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If You Had Something to Say to Future Generations...? 124

Posted by Cliff from the a-message-in-a-capsule-in-orbit dept.
gauthier-s asks: "KEO is a project that intends to place a geostationary satellite in orbit that will keep our messages for future generations (up to 50k years after our current existence) as a 'souvenir of Humanity'. Everyone is invited to submit his own message to future civilizations, since it costs nothing to do so. It has been said that any message submitted will be included without any censorship. These messages will be stored for the long trip onto glass disc, which will hopefully be readable by whatever future technology exists when it is recovered. Submissions are possible until December 31, 2002, so take the time to think about your message!" If you feel inclined to share, what kind of message would you leave to the future children of Earth?
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If You Had Something to Say to Future Generations...? More

If You Had Something to Say to Future Generations...?

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  • Message (Score:4, Funny)

    by anthony_dipierro ( 543308 ) on Friday July 12, 2002 @10:14PM (#3874908) Journal

    If you feel inclined to share, what kind of message would you leave to the future children of Earth?

    Don't blame me, I voted for Nader.

  • Wear sunscreen.
  • Both documents (along with several along similar lines) would probably be a good idea to include along with any individual comments. Especially if you subscribe to Orwell's theories of Big Brother etc and believe the future will be one of totalitarianism. I was worried about how the future descendants would be able to read the messages, but it seems they are including a DVD reader along with the storage (in the form of DVDs, of course!) There's no guarantee, though, that they'd be able to plug it in ;)

  • This is not a place of honor. (Score:5, Funny)

    by acceleriter ( 231439 ) on Friday July 12, 2002 @10:33PM (#3874958)
    Steer clear of Yucca Mountain.
    • Insightfull? Ignorant is more like it. The waste that will probablly never be stored in Yucca Mountain is hazerdous for "only" 10,000 years. What really pisses me off is that the "waste" still has 95% of its energy left. Why the hell do we even call it waste? Politicaly Hazerdous Material would be more accurate.

  • Advice... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Chasing Amy ( 450778 ) <asdfijoaisdf@askdfjpasodf.com> on Friday July 12, 2002 @10:36PM (#3874965) Homepage
    > If you feel inclined to share, what kind of message would you
    > leave to the future children of Earth?

    "Always...no, never...forget to check your references."

  • 640K (Score:2, Funny)

    by WiKKeSH ( 543962 )
    "640K ought to be enough for anybody." Bill Gates, 1981
    • You mean 640 exabytes?

      Slashdot requires you to wait 20 seconds between hitting 'reply' and submitting a comment.

      It's been 19 seconds since you hit 'reply'!

  • Ok, (Score:5, Funny)

    by Treeluvinhippy ( 545814 ) <liquidsorcery.gmail@com> on Friday July 12, 2002 @10:48PM (#3874989)
    To the children of the far future.

    If you have invented time travel and are ever around my area/time can I catch a lift?
  • Beowolf Cluster of Natalie Portmans pouring Hot Grits Down All Your Base Are Belong To Us

  • PS (Score:1)

    by Kizzle ( 555439 )
    Can you send me a Playstation36 and a few games through time? Thanks
  • Have they invented tri-breasted women yet? Like in Total Recall? 4 would be cool too.

  • of course (Score:5, Funny)

    by realgone ( 147744 ) on Friday July 12, 2002 @11:11PM (#3875030)
    "MESSAGE TO FUTURE GENERATIONS" LICENSE

    ATTENTION: Please read carefully before opening this geostationary satellite. The individual or entity opening this satellite (the "future generation") agrees to be bound by the terms of this license. If you open this satellite and do not agree to the terms of this license, do not use the glass disc contained within and promptly return the satellite unopened to its geosynchronous orbit.
  • There will almost certainly be censorship of the material submitted. It's just that it'll occur when the satellite is retrieved by these future generations and read, rather than when it is put up.
    • Actually, censorship wouldn't matter. How many people can understand the "English" that was spoken 1,000 years ago? Less than 0.001%, by far. Who can understand any language from 4,000 years ago? Who knows Sumerian? Who knows a language from 30,000 years ago? 50,000? The future generations won't.

      More useful would be images. Or some series of images made that could be made into motion pictures (anybody remember that story by A.C. Clarke? :)
    1. Look out behind you!

    2. Goodbye, and thanks for all the fish.

    3. Say Hello to iSatellite.

    4. First Post!

  • Would it be cool to get "First Post!" on the Disk?

