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Tabula Rasa Promotion To Send Gamers' DNA to Space
Bridger tips news that NCSoft's Tabula Rasa, created in part by Richard Garriott, is running an unusual promotion right now. Garriott is going to the International Space Station on October 12th, and he'll take with him a digital record of the DNA of various players and celebrities. The basic plot of Tabula Rasa is that Earth was attacked and humans almost completely wiped out. Garriott's promotion is playing on that idea; the hard drive with the DNA data will be left in orbit "just in case" something happens to humanity on Earth. NCSoft has been running a variety of polls and contests to include further data about humans on the hard drive. The deadline for joining the project has recently been extended to September 29th.
They should send every last copy of the game into orbit and leave it there.
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
If anyone deserves a trip to the ISS, I guess the creator of the best RPG of all time (Ultima IV) probably does.
I thought the DNA promotion was a little silly until I saw his name associated with it. That guy has karma to burn for several more decades as far as I'm concerned.
I'm a big tall mofo.
I may be a gamer, but I keep myself wrapped in plastic wrap in a negative pressure room in a sterile bubble. I don't want my DNA to go to space because of three reasons:
1) the US government is doing secret cloning experiments on the ISS and they will make a clone army of hundreds/thousands of ME
2) The space aliens will take over the ISS and they will make a clone army of hundreds/thousands of ME
3) A solar flare will hit the ISS causing the DNA to spontaneously mutate and infect the astronauts causing them have lots of space sex and they will make a clone army of hundreds/thousands of ME
TDz.
Imagine that - a world populated solely by celebrities and hardcore gamers. A superior race of shallow procrastinators.
DNA molecules are fragile, and hard drives even more so.
The DNA data will be shredded by cosmic rays, and even if it wasn't, how exactly would that save the human race in case of an extinction level event.
Wait, what? Only their DNA? Damn
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
That might give you a body, but what you really want is the person: all the memes that s/he has would need to be recorded and suitably grafted in, even then what you get won't be much like the original.
OK: I'll admit that it is a fun idea, but that is about it.
1. They store the sequenced DNA digitally. Do we *know* we can rebuild a fully functioning creature from just that?
2. If we all died today the ISS would burn down in the atmosphere in only a few months due to atmospheric drag.
3. What kind of media is that anyways? Doesn't look like it's the type of thing that you could still read 1,000 years later.
You just got troll'd!
on a blue dress?
Humans are our DNA's elaborately evolved package to defend it from a hostile universe. Sending our DNA out into space undefended with its human package is simply surrendering without a fight.
--
make install -not war
While DNA can be used like a fingerprint to identify someone, I don't think it has ever been proven to be a sufficient definition to recreate man, or any other living creature. Ok, it's just a game, so I shouldn't be so serious, but even if it were possible, why would you want a future alien scientist to recreate you? Best case scenario is they have a human version of Jurassic Park, worst case is he needs a test subject. I won! I won! Doh!
This sounds great at first. But if it's in space, then aliens will get hold of it, clone me a hundred million times, arm all the mes to the teeth, and then invade.
It's okay if that happens with somebody else, but it would make me feel sort of guilty, being the template for the harbinger of extinction.
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
They must be anticipating the demise of the human race really soon. So far I've outlived every hard drive I've ever owned... and all of those weren't exposed to hard radiation.
On a more abstract level, I doubt you'd be able to reconstruct any living creature using its DNA only. From what I understand of biology (which is rather limited), the DNA itself only contains the blueprints for how to create proteins, but the how, when, and how much is controlled by RNA, which previously had been overlooked as "just a carrier molecule". To put it in computer terms, the DNA is the processor, while the RNA is the operating system. You'd have a tough time re-creating Linux/Windows/Mac OS X based solely on the circuit diagram of a processor.
Procrastination Man strikes again!
The ISS orbit isn't particularly high, so the hard drive's orbit would decay pretty quickly.
I'm not sure how quickly, but it'd within a few years.
Guess he's not to optimistic about humanity's survival chances...
Won't we need some female DNA to rebuild the population?
Planescape: Torment was the best CRPG of all time. Everybody else (Baldur's Gate, Fallout, KOTOR, etc.) is just competing for sloppy seconds.
Ultima IV was made in 1985. Comparing it to Baldur's Gate or anything else that was made in the last 10 years is laughable. Sure, Planescape Torment is one of the top 5 of all times, but Ultima IV is definitely #1.
y'all need to lighten up. It's a game promotion. A serious effort to preserve human DNA wouldn't be spearheaded by a space tourist.
Oh wait...this is Slashdot.
Carry on.
