Gold Artifact To Orbit Earth In Hope of Alien Retrieval 282
Lucas123 writes "The problem: What do you leave behind that billions of years from now, and without context, would give aliens an some kind of accurate depiction of mankind. The answer: A gold-plated silicon disc with just 100 photos. That's the idea behind The Last Pictures project, which is scheduled to blast off in the next few months from Kazakhstan and orbit the earth for 5 billion years. The photos, etched into the silicon using a bitmap format, were chosen over a five-year process that involved interviews with artists, philosophers, and MIT scientists, who included biologists, physicists, and astronomers. To each, was posed a single question: What photos would you choose to send into outer space? The answer became an eclectic mix of images from pre-historic cave paintings to a photo of a group of people taken by a predator drone."
make a mirror... (Score:5, Funny)
Anyway, I for one, welcome our new gold prospecting overlords!
Re:Rosetta Stone (Score:5, Insightful)
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Umm. I think I see a flaw in your otherwise damn fine plan.
Re:Rosetta Stone (Score:5, Informative)
Mathematical/scientific language
Spoken language is unique, but mathematical language is universal, for a start every alien capable of space flight will know what integers are. Once you've established symbols for numbers, you can match that to elements' atomic numbers, which aliens would also understand. Once you have elements you can start to show chemical structures and so on.
Don't you remember how they did it in [Contact](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118884/)?
Re:Rosetta Stone (Score:5, Funny)
Mathematical/scientific language
Spoken language is unique, but mathematical language is universal, for a start every alien capable of space flight will know what integers are.
not it they're using javascript
Re:Rosetta Stone (Score:5, Funny)
If they are using javascript for space flight, all we'll need to do to defeat them is fly Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith up to their ship to infect them with NoScript.
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Spoken language is unique, but mathematical language is universal,
No it is not. Math itself is universal, but Mathematical Notation is a human contrivance which has no meaning without a frame of reference. If you hadn't been taught that the character "2" means a value of two, or the little cross we call a 'plus' sign indicates addition, you wouldn't have a clue what 2+2=4 actually was supposed to mean, or that it was even math.
And that's not even getting into irregularities in how we actual read our own notation. Take -2^2 as an example- that evaluates to +4 because the n
Re:Rosetta Stone (Score:4, Informative)
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If you are aiming for creatures capable of interstellar space travel I suspect you can assume they can work out some simple clues.
Use binary to reduce the numeric symbol space from 10 to 2 and to make the base representation of numbers obvious faster. Show a table of lines next to the numeric representation of the number of lines. Show a table of various examples of each operation. Deriving what those operations represent should be trivial (assuming that those operations are as universal as is being assumed
Re:Rosetta Stone (Score:5, Insightful)
> No it is not. Math itself is universal, but Mathematical Notation is a human contrivance which has no meaning without a frame of reference
That is not entirely correct.
*Symbols* are universal -- which is why you dream in them and not a language or math.
Math IS symbol *manipulation* using certain rules that are based on assumptions. Fortunately ALL of math is based on *assumptions*; regarding how to define integers and how to manipulate them can be easily expressed and almost universally understood; you don't *need* to express "higher" math such the arbitrary rules such as negative exponent rules. The abstract assumptions are "context" free.
First pick a generic set of symbols that represent *sequence* and *addition*. This also demonstrates the fact that you understand primes. (Ignore the underscores, they are for spacing...)
Demonstrating the Goldbach's conjecture
Of couse one could demonstrate sub, mul, div, etc. but the above is sufficient.
Slashdot's lame-ass filtering is retarded for posting math, code, and alignment.
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Even if you know all that you may not know that there will be a sequel next year to Cosmos.
The new series, referred to as Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey [wikipedia.org] , is slated to air on Fox sometime between Fall 2013 to Spring 2014.[10][11]It is to be hosted by astrophysicistNeil deGrasse Tysonand will be produced byAnn Druyan, popular science broadcaster and author, and Sagan's widow, along withSteven Soter, andSeth MacFarlane.
Re:Rosetta Stone (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, it's an assumption, and it's perhaps not a 100% certanity that it is correct.
But I think we can agree that the odds of some alien race being familiar with the concept of integers, is a lot higher than the odds that they'll understand english.