  • It's a useless effort (Score:5, Insightful)

    by eggstasy ( 458692 ) on Friday July 12, 2002 @11:26PM (#3875084) Journal
    They will never listen to us. Even if we gave them the most insightful advice possible, they wouldn't follow it. Look at the bible! Does anyone actually care about what's in it? Most "Christians" never even read it, let alone understand it. And yet it could similarly be regarded as advice for future generations. And if we could ever somehow follow the gist of it strictly, as in, love your neighbour, live in peace and harmony, do not kill steal or covet etc. then we would have sort of a utopian, idyllic society. But who cares about the bible or any other religious text? It's only created rivalry between people of different religions, and generated the majority of all wars ever fought. Whatever you tell someone, you'll be lucky if they listen to it. People never learn anything except from their own experience. You may try time and time again to teach them how to properly live their lives, but it would take genetic manipulation to get people to actually learn from each other instead of learning from trial and error. If people would only learn from their elders, we would all have ceased bickering amongst ourselves a long, long time ago, after the first wars were fought.
    Just look at spain and morocco. They're getting close to a war over some stupid deserted islands that no one ever heard about.Morocco just invaded one of them, and there's nothing there but rocks and sand, what's the point?
    You might as well send them "frosty piss" and "AYB" messages. They'll shit on them.
    • Even if we gave them the most insightful advice possible

      You're missing the point. You have to prefix it with 'I'm probably gonna get modded down for this, but...'

    • Um, who said anything about advice? Frankly I think if we're still around in 50k years, we're not going to be interested in advice from the start of the 21st century.

      What they probably *will* be interested in will be the historic value of what thousands of normal people 50k years ago had to say.

      As for the Bible, half it's problem is the advice is either useless, counter-productive, out of context, or common sense. Calling it "the most insightful advice possible" is rather laughable IMO.

      Anyway, in 50k years, the human race will hopefully have changed a lot. We should have developed a post-scarcity civilization and have a mature social, political and economic system. If not, well, damnit, I wanna know WHY not.
      • Care to share some examples for useless, counter-productive, or out of context advice from the Bible?
        • Depends, do you want to provide any evidence to the contary?

          Do I need to read the Bible to realise it's wrong to kill someone* or sleep with someone other than my wife*, not steal*, not commit thoughtcrime*, to love my neighbour and my enemy*, to turn the other cheek*, or that if I ever get the chance, it's a good idea to flood the planet and only tell people I like that they should prepare?

          No, I don't think so*. Not that my opinions on the Bible or religion are really up for discussion* :)

          * Various exceptions excluded
    • People never learn anything except from their own experience.

      You're being overly optimistic and giving people too much credit. Really. Most of the problems in the world stem from people repeating the same mistakes over and over again.
    • Well you oh so close I can smell it.

      It wouldn't require genetic manipulation to get people to learn from one another, but it would require genetic manipulation to remove all the animal instincts, we are afterall barbaric animals at hart (or at least 99.9% of us).

      There is very little you can do to 'teach' most people, there just not made that way.
      Most pepole cant understand the kind of philosiphy required to implement such a utopia, this can be expressed as a mild autism, when compaired to those who can understand.

      1: autistic ( you can-not understand that other people may see things differently from you)

      2: autistic-normal ( the double bluff, you cannot understand that someone might know what your thinking)

      3: normal ( unable to fully comprehend the double bluff (in some circumstances nothing matters))

      4: Full realisation ( we and everything around us are all made of star dust, I am no different from the air that I breath)
    • Look at the bible! Does anyone actually care about what's in it?

      Are you kidding? The bible is a tuned manipulation device, presented as 'The Wisdom of God' but really the embodiment of the church's effort to control the masses.

      Why th e *&*Q!@( would I care about the hallucinations contained in a work of fiction? What you Jews/Christians/Muslims fail to understand is that the bible is not an absolute re-telling of history. It is not an academic account of the last 4000 years. It is a tool, a collection of stories used to manipulate people, cleverly crafted as Indisputable Fact.

      If there is anything I would tell future generations:

      There is NO All-powerfull God. Take responsibilty for yourselves and one-another. You are all in absolute control over what your future will bring.

    • If we found the bible in a geostationary orbit in the earths upper atmosphere, i sure as hell would listen to it a lot closer.
  • Sell microsoft short.

