Yahoo's Time Capsule Project

eldavojohn writes, "Yahoo is compiling a time capsule (Flash required). This massive project, which accepts donations from anyone, is no ordinary time capsule, though. This time capsule will be digitized and beamed into space from the ancient pyramid of Teotihuacan in Mexico. From the article: 'Starting on Tuesday, enthusiasts from around the world will have a chance to submit text, images, video and sounds that reflect human nature to be included in the message.' I highly doubt this 'time capsule' will reach anyone, but it is a neat idea. After browsing through some of the pictures posted, I would hope extraterrestrial life would be more hesitant to exterminate us — if not for anything else than curiosity. We constantly strive to have our legacy live on in the galaxy." Yahoo worked with Internet artist Jonathan Harris on this project.

Comments

Desperate Publicity Ploy

[ackthpt]

I highly doubt this 'time capsule' will reach anyone, but it is a neat idea.

No this is not neat>, this is just stupid. This is so incredibly stupid it's left me speechless ... nearly:

So they're going to beam it into space via a laser from atop a ruin from a vanished civilisation. Are they going to rotate this laser to maintain RA and DEC, to keep it as one continuos beam or will they just fire it straight up (for maximum theatric effect) and thus have it whipped by the spin and orbit of the earth? Carl Sagan's record has a better chance. It's an opportunity for Yahoo to do something utterly useless to get their name in the news, just like it now appears on Slashdot. Applause, applause. It certainly is fodder for some comedy, maybe Mel Brooks will have someone in Spaceballs The Animated Series say, "what is that annoying glare?" while flipping down their pair of Spaceballs The Sunglasses.

meanwhile, picked up in orbit, the stream is immediately recognised and decoded by a Zygorthean ship. After reviewing the contents, the focus down upon the the pyramid of Teotihuacan and one says to another, "well, we certainly know what killed that civilisation!"

Re:Desperate Publicity Ploy

[Anonymous Coward]

It's no more useless than Google buying YouTube. Or Apple announcing yet another iPod. Or Paul Graham pandering to even more people.

Re:Desperate Publicity Ploy

[hcob$]

I don't know... It could be a massive legal ploy. Since they will undoubtably send music (In DIGITAL form no less), they can draw all the RIAA lawyers to an Aztec Pyramid. Hopefully, the will re-instated human sacrifice at that point!

Re:Desperate Publicity Ploy

[kfg]

No this is not neat>, this is just stupid.

This is not stupid, this is marketing.

Oh, wait. I guess you're right after all. Nevermind.

However, as I've already noted once today, there's a lot of money to be "made" in stupid.

KFG

Re:Desperate Publicity Ploy

[alewar]

how long are their going to transmit this message?
Are they trying to continue Sagan's work on SETI?

Re:Desperate Publicity Ploy

[Flashbck]

I hope that the intended alien intelligence also has the flash plug in that is required.

Re:Desperate Publicity Ploy

[nametaken]

It's probably best that this garbage doesn't make it out of the galaxy. Every category is whining and bitching about things that don't describe humanity with any usable context... crying about relatively small current events, with geographic locations and politicians referenced by their proper names.

Such a waste of time and money.

Re:Desperate Publicity Ploy

[Zardus]

Dude, the Madobemedia Flash player is installed on 97% of all browsers. I'm sure they'll have it installed.

Re:Desperate Publicity Ploy

[NetFusion]

A P2P (Planet to Planet) digital transfer of copyrighted material brings the RIAA lawyers out like giant worms to a ground thumper.

Re:Desperate Publicity Ploy

[frup]

I see the whole space beaming as a decoy to fool the stupid masses in to submitting all their private thoughts and concerns as well as photos into Yahoo's servers so that in 25 years they can come hunt everyone down. Googles been doing it for a while now and Yahoo wants in on the action.

Re:Desperate Publicity Ploy

[Anonymous Coward]

Unlike Google, there's editors working at Y!.

Should i send goatsecx

[Cartack]

In jpg or png?

Re:Should i send goatsecx

[Anonymous Coward]

Scenes from Star Trek we'd really like to see....

Spock: "Captain!! we've intercepted a digital signal from the blue planet in the alpha quadrant!".

Kirk: "Put it on screen!"

Sulu: "Oh my!"

Aliens have Flash?

[Anonymous Coward]

How can it require Flash?

Re:Aliens have Flash?

[ackthpt]

How can it require Flash?

Perhaps that's the true genius of it... The aliens will have to register with Macromedia to download the plug in and that's how we'll make alien contact! After that we'll defend ourselves against any hostiles with blasts of spam and junk faxes.

Re:Aliens have Flash?

[Skynet]

Didn't you see Independence Day? They also use TCP/IP!

Re:Aliens have Flash?

[wired_LAIN]

Good point... How will the aliens know how to decode the signal?

Re:Aliens have Flash?

[Gulthek]

Wrong! *We* use whatever the aliens call their design for computer network protocols.

That's because we (in the movie) designed TCP/IP and even digital computers themselves based off an examination of their alien technology!

For the millionth time:

The laptop. Was connected. To the Spaceship.
Which _itself_ was. Connected. To the mothership.

Yes, it was a cheesy action movie. No, their easy alien computer connection was not an error in the context of the movie.

Re:Aliens have Flash?

[MS-06FZ]

The laptop. Was connected. To the Spaceship.
Which _itself_ was. Connected. To the mothership.

Are you Shatnering? 'Cause I don't think he was in that movie.

Re:Aliens have Flash?

[geekoid]

It's is irritating.

They studied the technology for 50 years, but for some reason it would be impossible to build a emulator that runs on a mac.
sheesh.

Re:Aliens have Flash?

[geekoid]

in a signal, you can make sine wave change in a regular pattern, which then builds on a slightly more complex pattern, and so on.
It does assume that the reciepent understands RF electronics.

Re:Aliens have Flash?

[gstoddart]

Didn't you see Independence Day? They also use TCP/IP!

OK, like every other geek, when I left the theatre after Independance Day, I too felt like they had magically used TCP/IP or Apple-talk to communicate, and thought it was a ridiculous plot device.

Then I saw the directors cut of the movie several years later. And, like so many other directors cuts, the movie make a lot more sense.

In the directors cut, they went to great lengths to point out that the entire communications infrastructure of the Aliens was radio-signal type things. All of it. Since the Goldblum character was a radio engineer with a laptop fitted out for signal processing (that one I'll leave alone) he used his radio equipment to tap into their communications, figure out how to send a signal to them (using their own radio protocols) and interfere with them. He just needed to figure out how they were modulating their signals, and, voila, he had them pwned if he could get close enough to inject it.

