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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.
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!
My name is several times on Mars.
PS, I miss the jokes where they say that they land on the sun at night.
How dare you insult the state bird of Florida, you insensitive clod!
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
From http://parkersolarprobe.jhuapl... : "The deadline for submissions was April 27, 2018 at 11:59 PM EST and entries are no longer being accepted."
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.
"Thanks for posting this *after* the deadline."
Exactly what I thought upon reading the submission.
Saving my time and effort to submit a bogus name
in time for the deadline. THanks.
Something between the lines jumps out and bites your arm off. Soltan Gris / London
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
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.