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Pepsi Says It'll Use an Artificial Constellation, Hung in the Night Sky Next To the Stars, To Promote an Energy Drink (futurism.com)
A Russian company called StartRocket says it's going to launch a cluster of cubesats into space that will act as an "orbital billboard," projecting enormous advertisements into the night sky like artificial constellations. And its first client, it says, will be PepsiCo -- which will use the system to promote a "campaign against stereotypes and unjustified prejudices against gamers" on behalf of an energy drink called Adrenaline Rush, reports Futurism. From the report: Yeah, the project sounds like an elaborate prank. But Russian PepsiCo spokesperson Olga Mangova confirmed to Futurism that the collaboration is real. "We believe in StartRocket potential," she wrote in an email. "Orbital billboards are the revolution on the market of communications. That's why on behalf of Adrenaline Rush -- PepsiCo Russia energy non-alcoholic drink, which is brand innovator, and supports everything new, and non-standard -- we agreed on this partnership."
Go away. Don't pollute our beautiful skies like that.
And on a personal note, if I ever needed a reason to boycott PepsiCo products, there it is.
Brought to you by: "Al"toids - the curiously weird mint.
Dear space organization in India, There is a new target for you. Please fire at will. A space billboard already is space junk.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
A number of years ago, France was looking at doing something similar, using a number of large Mylar ballons, so they could celebrate an anniversery as the satellite passed overhead, which would glow brightly. This was finally nixed when astronomers made mention that this would destroy their equipment, as it would be difficult to plan for this object to go overhead, and its brightness would fry sensitive photocells.
Again, someone trying a project like this. The fewer items in space, the better. With countries starting to shoot down satellites, it is only a matter of time before the Kessler Syndrome rears its ugly head, and getting past low earth orbit would be impossible.
"campaign against stereotypes and unjustified prejudices against gamers"
This is clearly satire... r-right?
This might not go over as well as they think. People are kind of tired of corporations thinking they own everything. I can imagine children interested in science finding it offensive rather that cool. Pepsi has a lot of different products that could be boycotted. I run a planetarium, and I can imagine the shows I could do on light pollution, having a great big orbting billboard to point to as an example of BAD. Right now, everybody has too many bright lights. Nobody's head stands head and shoulders above the rest as offensive. But when Pepsi puts their name on a billboard, I have a bad guy to memorialize forever. It'd be terrible, but it'd be great for Pepsi to bring a whole world of opinion down upon their head as enemies of the night sky.
... or a short story about this published about 50-60 years ago? I'm drawing a blank (and all my old scifi novels are in storage) but it involved billboards in space or ads on the moon or some such idea.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
With all the tall buildings and smog I can't see the sky anyway
This is the absolute dumbest idea. The absolute dumbest. Beyond the absurd expense, beyond the stupid risk of debris, only people living in the darkest skies will be able to see it if they wanted to.
Or have the rocket "land" on PepsiCo's headquarters.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
This could interfere with celestial navigation. What do I do if suddenly a part of a pepsi can is now the brightest thing in the sky? When the solar flares take out the GPS satellites, we're all in trouble now.....
Fuck that; their target needs to be a certain office building or these "brilliant ideas" are ar risk of continuing.
Didn't we have ads in the 20th century?
Well, sure, but not in our stars. Only on TV and radio. And in magazines and movies and at ball games, on buses and milk cartons and T-shirts and bananas and written on the sky. But not in stars. No siree!
Wasn't it The Merchants of Venus by Fred Pohl?
Anyone have a can of Coffiest they can lend me?
"In the novel Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, Nova 5 is an American vessel owned by "The Coca-Cola Company" which was sent on a mission to induce the supernova of 128 super giant stars in order to create a five-week-long message in the sky visible even in daylight, reading "COKE ADDS LIFE!" Kryten causes Nova 5 to crash after cleaning the sensitive computer terminals with soapy water. After the Red Dwarf crew finds the wreck it is brought aboard and repaired in order to utilize its Duality Jump engine, which could get the crew back to Earth within three months. However, although the ship is successfully repaired, circumstances prevent them from ever going through with it. "
https://reddwarf.fandom.com/wiki/Nova_5
It's going to get hacked... and images of penises, Nazi, Mohammed, and shit will rain from the heavens.