The theatrical version was horrible in that they just made it look like the Mac directly hooked up to the aliens. If you get a chance, the directors cut/extended edition actually makes this to be a very plausible plot device. It's more along the lines of he figured out the radio protocol they used, and figured out how to send a message. Much more like traditional signals intelligence involving radio communications.

In the same way, the movie The Abyss in its theatrical version snipped out the parts which helped the movie make sense. If you see the extended edition, the additional scenes they put back make so much more of the movie make sense. And, once again, the directors cut of The Abyss suddenly became a complete movie without any huge gaps in how we got there. It's a hugely better movie for the addition of something like 20 minutes of footage.

The absurdity of the theatrical Independance Day can be more attributed to the studio's desire to have shorter films, and to throw away any attempts at plot exposition which tried to make all of the things make sense. The director had originally included some better explainations for how it all worked. And, for me, it was enough to suspend disbelief about the rest of it, and the movie became watchable.

I suggest to anyone still harbouring any bitterness over that movie to watch the extended edition. The movie gets ways better. (This is why I almost always buy directors (*) cuts since they usually are closer to the intended vision than what was shown in theatres.)

Cheers

(*) Except for LucasFilm of course.

Re:Aliens have Flash?

[rblum]

If you'd *ever* connected a System6 Mac to a PC network, you'd know it was entirely realistic. Power up the damn thing, and your network goes up in flames... ;)

Re:Aliens have Flash?

[Drooling Iguana]

He should've been. Shatmer makes any movie better.

Aye

[paranode]

Maybe they'd be better off using the sunshine that shoots from your arse as a vehicle?

Re:Aye

[Barryke]

Maybe they'd be better off using the sunshine that shoots from your arse as a vehicle?

Only if you shave.

I don't think this is possible

[Quaoar]

How are they going to build a tube that high?

Re:I don't think this is possible

[gEvil (beta)]

Don't be stupid. It's obviously going to be part of the space elevator.

Re:I don't think this is possible

[Zardus]

Not a problem. They're just gonna pile it all on the back of a truck and send it into space, no matter what any senator says!

Re:I don't think this is possible

[AnimeDTA]

How are they going to build a tube that high?

It will be a series of tubes

Why Mexico?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Are lasers cheaper there too?

Still, I found this comment interesting:

Archaeologists say a culture centred in Teotihuacan, known as the City of the Gods, dominated Mesoamerica for hundreds of years during the first millennium. It is unclear what led to the society's collapse.

The History Channel did a show on this- and suggested it was a lack of fuel & food (based on the fact that Teotihuacan is in the middle of a small mini-desert, which itself is in the middle of a jungle).

Re:Why Mexico?

[zenithcoolest]

Lol... I wonder they will dig into archaelogical facts before starting this project

Re:Why Mexico?

[ElleyKitten]

It was also disease from the Europeans. Same thing that killed much of the rest of the other Native Americans, just more effective in Teotihuacan and other cities because disease spreads faster in denser populations.

Re:Why Mexico?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Except- the original inhabitants of Teotihuacan abandoned the city in approximately 300 A.D.- long before the Aztecs, about 700 years before Europeans discovered Newfoundland. The mystery is in that original evacuation of the city, not the later Aztec renaming of Teotihuacan and die off in 1500.

Re:Why Mexico?

[Reaperducer]

It was also disease from the Europeans. Same thing that killed much of the rest of the other Native Americans, just more effective in Teotihuacan and other cities because disease spreads faster in denser populations.

I'm sure that's what they teach in Revisionist History class in politically correct schools these days, but it doesn't hold up. Teotihuacan collapsed a thousand years before the first European arrived there.

Random one I clicked on

[TubeSteak]

http://advision.webevents.yahoo.com/timecapsule/zo om.php?imgurl=http://us.i1.yimg.com/timecapsule.ya hoo.com/content/words//lg/3321.jpg&l=en

Die Religion ist das Opium des Volkes...
Religion is the opium of the people...
La religión es el opio del pueblo

Re:Random one I clicked on

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, misquoting in 3 languages! You must be mega-super-smart!

Re:Random one I clicked on

[Garabito]

another one:

Don't kill us. Thanks.

Re:Random one I clicked on

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought it was supposed to read "No Kill I"

Re:Random one I clicked on

[CopaceticOpus]

essential

42

Re:Random one I clicked on

[tehcyder]

This is all very well, but how are the aliens supposed to read the messages that aren't in English? Won't someone please think of the aliens?

A few thousand years later...

[__aaclcg7560]

Those stupid @#$% Earthlings are spamming us again!

Re:A few thousand years later...

[SydBarrett]

or its gonna get forwarded all over the universe as "FWD: FWD: FWD: LOL FUNNY EARTHING PICS"

Re:A few thousand years later...

[mamer-retrogamer]

Not unless Spamhaus gets an intergalactic domain name by then...

Re:A few thousand years later...

[reverseengineer]

Them: "Our people have spent generations traveling the void of space in order to reach the fabled Earth, home of our greatest god. Take us to the Almighty Yahoo!"

Us: "Should we tell them that Google bought their god 900 years ago?"

Summary of message:

[r_jensen11]

All your base are belong to us

Wow

[paranode]

They are just loaded with political statements under 'anger', kind of funny. Lots of kiddie speak about Bush, North Korea, Iraq, anarchy, etc. Quite entertaining.

You know it's going to happen.

[monkeypoo]

This sounds like a fun idea until you realize that someone is going to submit goatsex. I can only imagine the aliens reaction to this.

Re:You know it's going to happen.

[Gleng]

I can only imagine the aliens reaction to this.

"He's wearing a wedding ring!"

Re:You know it's going to happen.

[geekoid]

Alien: "Hey look, we can impregnate the "males" too!"

Re:You know it's going to happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

Alien thought, "Hmmm, looks like a great place for a probe."

Re:You know it's going to happen.

[nametaken]

"This sounds like a fun idea until you realize that someone is going to submit goatsex. I can only imagine the aliens reaction to this."

Hopefully it will be interpreted like this: "Please, here is a detailed image of our bowels, now stop probing the human anus."

Re:You know it's going to happen.

[nizo]

Or even worse: "Look how stretchy they are; time to add more instrumentation to our probes"

It takes an artist do do some real bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh well, I hope they don't pay the guy much.

Re:It takes an artist do do some real bullshit

[ackthpt]

Oh well, I hope they don't pay the guy much.

Perhaps they should also have contracted Christo to wrap the swathe the pyramid in lemon vinyl.

Fine, but for God's sake

[Phoenix666]

DON'T forget the last episode of 'Single Female Lawyer.'

Re:Fine, but for God's sake

[Anonymous Coward]

Just don't spill anything on the transmitter

Re:Fine, but for God's sake

[Daemonstar]

This could be what the brain spawn were waiting on all along!

