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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."
All that an intelligent species will care about is the non-natural arrangement of information - then we have first contact.
If it's paid for by idiots for the expected publicity, then all the better - less budget for them to spend on spamming me!
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
It doesn't matter. a Ham radio operator with $300.00 worth of gear can do the same thing.
Point high gain direction antenna into space, crank watts up to 100, have TNC transmit tones into space.
Want to get fancier? use a old discarded sattelite dish, point it straight up. get a 2ghz transmitter surplus Microwave oven at the focal point will do.
either modulate the carrier (hard) or transmit Via CW (easier
have a 10,000 watt deep space "transmitter" (1000 watt microwave into a 10dbi gain antenna is close to that... most 10 foot dishes are 20+dbi)
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It's a great publicity stunt, just cos it's quirky. Look, it's even made it on /.
Similar thing happened with the "Milka" cows in Switzerland. They painted cows with a variety of adverts (for a reasonable fee) and let the cows graze close to the railways in Switzerland. But most of the influence was due to people telling other people about the idea, because they found it interesting.
An example of memes in action.
Million dollar sig.
Questionable? It's downright evil, if you ask me. Think of all the time wasted being bombarded by nonsense and the added stress factors, the people killed in highway accidents who were distracted by ads, and so on.
Plus, imagine if, say, Einstein or Newton or Shakespeare were distracted with ads and made to waste their time shredding boatloads of unsolicited credit card applications? I think the overall cost of unrestrained advertising is far greater than even the harsh critics believe.
Now, imagine if life elsewhere is pestered with human ads at frequencies they use for academic communication (blanketing a version of wireless communication, for example). I can just see, after the tenth ad, one of them saying, "All right, to hell with them! This breed called 'homo sapiens'", pausing for a chuckle if they have deciphered what "sapiens" means, "are obviously a menace to sentient life. Let us pool our resources into wiping them out. I know, we are normally pacifists, but there are some things even pacifists cannot abide."
Similar to the upcoming US election results
A ham operator can't do that. The license does not permit broadcasting (except under very limited circumstances). See: http://www.access.gpo.gov/nara/cfr/waisidx_02/47cf r97_02.html