Space firm to send Christmas Day tweets to dead people Bereaved Brits desperate to send a message to their departed loved ones this Christmas could instead simply alert hostile aliens to our tenuous Earthly existence. The Bereavement Register - a useful service to help bereaved families avoid being deluged with junk mail and cold calls targeted at their dead relatives - is …
Something tells me this wouldn't be the worst thing to happen to us, and might benefit us...
Anyway, why are ex-NASA chiefs getting hot and bothered? Didn't they pretty much bolt "hello, if found please return to..." on the Voyager probes, with a drawing of what we looked like, what we liked to listen to and a scan of someone's brainwaves - perfect for when our overlords-to-be want to calibrate their mind-control-a-tron.
Fortunately, this will only be figured out if our new overlords are into vinyl.
"Didn't they pretty much bolt "hello, if found please return to..." on the Voyager probes"
Oh yes, golden records meant to be played on 16 2/3 RPM... good luck finding a gramophone using that speed.
Plaques with "We're here, please return to owner", though, were bolted on Pioneer 10 and 11. Mind you, I saw on "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier" that one hot-headed Klingon captain named Klaa used Pioneer 10 for target practice, so we're down to half of our plaques.
What do you mean "it's science fiction"? I've seen it on TV, it must be true!
Futurama nerd!!*
* Coming from someone who has the complete series box set**... and who's girlfriend mysteriously asked me if the new four film Futurama boxset had Benders head on the box. Wonder what I'm getting for Christmas?! :-)
** The original big box version, but the new smaller square box version looks appealing!!
"The fact that the Bereavement Register is restricting messages to a Twitter-style 140 characters gives further cause for concern, as any life form that picks up the message is likely to take one look and write us off as a non-intelligent life form ripe for harvesting."
The way forward seems clear. Twitter must be destroyed for the sake of humankind. Rise up my brothers (and sisters) and rain the holy fire upon the abomination that is TXT SPK!
Michaud and Billingham are idiots. Any civilisation with the ability to pay us a visit is going to find us no more interesting than the average planet full of monkeys, of which there are almost certainly squillions within their sphere of interest.
On the other hand, the target market for this scam seems to consist of "people who are so distressed by their loss that they'll try anything", which strikes me as tasteless and abusive. The real story here is what people suffer at the hands of their fellow humans, not aliens.
"Michaud and Billingham are idiots. Any civilisation with the ability to pay us a visit is going to find us no more interesting than the average planet full of monkeys, of which there are almost certainly squillions within their sphere of interest."
What responds to the signal may be an individual with vast automated resources and a tendency to pull the legs off bugs for fun.
We don't have anything it needs, we don't have anything it wants, but we're fucked anyway.
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