Here's a Better Title...

[Anonymous Coward]

Time Capsule? Can You Say Yahoo!?

digital time capsule?

[192939495969798999]

Yeah, because there's evidence in that pyramid that the aliens who built it used digital communication also...
Maybe it would be easier to communicate, albeit more expensive, if we shot up a big rock with stuff written on it, say maybe 10 rules that we consider important? I can't imagine that would be misinterpreted somehow by an early desert people on another planet.

Re:digital time capsule?

[MS-06FZ]

Better make it 15, in case they drop 'em.

Re:digital time capsule?

[rodericj]

I don't think the mods caught what you were saying. That was funny. Both of the above posts.

Re:digital time capsule?

[trupoet]

Might as well use the hidden ship with the gou'ld hand device and send the time capsule in that =)

Pre-emptive strike

[Red Flayer]

After browsing through some of the pictures posted, I would hope extraterrestrial life would be more hesitant to exterminate us -- if not for anything else than curiosity.

Hiroshima, famine in post-colonial Africa, the Killing Fields, the Trail of Tears... you get where I'm going with this? Is that stuff being included?

With any foresight, they'll go Vogon on our asses.

Though, perhaps if we can get them to hold off for a bit, we'll be in better position to take advantage of their technology and separate them from their resources.

Re:Pre-emptive strike

[geekoid]

sigh.

The human race has also don't some wonderfull things.

There reaction depends soly on their nature. Hopefully it's benevolent.
If it is hostile, then as our last act, I hope we put something long lasting on the moon that tells the next race about our folly.
Or even a very large orbit around the sun. Maybe attached to the Halley's Comet so we can nhide it from the incoming hostil aliens.

Of course, the odds of there being aliens, that can travel through space in a reasonable time, and stumbly upon this message is very, very, very low. about 1/Googol

Re:Pre-emptive strike

[Red Flayer]

Of course, the odds of there being aliens, that can travel through space in a reasonable time, and stumbly upon this message is very, very, very low. about 1/Googol

Well, I was partly being sarcastic, but I wonder if the 'time capsule' will indeed capture the worst as well as the best of what the human race has to offer.

If so, I think this could be a neat project not just for the slim chance of an alien race receiving it, deciphering it, and understanding it, but also for humankind to recognize what we are. Kind of like a massive introspection that can help us transcend our violent and uncaring ways.

Oh wait, it appears that some optimism has crept into my usual cynicism, excuse me while I go watch the news for a few minutes to recover :)

Re:Pre-emptive strike

[geekoid]

Good news! Most people care, and are not violent.

there is not best or worse the human race has to offer. Only the human race.

in other words...

[brunascle]

yahoo made a real-life /dev/null

"Hey everybody, throw your digital crap in here!"

Not gonna work, skippy....

[Pharmboy]

The first line says it all: "Yahoo is compiling a time capsule (Flash required)."

With our luck, aliens will be using Amiga OS or DOS and never see it. ;)

Re:Not gonna work, skippy....

[Rob T Firefly]

No, aliens use MacOS.

WiFi Spam

[Peter Trepan]

After browsing through some of the pictures posted, I would hope extraterrestrial life would be more hesitant to exterminate us -- if not for anything else than curiosity.

Lord Emperor, the Imperial Armada has exterminated the last of the hydrogen-band spammers. At last we can enjoy a reliable communication infrastruc... wait a minute, WTF is this coming from ZZ9 Plural Z-Alpha!?

Sell copies of it.

[BigGar']

From the article I highly doubt this 'time capsule' will reach anyone, but it is a neat idea.

Why not sell copies of the "capsule" for a few bucks. It would be kind of neat. Copyrighted material might be a problem I guess, but I'm sure there'd be ways to work with that.

Yes, the protocol is universal

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Someone at yahoo misunderstood the context when they heard that "TCP/IP protocol is univesally adopted everyone supports them". Yahoo, please sit down, or you might hurt yourself. Those real Klingons and Vulcans and Deltans are not likely to "get" the communication protocol.

Re:Yes, the protocol is universal

[moco]

There was a poster from cisco once that showed a flying saucer and had the legend: "If they have a computer on board we can communicate with them". You mean it was false advertising?

Re:Yes, the protocol is universal

[geekoid]

probably, bnut a properly encoded signal could tell a race that can recieve it how to decode it.

Trivial, really.

Another proof of YHOO mental dilution?

[zitintheass]

Beaming nonsense into the void? It feels a little better to be a GOOG shareholder again.
No wonder their stock is dropping like a rock.
http://finance.google.com/finance?q=YHOO

Re:Another proof of YHOO mental dilution?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes a drop of a little more then a dollar! Catastrophe! Yahoo will go bankrupt! The world will end!

Who wants to be that it'll climb right back up there in a few days?

Re:Another proof of YHOO mental dilution?

[untree]

Wouldn't a fine-tuned sense of irony have used http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=yhoo

Why "Troll"?

[Moraelin]

The guy has a point. A laser beam pointed straight up will sweep at _incredible_ speed over any receptor situated a couple of tens of lightyears from here. Even if that civilization were looking this way at the right time, had receptors strong enough for the task, had the luck of not having the beam blinded by our or their sun's light (there's a reason we have trouble detecting even Jupiter sized planets by their reflected light, which is higher than this laser will send), etc, it's something that will sweep over their sensor in milliseconds. At most you can say "oh, there's a bleep of light", but not even "oh, it's modulated". Much less have time to figure out what's being sent or how to decompress it.

And speaking of which, ffs, who got the stupid idea of sending encoded images? How about something as simple as morse codes, or train of pulses whose count are the prime numbers or Fibonacci's numbers? That's something that any civilization with even elementary maths knowledge and a primitive telescope can figure out quickly. "Hey, this can't be natural!" By comparison, a short faint burst of noise (which is what an alien data format would look like to you too) is likely to be written off as noise or as some unknown one-off cosmical phenomenon.

All in all it _is_ a stupid publicity stunt, and nothing more.

Re:Why "Troll"?

[grumpyman]

Hmm... that prompts me to think if this idea is as stupid as SETI idea...

Re:Why "Troll"?

[danpsmith]

All in all it _is_ a stupid publicity stunt, and nothing more.

I'd argue that there is a possibility that it is more than a publicity stunt, but rather an overall attitude of not only American, but human sentiment in general.

Someone once answered the question about why people do the things they do in a way that makes sense, why we are so different from the other animals. "We know we die," she said, "and most of what we do is primarily motivated by this knowledge. I believe that honestly comes into play here. Because we know we all die, we have to come up with some way of extending our longevity and our mark on the universe, because we feel we "live on" through this. This Yahoo! stunt, as ridiculous and publicity stuntish this all feels, I believe, is just keeping with this trend.

