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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."
That way they will be tricked into thinking that we look just like them and hopefully they wont be as hostile as some movies predict.
Anyway, I for one, welcome our new gold prospecting overlords!
rm -rf --no-preserve-root /
In a few hundred years, some teenager who's nicked his Dad's space car will go and steal it.
"Sir! We have a lot of pictures!"
"Leave them alone, Lieutenant. We don't have the copyright license to copy them, because the owners are long dead."
"But Sir!"
"I SAID, leave them alone! Haven't you heard of biogenic-nuclear copyright licenses? Without the antidote we'd all die."
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
We should just send up pictures from 4 chan.
Then the universe will leave us alone.
Will it contain something like the Rosetta Stone to help said aliens decipher our languages? More likely it will be found by some post apocalyptic humanish descendants relearning how to get into space...
That's exactly what they did. Sadly unsurprisingly the summary got it wrong. See this picture:
http://creativetime.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Disc_001.jpg
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I prefer the Voyager discs. They provide a more positive look on mankind. These photos look more like a guilt trip.
If you looked at the pretty photo of the disk you would know that it is a 10x10 grid of images etched into silicon, not a CDROM.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
Designed to last for 5 billion years? Won't it and the Earth be one with the sun in about 3 or 4 billion?
Anyway, I think we should baffle the aliens with a bit of bullshit and have a set of pictures that are screenshots of the Death Star destroying Alderaan. Hilarity ensues when word gets out about this and aliens from all over the galaxy scramble to tear up our long dead world in search of any useful information about this tech that allowed the great and ancient civilization that thrived here to build a space station with enough firepower to destroy an entire planet.
This space unintentionally left blank.
My first question on this concept would be, "Why would the hypothetical aliens expect to find a message from us to them in orbit, and look there amongst all the other orbital junk?"
Seems that the most natural thing to expect would be that one should look for informative objects where the culture lived, for which, off the top of my head, "encasement of pictures in a huge block of plexiglass, on Earth" seems more likely to actually be discovered. This seems akin to a historical human culture saying, "We want to make sure that future people know about us and what our ways were, so let's walk 500 miles away from where we live and all our buildings are, and put some paintings up in the mountains."
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
Why do people love stroking their ego so much? Is it so hard to comprehend that in terms of the universe our lives are completely meaningless?
It's "more space junk." If there was this lone object in orbit? Okay maybe. But we're talking about our planet with lots of stuff up there now. LOTS of stuff. And then meteor showers and crap?
And even if somehow this one trinket found its way into the hands/claws/tentacles of a being from space, are they supposed to be convinced of something? I mean really. Oh look, among all this stuff, there are creatures out there... sending some kind of message... I will go visit them!
"Mixed message" is the best we've got? And for fuck's sake... we've got actual people in orbit... people to talk to.
Maybe they could have just put printed pictures, well protected. Why use a disc they won't know how the fuck use, so they are pissed at us before even meeting?
At the very least put an Ikea-like manual (no text, just pictures, where things just "click") with it.
We can do a better job. How about something like the probe from the ST:TNG episode "The Inner Light." The only problem would be what tune/melody/song would the person engaged with probe learn how to play? We could auction it off the rights or hold some sort of Global Idol song contest, but we would probably end up with some piece of pop dribble or some old, boring classical piece. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inner_Light_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation
Without the context of human perception and aesthetics, many of these images may appear as random noise to an alien species!
Abstract artistic expression works for some of us, but might not be communicating directly enough to clearly convey ideas, concepts, facts, history, even human being's notions of beauty, the latter of which clearly was the curator's primary objective.
I'm not knocking the images themselves. But without the context of human eyes, human life and experience... these will have little or no meaning to anyone who has never lived earth.
O lord, bless this thy holy hand grenade, that with it thou mayest blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.
