A well formed religion might be thought of as an effective form of long term data storage. In that case Hubbard was on the right track even if his creation wasn't.
The entropy is pretty bad though, both in data and the interpretation of the data through medium translation.
Another example of long term data storage is oral folklore traditions. Some Australian Aboriginal myths, for example, are claimed to contain references to geological events that date back 40k years.
The geological events are actually backed up with real science. Australian Aborigines are the only human culture whose stories have withstood the test of time - tens of thousands of years, in fact.
The reason is, they used cryptographic techniques (in their kinship system) to validate the stories as they were told among differing tribes and identify alterations.
> A well formed religion might be thought of as an effective form of long term data storage.
An example might be useful; it seems to me that religions inherently distort the message of their founders. For example, most of Buddhist teaching was developed long after the Buddha died. Christians have had multiple doctrinal conferences to determine what is the "true doctrine". Islam has been divided since shortly after the death of the Prophet.
I think a useful example is in the book "How the Irish Saved Civilization." The basic premise is that Christian monasteries isolated from the post-Roman disorder preserved knowledge and knowledge tradition that reemerged later. Stating this is not intended as unqualified praise for the book or to deny the role of Orthodox, Syriac and Islam in knowledge preservation or to say that the deconstruction of the Roman Empire was a bad thing.
Aside from religions, that was essentially my other thought: send data via lasers aligned to stars such that the light was bent back to earth for download. Of course then you have the Betamax problem...