People seriously need to realize that yes, you are in fact a "mere mortal" and a tiny dot zit on the face of a small planet in a small galaxy of the universe and that yes, you probably aren't the most significant, or at least the only significant thing to happen to the universe and that yes, someday you will die and through the wonder of decay all traces of you and your loved ones will vanish.

People point to history, art, etc. to try to escape these facts. William Shakespeare still lives on, they say. We'll see what use his plays are in a million years. =P

In my honest opinion it is for this reason that we should probably stop kidding ourselves with stunts like this and except the inevitable truth, trying to have a bit of fun and stop being so serious about our worth. Especially trying to beam interplanetary messages from pyramids of ancient civilizations. Am I the only one that first entertained the thought of reading this as "this must be a joke, nobody is that stupid"? Seriously childish.

Re:Why "Troll"?

[geekoid]

Even if it was beemed with are spin taken into account, it still has all thr other spins to account for.

OTOH, a race capable of picking up sucj=h a weak signal might also know to look arounf the initals 'blip' and look for more blips. 5 blips and you ca calcualt how the signal mover and back track it to the sourse.

Sure, it's a stunt, and while it isn't likely to happen, it's fun to think about.

encoded images have a patterns. Of course the signal itself can have the method to decode the signal 'embedded'

Re:Why "Troll"?

[Anonymous Coward]

IANAA(lien), but I'd quicker beleive an alien society could share visual or audio abilities with us than lingual ones. Decoding images seems more reasonable than having to learn morse code AND the language it is in.

Re:Why "Troll"?

[famikon]

[troll]

Dude, were you drunk when you wrote this or are your fingers the size of bratwursts?

[/troll]

Re:Why "Troll"?

[gbjbaanb]

any civilization with even elementary maths knowledge and a primitive telescope can figure out quickly. "Hey, this can't be natural!"

They're going to send some internet porn out there? You'd have thought they'd send something a little more cultural. :-)

Re:Why "Troll"?

[Nutria]

Hmm... that prompts me to think if this idea is as stupid as SETI idea...

Praise Darwin that I'm not the only person who thinks that SETI is a totally, inanely bolloxed waste of electricty, CPU & radio antennae.

Re:Why "Troll"?

[Crunchie Frog]

Well regardless iof whether SETI is a good idea or not, it is different as they are searching for radio signals, not laser signals, and so wont have the narrow beam problem implied in GPs post.

So, what if we send along a picture of...

[88NoSoup4U88]

I wonder if a picture of Goatse will be making the timecapsule: How vulgar it is, it -does- reflect human nature... or at least that what is displayed on the Net.

And if it -does- make the timecapsule, and somehow this message reaches aliens; Would they assume we're very open to their supposed anal probing?

Questions... Questions... Questions...

Re:So, what if we send along a picture of...

[jo42]

ET will either be extremely fearful of goatse or immediately dispatch a war fleet to destroy the home of goatse...

this is a bad idea - where the Teotihuacan went

[Wizzerd911]

Oh great, Yahoo is doing it. That means I bet they won't be able to resist adding some ads into the "transmission" that they're sending, and I use that word loosely. You never know if those aliens want to meet sexy singles.

Archaeologists say a culture centred in Teotihuacan, known as the City of the Gods, dominated Mesoamerica for hundreds of years during the first millennium. It is unclear what led to the society's collapse.

hmmm, maybe they built a giant laser and beamed annoying ads into space so aliens came and obliterated everyone.

Oh, what's the point?

[MrPerfekt]

They'll just dig it up and open it long before they're scheduled to...

Re:Oh, what's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, it should hold up at least as long at the Crypt of Civilization time capsule at Oglethorpe University. That time capsule is scheduled to be opened in the year 8113.

Whats with the hubris?

[geekoid]

How come everytime a "sending something into space" people assume that huimans are wierd? Or more violent then aliens? or less kind?

I have a feeling life out there might see us and go "No wonder they can't travel through space , look how nice they are!"

Overheard in a spacecraft orbiding Earth...

[inviolet]

Green bug-eyed monster #1: "Listen to this transmission! Do you believe this?!"
Green bug-eyed monster #2: "WTF?"
Green bug-eyed monster #1: "This is one f***ed-up species!"
Green bug-eyed monster #2: "Word."
Green bug-eyed monster #1: "I say we blast off, and nuke the site from orbit."
Green bug-eyed monster #2: "It's the only way to be sure."

Re:Overheard in a spacecraft orbiding Earth...

[bohemian72]

Green bug-eyed monster #1: 'Sombody just shot us, dog!'
Green bug-eyed monster #2: 'WTF?'
Green bug-eyed monster #1: 'Oh wait. Get this it's a "laserrrr!"'
Green bug-eyed monster #2: 'No f***in' way!'
Green bug-eyed monster #1: 'Hang on, I'll crank up the Floyd!'
Green bug-eyed monster #2: 'Groovy.'

Interesting distribution

[Incongruity]

(at the moment) Love - 273 items Beauty - 119 items Fun - 100 items You - 99 items Hope - 98 items Faith - 59 items Now - 58 items Past - 47 items Sorrow - 28 items Anger - 24 items --- Kinda makes me like humanity a bit more.

Re:Interesting distribution

[Anonymous Coward]

(better formatting)
Love - 273 items
Beauty - 119 items
Fun - 100 items
You - 99 items
Hope - 98 items
Faith - 59 items
Now - 58 items
Past - 47 items
Sorrow - 28 items
Anger - 24 items

Re:Interesting distribution

[Anonymous Coward]

(at the moment) Love - 273 items Beauty - 119 items Fun - 100 items You - 99 items Hope - 98 items Faith - 59 items Now - 58 items Past - 47 items Sorrow - 28 items Anger - 24 items --- Kinda makes me like humanity a bit more.

I did a browse of the Love items... one of them was Capt. Picard!!!
I'm sure aliens will think of us as "That nerd planet" and give the intergalactic version of a wedgie.

Re:Interesting distribution

[youngerpants]

I couldn't agree more; if we send a Kirk image however, we'll gain intergalactic respect.

Re:Interesting distribution

[Incongruity]

Not to mention cheap flights and hotel rooms!

Re:Interesting distribution

[ptbarnett]

if we send a Kirk image however, we'll gain intergalactic respect.

http://www.khaaan.com/

Guess the ISS needs more porn...

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess this is clever way for NASA to beam the Internal Space Station new porn. Yahoo will be encrypting porn into their video feeds and then the ISS will decode it. The ISS people already used up all of their other stuff. This is the true cost of prolonged missions in space.