Though we probably f'd our future descendants with all the EM we have been spraying out into the ether, either unintentional leakage or purposeful broadcasts, any hard-copy information should give misleading information about our home system, so that no being would be able to find the coordinates of Earth Of course we would also have to do something to alter the trajectory of any craft we send out, so it couldn't merely be tracked backwards. We don't want any aliens coming 1000 years from now demanding we give them McNeal.
Why does this even get any press at all. It is just plain stupid.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I rather think that plate tectonics and vulcanism would put paid to any monument left on Earth for up to a couple of billion years. The moon or one of the other balls of rock might be a better option from a geological perspective, but would still be vulnerable to a suitably large meteor strike in the vicinity. A small object like a satellite floating around in space is probably going to have the best chance of survival, but the flipside is that it simply isn't very likely to be found unless it can be discriminated from all of the other lumps of ice, rock and dead satellites spinning around the sun.
Realistically, the only way I can see for us to leave a message for an alien race in the distant future is to get our asses off this rock and colonize as many other star systems as possible in the hope that something will still be around when they arrive, ideally that will include distant descendants. Quite simply, we don't currently have the technology to build something that can plausibly survive those kinds of timescales and also be significant enough to guarantee even a miniscule chance of being found.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
I quickly browsed the images and had a couple thoughts.
1) Why didn't they etch images unencoded? Simply make micro images in high detail (ala microfiche) so they don't have to be decoded?
2) I really didn't think the choice of photos was representative of life on earth. No cityscapes, no human faces close up, no animals / pets (inter-species friendship for example), no image of something technological such as a state of the art mobile phone / laptop. No images of agriculture or even a bouquet of beautiful flowers.
Hell, I could barely tell what some images were supposed to be (well, number 1 took a couple seconds - I thought it was a crystalline structure, number two I haven't figured out yet).
I did like earth from space, but how about an image of Armstrong / Aldrin on the moon? A passenger jet taking off showing outside & in?
So many choices, so poorly selected IMHO.
Here's what I dislike about the pictures that I've seen on the project website:
Most of them would make bugger all sense to an alien species. Heck, some of them are hard to make sense of if you are a human.
I, too, think the Voyager pictures were a better selection. They provide information about scale and location, something that these pictures don't. Many of them require you to have an understanding of humans and/or human culture to make sense. For example, the indoor pictures have no objective indicators of scale. There is absolutely no hint to tell future alien watchers if these are images of something microscopic, macroscopic, inbetween? Whatever this picture is showing, for example, does not even tell the alien if the area shown in the image is 5 mm, 5 cm, 5m, 50m or whatever across. The skeleton in the top-right corner is largely hidden, it only makes sense as a scale measure if you are a human and your brain is trained on filling in the blanks of other humanoid shapes.
Also, I agree that at least from the selection they show on their webpage, way too many of them show natural catastrophies and doom and gloom.
I miss images that would make alien visitors in the not-5-billion-years distant future help make sense of the ruins of our civilization. If you include pictures of cave paintings, why not a city or two? A million years from now, there won't be anything of either left, but a few thousand years from now, ruins of our cities will still be there even if we go away tomorrow.
And why the focus on humans? What about the other 99% of biomass on the planet?
For a project this expensive, it looks way too much like a high school project to me. Amateurish.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Orbits around the Earth are affected by the Moon, that satellite won't just stay there for so long. They would be better off with a Lagrange orbit. Also, if it's only 100 pictures they should've engraved them on the disks rather than using a digital format the aliens have little chance to decrypt.
Any course correction fuel will quickly (relatively) be used up. Geosynchronous satellites have course correction systems to keep them in the proper orbits.
Yes air resistance is minor at that distance from earth but they have not solved the three body problem. Tidal forces from the moon will eventually disturb the orbits and that will be the end of it. If this was not the case, we would have tiny natural moons around the earth.
Now if they put the disk in one of the L points they might have a chance.
