory, to keep everything organized.
In the early stages, the main outside help they will need is someone with a good Internet connection and printer to print copies of the script each morning.
Dress rehearsals and performances will need a lot more help. Actions will have to start at 12:01 to get everything done in one day, so the root of the phone tree for the project will have to get into a list memorized by someone who was awake and near a phone at midnight. Their contribution to society will be to place wake-up calls to a few memorized numbers each morning.
Someone who lives near a fabric store and has a car will be in the early phone tree. Their task is to break into the fabric store, with the owner's permission, collect the fabric, thread, and notions for the costumes, and deliver them to the costumers.
Each costumer will have rehearsed drafting the pattern, cutting it out, and sewing it for one costume. When they are just rehearsing they can sleep in and start at their normal getting-up time. On dress rehearsal and performance days, they will be in an early phone tree so they can start drafting soon after midnight, and be ready to cut out when the fabric arrives.
Similarly, the set builders and painters will rehearse constructing the sets, working out how to build them in no more than 18 hours. They may need someone to break into a hardware store, with the owner's permission, to collect paint and other materials.
The lighting people will rehearse hanging the lights and setting up the control boards so that they can do it in 18 hours. If the performance is going to be streamed to the Internet the camera people will also have rehearsed setting up.
A successful performance would be to the advantage of a large number of people, so I assume a lot of cooperation to make it happen. Even if the fabric store owner does not like theater, the chef who loves live performances is much more likely to ask them to dinner if they cooperate.
Society could operate either on informal barter, or on a "currency" with accounts managed by people who have both very good memories and very good reputations for honesty.
[Answer]
I won't give a complete answer because the other answers here are sufficient. But I don't think the concept of money has been fully explored.
This might work well with Erik's Project Last Hope [answer](https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/18125/2638).
# Money
### History (skip if you don't like historical economics)
Most small tribal communities worked with credit systems1 where "gifts" were remembered and repaid with more "gifts". Money was not needed because it wasn't hard to remember that you had given your neighbor a pair of shoes (after he complained about the hole in his). The cycle of gifting was a fundamental part of their societies and worked very well on a small scale.
But this made short (village to village) trade hard and long distance trade impossible. So, if trade became desirable, people turned to some form of bartering. And, out of convenience, more efficient bartering techniques were developed along the lines of:
1. A general purpose value item (like hides) becomes an intermediary that avoids the "double coincidence of needs" implicit to bartering. i.e. Everyone trades their stuff for hides and then the hides for other stuff.
2. Large, well known traders start making trades between each other in promises (notes) to avoid having to transport and actually own the item in question.
3. Coinage develops as a more stable and permanent replacement to the intermediary value item. (This usually coincides with a local gov taking over and taxing everything).
And then something happens and Fiat currency emerges. But I'm not an economist and my views of fiat currency are rather biased. So rather than making amateur mistakes about it, I will leave it out.
### Function
Fundamentally, money is a way of storing value for the purpose of trade between strangers.
Specifically, it is:
* an abstract form of *universal* value
* tied to something mostly permanent but fairly arbitrary (like rare metal)
* Accessible and tradeable
### Groundhog Day Money
On the local scale, we would likely revert back to a credit-based society (of some form) since credit (positive or negative) would be the only type of value that would last beyond midnight. But this means knowing everyone you interact with or forming "tribes" that remember interactions on different scales.
Once you want to move past this kind of society, you need some form of money.
Since memory is the only permanent "thing", it must be memory based. And therefore information based.
Naively, you could try to get people to remember how much money they all have. But this would require a significant portion of the population to be involved and prone to all sorts of errors.
Instead, we should look at current tech: what do we have that stores value as information? **Bitcoin**, of course. Memorize the block-chain, memorize your address, what could go wrong?
### Custom Cryptocurrency
So Bitcoin has some problems of course. First the block chain is huge (20gb atm and growing). That's a lot of data to memorize. Even your address is a bit long and random.
But this is all because it's meant to be stored and processed by computers. Also because it's meant to be "mined". (Interestingly, you could keep mining bitcoins if the blockchain was memorized).
We have different needs for our cryptocurrency.
* Small, non-growing "blockchain"
* Extremely robust system for distributing the blockchain to be memorized and collecting it again in the morning.
* Blame mechanism plus redundancy. (motivate people to not make mistakes and make mistakes survivable)
### Timeline
I imagine this to be relevant sometime after local affairs have settled. Some form of community has stabilized in your local area and you are once again interested in "progress" and a feeling of something other than futile repetition.