    -Sean

  • 5 words (Score:5, Funny)

    by jcsehak ( 559709 ) on Friday July 12, 2002 @11:36PM (#3875112) Homepage
    Be excellent to each other.
  • I hope that this project includes all the literary classics. They seem to have an infinite amount of storage space, so this should not be a problem for them. I would hesitate to offer my own personal comment to the far future, as I am currently faced with so many worthwhile thoughts from the past which are truly worthy of preservation.
    • Can't do that. By then the copyright terms will be extended out to eternity plus one day. Then the lawyers of the future will come back in time to sue you. Assuming copyright violation isn't a capital crime by then...
  • We should probably apologize in advance about the Backstreet Boys, N'Sync, New Kids on the Block...

    You know, since their annoying yet catchy music has probably burned itself into our DNA and our descendents will all be walking around in girly-boy outfits with atrocious haircuts and humming poorly-written ballads in harmony...

    No, seriously. Am I the only one who sees this?

    (As an aside, I always wanted to do a First Person Shooter where the premise is, a guy is given the opportunity to visit the future, and when he returns, he has this crazed look in his eye, and he gasps, "Kill them! We have to kill them NOW! While we still have a fighting chance! For the LOVE of GOD, KILL ALL THE BOYBANDS NOW!!!" etc. etc.)
  • A good place to start would be to include whatever was on [nasa.gov] the Voyager spacecraft.

    I wonder why they picked 50,000 years. I mean, you might as well say 80 gadzillion years. Why not just say "we'll do our best to make it last forever?"
    • I wonder why they picked 50,000 years.

      Nothing lasts forever, not even glass discs. Entropy and all that, also causes your razor blades to become dull by themselves. I guess they think the glass disc would still be readable after 50K years.
      • I hope they're not using normal glass, which is technically a liquid. Look at windows in colonial houses; their bottom is thicker than their top.

        Now that I think of it, they should put in some honey. I know that honey has been dug up from egyptian tombs, and was still good. Who knows, maybe it'll last 50k years?
        • I hope they're not using normal glass, which is technically a liquid. Look at windows in colonial houses; their bottom is thicker than their top.

          True, but:
          - modern day glass may have better properties than colonial glass
          - this thing is going to be put on a satellite orbiting the earth. The zero gravity should help that problem.

          Come to think of it: it may be a bigger challenge to keep the satellite's orbit stable for 50,000 years.
        • I hope they're not using normal glass, which is technically a liquid. Look at windows in colonial houses; their bottom is thicker than their top.
          Actually this does not have to do with the time that the window has been up in a house, eg: ~400 years. Rather it has to do with the way that the glass was poured and then installed.

          From Urban Legends.com [urbanlegends.com]:
          3)The temperature at which a rigid glass becomes a supercooled liquid is called the glass transition temperature, Tg. For window glass, Tg (measured) is 550 degrees C. For the limiting case of infinite time the thermodynamically calculated ideal glass transition state Tg(0) for window glass is 270 degrees C. For Pyrex the values are 550 and 350 deg., respectively. [This allone should be enough to put to rest any argument for the liquid properties of glass at room temperature (which rarely gets above 50 degrees C).
          "Glass" may not survive 50k years, but it won't be because it sagged.
        • > I hope they're not using normal glass, which is
          > technically a liquid. Look at windows in colonial
          > houses; their bottom is thicker than their top.

          Think "Zero-G".
        • If you made glass, and it was imperfect (due to the manufacturing methods being somewhat crude), would you install the glass with the thicker, stronger part of the glass on the bottom (as a support) or on the top, where it could be a liability to the thinner bottom edge?

          There are some older places (100-200 y.o.) that have the multi-pane glass arranged so that the thickest edge is always towards the outside of the frame (top row, thick on top... right column, thick on the right edge). It had an interesting effect (due to the slight warp in the glass...

    • Duh (Score:2)

      by Bastian ( 66383 )
      50,000 years was chosen because in that amount of time, it's almost guaranteed that every glass disc on the satellite will be shattered by the billions of micrometeors that will most likely be perforating the hull of the sattellite on a continual basis after they sufficiently weaken the skin in a couple hundred years.

      That way, the people of the future don't /really/ have to hear whatever inane [slashdot.org] shit [slashdot.org] the humans of today decide might be cute to say and have put in orbit.
    • I wonder why they picked 50,000 years

      From the KEO faq [keo.org]:

      "Why 50,000 years?

