(urth) Seal of Pas

[Gerry Quinn]

From: Gwern Branwen 

On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 11:07 AM, Gerry Quinn <gerry at bindweed.com> wrote:
> > From a naturalistic perspective, the numbers shouldn’t have any significance
> > that we would understand in the story: they should encode the contents
> > and/or date of storage, serial numbers etc.

> It has been a while, but wasn't there just one sequence of numbers
> which made up a Seal of Pas? If the sequence doesn't change, then none
> of those 3 suggestions would work (serial numbers which don't change
> are not useful; it's unlikely that every single chamber would have
> been sealed at the same time (especially since a datestamp that big
> ought to be accurate down to really small units like nanoseconds) or
> would have the same contents).
We are only told the sequence on one such seal.  I think we are to infer that all the seals are different.  Silk later finds the dust from a broken seal of a cabinet that had contained human embryos, but he does not encounter, or at least doesn’t notice, any other intact seals.
The seal had about 36 digits.  I just interpret it as the equivalent of a barcode; we don’t know what information was on it but we can guess what *kind* of information was there.
- Gerry Quinn
 
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