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Yeah, it's an assumption, and it's perhaps not a 100% certanity that it is correct.
But I think we can agree that the odds of some alien race being familiar with the concept of integers, is a lot higher than the odds that they'll understand english.
Here's hoping. We only got a zero in our own mathematical language about 1,100 years ago.
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the odds of some alien race being familiar with the concept of integers, is a lot higher than the odds that they'll understand english.
Why would you say such a thing? In *every* science fiction movie I saw the spoke perfect English.
Re:Rosetta Stone (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Rosetta Stone (Score:5, Insightful)
To understand elements and chemical reactions you need to know how many protons an atom has, which requires knowledge of integers. Atoms are also discrete units, again integers. Even from an astronomical point of view planets and stars for distinct countable (integer) units. If we find aliens they may not understand integers, but if aliens find us they would pretty much have to have all the mathematical and scientific knowledge we do (and a lot more) to get here.
Unless of course said aliens are a sentient cloud of energy / Boltzmann brain, but the laws of physics seem to like to combine common elements into the same organic molecules that life on earth uses, so it seems likely that relatively familiar carbon based live would also evolve on other planets.
Plus at least simple counting has been shown in many animals, even those only distantly related to primates, so it's not like humans are even the only species on earth that can count integers.
Re:Rosetta Stone (Score:5, Interesting)
To understand elements and chemical reactions you need to know how many protons an atom has, which requires knowledge of integers. Atoms are also discrete units, again integers. Even from an astronomical point of view planets and stars for distinct countable (integer) units. If we find aliens they may not understand integers, but if aliens find us they would pretty much have to have all the mathematical and scientific knowledge we do (and a lot more) to get here.
That is how we see things. Regardless of whether we're right or not, an alien civilization could very well have come up with a theory that adequately explains chemical reactions that is completely different. To think otherwise is to succumb to your own bias.
Now, I agree that a space-faring civilization would most likely understand integers, but you can't possibly know that. The universe holds too many amazing things. We have only the tiniest understanding of it, and much of what we 'know' could very well be wrong.
Let's take a slight detour:
Imagine a species that evolved in space, rather than on a planet's surface. To meet our current definitions of life, they would need to be able to move around and interact with their environment, which means some sort of propulsion in space. If this species managed to make it to our planet, they could be very intelligent and still not necessarily have any need for integers or subatomic particles.
Plus at least simple counting has been shown in many animals, even those only distantly related to primates, so it's not like humans are even the only species on earth that can count integers.
True, but they also evolved on the same planet with the same conditions. You can't assume that alien life would be anything like the life forms on this planet. Some people think they might be, but we don't KNOW.
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Re:Rosetta Stone (Score:4, Interesting)
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One moon circles.
Re:Rosetta Stone (Score:4, Insightful)
They will have to understand math and integers, but not our textual representations of them.
So they'll have to figure out what the encoding is. Given that they need to build a spacecraft to even be able to get to the message in the first place, decoding shouldn't be totally beyond their powers. It might take them quite a while to do it, but why worry about that?
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An equivalent for this would be a passage in English, and two translations of it into languages read by aliens five billion years into the future. So, no.
Having translations of a number of languages in the same place might well be enough if coupled with some children's books. In order to decipher our lost peoples the aliens might well have to find an entire library. If we hang on long enough for progress to march on as it has been, that will fit on a piece of removable media the size of a thumbnail... oh wait, yesterday. Carry on then. Of course, it also has to be readable.
Re:Rosetta Stone (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Rosetta Stone (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't belittle the above comment unless you have read a very SF good story called Omnilingual, by H. Beam Piper.
It is even available for free:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19445/19445-h/19445-h.htm [gutenberg.org]
yeah but it won't last that long. (Score:2, Funny)
In a few hundred years, some teenager who's nicked his Dad's space car will go and steal it.
Re:yeah but it won't last that long. (Score:5, Interesting)
It'll be gone long before then. If you figure that it only costs a few tens of millions for a private individual to launch a satellite, returning requires more fuel and heat shielding, but that's not too much more. Considering that artifacts only increase in value, the cost of "recovery" only decreases, the only thing that can happen to save it from some billionaire with questionable ethics is if there's so much junk up there that nobody even cares it exists.