      50,000 years is the mirror date to a milestone in the evolution of our species: the first traces of Art reveal the human capacity for abstract thought and symbolic expression.
      50,000 years is distance in time so compelling that it forces us to shed our worries and daily routine and puts us each on an equal footing, inviting us to bask in our thoughts, intuitions and deepest convictions...
      However 50,000 years only represent 1% of the evolution of the human species that have appeared on Earth some 5 million years ago.
      It is also the concept of time and distance that will give our treasures a genuine archeological value because it is very probable that definitive traces of the activities of the Man of today will be in turn recovered by the Man of tomorrow.      "

  • Three Little Sentences (Score:3, Funny)

    by sharkey ( 16670 ) on Saturday July 13, 2002 @12:11AM (#3875223)
    1. [whisper] Cover for me.
    2. Oooo, good idea, boss!
    3. It was like that when I got here.
    --Homer

  • Native perl DeCSS (Score:3, Funny)

    by bmud ( 590967 ) on Saturday July 13, 2002 @12:26AM (#3875265)
    is roughly three lines long. If I conclude my message with the source code and explain it's applicability to future generations, will the satellite then become a circumvention device?
  • All the crap flooders will fill the poor satelite with *BSD is dying posts - the funny thing is that the life forms that will read the disk will probably be *BSD based sentient AI systems.

    Poor things won't know what to make of the ASCII goastse.cx posts though.

  • How about (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Zelig321 ( 592536 )
    Let's put the whole Slashdot message archive on that DVD. After all, it's the stuff that matters.

  • Okay, so I didn't read the article... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by extrasolar ( 28341 ) on Saturday July 13, 2002 @01:19AM (#3875425) Homepage Journal
    I'm allowed, once in a while, aren't I?

    But 50,000 years seems a bit too long.

    Why?

    The assumption is that our technology will continue to advance the farther we travel into the future.

    But, consider _The Time Machine_ by H.G. Wells. When the main character traveled far enough into the future, eventually we reversed this trend, evolved into two separate species, and ran around in happiness about all the fruit we've found (okay...so its been a while since I read the book).

    And I think Wells has this point right on. Look around us, people. If you haven't noticed, the renaissance is over. We've already passed our Great Enlightenment. And we've already passed our technological maturity.

    Scientists already think that we pretty much know most of what there is to know (I read this somewhere, not sure where). Even if you're a programmer, what else is new or interesting to program? (I am seriously curious about this, but probably off-topic)

    At what point does going to school mean learning that any new idea you have has already been discoved and written about in depth?

    And at what point are we running around naked, glad at being so happy eating our yummy fruit, completely oblivious about the messages contained in a dark satellite, silently circling around the earth?
    • You're hilarious. Scientific knowledge is in the middle of an exponential curve, with no end in sight. The scientists who think we know everything are the ones not doing any research. There's plenty of new ideas out there, and plenty of new things to do. This isn't our technology maturity; it's barely the start of our technological infancy.
    • Scientists already think that we pretty much know most of what there is to know...

      Ah yes, I think Stephen Hawking is one of them. Well, I remember reading this statement made by Lord Kelvin around 1900 or so, where he said the same thing: "Physics is more or less complete. There are only two small problems left to be solved". Or something like that, forgive me for not quoting literally. Anyhow, one of the small problems led to the theory of relativity, the other to quantum mechanics.

    • ...The physicists thought they had their knowledge of the universe pretty much down pat.

  • Message (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    By the time you read this, the copyright to Mickey Mouse should have just expired.
  • I'd send ASCII copies of all the great works of art. both in black and white and in color. What's great about ASCII is it's huge compression rate. You could fit all of them into the space of a good sized/quality jpg file.

    Here's an example:Mona Lisa [totalise.co.uk]

    and one in color... html coloring.

    Some dog [cavallo2000.com]

  • Time Shards (Score:2, Interesting)

    by cheezehead ( 167366 )
    There is a great SF story by Gregory Benford

    Spoiler Warning
    Don't read on if you think you want to read the story. The following spoils it a bit. However, it is essential to illustrate my point.
    .
    .
    .
    .
    .
    .
    .
    The story is about retrieving information from pottery. The idea is to restore the sounds that were around when people were making pottery centuries ago. I read somewhere that this was based on actual serious research.
    Anyhow, the scientists succeed, but are disappointed by what they can retrieve: middle-agers shouting warnings into the pot not to walk on this and this guy's land, because the sheep will get sick, and other nonsense like that.
    At the same time some other scientists are preparing a time capsule for the benefit of future generations. The conclusion of the story is: "what makes us think we are doing a better job than the people from the middle ages?"

