Craigslist to Beam Ads into Space (for Free)

rdarden writes "According to a press release issues yesterday, Craigslist will be broadcasting 10,000 ads into space later this year. CEO Jim Buckmaster won an eBay auction offered by Deep Space Communications Network, a Cape Canaveral, Florida company. According to an article at Technewsworld.com, they may have already received permission from 10,000 ad submitters."

Comments

Beam ads ?

[mirko]

What's the point ? Isn't this a form of pollution, anyway ? Even if we do not actually know what we pollute if these are radio waves...
If itz's light, no doubt, it is. The Macunmba disco (near Geneva) had to stop lighting the sky at night for ecological reasons.

Re:Beam ads ?

[Laurentiu]

Haven't you noticed yet? Human beings sorely lack the capacity to put things in the proper perspective. Their view of their immediate surroundings almost always superceeds whatever large-scale or long-term effects their actions might have.

"Yeah, we'll dump the nuclear waste in the Pacific. The containers are sealed so tight, there's no way they're gonna leak." 350 years later our children's children will have an ecological disaster of such scale on their hands that Hiroshima will be remembered fondly as "the good ol' days".

"Stop pollution? But that would cost us votes... erm, jobs! No way!" What is the long term cost, we wonder? I don't want my grandchildren to live in a future where they buy CocaCola Pure Mountain Air, do you?

This is just the newest folly in a long list of follies that the human race produced over the centuries. Craigslist sees it as a slick marketing move - they'll get all the free publicity they need with this one. They can now safely claim they boldly spammed where nobody spammed before. But that's as far as they think; other consequences, if any, escapes them completely.

Anyone remember the Voyager message? That was something our race could be proud of. 15 years later we're sending another message, which makes me wish there's no one out there to receive it. I wish they would begin and end their transmission with this disclaimer:

"This message represents only the human corporation known as Craiglist, and not in any way, shape or form the entirety of the human race. Any complaints, jams, deathray beams or any other form of communication related with this transmission should be directed towards the aforementioned entity."

Re:Beam ads ?

[Dogtanian]

either way the signal is not going to go very far (interstellar speaking) and is a huge waste of money that is purely for the fool to spend his money on. Case in point.... CEO of Craigslist.

Why is he a fool? His aim seems to have been to get attention for his company for little cost, at which he has probably succeeded.

The fools, if anyone, are the people getting excited at this.

Re:This won't make much difference...

[DeityAvatar]

True of course, however it seems to me that intentionally transmitting advertisments outside our planet would get us a lot more bad interstellar PR than unintentional broadcast "leakage".

ban black holes

[toiletmonster]

radio waves are pollution? give me a break. black holes generate radio waves. lets pass a law against black holes.

Life comparable to us needs simultaneous evolution

[Dogtanian]

They should be more excited about the message I sent: "I claim your planet in the name of Earth. Surrender or die."

Assuming that intelligent life follows the same evolutionary spurts that the human race has followed in the past few thousand years, we can conclude that evolution of intelligent life is on a scale God knows how many magnitudes faster than the pace of construction/destruction of stars/planets etc.

Thus, although by numbers, there may be a massive number of potential sites for life out there, the transitions from dumb to super-intelligent life will be like almost instantaneous sparks that happen relatively rarely (say, every few hours or so?) in the universe.

What is the chances of two (random) sparks occuring at *exactly* the same time, to within a few milliseconds?

If one race's evolutionary spurt happens even just a "few seconds" before ours, in real-life, that's still hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years ahead of us. If they survive, they'll be so much more intelligent that us that they won't have to take our threat seriously.

If, OTOH, they're behind us, they'll still be at such a dumb stage that they won't be picking up signals from space.