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Gold Artifact To Orbit Earth In Hope of Alien Retrieval
Lucas123 writes "The problem: What do you leave behind that billions of years from now, and without context, would give aliens an some kind of accurate depiction of mankind. The answer: A gold-plated silicon disc with just 100 photos. That's the idea behind The Last Pictures project, which is scheduled to blast off in the next few months from Kazakhstan and orbit the earth for 5 billion years. The photos, etched into the silicon using a bitmap format, were chosen over a five-year process that involved interviews with artists, philosophers, and MIT scientists, who included biologists, physicists, and astronomers. To each, was posed a single question: What photos would you choose to send into outer space? The answer became an eclectic mix of images from pre-historic cave paintings to a photo of a group of people taken by a predator drone."
Don't belittle the above comment unless you have read a very SF good story called Omnilingual, by H. Beam Piper.
It is even available for free:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19445/19445-h/19445-h.htm
Summary:
"The photos, etched into the silicon using a bitmap format,"
Article:
"MIT used a machine to etch the photos into the silicon using a bitmap format to create a binary image."
This just illustrates what really pisses me off about journalism today. I spent a good half an hour looking for the actual source of the quotations and statements from the MIT guys. Most of the articles claim to be written by whoever posted them on their magazine/blog/newspaper, but here's the original interview that most of the articles are ripping their quotes from:
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-last-pictures-interview-with-trevor-paglen/
I got this link from MIT: http://arts.mit.edu/va/artist/paglen/
I'm still trying to figure out where the information about "MIT used a machine to blah blah" came from, however. So far I haven't actually been able to track it back to anybody.