    I guess the same applies here: even if we would filter out all the crap ("l33t hax0rz in sp33z!"), are people really going to give a damn in 50K years?
    • Historians and archaeologists seem to give a damn about stuff that happened a long time ago. I don't but... Maybe they'll have similar people in 50k years...
  • "We, too, thought we were intelligent. We mistook data for wisdom."

  • Future generations will be quite confused when most of the comments sent to space consist of 'first posts', just like this article.. along with many other comments pointing this fact out.

  • Well, I'd zip up a combination of the latest BitchX client, a picture of our mutual Goatse friend and a text file with the message:

    These backdoors had belonged to us.

  • Sorry (Score:2, Funny)

    by Red_Winestain ( 243346 )
    How about WE APOLOGISE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE, preferably in the form of giant flaming letters.
  • They told us it was fixed!
  • Is this little project part of a greater payload, one involving a military satellite with ultra-top-secret payload?

    If I was them in 50,000 years...

    Actually, people in 500-1000 years are going to go up there and remove all the stinking satellites in orbit because they will interfere with starship lauches.

    And they probably would laugh their head off finding our pathetic attempt at imparting wisdom from the distant past, and yet be not amused at all by our propensity to put junk in space for no other reason than to stroke our own egos...

    The point is that there's a marketing ploy somewhere. Someone is selling movie tickets, sodas, or cars behind this one...

    repeat after me: "I am a victim of marketing"
  • One word, Two characters...

    42!
  • It's better to pissed off then pissed on!
  • Don't forget to take a towel.

  • "Sorry. We thought it was a good idea."

    That should pretty much cover everything. ;)
  • im all borken up between:

    1) S'long and thanks for all the fish!
    2) LOOK! BEHIND YOU!
    3) NI!
    and
    4) Bond, James Bond
  • "If you can read this you've done better than I could have hoped." I mean, seriously, what are the chances of something like this being readable in even 50 years?
  • Future generations will only need two things from us. The complete works of Luis Armstrong
    and the rules of major league baseball.
  • "He, O' Men, is wisest who, like Socrates, knows his wisdom has no value."

    -- Socrates
  • If You Had Something to Say to Future Generations...?

    GET OFF MY LAWN!

  • Always clearly and concisely comment your code.
  • "Hi, I send you this in order to have you advice..."
  • 1. "Sorry..." 2. Include a COBOL Manual!
  • ... there you are.
  • From the website:

    "... Some 50,000 years later it will return to earth, intact, ...."

    I have only one word

    "DUCK!"

  • ... STFU and RTFM!
  • DON'T PANIC!
  • [anu.edu.au]
    The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

  • ...herpes sucked, so did war, money was kind of fun (but annoying), and planes actually crashed... but the primitive girls rocked!

    Um wait... what was my first point?
  • If you are hearing this message, this craft was not destroyed in a collison with near Earth asteriods. And now a word from our sponsor Coca-cola.
  • Language is a living thing. It changes over time. English from 1000 years ago looks nothing like English of today. The same can be said for any of the modern languages. Other languages may not have changed so drastically over time, but they have changed. What makes anyone think that any human living 50000 years from now will have even the slightest clue what our messages say? Even if they could read today's languages, the meanings of words change over time. "Computer" a hundred years ago, meant "one who computes", and had nothing to do with the machine on which I am typing now.

    Add to that the problem of human evolution. Modern humans have only been around for 20000 years. We may not look or act the same, or even be here 50000 years from now. We're long overdue for an asteroid impact, ice age, or other disaster. Any such event could cause the evolution of species on Earth to change significantly. Maybe I'm a pessimist, but I really don't think we'll be here 50000 years from now, unless we get off our butts and colonize space. Then we at least have a chance of surviving long enough to be around to read these messages 50000 years from now.

    That said, I'll probably leave a message anyway. Who knows? Maybe some future historian will have remembered the languages of the twenty-first century and will be able to read it. It would be cool to think I might be able to rant that far into the future.

  • "I really hope you guys aren't still waiting for some magic man from the sky to 'return'. -steve"

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