Asking for a 1:1 male to female ratio of bricks when building a house?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Personally I am just happy that some of the music of Bach is on the Voyager Golden Record, traveling off into the cosmos, and will in some small way survive even the heat death of our sun. That's _real_ immortality.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
...Send Gamers' DNA to Space
2010 A Sperm Odyssey
"My God, it's full of sperm!"
This gives new meaning to the term "blast off".
[All right, I'll shut up now.]
If humanity was extinct who would retrieve the hard drive? And what type of file system does it have?
isn't there already a problem with too much crap from earlier missions in orbit? do we really need another chunk of metal whizzing around for the next million years?
Tragic PR stunts should stay out of space.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
There's all the DNA you could ever need there.
Current technology to COMPLETELY sequence a single person's DNA is still way too expensive to be practical. It cost billions of dollars for the NIH and Craig Venter's company to sequence the first human (in 2000). (Guess who's DNA they used!) Even after eight internet years It probably is still in the millions of dollars, I don't think Mr Garriot is going to fork over that kind of cash. He's probably going to pay for some people's genetic PROFILE to be sequenced, enough for certain genetic diseases to be exposed. (I think you can get this done for about $1000). Then again, aliens could also use it to pick out the (un)lucky human from a extra-terrestrial police line up! Still there certainly wouldn't be enough information to recreate the human "from scratch" even assuming the technology was available.
However, he could at least bring up Craig Venter's publicly available DNA and if stored digitally I'm sure that it could be encoded very very redundantly so that even a huge number of cosmic ray hits wouldn't effect it. Consider Voyager, with 30 year old tech., still can run its old programs.
As for bringing up the real stuff, I'm not sure that the NASA/ESA and other ISS partners would appreciate him bringing up little vials of other people's DNA for storage. (Of course some contamination has always been unavoidable, humans are basically walking bags of bacteria). Would he just take some hair samples or bring up DNA in more purified form? (Actually the previous poster's 2010: A Sperm Odyssey wouldn't be bringing up complete copies of the person's DNA because during reproduction the sperm cells only have half of the man's genes...). He could however get someone's DNA and using PCR (polymerase chain reaction) make as much of it as he wants. Milky white fluid, looks just like sperm.
You people talking about how the hard drive won't survive and you can't generate actual genome information and so forth are missing the entire point of this exercise: extravagant and pointless marketing.
Richard Garriott is not trying to save the human race. His plans aren't that grand. Instead, he's trying to save a failing game franchise with a publicity stunt.
Besides which, even assuming this DNA was called upon someday to repopulate the earth... what would we have? A whole lot of catass MMORPG addicts incapable of attracting females and convincing them to copulate.
By definition of MMORPG players, the only females on board would be celebrities, who may prove a difficult challenge for the aforementioned bearers of catass.
I submit that this is perhaps not the recipe of success that earth needs in its most dire hour.
so the wifi on the ISS is for gaming? -- NCSoft is korean right?
No pussy for YOU!
http://www.pierretristam.com/Bobst/07/wf041307.htm
Instead of throwing money away at stupid promotions, why don't you put the money into the game and make it not suck so much?
Garriott can get fucked and everyone else involved needs a brain transplant.
Why not just put the thing on a planet, or one of the moons of Jupiter or Saturn? That should give it at least some protection, certainly more than it would have just orbiting around the Sun, and we would always know where to find it.
Another piece of space junk; I do, however, see an opportunity for gods must be crazy like moment where a hard drive falls out of the sky and hits a person, place or thing; or maybe someone does get the data, they follow the recipe hoping for something good, they get a few of us, realize their error and place the newly grown humans on a type M planet somewhere...
Unix, an obscure operating system developed by bored researchers in an attempt to get a better game playing experience.
... discover this hard drive in orbit. They read it, reproduce the DNA sequences and breed a race of gamer clones that will inevitably take over the universe.
Whatcouldpossiblygowrong?
Have gnu, will travel.
I agree with the previous commentor(s) who said they'd be much better off investing this money in improving the game instead.
Reagarding sending my DNA up into space:
1) Just the sequencing part of the promo sounds pretty cool, the sending to space part just stupid marketing crap
2) Sending the data up on a hard drive - WTF? Are we really using sneaker-net to get data to and from space now? Wouldn't ya think it be more effecient to maybe 'transmit' the data into space instead of bringing a fragile, heavy object with it on it up?
update-in today's MIT tech review they have a story about the first full sequences being available for $350K. So only the price of a dress (if you're Mrs. McCain ;).
They take my sperm and Angelina Jolie's egg, make a test tube baby, launch it into space.
Sign me up!