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NASA To Send 1 Million People's Names To the Sun (theatlantic.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: This summer, a NASA spacecraft will launch into space from the coast of Florida, headed for the sun. After making several flybys of Venus to slow itself down, the Parker Solar Probe will come within 4 million miles of the sun's scorching surface, closer than any spacecraft in history.
NASA is never one to miss an opportunity to drum up publicity for upcoming space missions, especially the less flashy ones. Sending something to study the star we see every day may sound less thrilling, for example, than launching a mission to find exoplanets around 200,000 stars. So in March, the space agency announced a little campaign to promote the Parker Solar Probe: Send us your names and we'll put them on a microchip inside a spacecraft bound for the sun. (They even got Star Trek actor William Shatner to help promote it.)
The call for names, which closed at the end of last week, received more than 1.1 million submissions, according to a spokesperson at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, which designed and built the Parker Solar Probe. On the surface, the campaign was little more than a quirky act to get the public interested in space exploration. But considered more deeply, it represents the human desire to find ways to outlive ourselves and our bodies, to be remembered once our time here on Earth is up.
NASA is never one to miss an opportunity to drum up publicity for upcoming space missions, especially the less flashy ones. Sending something to study the star we see every day may sound less thrilling, for example, than launching a mission to find exoplanets around 200,000 stars. So in March, the space agency announced a little campaign to promote the Parker Solar Probe: Send us your names and we'll put them on a microchip inside a spacecraft bound for the sun. (They even got Star Trek actor William Shatner to help promote it.)
The call for names, which closed at the end of last week, received more than 1.1 million submissions, according to a spokesperson at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, which designed and built the Parker Solar Probe. On the surface, the campaign was little more than a quirky act to get the public interested in space exploration. But considered more deeply, it represents the human desire to find ways to outlive ourselves and our bodies, to be remembered once our time here on Earth is up.
Is it April 1st again?
I'm not sure how one can tell the difference, temperature-wise. Might need slightly more sunblock I suppose, perhaps SPF 10e40?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
shame if something happened to it
I think his fat ass would fuck up the suns orbit. His mass alone will tilt the whole solar system causing chaos around the globe.
> The call for names, which closed at the end of last week
Thanks for posting this *after* the deadline.
Shit, you're right. The grease fire would be visible from Alpha Ceti V. Future generations of alien sailors will orient themselves by Tardchris's Star, and tell bone-chilling tales of Amazon affiliate link spam, low carb diets that make you fatter, retirement strategies based on luck, and YouTube videos that no one watches!
Let's hope it's just a name and not Name and Email.
My name is several times on Mars.
PS, I miss the jokes where they say that they land on the sun at night.
Cuz I can't really afford the rents there.
#DeleteChrome
I don't want the sun people knowing my name!
LOL. Mod up. That was hilarious.
They stopped accepting names April 27th... booo
From http://parkersolarprobe.jhuapl... : "The deadline for submissions was April 27, 2018 at 11:59 PM EST and entries are no longer being accepted."
Nice. Now the Aliens that catch the probe will know who to come after with the sophisticated anal probes...... watch your corn holes!
What's the point of bothering to encode names on a fucking microchip so small that no one can read it? At that point, I'm sure that any piece of matter has atoms arranged in a random pattern such that my name (and any number of other people's names) appears represented on it somewhere in the sequence....
It would be great to have these articles before the deadline.
FTFY
#DeleteFacebook
Instead of burning trash in various dumpsites around the world, send a rocket to the sun hauling all our garbage, all those plastic islands floating on the oceans, even the ones destroying the Great Barrier Reef, and sure, attach whatever instrumentation you need for more studies -- not a problem. But why not? How about it, science? What say you, Kim Jong Un?
>> They even got Star Trek actor William Shatner to help promote it.
For free, I hope? Otherwise, this is a classic example of the government setting money on fire...to get more people interested in setting other money on fire.
Will presumably be first on the list!
This is a nice sentiment - it's just like the time my uncle wanted to be buried with his wealth. My family objected, but I told him I would do it. He thanked me and gave me the money. I put a check in his casket with a nice little message in the memo.
*stolen from old joke*
Having a million names on a micro chip? Seriously? That's all the room/weight allowance you got? I think not.
You could easily get a billion names on a something pretty small and light.. Especially if you didn't really care to be able to read them later.
Besides, who's going to know?
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
An intelligent sentient species that is not inherently interested in space exploration is an evolutionary dead-end, for the simple reason that there are only two possible solutions for long term survival of such species: population control (which, let's face it, is even more impossible to achieve than faster-than-light travel), and colonisation of space.
Judging by how everything NASA, and everything science actually, is devalued and despised these days, you can't expect the one percent of the population actually interested in discovery and knowledge to continue dragging the other 99% as dead weight indefinitely.