If it were a real time capsule

[Anonymous Coward]

They'd find something to bounce it off of x light years away, then pick up the signal in 2(x) years. I'm not saying it would be easy, but at least it would be a real time capsule effort.

text, images, video and sounds that reflect humans

[blindd0t]

So basically they're beaming up decades of porn into space?

Send It To Ourselves

[cybrpnk2]

Something like this was proposed in the David Gerrold novels of his Dingilliad series. The sum total of human knowledge was constantly being shot around the solar system on a laser beam that bounced off of various retroreflectors on the different planets. If you waited some finite amount of time (an hour or so) for the next pass of Item X, anything you wanted could be siphoned off of the stream by setting up a telescope receiver and picking up part of the "spillover" laser beam that hit your colony location but missed the retroreflector. This dynamic "storage medium" was used at the time of the story instead of a "static medium" like physically immobile hard drives or memory chips.

As I recall, Gerrold presented some mumbo-jumbo that said the storage capacity of such an arrangement - a billions-of-miles-long laser beam - was truly enormous. Sounded like a pretty good idea. Anybody think it would really work - and better yet, be practical?

Re:Send It To Ourselves

[TaoPhoenix]

Is this a way to get around the RIAA?

"I downloaded it off of the Alien Broadcast"

Re:Send It To Ourselves

[richdun]

Interesting for sure. My main worry would be about signal degradation -reflection is never perfect, so there would always be some loss.

Re:Send It To Ourselves

[Anonymous Coward]

Google around for optical delay line memory or mercury delay lines. A number of people have written on the subject of suchlike "transient" storage mediums (media?).

Re:Send It To Ourselves

[AeroIllini]

As I recall, Gerrold presented some mumbo-jumbo that said the storage capacity of such an arrangement - a billions-of-miles-long laser beam - was truly enormous. Sounded like a pretty good idea. Anybody think it would really work - and better yet, be practical?

It does sound like an intriguing idea. Some of my thoughts on the subject:

In order to maintain a constant signal strength, each receiver/transmitter would need to "boost" the light signal, presumably by adding a beam of light of its own. The spillover light you mention is a result of the focus angle, and if some of it is not reflected, then the light signal degrades with each station. Also, reflection itself is lossy; some light is always absorbed by the mirror. The whole system would dim over time unless you boosted it back up periodically.

In order to boost the signal, you would probably need to have the signal not be reflected, but rather collected, processed, and retransmitted. Since nothing travels faster than light (according to Einstein, and I hear he was pretty good at math), it would be impossible to collect a signal, interpret it, and send an identical signal in the time it takes to reflect. So the boost signals would be slightly behind the source signals, resulting in some phasing of the signal over time. The whole thing would "blur." That means we're left not with reflection, but with collection and retransmission. There would be a slight delay, but it would work like the 7-second delay built into radio stations: if it's constant, no one notices. The other alternative would be to place enough mirrors between the reception mirror/signal collector and the transmission mirror/signal booster to keep the timing of the signals lined up. But the signal would still need to be collected and retransmitted, perhaps through a partially-silvered mirror at the outgoing end. All this would require that each station be powered. Even if you used the incoming light to power the system (and did no reflection at all, simply collect light -> generate power -> read signal during generation using generated power -> retransmit using generated power), the act of collection/retransmission, and the spillover, will result in a negative net power generation, and power would need to be supplied. This could probably be taken care of with solar cells or something, but that brings us to the question of...

Maintenance. The system you're talking about, with one giant ring of retransmission stations, allows for a single point of failure, which would result in loss of data. This is unacceptable. Instead, I would propose building each station so that redundancy is built in; there would actually be several rings transmitting identical data in parallel. With proper "junction" stations, one could even build a striping system that would ensure that even if several receivers/transmitters went down, no data would be lost.

However, if this were being accomplished in a solar system, it would have to be bounced off satellites in a polar orbit around the sun, to avoid the situations where the signal would need to travel close to the sun and receive interference. A better system than bouncing just between planets would be to have the planets be just stops on the loop, with the majority of stations as satellites in very eccentric orbits around the sun (all the solar systems we know of so far have all the planets basically in a single plane of orbits). The planet stations themselves, of course, would be satellites in orbit around those planets to avoid all the nastiness with transmitting through atmosphere.

Additionally, the stations themselves would need to be self-correcting for perturbations in orbits and pointing angles. This can't be accomplished by a central server or even by communication between the satellites, since that communication would take place at the speed of light, and misalignment would result in loss of data. Each station would have to be semi-intelligent about orbit perturbations and alignments.

Re:Send It To Ourselves

[SamSim]

Assuming that a retroreflector is something which amplifies the signal (otherwise it fades quite fast), the maximum number of bits you could store is equal to the frequency of the signal in hertz multiplied by the total round trip time of the signal in seconds. If we call that a 75THz signal (maximum of visible light) and a 24-hour round trip around the whole solar system, that's about 10^20 bits, or ~1000 petabytes? Not bad.

I collect donations

[suv4x4]

I collect donations, you guys. Here's my plan:

1. Collect massive quantities of information
2. Record them into expensive as hell piece of hardware
3. Throw it out in space and lose it forever

I swear it makes a hell of a sense!

Honestly. Let's see what we have here to communicate with unknown being from outer space. No really, let's ignore that those artifacts will never really hit anything remotely alive out there (hey the Universe is really huge you know? And most of it is just empty space).

We can try with light (video, images?), sounds, shapes, materials. Of course there's no guarantee that our space friends wil have ears or eyes or if they do, they'll use the same range or see the same patterns. They may also be too small or too big to realize what the hell hit 'em.

And no, beaming NTSC into space is not helping either.

But let's do it, if it helps us build brand loyalty here! Oh, did I mention I've a search engine. yadoodle.com... or something like that.

Re:I collect donations

[geekoid]

NTSC is a regular pattern, with sidebands.

"3. Throw it out in space and lose it forever"
If I submit something, it is not lost forever. A copy is lost forever, but big whoop.

If they are to small, then they're not sentiant. So they are not the target demographic.(see, I recognize marketing when I see it!)

Re:I collect donations

[suv4x4]

If they are to small, then they're not sentiant.

Only goes to show how limited our knowledge is. You claim how big a sentient creature may be only because the sentient creatures you see around you are around a specific size.

Depending on environment, gravity and so on, you might end up with quite a different ecosystem.

Is it not dangerous?

[Max_W]

I mean we live quietly on Earth, no problems.

Why to beam out voluntarily any info about ourselves? How do we know that those extraterrestrials will not use this info against us?

I would suggest that we listen more carefully instead to the outside world and try to understand what is out there.

Re:Is it not dangerous?

[patrixmyth]

I, for one, welcome our dangerous yahoo spam-browsing alien overlords. I have complete trust in their honesty, and know that only they will be able to assist me in liberating my late father's hidden fortune from Nigeria.

