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Even ASCII itself is a strange encoding that could be lost with enough time and need to be recovered through cryptographic analysis and signals processing. That doesn't look at all likely today given UTF-8's promised and mostly accomplished ubiquity and its permanent grandfathering of ASCII. But ASCII is still only one of a number of potential encoding schemes, isn't necessarily obvious from first principles.

Past generations thought EBCDIC would last longer than it did.

Again, not that there any indications now that ASCII won't survive nearly as long as the English language does at this point, just that when we're talking about sending signals to the future, even assuming ASCII encoding is an assumption to question.



Baby's first cryptographic analysis, sure. Mapping letters to bits is easy, and the 8 bit repeating pattern is also easy.

The thing that might make it hard is if people have forgotten English itself, and in that case ASCII is one of the smallest barriers.

EBCDIC would also be fine.




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