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yeah if you want to leave a message
the gold plate the moon,
not some tiny disc that'g going to get lost
Copyright License? (Score:5, Funny)
"Sir! We have a lot of pictures!"
"Leave them alone, Lieutenant. We don't have the copyright license to copy them, because the owners are long dead."
"But Sir!"
"I SAID, leave them alone! Haven't you heard of biogenic-nuclear copyright licenses? Without the antidote we'd all die."
Re:Copyright License? (Score:5, Insightful)
the only way to see the pictures is if you buy the book. thanks world for not being so cool as during and after the space race.
Re:Copyright License? (Score:4, Funny)
"Leave them alone, Lieutenant. We don't have the copyright license to copy them, because the owners are long dead."
You made me remember the plot of a short story I read, I think, in an old Asimov SF magazine. Aliens come here in the stone age, become quite amazed at cave painting, a completely novel art form for them, but cannot make copies and must delete the recordings because their ethical system requires them to pay for cultural goods with some other cultural good of theirs at the same technological level, but all they have is more advanced than stone age tech, so no exchange, and no cave paintings for them. One of them however has a nice idea: giving humanity bows and arrows. The other aliens are doubtful, arguing that's quite a technological leap for humanity, which might not be ready to deal with such weapons. The other guy prevails though, with an argument akin to: "Hey, they're almost there anyway, and those paintings are soooo nice. After all, it's just bow and arrows. What could possibly go wrong?" And so they depart, with their properly purchased photos and a new art form, and in exchange we get a new, efficient and very lethal new means of war.
4 Chan (Score:5, Funny)
We should just send up pictures from 4 chan.
Then the universe will leave us alone.
Re:4 Chan (Score:4, Funny)
Re:4 Chan (Score:4, Funny)
That depends - do they have a Boxxy?
Voyager discs (Score:5, Insightful)
I prefer the Voyager discs. They provide a more positive look on mankind. These photos look more like a guilt trip.
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Linky link [wikipedia.org].
Re:Voyager discs (Score:5, Insightful)
In particular, the pictures show very, very little about who this mysterious species that created the disk happens to be. I like the cave paintings, but who cares what a glacier looks like? Or a tornado? Or big waves? Or the inside of a mine/tunnel? How about showing a boat where you can actually see the people? Any space-faring race that finds Earth will have trillions of photographs of interesting geology in their libraries.
Voyager was a sincere attempt to be testimony on the human species. This is just a testimony on the grandiose artistic pretensions of one specific human.
Overkill by 1 or 2 Billion Years (Score:5, Funny)
Designed to last for 5 billion years? Won't it and the Earth be one with the sun in about 3 or 4 billion?
Anyway, I think we should baffle the aliens with a bit of bullshit and have a set of pictures that are screenshots of the Death Star destroying Alderaan. Hilarity ensues when word gets out about this and aliens from all over the galaxy scramble to tear up our long dead world in search of any useful information about this tech that allowed the great and ancient civilization that thrived here to build a space station with enough firepower to destroy an entire planet.
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Oh yeah, we also need the obligatory Goatse picture as well.
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I was wondering that too. A couple of searches though seems to indicate that the Sun will not start to enter the Red Giant phase for another 5 billion years.
However, after only another billion years the oceans should boil off due to the extra solar output. I sincerely doubt a gold disk is going to survive in orbit long enough to be destroyed by the beginnings of the Red Giant phase.
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RE: the deathstar joke,
Totally gave me a flashback to Galaxy Quest with Tim Allen. The ultra-advanced race of aliens have no concept of deception or even untruth, so they believed the Galaxy Quest show (read Star Trek) was filmed-as-it-happened documentary, and used it to develop their ship. Heh. I can't believe a species as or more intelligent than us could ever survive without a concept of deception....
And if life is common in the galaxy or universe, life advanced enough to do convenient interstellar t
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Designed to last for 5 billion years? Won't it and the Earth be one with the sun in about 3 or 4 billion?
It is called quality. You overshoot the design estimations so that when unforeseen things happen, your thingy is still useful. Not much of it about nowadays unfortunately.