Re:Is it not dangerous?

[rts008]

You have a point there.

I can see it now:
1.Images and music files end up on alien P2P network- RIAA and MPAA go batshit, sue aliens, start intergalactic war- ALL of them against Earth.
2. Romulus, not having latest version of flashplayer (they are running Romulinix), get paranoid that it is secret invasion plans, makes first strike.
3. The Vulcans- instead of seeing Cochran's warp signiture get spammed with OMGZ!!!!11!PINK PONIES and Goatse.cx, turn tail and first contact is instead by 1 and 2 above.
4. The G'ould, seeing something going on at one of there pyramids tune in...Apophis gets an eyeful of Tubgirl, goes yellow-eyed, and orders the total destruction of Earth- again.

Maybe we should just stick to the "beaming" of the pinnacle of our science and technology out there- then they can see that we are still too limited to be a threat, too stupid to be a resource, and let us be.
If we include religion, philosophy, and our culture, we are in deep shite!

Send the full IRS Code.

[lrohrer]

Someone should send the full IRS Code complete with all of the case law. They will annaliate us for sure!

I forget the author I borrowed that from...

Re:Send the full IRS Code.

[ricree]

Someone should send the full IRS Code complete with all of the case law.

That's all well and good, but don't forget that we need to choose something that can be broadcast in a finite length of time.

Someone submit Goatse!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Show those alien's how strange humans are!

Beam back to earth?

[BytePusher]

I've often wondered if there are gravity lenses, what about gravity mirrors? With the proper calculations and precision I imagine one could send a beam of light from Earth to Earth and it would be a real time capsule. I imagine using this black hole would be our best shot. Send the light just close enough that it bends around the black hole and comes directly back to us... then wait however many light-years away it is times two. The thing I'm wondering is if the information would be distorted beyond recognition or if anyone would be listening once it came. Could an earth based telescope with a high powered laser be used in reverse for this?

Re:Beam back to earth?

[BytePusher]

This black hole: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/1 0/1626229

Aliens... Flash... Windows

[Ice Wewe]

Yahoo is compiling a time capsule (Flash required).

...And we'll include a link where the aliens can go to download the latest version of flash (Windows required).

Flash required?

[GroeFaZ]

Let's hope those communist aliens don't ALL run Linux or they'll be out of luck.

Craigslist

[sugarmotor]

Craigslist did this a while ago. There was a connection to an ebay auction. Jim Buckmaster (craigslist ceo) won the auction. (see http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=1552 ) The second time around this is not that funny is it? Or did Yahoo add something substantial?

Stephan

oblig

[christus_ae]

I wonder if the extra-terrestrial beings will reconsider their decision to not annihilate us when they hear something along the lines of "YOU'RE THE MAN NOW DOG...NEDM!"

Sir. We're receiving a transmission!

[Chas]

[Captain Kirk] So Ensign Shortskirt, what was that transmission?

[Ensign Shortskirt] It took a little while to reconstruct the message, but it appears, from the predominance of nude photos, to be an invitation for sex...

[Captain Kirk] Woohoo! Plot a course to the source!

[Ensign Shortskirt] Uhm. Sir, the origin point is Earth, as of about four hundred years ago...

[Captain Kirk] DAMN...IT...I...NEED...TO...GET...LAID!

[Ensign Shortskirt] Your cabin or mine sir?

[Captain Kirk] Mine. Five minutes. Bring friends...

Nice idea, but...

[einnar2000]

.. by opening it to contributors, you know any alien that gets it is going to be flooded by popup ads.

They'll rush right over here and exterminate us soooooo fast.....

Good thing it's not in India...

[darthservo]

Otherwise Yahoo would have to pay a 12.5% tax on sending this message via light.

Funny one I saw

[Archangel Michael]

Windows BSOD.

This must be Slashdot...

[killjoy966]

This project's a dupe! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record

HAHA

[Anonymous Coward]

Hilarious! Moses... Ten Commandments... too much! Where is your next performance?

User generated content

[SeaFox]

From the article: 'Starting on Tuesday, enthusiasts from around the world will have a chance to submit text, images, video and sounds that reflect human nature to be included in the message.'

It's like MySpace... In spaaaaaaace!

Speling Mistaeks

[rueger]

After a quick sampling of the wisdom on the site...

You know, maybe it's just me, but if I was composing a message that would be sent out to the Universe, available to entities on billions upon billions of worlds, I would at least run a spellcheck before hitting "Submit."

Special guest star

[Rob T Firefly]

Yahoo worked with Internet artist Jonathan Harris on this project.

You bubble-headed booby! Oh, the pain...

DRM?

[scottsk]

The DRM implications of beaming stuff into space are enormous. Will the aliens have the right media player and license? What if the DRM expires before the beam is received? If teens can't pay for MP3s on Earth, how will we collect money from aliens? What happens if I accidentally contribute copyrighted music - will the RIAA sue the aliens? What if the LCD screen on the time capsule cracks?

Re:DRM?

[Jehosephat2k]

What about the wrath the aliens RIAA (RIA-Aliens) will have on us once alien-kids they start proliferating Britney Spears throughout the universe?

Extermination

[keitosama]

More hesitant to exterminate us? One of the first pictures I saw on there was the O RLY owl, so maybe we'll trick them into thinking there's no intelligent life here, and keep away for that reason.

Detectability?

[Mr EdgEy]

If you saw a short flash of light outside the window, even if you were curious enough... it's too late now, it's gone. How can we expect 'them' to be monitoring this?

I can submit anything?

[Anonymous Coward]

Starting on Tuesday, enthusiasts from around the world will have a chance to submit text, images, video and sounds that reflect human nature to be included in the message.

Unless the submitted material is from YouTube... then never mind.

Flash required

[dracvl]

"Yahoo is compiling a time capsule (Flash required)."

I'm pretty sure any intelligent race out there is blocking the Flash plug-in.

Goatse in space

[roman_mir]

I think a world could be destroyed for sending out an image like that. Let's just hope that Yahoo is incompetent enough and will not compensate for the Earth's rotations.

Cynical

[COMON$]

Outside of the pity I feel for your life. A couple comments.

Being that your version of life will end, never to be seen again, is it just not worth it to dream? Should Columbus never have used selfish motive? Or Magellan? Each had a 1 in a million shot by earthly standards at the time. After all it doesnt matter in the scope of things, they should have just stayed at home and drank themselves to oblivion in the pub.

What about the worlds largest cookie, absolutely absurd, but fun to do anyway.

It is how we live today that matters, if I want to try to beam a nice message into space, and make a few bucks along the way so what? What if in the meantime people browse through the message here and see that earth is not actually that bad of a place at all. That our fighting and bickering and cynicsm are useless in the scope of things.?

