Yahoo's Time Capsule Project

eldavojohn writes, "Yahoo is compiling a time capsule (Flash required). This massive project, which accepts donations from anyone, is no ordinary time capsule, though. This time capsule will be digitized and beamed into space from the ancient pyramid of Teotihuacan in Mexico. From the article: 'Starting on Tuesday, enthusiasts from around the world will have a chance to submit text, images, video and sounds that reflect human nature to be included in the message.' I highly doubt this 'time capsule' will reach anyone, but it is a neat idea. After browsing through some of the pictures posted, I would hope extraterrestrial life would be more hesitant to exterminate us — if not for anything else than curiosity. We constantly strive to have our legacy live on in the galaxy." Yahoo worked with Internet artist Jonathan Harris on this project.

Desperate Publicity Ploy

I highly doubt this 'time capsule' will reach anyone, but it is a neat idea.

No this is not neat>, this is just stupid. This is so incredibly stupid it's left me speechless ... nearly:

So they're going to beam it into space via a laser from atop a ruin from a vanished civilisation. Are they going to rotate this laser to maintain RA and DEC, to keep it as one continuos beam or will they just fire it straight up (for maximum theatric effect) and thus have it whipped by the spin and orbit of the earth? Carl Sagan's record has a better chance. It's an opportunity for Yahoo to do something utterly useless to get their name in the news, just like it now appears on Slashdot. Applause, applause. It certainly is fodder for some comedy, maybe Mel Brooks will have someone in Spaceballs The Animated Series say, "what is that annoying glare?" while flipping down their pair of Spaceballs The Sunglasses.

meanwhile, picked up in orbit, the stream is immediately recognised and decoded by a Zygorthean ship. After reviewing the contents, the focus down upon the the pyramid of Teotihuacan and one says to another, "well, we certainly know what killed that civilisation!"

Re:Desperate Publicity Ploy

I don't know... It could be a massive legal ploy. Since they will undoubtably send music (In DIGITAL form no less), they can draw all the RIAA lawyers to an Aztec Pyramid. Hopefully, the will re-instated human sacrifice at that point!

Why "Troll"?

The guy has a point. A laser beam pointed straight up will sweep at _incredible_ speed over any receptor situated a couple of tens of lightyears from here. Even if that civilization were looking this way at the right time, had receptors strong enough for the task, had the luck of not having the beam blinded by our or their sun's light (there's a reason we have trouble detecting even Jupiter sized planets by their reflected light, which is higher than this laser will send), etc, it's something that will sweep over their sensor in milliseconds. At most you can say "oh, there's a bleep of light", but not even "oh, it's modulated". Much less have time to figure out what's being sent or how to decompress it.

And speaking of which, ffs, who got the stupid idea of sending encoded images? How about something as simple as morse codes, or train of pulses whose count are the prime numbers or Fibonacci's numbers? That's something that any civilization with even elementary maths knowledge and a primitive telescope can figure out quickly. "Hey, this can't be natural!" By comparison, a short faint burst of noise (which is what an alien data format would look like to you too) is likely to be written off as noise or as some unknown one-off cosmical phenomenon.

All in all it _is_ a stupid publicity stunt, and nothing more.

Re:Desperate Publicity Ploy

I hope that the intended alien intelligence also has the flash plug in that is required.

I don't think this is possible

How are they going to build a tube that high?

Re:Random one I clicked on

another one: [yahoo.com]

Don't kill us. Thanks.

A few thousand years later...

Those stupid @#$% Earthlings are spamming us again!

Re:A few thousand years later...

or its gonna get forwarded all over the universe as "FWD: FWD: FWD: LOL FUNNY EARTHING PICS"

Fine, but for God's sake

DON'T forget the last episode of 'Single Female Lawyer.'

digital time capsule?

Yeah, because there's evidence in that pyramid that the aliens who built it used digital communication also...
Maybe it would be easier to communicate, albeit more expensive, if we shot up a big rock with stuff written on it, say maybe 10 rules that we consider important? I can't imagine that would be misinterpreted somehow by an early desert people on another planet.

Re:digital time capsule?

Better make it 15, in case they drop 'em.

Not gonna work, skippy....

The first line says it all: "Yahoo is compiling a time capsule (Flash required)."

With our luck, aliens will be using Amiga OS or DOS and never see it. ;)

WiFi Spam

After browsing through some of the pictures posted, I would hope extraterrestrial life would be more hesitant to exterminate us -- if not for anything else than curiosity.

Lord Emperor, the Imperial Armada has exterminated the last of the hydrogen-band spammers. At last we can enjoy a reliable communication infrastruc... wait a minute, WTF is this coming from ZZ9 Plural Z-Alpha!?

Interesting distribution

(at the moment) Love - 273 items Beauty - 119 items Fun - 100 items You - 99 items Hope - 98 items Faith - 59 items Now - 58 items Past - 47 items Sorrow - 28 items Anger - 24 items --- Kinda makes me like humanity a bit more.

Send It To Ourselves

Something like this was proposed in the David Gerrold novels of his Dingilliad [gerrold.com] series. The sum total of human knowledge was constantly being shot around the solar system on a laser beam that bounced off of various retroreflectors on the different planets. If you waited some finite amount of time (an hour or so) for the next pass of Item X, anything you wanted could be siphoned off of the stream by setting up a telescope receiver and picking up part of the "spillover" laser beam that hit your colony location but missed the retroreflector. This dynamic "storage medium" was used at the time of the story instead of a "static medium" like physically immobile hard drives or memory chips.

As I recall, Gerrold presented some mumbo-jumbo that said the storage capacity of such an arrangement - a billions-of-miles-long laser beam - was truly enormous. Sounded like a pretty good idea. Anybody think it would really work - and better yet, be practical?

Hey people dont believe this

Yahoo has cancelled plans [dnaindia.com] for a "time capsule" ceremony at pyramids in Mexico, citing concerns regarding possible damage to the ancient site.

"The position of INAH is that after evaluating all the technical and operational aspects, it would be very difficult to move forward with this endeavour," Yahoo said in a release.

"Therefore, we have decided to move the location of the event. For now, we are focused on collecting as many unique and interesting contributions as possible from around the globe."

INAH: Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia (National Institute of Antropology and History).