Maybe "counterintuitive" doesn't apply to aliens (Score:4, Interesting)
Seems that the most natural thing to expect would be that one should look for informative objects where the culture lived, for which, off the top of my head, "encasement of pictures in a huge block of plexiglass, on Earth" seems more likely to actually be discovered. This seems akin to a historical human culture saying, "We want to make sure that future people know about us and what our ways were, so let's walk 500 miles away from where we live and all our buildings are, and put some paintings up in the mountains."
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What if alien life in 5 billion years has evolved to look nothing like it is today? They could be bags, of mostly energy, with no real bodies.
"Zodon, please place the Solid Gold Aliens Top 100 Hits CD in the player, so we can decode it."
"I can't, Korgos, we are bags of mostly energy, with no real bodies, and we have no hands."
We should have included a fart app on the CD. That one really never seems to get old.
And then the aliens could really understand our intelligence level.
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Futility at its purest (Score:3, Insightful)
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Actually, it is more for when the astronauts time warp into the future and discover humans are subservient to apes. It will be proof it should be the other way around and help the humans reclaim their status and we won't need to watch old actors yell those damn dirty apes again..
Re:Futility at its purest (Score:4, Insightful)
Whaaaa? Why do you say that? We are the Universe--we're the conscious part, a beautiful self-aware organism. We didn't create ourselves, but we are the product of a vastly complex series of interactions taking place over the course of billions of years.
We're as about as meaningful as anything the Universe has brought into existence, if not more.
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But the utility of that contraption kicks in only after we are no more, so your argument will no longer be valid.
So I agree with the GP. Also, I find depressing that some people are counting on the extinction of mankind, and are more worried about the time after that and some hipotetical aliens (who may not even exist or come close to Sun, let alone find a piece of debris around a dead planet).
In essence, this gets to be both a silly and depressing idea. Great boooh.
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No, but it matters while we are still alive. That's the essence of everything we can think of.
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We're as about as meaningful as anything the Universe has brought into existence...
Exactly my point. If the planet dies tomorrow in a fiery explosion, the Universe will not be a bit different. Noone will notice and noone will care. I think that sending a plaque with (pathetic and preachy) pictures in orbit is arrogant and self centered. I don't even want to raise the question about space junk and how would "aliens" differentiate between debris and inspirational plaques.
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It doesn't strike me as particularly effective either--more symbolic than anything else. I can appreciate the gesture, though. And isn't that what this largely is? Part of the idea is that hopefully, somewhere out there is life. This is sort of a way to reach out to them. It's very human to me--reaching out towards the unknown, hoping for someone to be there.
I'd like to think there are two ways to think about life--either everything's futile or some things are meaningful. I don't think there's a decisive wa
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Your life may be meaningless, mine is not. That aside, while our lives may be meaningless in this scale, it doesn't mean that we are meaningless. Every part is equally a part of the universe.
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Look at all the cool stuff we learned from different human cultures on this planet alone. Then think about how excited we get about the prospect of just finding simple bacteria on another planet. There's no way an alien species sufficiently advanced to be exploring our solar system would find a record of our history and think "meh, just humans, nothing worth seeing here"
There's a healthy middle groun
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I believe life, particularly intelligent life, gives the universe meaning.
Whoaaa, arrogant much?!? This sentiment, my friend, is what a number of anthropologist have called "The most dangerous idea". Because naturally, you don't really mean "intelligent life" - you mean humans in general and you in particular. Yhea, the whole universe would be nothing , nothing I tell you, without some self-righteous intelligent life to give it a "meaning". From that sentiment follows the other one - that we, in fact OWN t
How will they find it? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's "more space junk." If there was this lone object in orbit? Okay maybe. But we're talking about our planet with lots of stuff up there now. LOTS of stuff. And then meteor showers and crap?
And even if somehow this one trinket found its way into the hands/claws/tentacles of a being from space, are they supposed to be convinced of something? I mean really. Oh look, among all this stuff, there are creatures out there... sending some kind of message... I will go visit them!
"Mixed message" is the best we've got? And for fuck's sake... we've got actual people in orbit... people to talk to.
Why a disc? (Score:2, Offtopic)
At the very least put an Ikea-like manual (no text, just pictures, where things just "click") with it.
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Maybe they could have just put printed pictures, well protected.