It will be a good fun year... or month...
So basically pollute the sky with a freaking advertisement... and it's against prejudices towards gamers. Why the fuck should this happen?
...you go off and do one of the nerdiest things in human history?
Oh yeah. That'll keep Ogre at bay.
My family does not drink artificially infused sugar water. Do we have to watch it? Or the mug of a hell bound presidential candidate.
I'd love to see this. It's a pretty neat technological achievement if it works. So yea, I say do it. Show the world what it's capable of so we can all see it. I think it would be pretty damn neat to see.
Then ban the shit out of it at the international level and force them to de-orbit their sats, so we don't have to ever see it again. Once was plenty.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Looks like the next black hole we are going to image is going to look like the pepsi swirl logo...
Great.. now im gonna have to figure out how to Ad-Block SPACE! (Pops open UBlock Origin Umbrella)
Billboards are illegal in my state - outlawed back in the 1970's. How will these laws stand up against the out-law space region?
This is the ultimate in light pollution preventing astronomers from seeing the night sky. As a person with a small backyard telescope it might be interesting to view them. But for those multi-hour images I just hope these don't drift into my view. It'd be like that annoying mime at the park who keep trying to photo-bomb.
Suddenly a joke from the space race era gets new merits:
"What if the Russians get to the moon first?"
"They'll probably paint it red."
"So we have to hurry!"
"Relax. If they do, just send up a crew with loads of white paint and have them write "Coca Cola" across"
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
All hail the new God.
They looked on the beautiful night sky, pointing out to each other the constellations they knew, admiring the band of the Milky Way as it swept across the inky night sky.
But all go things must come to an end, they had to get up early to polish the shipping drones for tomorrows run. They stood up, and removed the augmented reality goggles.
Looking up again, one of them thought he could maybe see Orion peeking out from behind the neon cup-o-noodles constellation and northen lighting shading effects, but then it was gone as the remaining colors of the night sky washed over his eyes competing for attention.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If this happens we'll have to make sure to completely remove PepsiCo from all universities (not only those with faculties of astronomy), all colleges and all highschools and schools.
Some anti-capitalist or anti-western will take it out in some way and be very disappointed at the lack of negative reaction from the "west" or most capitalists. In fact we will be able to see who is most in the pockets of the crazies by how loud they howl.
What treaties or international treaties would be broken by whoever takes out those things? Which country could do it? As India can, I suspect Pakistan is working on it. They have a track record of working with North Korea. Perhaps they see Iran as someone to cooperate with and so on.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
Did they actually say NEXT to the stars??
E Proelio Veritas.
I won't accept this horrible insult to nature unless is supports 4K resolution with HDMI support. I wanna play video games on a giant screen in the sky!!!!
Seriously though, reading the article is sounds more like a joke. But academically, I'd love to see how the science for this could work.
Why not shadow a full moon in such a way that you draw the Coca Cola logo on it. You're walking with your lover's hand in yours on a beautiful moonlit night along the beach. You stop, hold her hands, gaze at the moon and there she is, "Coca Cola written on the face of it." You crack open a bottle of Coke and forget all about each other. Go home, get some Cheetos.
This kind of shit should not be allowed...
http://astronomy.com/news/2019...
Just another day in Paradise
You know you're a moron, and so is the idiot who modded you up.
http://astronomy.com/news/2019...
Just another day in Paradise
(Boycott) Me too!
In _The Man Who Sold The Moon_ the idea was to go to the (thinly disguised) Coca Cooa company and sell them the rights to turn the moon into a billboard - a giant bottle cap - by launching small rockets to spread soot to selectively darken the surface.