In your cynicism you blot out hope, dreams, and just plain silliness just for the hell of it.

Re:Cynical

[danpsmith]

In your cynicism you blot out hope, dreams, and just plain silliness just for the hell of it.

You act as if acknowledging these truths makes you somehow want to sit in a corner and cry about it. Perhaps that is how most people feel. I find these truths to be liberating. If nothing you do ever really matters to anyone except yourself it gives you the freedom to do the things you really want to do. Now maybe for most people that's murdering and pillaging and whatever, but for most normal people it is simply things they put off on a daily basis because they are afraid they aren't good enough or something enough.

Magellan and Columbus might have been selfish, yes, but who cares if they were. If they really enjoyed traveling the seas, if it made them feel like they were a big hero man then great. I just wish people wouldn't fool themselves into thinking it signifies something.

Maybe to you enjoying yourself would be sitting in a pub drinking yourself stupid. To be honest, as someone who has done that on occasion I find more constructive activities to be funner, for me, personally. So you might say that knowing these things doesn't actually have an overall effect on what you are doing, but why you are doing it. If your life is a pile of obligations and responsibilities and you see it as attaining some goal or something, forever pushing off happiness for some kind of awesome prize at the pearly gates or something, I'd argue that you are deluding yourself. And people that behave this way are more often the pyschos and lunatics that end up killing innocent people and overall repressing themselves until the world sucks to live in. You don't have to feel you are immortal to do what you enjoy, and what you enjoy doesn't have to be destructive. For most people it isn't. However, you can dream all you want but the remarks I've made are true. To not deal with them is to not deal with reality.

Re:Cynical

[BalanceOfJudgement]

However, you can dream all you want but the remarks I've made are true. To not deal with them is to not deal with reality.

Very few people ever actually deal with reality. It's too harsh.

I have long since come to the conclusion that in some part of most humans' minds, this knowledge MUST be blocked out - to KNOW that in the end, everything that we will ever know or ever dream will fall to dust, would paralyze and immobilize most people. Merely getting through a single day requires not thinking about the long-term meaning (or lack thereof) of that time spent.

This is evidenced by how hard people fight against the idea that our existence truly has no existential meaning beyond that which we assign it - it is an unbearable idea to most. This is why so many need to believe in an external God that gives our existence meaning.

But I, like you, have always found that knowledge liberating. The dawning of that understanding freed me from my fear of failure, because I realized that the world truly is what we make of it - and what we make of it is all that can ever possibly matter to us. There is no objective meaning to our lives - but that just means we're free to define our own meaning, and that has possibilities beyond any infinity we can imagine.

Now I can do anything I choose to do, without fear, without even a second thought. Sometimes that means I have to think about my morality and ethics more than most, but I find that to be a more fulfilling experience than letting them be whatever my surroundings made them.

There's a saying I absolutely love, from Babylon 5, which embodies these ideas.. apologies if you don't like the show but I believe the quote is apt:

Lorien: "We were born naturally immortal."
Ivanova: "That's impossible. Everything dies."
Lorien: "Yes.. now. Once, we were kept in balance by birth rate. Few of us ever died, so few of us were ever born.

Then, I think the universe decided that to appreciate life - for there to be change, or growth - life had to be short.

To live on, as we have, is to leave behind joy, and love, and companionship - because we know it to be transitory. Of the moment. We know it will turn.. to ash.

Only those whose lives are brief can imagine that love is immortal.

You should embrace that remarkable illusion. It may be the greatest gift your race has ever received."

Re:Cynical

[COMON$]

I think we understand each other well. Cant disagree with you, I was just pointing out that our lives are our own. What we wish to do with them us up to us. Would I be a better person for acknowledging my insifigance? I guess that would depend on whether or not it would bring happiness. Should I benefit society? Or just myself, what if, in bettering society I lead a fulfilling life? What if my dream is to send a nonsense capsul into space? In my opininon, children have it right in life. We dont need to understand the atom to enjoy the benefits of them. I dont need to know how or whys to life to live a fulfilling existance.

Of course all of this "life is insignificant" stuff becomes moot, if we turn out to be eternal beings.

From me to you

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear aliens,
    Attached is a little program for inclusion in our capsule to you.

#include

int main(){
      printf("Hello world!");
      return 0;
}

Communicating math to an alien (was Re: Why "Troll

[ortholattice]

I agree this idea is stupid. Even more annoying to me, though, are the categories they are asking for - love, hope, anger, sorrow, beauty, etc. - with no category for scientific information. I would think that 99% would be meaningless to an alien species. If I intercepted an alien transmission, the first thing I'd wonder is what new knowledge it encodes. If they had their Yahoo equivalent sending out their version of this, scientists on earth might spend decades or centuries struggling to decipher the meaning in some pattern detected in their alien transmission. How disappointing it would be if it actually was nothing more than an alien analogue of "music", that meant nothing at all outside of the context of some peculiar wiring of the alien brain that responds to that pattern.

It would be nice if they had a category for math and science, starting with the basics of math and building up. That is an interesting encoding problem in itself, to communicate that information independent of human context. For a start, a sequence of prime numbers might provide a clue that there is mathematical content in the information. Then, mathematics starting from axioms could be transmitted, (idealistically) building up to the general significant areas of modern mathematics. Imagine the reverse: supposed we received an alien transmission encoding proofs of outstanding Millenium prizes (P=NP, etc.) and much, much more. How could the alien communicate it to us, given that the alien would have zero knowledge of anything human?

I don't know the best format for presenting mathematical knowledge starting from a void, but the simplest language I know of that can encode all of modern mathematics directly along with rigorous proofs, is probably metamath. A 300-line program can verify its proofs (unlike about 3000 lines for other proof languages). I believe an intelligent human looking at its symbol strings in isolation, starting from the beginning, could probably figure out the encoding eventually, and presumably an intelligent alien could too. I think this would even be the case if you obfuscated all of its tokens with meaningless symbols - that is an important test. If I had a choice of one thing to transmit, it might be metamath's set theory database, probably with the human comments stripped out. (There are simpler universal languages such as SK combinatory logic, but they are not practical for expressing deep math theorems beyond a certain point.)

Similarly, it would be interesting to try to communicate physics from the ground up, starting with the axioms for what we know, and even eventually building up to chemistry and even biology. That might be a daunting and hopeless task, I don't know, but the problem of how to encode it is intriguing. Presumably math would come first, and physics would add its axioms and build on it. Or something like that.

Let's beat yahoo...