PS: from an orbital mechanics point of view, geosynchronous orbits are not special. They just happen to take the same amount of time as a rotation of the earth. When the length of the day changes over the time frame mentioned, the orbits will no longer be geosynchronous. A billion years is long enough for the moon to change the rotation speed of the earth.
What if alien life in 5 billion years has evolved to look nothing like it is today? They could be bags, of mostly energy, with no real bodies.
"Zodon, please place the Solid Gold Aliens Top 100 Hits CD in the player, so we can decode it."
"I can't, Korgos, we are bags of mostly energy, with no real bodies, and we have no hands."
We should have included a fart app on the CD. That one really never seems to get old.
And then the aliens could really understand our intelligence level.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Amongst the hundreds of thousands of orbiting satellites not to mention the garbage floating around the planet how are they supposed to find one little disc? Hell they could make it the size of a shopping mall and they'd still have difficulty locating this. Combined with the fact that I think the future of our planet looks a lot like the few opening scenes from Wall-E I don't have much hope at all for this every being anything than a colossal waste of money.
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.
Maybe I'm browsing the project site wrong, but all I saw were about a dozen photographs? None show images of naked humans that can at least give a hint of what a human looks without the environmental protection suit. Photos of couples having sex and babies can also explain the nature of human reproduction. We're not androids that just rolled off the some fab lab.
The hops this satellite is going last 5 billion years at the orbit of 30.000 km is just nonsense. The orbit is too low and unstable at best, even if this is geosync orbit. He would have needed a orbit pattern of at least 600.000 km (outside the orbit of the moon) to get this goal. Outside forces are more likely to push the satellite towards Earth in few thousands years. Rather then from it. Orbital debris is also going to be a major problem in the long term.
I agree with everyone else about the poor choices of photos that are vaguely artistic rather than actual useful or communicative to a potential alien species, but I also have another issue: 5 billion years?
My understanding was that most orbits decay eventually. I know this is close to geosync and not like the ISS, but is it really likely such a orbit would remain stable for 5 billion-freaking-years? I mean, even assuming no other outside objects cross paths with this satellite, won't its orbit eventually decay? Wikipedia's page on geostationary orbit, specifically orbital stability says this: "In the absence of servicing missions from the Earth or a renewable propulsion method, the consumption of thruster propellant for station-keeping places a limitation on the lifetime of the satellite."
Anyone with a greater knowledge on orbital stability, please chime in.
http://www.keo.org/
Not that I believe in its interest at any rate, but there is a guy that proposed this to UN in 2000, and has been announcing launch dates every two years since then...
At least he made a living out of it for himself, and seems sincere...
Herve S.
This selection of images is an accurate representation of the human species only in the sense that both are incredibly wasteful embarrassments.
The point is to have something that can outlast the human race, and no machine can do that.
On the contrary, I am convinced that quite a few machines will. When the last human dies, whether it is three years down the road or three million[*], there are bound to be machines surviving.
But if we really want to make an impression, we need to do something else. This is just signalling to visitors how stupid and vain we are. This plate is obviously made for us, not them. It's a 21st century folly, and not even impressive.
Also, unless they place the satellite in L4 or L5, its orbit is unlikely to last very long.
[*]: If we survive three million years, we won't be human anymore. And if we only last three years, nothing of value was lost.
Put it on the moon, buried in Tycho crater with a magnetic bullseye to direct future travellers to it.
this is to sell a book. Stop looking for deeper meaning and taking this group literally, discussing details like why there aren't any pictures of humans, or pictures of cell phones or buildings. It's a very, very expensive promotion to sell a coffee table book.
. . . let's put some Flash videos up there. At the right we're going, it's still gonna be around in a few billion years.
As an added bonus: It should act as a warning sign to any visiting aliens - there is no intelligent life here, now move along.
But how do we know that an alien are equipped to translate a 2D monochrome into anything meaningful?
Do they even have vision? Were they ever restricted to 2D observation (like our eyes). Perhaps they used area-based sonar for spatial awareness, or something even weirder?