But the idea was not to actually DO it. It was to NOT do it, and build an ad campaign on how it had bought the rights in order to head off one of its rivals (7 up, also thinly disguised as "6+"). The 7up/6+ logo would be easily readable from Earth, but the Coca Cola / (whatever he called it) was too "busy" to be clear.
7up was independent at the time. But it's now owned by PepsiCo.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Between this and that commercial with a Kardashian-Jenner they really get what most people want
I've heard this idea was being explored many times before, but it's never materialized. I think a CEO hears about the idea and gets excited over it, but the economics usually mean a lot of billboards and other ads will reach more eyes for less money.
Firstly, these work by reflecting sunlight. That means it will only be visible at night, but only when the satellite is still in sunlight and hasn't entered Earth's shadow yet. Then it's only visible to people with good horizons, or where it's passing very high overhead and people just happen to be looking up.
And the biggest problem is that these have a very large surface area which increases the atmospheric drag. So the orbit will decay a lot faster, with pretty much no options for any control after the ad is unfolded.
So, it's probably not going to happen this time either.
The opposition to it is also a bit overblown. The ods that you will ever see it are pretty slim, let alone have your view obstructed by it. All of the other ads spewing light neadlessly into the atmosphere are a much bigger problem for astronomers.
There should be a ban on advertisement methods like this. This is going too far. There's already too much junk hanging around our planet, and with systems like this one can also make it harder to navigate without tools.
They do this, it'll become Target Number One for every hacker and hacking organization on the planet, like an Eagle Scout Merit Badge for hackers. Just imagine it: a giant ASCII penis in your night sky. Or "KILL {insert country leader name here}". Political propaganda.
Overall? Worst idea EVER. This is graffitti on a cosmic scale. Should not be allowed.
The sky told me Pepsico has a solution for you.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/us...
This is already illegal, in the US. I wonder where this company is based and we can just charge, and try in absence their executives.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
You pull some shit like this, you loose this customer in perpetuity.
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
This startup made an AI read every dystopian fiction novel and is turning its cursed ramblings into business plans.
Nope, no sig
Reminds me of the Red Dwarf books. (source: https://reddwarf.fandom.com/wi...)
"In the novel Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, Nova 5 is an American vessel owned by "The Coca-Cola Company" which was sent on a mission to induce the supernova of 128 super giant stars in order to create a five-week-long message in the sky visible even in daylight, reading "COKE ADDS LIFE!" Kryten causes Nova 5 to crash after cleaning the sensitive computer terminals with soapy water. After the Red Dwarf crew finds the wreck it is brought aboard and repaired in order to utilize its Duality Jump engine, which could get the crew back to Earth within three months. However, although the ship is successfully repaired, circumstances prevent them from ever going through with it."
John_Chalisque
fuuuuuuck theeem!
-pyrrho
The 7-year-old in me is hoping hackers re-shape the constellation into a giant you-know-what.
Table-ized A.I.
Leela: Didn't you have ads in the 20th century?
Fry: Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio. And in magazines. And movies. And at ball games and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts and written in the sky. But not in dreams. No siree!
No one cares what your captcha was
Houston TX, USA
Light at night, especially blue light, messes up circadian rhythms and has been implicated in sleep disruption, diabetes, and cancer. Imagine putting up an advertising constellation only to be sued by every woman with breast cancer and every man with prostate cancer. https://www.eurekalert.org/pub...
Those lawsuits would certainly hurt the bottom line. Is there blue in Pepsi's logo?
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
Yeah, no they're not. Hard no. Absolutely, positively, no.
But hey, there's a bright side. It'll give us a way to test anti-satellite defenses.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Does this remind anyone else of a certain Dilbert episode?
--
Francisco
São Paulo / Brazil
Wasn't this prophesied in the Red Dwarf books with the same company? Been a while since I've read them but I'm sure this was part of the story that lead to the Earth being voted to be the space dump for the entire solar system.
Haven't I heard this one before?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
"I was born on the cusp of Pepsi and Verizon, with Taco Bell in retrograde."