It starts small, maybe goes through a few phases, and then starts spreading around the world as people realize they can start progressing again. That their actions today will actually have some effect on tomorrow.
1 Contrary to popular belief, tribal communities were almost never "barter" economies but something closer to credit economies. See [Debt: The First 5,000 Years](http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/1612191290) by David Graeber
[Answer]
## It would be a global reenactment of the Zimbardo prison experiment
People are not basically good, they act in a way contingent with the society they find themselves in.
The notion that most people are basically good is false. Most people appear to have the capacity for casual brutality if the situation allows and expects it, as demonstrated by [Zimbardo](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment).
It would after a while become apparent that the only things with value are experience and memory, the more extreme the better. Experience can take many different forms. I would anticipate that many people would simply take a gun and go hunting. Expect fighting in the streets degenerating into fantastically detailed levels of barbarism as the decades, centuries and competency levels of the participants progress.
Those with access to the nuclear launch codes would use them, not once but day after day. Death from above would be frequent, unpredictable and arbitrary. Those with access to enhanced weaponry such as warplanes would treat them as toys, strafing neighbourhoods and stadia.
People without access to such advanced toys would band together to storm military bases, fighting each other for access to the biggest bang, the best experience.
It would be hell by nightfall, mountains of burning corpses, screaming madmen in bulldozers, aircraft exploding in mid air and raining burning bodies down onto neighbourhoods. Children with the minds of war ravaged old men murdering their parents in their beds and laughing. There would be no escape, you would be trapped forever.
No permanent consequences, no right or wrong, kill me today and I'll come right back at you tomorrow.
[Answer]
I suspect this would happen in the following stages:
1. Confusion
2. Experimentation
3. Lamentation
4. Re-organization
5. Acceptance
Similar to Groundhog day, the first several days would be confusing to most people. I think they would figure it out after a while, but not at first. This would gradually lead to the next stage, experimentation.
Once it became known exactly what was happening, there would probably be a mixture of reactions. I suspect that the general thought would be that people would experiment to see what was happening. I can imagine a number of things being tried, like someone cutting themselves, breaking stuff, and other very noticeable things to see if it would stay, while some of the more adventurous would try killing someone, perhaps. I think people would generally be pushing the boundaries further and further, until they realized exactly what was happening. Scientists would run experiments, likely looking at the stars and planets to see if they exhibited the same behavior, seeing how far the bubble was. Perhaps they would try other things.
Next would come a phase were people would be confused, and wonder why this was happening, and try and stop it from happening. Riots would likely happen in this phase. So would some desperate experiments. Many people would just stop coming in to work. For those things required for normal life to continue, there would likely be some difficulty in getting people there to provide them (Water, power, food, etc). People working stuff that only matters in the long term almost certainly would stop working, as there just wouldn't be any point. Many churches would have higher attendance, especially at first, as people reacting to the drastic change in their lives.
Long-term, acceptance would happen. Society would re-structure itself. Likely a new system of time would somehow be created. People would probably come to some kind of an agreement on how to improve life for those around. Those who committed certain types of crimes would be dealt with, so they could not continue to do so. People would try to figure out how to get the most of life. They would likely be concerned about having adventures, seeing and experiencing new things. I suspect that people would take things to the extreme. In fact, I suspect all people would be pushed to the extreme. People would be pushed to be more conservative or liberal in general, further from moderation. Fear of death would not be a real thing. Some people would continue to work just to avoid boredom.
[Answer]
The first thing that comes to mind for me would be an analogy to [Albert Camus - *The Myth of Sisyphus*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_Sisyphus).
**One would have a choice as to whether or not to accept the fact that today will be the same as tomorrow.**
In the movie, reality was deterministic for the first few awakenings, then Murray's personal growth and new choices changed reality into a less deterministic one.
[Answer]
I think there would be some big changes, but not the ones most people think.
As others have mentioned, this is a post scarcity society. No global warming, no resource limitations. Most people have enough 'money' to buy or do whatever goods they want. But there would be no sellers.
So they go to university to learn something, or to a posh restaurant. But there are no staff, everyone is taking the day off because they tried to go skydiving (which was closed, incidentally).
However, a new economy would develop, based around the existing services and luxury goods industries. Most other industries would be discontinued.
Existing money would have to be replaced. Each person would be required to memorise the net wealth of 3 individuals at the end of the day. A basic algorithm would ensure 3 people memorise each person's wealth (with jail or financial penalties for lying).
So while people are not forced to work, plenty of people would (not every day, but when they want more money).
