Slashdot Mirror
Florida GoogleX Team Offers To Send Your DNA To the Moon For a Price
First time accepted submitter Udigs writes "You might have heard of the Google LunarX Prize. It's a competition where private, often non-profit organizations race to build a vehicle capable of completing a short mission on the moon. But one of the problems facing these private teams is the issue of raising money to make the trip. However, one Florida team is taking an interesting approach: they are offering to send your DNA to the moon for a price. For the inclined, they've started a kickstarter page."
However, one Florida team is taking an interesting approach: they are offering to send your DNA to the moon for a price.
It'll save the aliens gas money to come here and get it.
...circle jerk.
They tried this in the movies, and IT DIDN'T WORK!!!
Moon (2009 Movie with Sam Rockwell)
They pay me or I pay them?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
DNA samples will be stocked in shipping container and dumped into a volcano. $40/sample.
With mother-in-law attached.
For a much cheaper price i'll offer you the privilege to have your DNA sent to some other place just as useless.
While I understand that weight is key, 10k seemed a little high for the DNA sample. A single cell is sufficient to "get your DNA on the moon". I would think that a lower cost would result in many more people taking that option and increased financial contributions.
Granted, having to farm out the DNA collection and storage process is eating up money that isn't going to the launch, and the keeping the resulting samples small will cost more than just sending any cheek scrapings that come in. Even with the 10k price it's only $3500 higher than the next donor level that includes all but the DNA sent to the moon.
Their marketing department might want to revisit this. To be honest though, they're not likely to lower the amount enough to interest me.
The cost to get your dna back is where they make their profit.
They want us to pay them for giving them access to our complete DNAs?
Sounds like the modern day Cryonics scam.
-- It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. -- Aristotle
to shoot a load.
How are they going to preserve your DNA on the moon, with all the exposed radiation, and freezing temperatures? It's hard enough to keep DNA preserved in a monitored environment here on earth! If you want your DNA preserved, better off just fossilizing it, like they do with Moose Droppings.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
DNA (and in fact the cells in which it is encased) is so unbelievably light that if you could get it out of the atmosphere, the light pressure from the sun could blow it to the moon in a matter of days(?).
So just take some skin flakes and grind it up into an extremely fine powder. Attach it to a weather balloon (with an optional rocket stage). At the edge of the atmosphere with the setting sun in one direction and the moon in another, release the powder.
Is it absolutely positively guaranteed to get to the moon undamaged? Will any of it/you survive? No, but it's not like you were going to do something useful with it anyway (like make a clone). Anyway, some of the bacteria that lives on you might conceivably make the trip. Think of this as the poor man's version of panspermia.
Was this auto-generated? If so I'm impressed that someone has simulated the intelligence of a crazy ranting hobo.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
ESI will collect your DNA sample, package it into a storage container mounted on the company's Lunar Descent Vehicle and fly it to the surface of the moon where it will be preserved for all time.
Inside a container subject to extreme temperatures hot and cold and with no meaningful protection against cosmic radiation?
Nothing is forever:
Forty years ago, Apollo astronauts placed the first of several retroreflector arrays on the lunar surface. Their continued usefulness for laser ranging might suggest that the lunar environment does not damage optical devices. However, new laser ranging data reveal that the efficiency of the three Apollo reflector arrays is now diminished by a factor of 10 at all lunar phases and by an additional factor of 10 when the lunar phase is near full Moon. These deficits did not exist in the earliest years of lunar ranging, indicating that the lunar environment damages optical equipment on the timescale of decades. Dust or abrasionon the front faces of the corner-cube prisms may be responsible.
Long-term degradation of optical devices on the Moon
I remember one sci-fi writer arguing that quantum effects would set a limit to any form of suspended animation. In time too much information would be erased to make revival possible.
...Lets just give away the perfect blueprint from which the aliens can design kick-ass biological weapons.
Of all the places my DNA has wanted to go, the moon is not one of them.
Is not like "you" will be in the moon, we are more software than DNA-encoded hardware. And our DNA is probably 99.99% identical to the someone's else DNA that already been on the moon.
send me a vial of your DNA, and I'll provide you photographic evidence that I brought it to the moon. You'll know it's me because I'll be holding an american flag, and the picture will be in black and white (got to cut costs somewhere).
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
always finding a way to produce more trash and make it someone else's problem later. We can't be happy with junking up our own planet, we have to send stuff to the moon... *sigh*
On a side note: assuming anyone wanted to live on a dead rock, what purpose will DNA being exposed to extreme conditions there serve? False peace-of-mind for the human race? We should be donating money to fix 'global warming', cancer, and other pressing conspiracies first? ;-)
So that's what Ralph Cramden did to Alice? He was ahead of his time.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
If I pledge $10,000, do I still get a 5 gallon bucket of duck sauce?
If the GoogleX team can guarantee that, because of increased exposure to: cosmic rays, CMEs, etc., my cells will mutate into strange (preferably homicidal) creatures, I'm totally sold. Who could turn down an opportunity like that? I'll go to my grave content in the knowledge that future generations of space faring humans will likely be devoured by my mutated progeny.
Just what the solar system needed: polluting the moon with egotistic DNA... if your ego does not fit Earth, send it to another planet!
Toynbee Idea
In movie 2001
Resurrect dead
On planet Jupiter
Everybody else gets theirs archived at cold harbor for free and that has now been going on for decades.
What do I have to possibly gain from having my DNA taken to the moon? A greater prize would be to
have a thai whore inseminated with my sperm and sent to Mars.
they can do it. Let's assume their rocket will work, and they will in good faith take a copy of your DNA, and place it in a rocket, (or whatever) and send it to the moon, what the hell will it do there? End up in a tiny pile between the bodies of Tom Cruise and Willzyx? Where it will do, what, exactly?
Exactly. Nothing. They could, let's not forget, TELL you they put your DNA in there, steal your money, skip town, and if no one ever found out, it's not like you (as you'll most likely never see the moon, in as it were, person...) can ever check to see if it got there.
Another non-article about a non-starter "kickstarter" project. Sad AND boring.
I live in the UK, so I'm just going to send my toenails to Her Majesty the Queen instead, Royal Mail will do this for a much better price.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
If our grandchildren ever manage to get out of the oil trouble and they start building cities on Moon, let's make it even harder for them. Space debris is not enough, let's contaminate the Moon, too.
Best to get started now, so it'll be there when Frank Poole and HALman need it in about nine hundred eighty-some odd years.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.