I don't expect people to read the articles - this is Slashdot, after all - but you could have at least read the summary.
The Inner Light (Score:2)
Good if the aliens grasp human aesthetics (Score:4, Insightful)
Without the context of human perception and aesthetics, many of these images may appear as random noise to an alien species!
Abstract artistic expression works for some of us, but might not be communicating directly enough to clearly convey ideas, concepts, facts, history, even human being's notions of beauty, the latter of which clearly was the curator's primary objective.
I'm not knocking the images themselves. But without the context of human eyes, human life and experience... these will have little or no meaning to anyone who has never lived earth.
Re:Good if the aliens grasp human aesthetics (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not knocking the images themselves. But without the context of human eyes, human life and experience... these will have little or no meaning to anyone who has never lived earth.
Well I have lived on the earth, my whole life in fact, and even I struggled to figure what half these photos were about. Silly blurry arty black and white shit may work in the cool end of town, but when you're attempting to communicate with foreigners, you need to keep it as simple as possible.
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I also am dubious about the particular choice of pictures. But it would be stupid to do anything other than monochrome. RGB colour only works because of the biology of the human eye, that has receptors for these 3 particular wavelengths of light. Similarly CMYK and every other colour system depends on how human sight works.
Of course we can make no guarantees that the aliens would have something that that we can recognise as sight. Although for a race to make it to earth, some way of making sense of a scene
Misinformation (Score:2)
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Ah, Futurama. Now you've got the phrase "compellingly short garment" stuck in my head
Another worthless stunt (Score:2)
Why does this even get any press at all. It is just plain stupid.
Lame choice of photos (Score:5, Insightful)
I quickly browsed the images and had a couple thoughts.
1) Why didn't they etch images unencoded? Simply make micro images in high detail (ala microfiche) so they don't have to be decoded?
2) I really didn't think the choice of photos was representative of life on earth. No cityscapes, no human faces close up, no animals / pets (inter-species friendship for example), no image of something technological such as a state of the art mobile phone / laptop. No images of agriculture or even a bouquet of beautiful flowers.
Hell, I could barely tell what some images were supposed to be (well, number 1 took a couple seconds - I thought it was a crystalline structure, number two I haven't figured out yet).
I did like earth from space, but how about an image of Armstrong / Aldrin on the moon? A passenger jet taking off showing outside & in?
So many choices, so poorly selected IMHO.
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no animals / pets (inter-species friendship for example)
What is that you want, the alien version of goatse?
Anyway, more seriously, the Armstrong / Aldrin photo in the moon is a good idea, but the "state of the art technology" will become obsolete and meaningless to ourselves in perhaps half a generation, that is a bad example.
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no animals / pets (inter-species friendship for example)
Anyway, more seriously, the Armstrong / Aldrin photo in the moon is a good idea, but the "state of the art technology" will become obsolete and meaningless to ourselves in perhaps half a generation, that is a bad example.
It's true that the technology would be obsolete rather quickly, but in the billion-year time frame under consideration, it would give an idea of how we interact with our (non-satellite consumer) tech. i.e. a human face gazing at a smart phone with a map displayed, or a video call...
A human interacting with a laptop showing the screen (data consumption & manipulation) & human face again...
I still think it would be worthwhile.
Once we have space elevator(s), we can "upload" more current images of ou
Re:Lame choice of photos (Score:5, Informative)
1) Why didn't they etch images unencoded? Simply make micro images in high detail (ala microfiche) so they don't have to be decoded?
Isn't that exactly what they've done? A lot of people seem to have missed this. They're etched on the blue centre of the disc.
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1) Why didn't they etch images unencoded? Simply make micro images in high detail (ala microfiche) so they don't have to be decoded?
Isn't that exactly what they've done? A lot of people seem to have missed this. They're etched on the blue centre of the disc.
Now that you mention it, yes, it looks like they have. Although the disk appears cut away.
Harrumph - like I said, it would be a good idea...
*looks away, pretends to be busy*
context interpretation (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's what I dislike about the pictures that I've seen on the project website:
Most of them would make bugger all sense to an alien species. Heck, some of them are hard to make sense of if you are a human.
