Send your name to Pluto

hatredman writes "NASA is preparing to send the New Horizons probe to Pluto. It will be the first earth device to get intimate with the icy planet. And you can be there too - or, at least, your name. NASA is asking everyone to send them their names, which will be attached in the space device. The New Horizons probe will be launched in January 2006 to explore Pluto and the Kuiper belt, in the outskirts of the Solar System. It is expected that the probe will return to earth in approximately 50 thousand years."

Kinda depressing

[AviLazar]

That it is going to take us 50,000 years to send a probe to pluto and back? Wow. So much for the dreams of a child going into space :(

50,000 years??

[tont0r]

seriously? what is the point? its a cute idea because 'HEY! LOOK! ITS THIS 50,000 YEAR OLD SATELLITE!!' but thats a long ass time for lots of things to go wrong. also a long ass time for people to forget 'hmm... NASA. what the hell is that??' sorry to sound trollish, but i would like to think that in 50,000 years, we could travel to pluto just fine. either that, or we will just be dead.

Binary CD?

[Lewisham]

Um, am I the only one wondering what the point of sending a CD is? Apart from the "prestiege" for the people on said CD, if any intelligent life picks it up, they're not exactly going to be able to read it are they?

I have trouble enough making sure my Windows using friends don't send me documents in PowerPoint format, let alone intelligent life understanding our alphabet, then working out ASCII code, then working out binary.

It's a standards nightmare to make Tim Berners-Lee cry.

Re:Kinda depressing

[commander_gallium]

And how long is a CD going to last being exposed to all that cosmic ray goodness? Certainly not 50,000 years.

Re:50,000 years??

[forum__32]

The data that will be retrieved from the probe will more then likely be useless. If they are planning on this thing communicating back to NASA on regular intervals, then that is a different story. But for them to beleive that anyone on earth in 50,000 years will know how to get the data off is pretty naive. Its been less then 40 years and already 5" 1/4 discs are useless and hard to come by.

It's for kids

[edremy]

I put my two sons on the list- they give you a little certificate you can print out with their name on it.

My 4-year-old will think it's neat. (The 8-month old might not really understand.) It gets them to think about science, and costs a few grams added to the probe. Why not?

Re:It seems kinda pointless

[YrWrstNtmr]

Right. Future inventions will be sooo much faster and better. Doing all that hard R&D work up front is simply silly. For instance, Henry Ford should have bypassed the Model T, and gone directly designing and building a Mustang Cobra. Or Ferry Porsche could have blown off all that silly Volkswagon stuff, and instead just built the Carerra GT.

What have you been smoking? Please tell us, so we can avoid it. It obviously burns way too many brain cells.

Re:This is idiotic!

[rbarreira]

More or the same that you gained from posting that here :)

Re:Will people even be able to read the names??

[Vadim Makarov]

I doubt the average person will be able to read the list of names when the probe comes back. The Latin alphabet has only existed for 2,700 years, and the probe is coming back in 50,000. In 50,000 years, it's almost inevitable that either humanity will be communicating without written words, we'll be using an entirely different alphabet, or humanity will be extinct.

Chances are, the probe will be retrieved and placed into some sort of museum much earlier. If all goes well, the humanity will have nuclear drives and all that stuff for interstellar flights in mere few hundred of years. However, if it happens so that the humanity in, say, the next 500 years won't be interested in retrieving its earlier probes as historical artefacts, won't have the means of doing so or won't exist, THEN the next 49500 years or whatever long time won't change the situation either. The point is, the fate of the probe will be likely decided in the next 500 years, and not when it returns to Earth without interruption.

50'000 years

[pgilman]

"It is expected that the probe will return to earth in approximately 50 thousand years."

unlikely. the probe will be picked up by one of our own spacecraft long before then. it will sit in a museum for a while, and in 50'000 years it will be long returned to dust and forgotten by whatever we've evolved/mutated into by then.