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

[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

[Flashbck]

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

I don't think this is possible

[Quaoar]

How are they going to build a tube that high?

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...

[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?"

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.

Fine, but for God's sake

[Phoenix666]

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

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.

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. ;)

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!?

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"?

[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.

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.

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

[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:Random one I clicked on

[Garabito]

another one:

Don't kill us. Thanks.

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...

Re:Random one I clicked on

[CopaceticOpus]

essential

42

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."

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).