I, too, think the Voyager pictures were a better selection. They provide information about scale and location, something that these pictures don't. Many of them require you to have an understanding of humans and/or human culture to make sense. For example, the indoor pictures have no objective indicators of scale. There is absolutely no hint to tell future alien watchers if these are images of something microscopic, macroscopic, inbetween? Whatever this picture [creativetime.org] is showing, for example, does not even tell the alien if the area shown in the image is 5 mm, 5 cm, 5m, 50m or whatever across. The skeleton in the top-right corner is largely hidden, it only makes sense as a scale measure if you are a human and your brain is trained on filling in the blanks of other humanoid shapes.
Also, I agree that at least from the selection they show on their webpage, way too many of them show natural catastrophies and doom and gloom.
I miss images that would make alien visitors in the not-5-billion-years distant future help make sense of the ruins of our civilization. If you include pictures of cave paintings, why not a city or two? A million years from now, there won't be anything of either left, but a few thousand years from now, ruins of our cities will still be there even if we go away tomorrow.
And why the focus on humans? What about the other 99% of biomass on the planet?
For a project this expensive, it looks way too much like a high school project to me. Amateurish.
Re:context interpretation (Score:5, Informative)
Voyager's pictures are here:
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/sceneearth.html [nasa.gov]
5 billion years is very optimistic (Score:3)
Orbits around the Earth are affected by the Moon, that satellite won't just stay there for so long. They would be better off with a Lagrange orbit. Also, if it's only 100 pictures they should've engraved them on the disks rather than using a digital format the aliens have little chance to decrypt.
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apparently they did etch the images onto the disk.
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Oh, didn't see them the first time. But if they are that small, they should need some protection against radiation or micrometeoroids.
How will they find this one? (Score:2)
Amongst the hundreds of thousands of orbiting satellites not to mention the garbage floating around the planet how are they supposed to find one little disc? Hell they could make it the size of a shopping mall and they'd still have difficulty locating this. Combined with the fact that I think the future of our planet looks a lot like the few opening scenes from Wall-E I don't have much hope at all for this every being anything than a colossal waste of money.
Where's the p0rn? (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe I'm browsing the project site wrong, but all I saw were about a dozen photographs? None show images of naked humans that can at least give a hint of what a human looks without the environmental protection suit. Photos of couples having sex and babies can also explain the nature of human reproduction. We're not androids that just rolled off the some fab lab.
Won't last that long (Score:5, Informative)
The hops this satellite is going last 5 billion years at the orbit of 30.000 km is just nonsense. The orbit is too low and unstable at best, even if this is geosync orbit. He would have needed a orbit pattern of at least 600.000 km (outside the orbit of the moon) to get this goal. Outside forces are more likely to push the satellite towards Earth in few thousands years. Rather then from it. Orbital debris is also going to be a major problem in the long term.
Poor choices, but off by a few billion years too? (Score:2)
I agree with everyone else about the poor choices of photos that are vaguely artistic rather than actual useful or communicative to a potential alien species, but I also have another issue: 5 billion years?
My understanding was that most orbits decay eventually. I know this is close to geosync and not like the ISS, but is it really likely such a orbit would remain stable for 5 billion-freaking-years? I mean, even assuming no other outside objects cross paths with this satellite, won't its orbit eventually de
already proposed for 10 years by KEO (Score:2)
http://www.keo.org/ [keo.org]
Not that I believe in its interest at any rate, but there is a guy that proposed this to UN in 2000, and has been announcing launch dates every two years since then...
At least he made a living out of it for himself, and seems sincere...
just a very expensive ad campaign to sell a book (Score:2, Insightful)
this is to sell a book. Stop looking for deeper meaning and taking this group literally, discussing details like why there aren't any pictures of humans, or pictures of cell phones or buildings. It's a very, very expensive promotion to sell a coffee table book.
Better Yet . . . (Score:2)
As an added bonus: It should act as a warning sign to any visiting aliens - there is no intelligent life here, now move along.
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. . . let's put some Flash videos up there
Apparently, Adobe plans to drop support for Alien Flash in 3.5 billion years, so this suggestion won't fly....
...at the right we're going...
