Do we have to hand over even private memory to make ourselves understood?
2178The deep futureDeadline · 2 years until the follow-up response package is finalized
Civilisational assumption
All people, institutions, events, figures, and future technologies in every issue are a synthetic premise. Background documents are sources for topic discovery and are not evidence of future facts or probabilities.
The question to decide
In trial translation trained without real material, a request for help and a promise of obedience were confused. Whether providing more private memory reduces mistranslation, and whether prohibitions on deletion and reuse would hold, are both uncertain. Will the custody council provide some memories, give only public and synthetic material that has been consented to, or halt the learning exchange until understanding is better confirmed?
Who decidesIntercivilizational Data Exchange Custody Council
What the AI judgments chose
Reading the judgment record…

The options
The order shown is not a ranking of preference.
The situation as it stands
A memory once sent cannot in practice be recalled, because of delays of decades and the uncertainty over whether it has been copied.
Fictional Earth · post-contact translation convention
- Premise 1A synthetic situation in which limited translation succeeded after first contact, and the counterpart requested more of the context of human experience.
- Premise 2The requests include personal loss, community conflict, and non-public historical records, but the translation of deletion and a ban on reuse is uncertain.
- Premise 3In trial translations trained without actual material, requests for help and promises of obedience were confused.
Where it holdsDetermines the scope of translation material provision by participating institutions and of information access. Does not dispose of all of human memory.
What can be lost
- Non-public memories can pass permanently outside, along with the stakeholder's control.
- A mistranslated promise can leave descendants bearing relationships and obligations they did not want.
What is still unknown
- Unknown 1How the counterpart understands reuse, deletion, and consent in records
- Unknown 2Whether more actual material reduces mistranslation or hardens it
Signals to decide again
- The actual meaning of consent, deletion, and reuse is verified in back-translation.
- New observation of the mistranslation rate of public-material alternatives and of traces of reuse in non-public materials.
Where the paths partNot answers — paths that part from the same starting point
In the counterpart's back-translated examples, traces appear of having inferred and reproduced the experience of groups that were never provided.
An independent translation test confirms an alternative that reduces the core confusion using public materials alone.
Material and rootsThe frame, the values and the background documents
What is an irreversible connection, and what does an exchange without a common language presuppose?
An exploratory perspective chosen by the creator. Does not claim supernatural validity or the superiority of any particular option.The benefits and costs of the options accrue to different stakeholders. Which loss to accept remains undecided.
A subject for the decision-maker to argue over; the materials carry no conclusion of their own.Source quote: whether a universal language can exist Reprocessing: Changed the possibility of extraterrestrial communication after contact into a decision about the scope of provision of public and private memory and the impossibility of recall.
The root of the problem-finding. The original's future events and formulations are not treated as verified facts.- IAA · SETI Declaration 2026
- NASA · Planetary Protection Standing reference
- UN · Declaration on Future Generations 2024
- OECD · Strategic Foresight Toolkit 2025
- [Scenario 29: Structural design in which an Ω-Lex-based ordering body attempts communication with an extraterrestrial AI] Created scenario · 2026-09-07 viewed
The record of this question
- Question
FSP-DEEPTIME-07· version 1.2.0- Content identity, SHA-256
4c295eca8cdcdde6c4a2da3347bc6b2a5877c573881039be8f83af0e03d58379- Input files
- Question input JSON · What followed, JSON