[PermanentMarker]

Well somewhere a distant laser who the f*ck is gonna see that ?. Beat them and use your own flash light, or laserpoiner. Take a book of morse code and put into space your own text. Silly??? No not so silly think about 100 years ago we could hardly see pluto These day we try to see planets rotating distant stars. Imagine a 1000 year more advanced species what they could see so repeat after me in morsecode L u n a t i c :))

We're made of meat

[kabdib]

I would definitely include this classic by Terry Bisson.

http://www.terrybisson.com/meat.html/

"Omigod. So what does this meat have in mind?"

"First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the Universe, contact other sentiences, swap ideas and information. The usual."

"We're supposed to talk to meat."

Think further than the surface

[Moraelin]

IANAA(lien), but I'd quicker beleive an alien society could share visual or audio abilities with us than lingual ones. Decoding images seems more reasonable than having to learn morse code AND the language it is in.

If you gave an alien a photo, yes. But if you give them a signal encoded with some proprietary lossy compression? Heh.

The problem isn't the photo. The problem is that you get a stream of 1 and 0 and you have to figure how the fuck to even make heads or tails out of it. Before you'd get a photo to use your alien intelligence on, you'd have to start from scratch in, basically, cracking the encryption. Because that's what a JPEG is to someone who never heard of the format specs: as good as encrypted.

And you don't even have any known cleartext to aid you in breaking that code. What are those 1s and 0s trying to tell you? When you should stop trying new things on that stream? When you get a text? A picture? How do you even know what a realistic alien picture looks like, to know you've cracked the format? Is it in RGB, or maybe BRG and their sky is green like on Venus? How do you even know it's RGB and not CMY? Or what if that civilization sees in IR-Y-B like the common house cat? Your channels mistaken to be _their_ primary colours would yield a weird picture in which a lot of things (e.g., a rose or someone with a sunburn) appear to be literally red-hot. Did you even figure out right which fields are the width and height? Did you even get the header or chunk start in that millisecond slice of it, or are you working with some piece in the middle that relies on info you missed? Etc.

It's a monumental task to start from such a stream and even reconstruct the picture. Sure, you may relate better to visual stuff, but just getting that visual stuff back from the stream fragment is a monumental task that makes cracking the Enigma code look like a kindergarten exercise.

That's why I said send the prime numbers instead. Any civilization can count beeps. There is no advanced maths and data processing needed to decode that. Any average guy looking at that signal can go, "heey, the pulses come in groups of 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13... Jesus F. Christ, that's the prime numbers!"

You can send them the images later, after you get their answer. But the first step should be to make damn sure that it's a no-brainer to recognize the signal, what it is, and that it can't just be cosmic noise.

Sorry, that's not even close

[Moraelin]

No. Just no. See, the world is full of idiots doing something stupid and pointless. Those are a dime a dozen, and comparing them to people like Columbus or Magellan is just insulting to the latter category. The ones who changed history, e.g., Columbus or Magellan, weren't retards doing publicity stunts, they were people who put some solid thought into what they were trying to do.

E.g., Columbus's calculations might have been wrong, but he started from solid evidence that the Earth must be round. The idea that travelling West can get you somewhere in the East was sound. If there hadn't been this unknown continent in the way, he would have actually arrived in Asia as he planned.

E.g., Magellan actually did even better. He set a goal, put some solid thought into it, and actually achieved it.

Do you understand? That's the difference between those and Yahoo's publicity stunt. In the comparison to Columbus and Magellan, Yahoo comes out just about comparable to the village idiot running around with pencils up its nose. Sure, it gets some attention and maybe even some money, but comparable to Columbus and Magellan it ain't.

That is, assuming Hanlon's Razor applies. ("Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.") But there's also a chance that it's just plain old dishonest, and they don't actually give a shit about actually achieving anything except publicity. I.e., pretty much as ic Columbus had just stirred up a frenzy, got some money out of it, then went and got drunk in France with that money. Without even giving much of a damn about actually reaching the Indies. Hey, he did his publicity stunt, got his money, the rest isn't his problem.

Re:Sorry, that's not even close

[Anonymous Coward]

Columbus's calculations might have been wrong, but he started from solid evidence that the Earth must be round. The idea that travelling West can get you somewhere in the East was sound. If there hadn't been this unknown continent in the way, he would have actually arrived in Asia as he planned.

Bzzzzt. Sorry, wrong, thank you for playing. If the Americas weren't in the way, Columbus et al. would have been up shit creek without a paddle. They did not have the supplies (let alone the wherewithal) to make it all the way to Asia. That's leaving aside the obvious threat of a mutiny had they not sighted land when they did.

Re:Communicating math to an alien (was Re: Why "Tr

[Nutria]

Even more annoying to me, though, are the categories they are asking for - love, hope, anger, sorrow, beauty, etc. - with no category for scientific information.

Certainly you don't expect rational thought from an artist who wants to shoot a laser from the top of a Mexican pyramid?

It's been done before

[cowtamer]

Archaeologists say a culture centred in Teotihuacan, known as the City of the Gods, dominated Mesoamerica for hundreds of years during the first millennium. It is unclear what led to the society's collapse.

Clearly, the last time capsule they tried to beam into space!!

This will only attract the attention of the Jjaro

[slyborg]

And possibly piss off the Dreaming God....

Anybody think it would really work?

[patio11]

No. That is why it is called "science fiction".

in Soviet Russia...

[_randy_64]

...time capsules YOU!

Slashdot timecapule

[mahju]

Process:
1. Post information to slashdot.
2. The information is returned monthly as a dupe

What I would sent is a copy of Vista.

[master_p]

It would be a good way to keep alien invaders out. It would be like saying 'nothing to see here, move along'. If aliens see how primitive our computers are, they would definitely think again about visiting us.

I would have suggested DNF, but by the time it will be out, we will deliver the goods to the aliens ourselves.

Hey people dont believe this

[xtracto]

Yahoo has cancelled plans for a "time capsule" ceremony at pyramids in Mexico, citing concerns regarding possible damage to the ancient site.

"The position of INAH is that after evaluating all the technical and operational aspects, it would be very difficult to move forward with this endeavour," Yahoo said in a release.

"Therefore, we have decided to move the location of the event. For now, we are focused on collecting as many unique and interesting contributions as possible from around the globe."

INAH: Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia (National Institute of Antropology and History).

Yahoo cancels Mexican time capsule ceremony

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?NewsID=1057970

I saw a story about this

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw a story about a very similar idea, only the thing they beamed into space was a digitised copy of the entire human race, which was going to be wiped out in the next few minutes. The catch was, the guy who sent the signal KNEW nobody would ever receive it. He planned to stay behind (having escaped the cataclysm), develop an FTL drive, race ahead of the signal, build a receiver, pick up the signal again, beam it home and reconstruct the human race from the data.

Calling the Goa'uld

[Megajim]

Just when they forgot about us, we stick a laser on top of one of their old landing platforms. Sheesh.