If your dog can't understand a picture, why would you think an alien can? The dog is likely going to be much closer to what you are.
Anyhow, this is a folly, plain and simple. And not even an impressive one.
... and when they go to launch it into orbit in the most likely spot that it will be found there will be found one already in it's place.
Why did they include the drone picture - its horribly fuzzy and I get nothing of value from it. The picture of earth from the moon, I do like a LOT.
Is it really that hard? Dog's aren't making spaceships and flying across the galaxy. If the aliens are doing that then they likely have the tech/intelligence to figure out what it is they are looking at.
On the contrary, I am convinced that quite a few machines will. When the last human dies, whether it is three years down the road or three million[*], there are bound to be machines surviving.
A few that come to mind are the model M IBM keyboard and the model 500 telephone.
Time to offend someone
A picture of a flowering tree, with the sky as a background? There's no context - you only know its a tree because you know it's a tree. Grainy picture of predator drone footage? Too blurry to even know what it is... unless you know what it is. This needs to be far more universal, something like the Voyager record. The one decent picture was the one of the moon, although the moon won't be in the same place in 5B years.
These pictures are from some Freshman Art 101 class, something a kid with an old SLR and some cheap B&W film might produce as some kind of "insightful" class project.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
With a goal of 5b years, even the mountains you painted in would be whittled away be erosion. There is almost nothing you can do on the Earths surface that would last 5b years, if only because it would go back under the crust. Entire continents will be gone in that much time.
Include a Donald Duck cartoon - that will fool them
(Expedition to Earth by Arthur C Clarke)
Gold Artifact To Orbit Earth In Hope of Alien Retrieval
Why does Gold Artifact hope for alien retrieval? Is this some new religious meme?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Seriously. Or Goatse.
What vanity.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Bollocks! We just need to leave a beacon on Mars that a future soldier will stumble upon and see telepathic images of our race. Also, it may be necessary to warn them of the impending doom of the galaxy. Also, we may need to build a space station and some big floating widgets that enable faster-than-light travel to other big floating widgets...
Wah wah wee wah!
Well, if they got father that humans in their space trace, probably they will figure it out easily. I would be more concerned that they find a disc that may be surrounded by a pile of trash we have been throwing out.
Darn auto correct: farther than.... space race
Those idiots drew the Earth upsidedown!
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
From the collection of photos shown on their website it would appear they were selected by an art student with an obnoxiously cynical view of humanity. The hold little meaning beyond this pervasive sense of negativity.
Let's take stock:
Before and after photos of melting glaciers
Grainy photo waves crashing on a pier with a bunch of people watching
Some random ship in what appears to be the Suez canal
An approaching dust storm during what I think is the dust bowl
Barely decipherable cave paintings
A mine
Some nonsensical photo of a huge auditorium with 7 tv screens depicting highway interchanges
A waterspout
A blurry photo taken by a drone (presumably pre strike)
Random kids standing in water, most looking away from the camera
A rather strange looking room that looks like something from colonial times
I'm a human and I see no rhyme or reason in these photos beyond what I mentioned above. What the hell is an alien intelligence going to make of these? I think this is a neat concept, but that's a rather pathetic selection of photos.
Did anyone else notice that all the pictures were in Black and White? Why no color? It makes everything look so gloomy and boring. We need to show these visitors the beauty of nature in it full color glory. Maybe they did this on purpose so that the visitors would think that we were too boring to take over.
that "lifetime" for a geostationary satellite means being kept in a useful position, that's another matter from an object that doesn't have to maintain ideal comm location
Because that will convince some alien race that we are worthy of further contact. Not.
For all we know, the alien finding it will be named Mohammad al Arrakis. And he'll be pissed about our choice of targets.
Have gnu, will travel.
This will be attached to an Echostar satellite in a valuable orbit. Now, at "end-of-life" its orbit should be raised, but still, it will be be up there, at that point available for either junk or salvage. I would regard the prospects of this lasting 500 years as very dim, much less 5 billion years.