The call for names, which closed at the end of last week, received more than 1.1 million submissions,
The new slashdot, always a day late and a dollar short.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Stars really are part of a time machine/computer hybrid system linked together with their futures and pasts, performing calculations throughout their vast lifetimes and sharing those results to times before they even started. I can't even imagine the type of data mining NASA is attempting with this mission, but I'm glad they didn't get my name. Let this be a reminder to you to never give your details to any company which is unable to trust lowercase letters and believes it must stand above all others.
So this is the third time this year this is news on slashdot...
Guess it must really be a slow nose day today.
YMMV
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FscIgtDJFXg
I'm just going to change my name to one of theirs, then they will be sending MY name to the sun! Mwahahahaha...
But seriously... if they want to get people interested in space exploration, all they need to do is promise each person who supports NASA and their mission their very own planet to rule when they die. Works for the Church of Joseph Smith ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, A.K.A. the Mormons.
Okay, all kidding aside, maybe if NASA really wants to get people interested in space exploration, they should announce the plans for some grand construction project, not here on Earth, but rather on the MOON! Not some bland geometric shape, either... not a pyramid, a great cylinder, or other right, regular, geometric solid, but rather a space habitat in the shape of a giant, voluptuous, nude woman, laying on the moon's surface, spread-eagled, where the tits are giant, bulbous flesh-tone-tinted domes with rosy red apices where the nipples would go, and to go in or out, you pass through one of three portals to the lunar surface. THAT would, I know, get SOME people excited about the idea of space exploration! They'll have to make special space suits that can accommodate a raging erection, though, without it punching a hole in the thing.
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
I read that as "1 million people" like Australia again or are we fixing the worlds biggest problems 1 million muslims at a time?
Exactly... It's not like some future astronomer is going to find the list, since it's going to be incinerated.
tl;dr: I agree with parent: limiting the list in any way is retarded.
Sending 1M names to the Sun is probably a scam to call for a massive, world wide voodoo curse.
The voodoo zombie apocalypse is about to start.
They should toss out a grappling hook and yank the capsule with Elon's Tesla Roadster in it along for the ride to the sun.
They should contract out to the ARRL, who could send 1e6 names into the sun a lot more cost effectively, using massless photons instead of expensive rockets.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Instead of names, lets send all the politicians. Also, all the idiots from California.
I was reminded of this one, Steve Martin's new phone book from "The Jerk"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
What's the point in announcing this on Slashdot AFTER the deadline has passed?
"But considered more deeply, it represents the human desire to find ways to outlive ourselves and our bodies, to be remembered once our time here on Earth is up."
Mmm. Outlive? Did they miss this part? As stated by the always affable Douglas Adams:
"What does sundive mean? The ship is going to dive into the sun. Sun. Dive. It's very simple to understand."
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
Let's pack up a million republicans and sent them to the sun. Maybe we can realize some sanity then once we clean out the trash bin a bit.
Is this related to the Parker Square? http://theparkersquare.com/
I plan to send all of my atoms into the sun already - just mine won't be getting there for another 7.5 billion years or so.
I will be immortal! My memory will never fade because I plan to write my name on this little chip and launch it .... into the sun.
I may not have thought this through. It may be a better idea to just put my name in a text file on a USB stick and drop it behind the couch. It will probably last longer than what is proposed here. :-)
I'm to lazy, I'll just wait for the sun to get here since it's on it's way anyhow.
So the Sun "news"paper can hold off the next round of phone hacks because they'll get them from NASA, or were they stuck and didn't know who to hack next and NASA is giving them a list of names? At least we got a heads up.
*reads the summary*
OH, you meant that Sun! Nevermind...
"Everybody's naked underneath" -- The Doctor
I have a proposal for Nasa - I give them a list of a hundred people, and they grant them immortality by shooting them into the sun personally.
What if all of those people with those names turn to ashes?
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
While sending your own name into space on a rocket is a neat idea, the problem is with it being so close to the sun, radiation will likely have destroyed the probe before any future civilization gets a chance to even get to it.
Why the fancy name of Microchip? I can bet it's just a regular 32 GB MicroSD flash drive. Like the ones we use in our cell phones. SanDisk did say their flash drives are Water proof, shock proof, x-ray proof and temperature proof. What, temperature proof? You mean the sun? lol
Phawk Slashdot, how come I didn't read any of this last week in Slashdot???? Damn you!
I'd prefer they send one million people to the Sun.
On a chip near the Sun? What's the fun in that? Now if they were to send claim stakes to the Moon, preferably to mark that plot of Lunar real estate I remember getting many years ago (what did it cost me then? A buck? Can't remember.) ... now then, THAT would be impressive :-)
Thousands of little sterilized metal or plastic stakes, fired out like from a giant shotgun, each one with a subscriber's name on it ... yep, I'd pay money for that :-)