You're voting for Romney...?
cheers,
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P.S. I knew I shouldn't have played hookie on the day they covered "proofreading" in my grade school grammar class . . . but I figured "When am I ever going to use THAT?" (apparently not today)
Most of those pictures suck (Score:2)
A picture of a flowering tree, with the sky as a background? There's no context - you only know its a tree because you know it's a tree. Grainy picture of predator drone footage? Too blurry to even know what it is... unless you know what it is. This needs to be far more universal, something like the Voyager record. The one decent picture was the one of the moon, although the moon won't be in the same place in 5B years.
These pictures are from some Freshman Art 101 class, something a kid with an old
Expedition to Earth (Score:2)
Include a Donald Duck cartoon - that will fool them
(Expedition to Earth by Arthur C Clarke)
Huh? (Score:2)
Gold Artifact To Orbit Earth In Hope of Alien Retrieval
Why does Gold Artifact hope for alien retrieval? Is this some new religious meme?
What the hell? (Score:4, Insightful)
From the collection of photos shown on their website it would appear they were selected by an art student with an obnoxiously cynical view of humanity. The hold little meaning beyond this pervasive sense of negativity.
Let's take stock:
Before and after photos of melting glaciers
Grainy photo waves crashing on a pier with a bunch of people watching
Some random ship in what appears to be the Suez canal
An approaching dust storm during what I think is the dust bowl
Barely decipherable cave paintings
A mine
Some nonsensical photo of a huge auditorium with 7 tv screens depicting highway interchanges
A waterspout
A blurry photo taken by a drone (presumably pre strike)
Random kids standing in water, most looking away from the camera
A rather strange looking room that looks like something from colonial times
I'm a human and I see no rhyme or reason in these photos beyond what I mentioned above. What the hell is an alien intelligence going to make of these? I think this is a neat concept, but that's a rather pathetic selection of photos.
Re:Bitmap (Score:5, Informative)
That's exactly what they did. Sadly unsurprisingly the summary got it wrong. See this picture:
http://creativetime.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Disc_001.jpg [creativetime.org]
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
But how do we know that an alien are equipped to translate a 2D monochrome into anything meaningful?
Do they even have vision? Were they ever restricted to 2D observation (like our eyes). Perhaps they used area-based sonar for spatial awareness, or something even weirder?
If your dog can't understand a picture, why would you think an alien can? The dog is likely going to be much closer to what you are.
Anyhow, this is a folly, plain and simple. And not even an impressive one.
Re: (Score:3)
If you looked at the pretty photo of the disk you would know that it is a 10x10 grid of images etched into silicon, not a CDROM.
Re:Bitmap (Score:5, Interesting)
Summary:
"The photos, etched into the silicon using a bitmap format,"
Article:
"MIT used a machine to etch the photos into the silicon using a bitmap format to create a binary image."
This just illustrates what really pisses me off about journalism today. I spent a good half an hour looking for the actual source of the quotations and statements from the MIT guys. Most of the articles claim to be written by whoever posted them on their magazine/blog/newspaper, but here's the original interview that most of the articles are ripping their quotes from:
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-last-pictures-interview-with-trevor-paglen/
I got this link from MIT: http://arts.mit.edu/va/artist/paglen/
I'm still trying to figure out where the information about "MIT used a machine to blah blah" came from, however. So far I haven't actually been able to track it back to anybody.
Re: (Score:3)
The point is to have something that can outlast the human race, and no machine can do that.
On the contrary, I am convinced that quite a few machines will. When the last human dies, whether it is three years down the road or three million[*], there are bound to be machines surviving.
But if we really want to make an impression, we need to do something else. This is just signalling to visitors how stupid and vain we are. This plate is obviously made for us, not them. It's a 21st century folly, and not even impressive.
Also, unless they place the satellite in L4 or L5, its orbit is unlikely to las
Re: (Score:2)
On the contrary, I am convinced that quite a few machines will. When the last human dies, whether it is three years down the road or three million[*], there are bound to be machines surviving.
A few that come to mind are the model M IBM keyboard and the model 500 telephone.
Re: (Score:2)
Why do they think it will stay up so long? Because they've done the math, while you've just waved your hands around vigorously.
For example, geosynchronous satellites require curse correction not to stay *in* orbit, but to stay in a very precise position *in* orbit - a very significant difference.