Make Plans Now: Earth to Be Destroyed in 2049.
Is this really how we want to put our best foot forward in a potential first contact situation?
A total of 25,880 text messages will be broadcast into space, transmitted 20.3 light-years to Gliese 581d. That world is the outlying planet in the Gliese 581 system, and orbits its parent star every 66.8 days. It may be covered by a large and deep ocean and is the first serious “waterworld” candidate discovered beyond our Solar System.
Great. So if there is an advanced civilization on Gliese 581d, the very first communication it’ll get from us will be a two-hour long text spam attack. How, exactly, is several billion variations of “u r teh suxxors rofl” and “OMG ur my new BFF aliens!!11!!!” supposed to convince an alien planet that we’re actually intelligent. More importantly, how will this convince them that we’re actually good neighbors?
The story says that the messages will take about twenty years to arrive. That gives us all about forty years before Earth is destroyed by a planet-annihilating death ray from Gliese 581d in 2049. Like the Cats said, “You have no chance to survive make your time.”
(via Glenn Reynolds, who doesn’t seem quite so worried)
UPDATE: Instalanche! As you’ll see if you follow the link, this was inspired by a post of Glenn’s, so we’ve achieved Maximum Link Circularity. Also, a healthy fear of being vaporized by a death ray from space.
If this is your first time here, take a few minutes to look around the joint. Maybe pick up a little gew-gaw from Amazon or drop a fin in the tip jar. Be sure to come back soon, because life’s too short to spend it reading inferior blogs!
Other Posts of Interest:
- Drama and Grease, In Space!
- One Fractionally-Small Step for Man…
- Cool Space Stuff – Lightning on Saturn
Category: Out in the Black
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killing_Star
We have learned NOTHING!
Women and minorities will be hit hardest.
Ba-ZING!
It could be worse; they could be beaming that at 61 Ursae Majoris.
Actually, we can be fried anytime after 2030. If they are really advanced, they will have faster than light travel, or they might just open a wormhole and suck us all up!
They'd better transmit the final episode of "Single Female Lawyer" while they're at it.
And, so far as I know, we don't have a robot capable of handling the theme song:
"Single Female Lawyer
Fighting for her clients.
Wearing sexy mini skirts
And being self-reliant."
If there's an intelligent civilization there, they already know about us. We've been broadcasting radio since 1920 and television signals since 1947. The first chance they had to see what we look like, we sent them Milton Berle in drag. Add in I Love Lucy, Pinky Lee, Gunsmoke, the Untouchables, The Beverly Hillbillies, Gilligan's Island, My Mother The Car, the Flying Nun and disco, and it's no wonder they've never contacted us.
Talk about "flagged" …
Oh, to heck with my texts … Just don't let `em see my emails.
This is complete bollocks, of course.
There is no way any advanced civilization would destroy us. Not after having been bombarded by Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, and the young genius of Mel Brooks in Your Show of Shows in the original kineoscope.
My God, can you imagine the towering Temple to Imogene on Epsilon Bootes right now? The Slime Worm People must worship her graven image three times a day!
Then of course, there's the Festival of Lucille Ball every Mating Season. Let's not get into that….
[...] August 2009 in links | Tags: breadcrumbs A couple more OMG contingencies the White Paper forgot. No mention of end-of-civilisation-as-we-know-it death rays at [...]
[...] crock.* Science reporting is no good.* Lefties are violent.* The French are useless.* The world is coming to an end (thanks [...]
hmm….guys we r living ina planet that is less than a particle in the this system.billion of stars are there.billions of planets.billions of glaxy..its no wonder some day some bulldog comes and will destroy us..it is to occur..so pray to GOD.infact we dont know what would happen in next second of my life.we survive or we breath our last
Those messages we sent out to them? Yeah. They were monitored before they were sent. There weren't any…what did you say? "u r teh suxxors rofl"? That would be really stupid of us. Sure there were probably people who sent that kind of stuff in, but you don't think that the group sending the message into space wouldn't know to not send images, messages, etc. that make us look like bad neighbors or unintelligent? And for all we know "u r teh suxxors rofl" could be intelligent to them!
And who says they're advanced? Why do all "aliens" have to be more advanced than us? Who says they're not still in the "caveman" ages and compared to them we could seem like Gods.
This shows a complete lack of interest or understanding in the subject you are "reporting" on. There are so many variables that aren't mentioned to make this post make completely NO sense. Thank you and goodnight.