I expected better from Slashdot. You're getting trolled, folks. The dimmest object you can see with the naked eye is magnitude +6. Those are only visible in very dark rural areas. In big city suburbs, the best you can see with the naked eye is magnitude +4. A cubesat's reflected sunlight magnitude is typically +10 or +11. Cubesats are only barely visible to a very large telescope when illuminated solely with sunlight.
Now if each cubesat is an active light emitter, that's a whole different thing. Let's say it's primarily solar powered. Let's further say Pepsi spends $BIG_NUM on 44% efficient multi-junction solar cells. If 3 of the 6 faces of the cube are solar cells, that's 300 square centimeters of solar cell. Solar irradiance outside atmosphere is 1367 watts per square meter. 300 square centimeters is 0.03 square meters. 1367 * 0.03 * 0.44 = 18.04 watts. Let's say the other 3 faces of the cube are LEDs. 18 watts of LEDs from Amazon gets you 1260 lumens. 1260 lumens from 0.03 square meters is 42,000 lux. That's like a tiny spot of direct sunlight as seen from Earth. That's pretty good, though the angle at which it's visible is limited by altitude and it having only 3 illuminated faces. There's no image whatsoever. It's just a bright spot.
These are all best case numbers, of course. In reality the three faces of the cube won't operate at maximum efficiency since they can't all face the sun directly at once, and in LEO they don't see sunlight at all for half their orbit, etc etc. Still, if they worked at it, it could be pretty obnoxious.
I'm surprised no one has pointed out that you can't put a bunch of satellites into orbit and have them maintain a formation. The only way to maintain formation in orbit without constantly using some kind of propulsion is to have all objects in an identical orbit, line astern. So maybe the ads will be in morse code?
It's bad enough they are playing ads at the gas pumps now.
Can there be no space free of ads?
I would join you in the boycott... if I bought anything from Pepsi in the first place. I don't drink soda, or lipton; I almost never eat fast food, so me boycotting KFC and TacoBell, and any other Pepsi owned chains over this won't help.
Pepsi hasn't owned KFC, Taco Bell or Pizza Hut (you forgot them) since 1997. I can't get mod points very often here, yet people have thrown you enough to get you up to a score of 5 for basically being ignorant of history. So that's what it takes to get modded up around here. Very interesting.
Should get coke to pitch in and launch some additional cube sats to deface the Pepsi constellation and establish a defacement foundation dedicated to defacement of all similar advertising campaigns by anyone else contemplating this.
Now, that doesn't mean some other brand that cares less about its image won't do the same thing. GoDaddy sounds like a good candidate.
A Danika Patrick constellation? That's a lot of cubesats.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
I'm just still trying to figure out WTF "Next To the Stars" is supposed to mean.
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
I mean, this really isn't that far out there. In the 60s there were Senate hearings over advertising to children where experts made it clear that kids couldn't tell adverts from actual programming, but they were brushed aside. There's all the smoking adverts too, not just to kids but the outright lies to adults. Or the tricks used by marketers to make Diamond engagement rings seem like a thousand year old tradition when they invented it themselves in the 30s. Oh, and Santa Claus was made up to sell Coke.
I guess what I'm saying is that I'm not sure if this should be the straw that breaks the camel's back. It's seems pretty par for the course. I suppose you could say it's harder to avoid, but to be honest I'm not an astronomy nerd and can't remember the last time I went stargazing.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Life isn't all YES or NO answers.
Pepsi Satellites NO!
Flaming Hot Cheetos YES!
Keep your craptastic advertising out of our skies, you fucking maggots.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Hey pepsi, how about using that money and lower your prices!!! the best advertising is having the lowest prices.
get the heck off my sky
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
"Who has the pee-pee tape?"
Time to launch the ad blocker hyper sonic missiles.
So, I've heard there is a guy building a home made rocket to go to space. Since flatearthers pay the bills he promises to prove Earth is flat.
So, how about we chip in, so he would knock this shit down while he's at it?
What is best in life? Hot water, good dentishtry and shoft lavatory paper.
Scramble the jets boys, we're under attack.
99 red balloons.