I always regard these sorts of things (like the Voyager gold discs) as being much more likely to be picked up by future humans (or post-humans) than aliens anyway. From that standpoint, copies of mundane texts (like, say, the US Census, or some popular novels, or a history of the world) seem much more likely to be valuable than some photos of cave art or kids standing on a beach. (If civilization between now and then has not collapsed, they will know what's on the disc. If it has, then send details, not art, as the details are what tends to get lost.)
I don't know. It stands to reason that the planet we'd pay the most attention to if we were out exploring would be the one with a big ring of clearly artificial space debris. Any spacefaring civilization is extremely likely to understand the benefits of satellite technology, even if they may have moved beyond it.
More importantly, in space, we can easily inspect things without touching them - Gravity Probe B for example, isn't actually orbiting the Earth. The gyroscopic sphere inside it is orbiting Earth, and the rest of the space craft is maintaining position away from the surface of the gyroscope. You could zip on up to this thing and do a very thorough analysis without touching it.
Your concerns would be valid if we were talking hundreds, thousands, possibly even millions of years later. Even millions of years is an order of magnitude below just 1 billion years, much less 3 or 5 billion. At 5 billion years, there will be no discoverable trace of mankind at all on Earth (unless we live that long in which case we do not need the disc). Tectonic movement, subduction, etc all say that everything that exists right now will disappear as if it had never existed. Granted, finding that little disc in an orbit around something the size of Earth is akin to finding a needle in a haystack... but at least the disc will still exist in 5 billion years rather than melted into its component atoms and molecules.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
There are several things we can expect to have in common with *any*evolved intelligent life we will encounter, because the selective advantages they provide apply to any environment in which they would have evolved.
That includes porn.
As a member of an advanced xenological monitoring and listening post team studying your world, I can attest that your Rule 34 is, indeed, universal. Right up to and including holo-stims of an anthropomorphic galaxy with disproportionately large ... equipment ... mounting and having its way with a galactic super-cluster.
And as for aliens relying on other senses, they are space farers. We can use instruments to see with other senses, so would they.
I see a teaspoon is needed. Open up, please.
Being able to sense what is there doesn't equate to an ability to abstract a 2D image into 3D. If their senses are true 3D, unlike ours[*], they will never have seen a 2D image. They can still have instruments for observing matter and energy, but their instruments will likely be 3D based too. If they encounter a 2D image, how would they know that it was supposed to mimic a projection done through a single-lens pinhole camera for a certain bandwidth range, i.e. an "eye"?
You might as well ask give someone born blind a photo and expect them to scan it, examine the raw data in Braille and tell you what the photo was of, or give someone deaf a sound recording file and expect them to figure out that it's of a child crying.
In both cases, the observer either won't spot the task required, or will have to rely on the work of others who have the required senses.
Stop anthropomorphising potentially visiting aliens, or assume you know anything about them. That's as silly as having faith in a manlike god (except, of course, that aliens visiting us is much more likely than a manlike god, i.e. only extremely improbable and not downright absurd).
[*]: We see in 2D with two eyes, and extrapolate 3D information from that. That doesn't mean that aliens do the same.
Does anybody know where you can see the actual pictures? My slide show ends with the dust storm,
So we're sure that the aliens use cartesian coordinates for pixels and three channels of light mixture that thankfully are at the same frequencies as what we consider visible?
Sounds like any aliens who can view these photos won't have to look at them to know what we were like anyway.
It's OK Bender, there's no such thing as 2.
This is an idiotic waste. Am I to believe an alien race that can span the light years to get here will scoop an artifact from orbit and then go home and not explore the planet? Even assuming in 3 billion years all traces of civilization on the planet have vanished, some orbiting disk of photos will tell all?
I find myself deeply suspicious about the implied duration of orbital stability too.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"