(urth) Seal of Pas

[David Stockhoff]

On 10/28/2011 1:18 PM, Gerry Quinn wrote:
> *From:* Gwern Branwen <mailto:gwern0 at gmail.com>
> 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


It strikes me that a large part of the number's "significance" is that 
it is a sign of "our" era and of computer-generated IDs.