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.

Comments

Don't bother, the aliens are mostly just scammers

[elrous0]

Contacting aliens will just get your inbox flooded with respondents claiming to be an alien princes who need you to wire them money.

a satirical religion ?

[Anonymous Coward]

you mean the others aren't?

Slack Beacons

[electroblood]

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.

I have a better idea

[boudie2]

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.

Re:I have a better idea

[pr0t0]

Or they could, you know, donate it to SETI.

While poking fun at the whole idea (and themselves) provides a good laugh for everyone, building a sufficiently powerful beacon is something that should be given a fair amount of thought. You only have to research Beserker Theory, or read Cixin Liu's Three Body Problem (particularly 'Dark Forest') to see why. 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?

But everyone has fun with this idea of a beacon, it raises enough money and in a big party and to much fanfare they turn it on. Years go by and everyone forgets about the stupid shenanigans that went on. Then 200 years later the Sun is obliterated.

Just sayin'

You all lack slack

[ArylAkamov]

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.

Re:Don't bother, the aliens are mostly just scamme

[Hal_Porter]

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.

Re:Vogons....

[KtadenLegume]

I told them it means 'peace among worlds'.

Re:Subgenious not funny

[sheramil]

The subgenious thing was never that funny. It was always too unfocused in concept and just wordy. Parodies are not automatically funny.

Yeah, how's that Discordianism working out for you? Fnord! Don't eat hotdog buns on Friday, lol! Who's the target for this year's jape?