Education would become a huge industry.
However, it would be a fundamentally unequal society, based on the location you are when things reset. In remote and rural areas, almost nothing would be available, regardless of price.
[Answer]
>
> What of government? What laws will be put in place, if any? Drugs have addictive effects beyond the physical, and there will be great temptation to use. Will the penalties become worse? How can they be enforced? Social programs? Military intervention and distribution programs? What about organizations? The Humane Society, Red Cross, Shriners, Knights of Columbus? How do they remain relevant? Do they? I imagine they will try...
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First: How do you keep records? In a scenario where everything except for human brains resets each day, how do you write down new laws or contracts for others to study? You might think that you could have people simply remember them, and recite each day, but over the long term that's not going to be viable. The record-keepers will quit eventually.
Second: You can't build anything new or permanent. People would have to re-create the infrastructure every single day, and that's not going to happen.
Third: there's no point in doing any job. There's enough food lying around to last the day, and you don't need anything new if it'll just be recreated.
So losing access to record keeping is going to destroy large-scale governance. Additionally, there's really no economy - why should you care about cash, or gold, if it goes away the next day? Because of these two factors, the only things valuable are:
1. New experiences/education.
2. Protection from hostile actors.
So worldwide, society will fragment into two rough groups - conformants and hostile actors. These will organize on a local basis into government analogs, but they will be much more fluid than anything we have today, and smaller. I suspect the largest groups will number in the thousands.
**Conformant Groups** will be people who, roughly, want to live their lives as close to normal as possible. They'll group up for protection, traveling a few hours each day to static locations where they can set up a defensive perimeter, and trade knowledge/education/ideas/sex.
**Hostile Actors** will be individuals or groups who want to take advantage of others without fair trade. They'll be looking for drugs or sex, since almost everything else is worthless long term. Individuals will probably try to infiltrate conformant groups, although this will be tough since they'd rapidly be found out. Groups would be offensive, looking to capture/assault conformant groups for their use.
This will be a fluid situation - a safe spot one day means that a group of hostile actors might try to get their first today. However, I suspect that long-term conformants will massively outnumber hostile actors, because there's simply not much point in going for the rape and pillage thing when there's a reset at the end of the day. So most of the world will be "safe", with islands of hostiles that can't be dug out easily.
>
> We're also very US/Eurocentric. What about the rest of the world? How will China, North Korea, African nations respond to all this?
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I suspect eventually almost all of the world will follow the above pattern. You can't keep big governments together, and eventually everyone will fall into localized groups that promote their interests.
One thing I do think about most of the rest of the world is that in rural areas, you'd likely see local cults develop around charismatic figures. Without access to first world transportation, these cults would be able to form into hostile actor groups and control/gather all people in their area, basically having permanent slaves. Eventually they'd run into conformants that can defend themselves, though, at which point their expansion would stop.
I also wonder if maybe the US/Russia would identify these and eliminate them with the "stop doing bad shit or be nuked" rule, where they have "known" rural cult areas, and watch them with satellites. And if they see the bad behavior, they just launch a nuke, because the long-term negative effects will go away eventually and no one will really be killed.
**Conclusion:**
This rambled on a fair bit. The main point is it won't be possible to keep large scale governance, so people will organize over time into smaller groups that let them stay protected while doing what they want. Or they'll go for the rape and pillage deal.
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"[Question]\n [\nYesterday my 7-year-old daughter asked me:\n> \n> Why can't I do magic for real?\n(...TRUNCATED) |
"[Question]\n [\nMy hero lived his ordinary life until recently, when he realized that Magic actual(...TRUNCATED) |
"[Question]\n [\nFor my non-European readers, here is an excerpt of what the [GDPR](https://en.wiki(...TRUNCATED) |
"[Question]\n [\nSo, I've got this idea for a short story. Some researchers find a forgotten manusc(...TRUNCATED) |
"[Question]\n [\nLet's say a time traveler from the year 2100 comes back to the year 2015. He has a(...TRUNCATED) |
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Updates:
- Jan 7th 2024 - scraped all the worldbuilding stackexchange Q's, with 5+ rep, left with 18000 Q's.
- Jan 8th 2024 - incorporated 100mb more in roleplay and worldbuilding, the dataset now includes Pippa, Bluemoon, and RolePlayIO
- Jan 9th 2024 - More misc. worldbuilding data incorporated, the dataset is complete enough now
Worldbuild
A dataset focused on worldbuilding and roleplay, mostly well-formatted, high quality data, in the markdown format.
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