• BabyVi@lemmy.world
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    17 hours ago

    It would be interesting to know how long these signals can persist in birdsong before the information is lost to the bird telephone game. Could it be possible to encode a secret message into birdsong long term?

    • dmention7@midwest.social
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      16 hours ago

      What if our memes are just super-intelligent aliens storing a backup of their critical knowledge in the collective consciousness of billions of humans?

    • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world
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      13 hours ago

      I’m more intrigued by all that and the potential for a mesh-net that shuttles discrete ‘memes’ like this around.

      I would bet that research would show that it’s possible, but there’s bound to be pruning and errors in the payload as the ‘song’ gets passed around. So the actual practical amount of storage for a network is going to be a lot smaller. At the same time, data could be optimized to better match the bird’s memory, behaviors, and vocal limits. One might also employ different encoding strategies too, based on that fidelity information.