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buybuydandavis comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, January 2015, chapter 103 - Less Wrong Discussion

7 Post author: b_sen 29 January 2015 01:44AM

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Comment author: buybuydandavis 11 February 2015 02:08:37AM 0 points [-]

Harry musing on what Q might have done to the Pioneer Plaque:

“Or... hm. A portrait seems to store a whole human brain’s worth of information... you couldn’t have added any extra mass to the probe, but maybe you could’ve turned an existing part into a portrait of yourself? Or you found a volunteer dying of a terminal illness, snuck them into nasa, and cast a spell to make sure their ghost ended up in the plaque.

Q later describing the Horcrux spell.

Horcrux sspell channelss death-bursst through casster, createss your own ghosst insstead of victim'ss, imprintss ghosst in sspecial device.

It seems another case where someone's musing turns up in detail later in the book. There are lots of these. Often, it just seems like EY foreshadowing (and possibly making the story nature of the events part of the plot), but in this case, it also seems very much like making up a lie that fits in with Harry's preconceptions.