The majority of us didn't know about the plaques until after the spacecraft were packed up and ready to be shipped to the launch-site. It was a nice surprise when we learned about it. Feels good to know that we got to sign our name on our work.
Inherently lighter on the moon. ;)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Museum
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallen_Astronaut
I really wish I would be around to see the day those exhibits get their first visitors. I guess there will be a gangway route to take between all these spots, eventually.
I have hope for you, humanity. Don't screw it up.
EDIT: Oh I just remembered that the fine folks behind Artificial Museum[0] have already installed their exhibits on the moon .. can't find the link just yet (maybe its in bunker mode for now), but for those interested in paying a virtual visit to the Moons' first civilian art installations, keep an eye on these guys ..
clickety_clack•2mo ago
BigTTYGothGF•2mo ago
dotancohen•2mo ago
Citizens of the Blue Planet,
Once again your surface-crawling machines inch toward our sacred dunes, and once again you proclaim that "anyone wanting to know more can go right to the source." We are the source.
Let the Council make this perfectly clear: Your probes do not "visit." They trespass.
Each lumbering, dust-belching contraption arrives uninvited, drilling our soil, sniffing our winds, and snapping impertinent images of our most private crater-gardens. Then your kind declares triumph: "We have studied Mars!"
You have studied exactly nothing, save for what we allow your machines to perceive.
Our Atmospheric Obfuscation Choir continues to blanket your sensors with carefully tuned spectro-misdirection. Your rovers cannot see the Red Orchards. Your orbiters cannot detect the life-pools. Your spectrometers cannot interpret a single nutrient of our gelsacs - may they throb eternally.
Yet still you boast.
And so hear this proclamation from the Council of Elders:
If the beings of the Blue Planet truly wish to "go to the source," they may present themselves honorably: unshielded, unarmed, and prepared for diplomatic puncturing of their diplomatic gelsac. Such is our custom. Such is our law.
Until then, we will continue to tolerate your stumbling robots, harvest what amusement they provide, and allow them to perish in their own confusion.
iammattmurphy•2mo ago
DarmokJalad1701•2mo ago
Molon Labe. Until then, we will continue to boast, and above your "private" crater-gardens (that we will keep taking pictures of), the stars will belong to us.
CamperBob2•2mo ago
hidroto•2mo ago
inglor_cz•2mo ago
qlm•2mo ago
inglor_cz•2mo ago
(Notice that the very word brainrot is a neologism?)
I don't think we should pooh-pooh such developments as irrelevant, and I am very unhappy that they have been subsumed to the universal polarization of the culture wars that consume everything while producing nothing of value.
The Moloch indeed.
PaulDavisThe1st•2mo ago
Examined more closely, this appears to mean nothing more than "people spend less time wearing the clothes that a previously dominant culture considered to be high status markers".
inglor_cz•2mo ago
People will now turn out for a funeral in a tracksuit. Yes, previously dominant culture frowned upon such things. Yes, the culture has obviously changed.
Our main disagreement seems to be whether such change is good, bad, or irrelevant.
I could live with people dressing in a disgusting way, but I really dislike the death of book reading. That will make us all worse at thinking.
PaulDavisThe1st•2mo ago
When it comes to culture, I believe that things change rather than go up or down. In general, I suspect there are two very long term (i.e. many millenia-long) trends that occur in parallel, one of them generally improving the human condition and one of them degrading it. The world is literally going to hell in a handbasket, at the same thing as nearly everything is getting better.
Your concerns about book reading are, of course, the opposite of those of the Greek philosophers who imagined that it would make us all more stupid.
inglor_cz•2mo ago
As for the Greek philosophers, I feel you are being too dismissive saying that they imagined us being more stupid. First, it was mostly about Socrates and second, his position was a bit more nuanced than how you present it. He was concerned about education becoming impersonal, which definitely has some downsides (until today, we haven't discovered any educational mode more efficient than 1:1 tutoring, at least from the student's individual point of view; the economic dimension, of course, differs). Second, he believed that our memory capabilities would go down, which they probably did. We don't have much contact with purely oral cultures now, but the little we do, show that pre-literate people were indeed better at remembering their collective past, including their culture, in the sense of "actually having it in their own heads" instead of "hearing about it once in the class and then promptly forgetting what they heard".
How many people today can recite a thousand songs from memory? Not that long ago, people like that would exist and keep ancient songs alive.
Today I hear Ed Sheeran ten times a day (ugh), but I wouldn't be able to recollect the lyrics even if threatened with an execution.
That is certainly one way of being stupider than before. Yes, it is compensated by other improvements, no doubt about that.
gcanyon•2mo ago
In the '80s movie Trancers, Jack Deth is a visitor from the future, and as he's slicking his hair back with water from a flower vase a woman from the present day asks something like, "People from the future put vase-water in their hair?!" and Jack Deth replies very seriously, "Dry hair is for squids."
BigTTYGothGF•2mo ago
I bet if they had showed up in a sport coat you wouldn't have found it notable despite the fact they were the tracksuits of their day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sport_coat
inglor_cz•2mo ago
Yes, it is possible that tracksuits will become the to-go clothing for funerals and theatres as well as gyms.
tired-turtle•2mo ago
inglor_cz•2mo ago
I am actually an algebra major and I always felt that the need of some of my peers to stuff the entire outside world into mathematical definitions does not lead anywhere. Please don't mathematize societal concepts ("a set with a total order"), you will only mislead yourself and others. Maths isn't a good tool to understand people.
Let us talk about humans in a human language instead.
BurningFrog•2mo ago
Importantly: even if this is the case, it doesn't mean we're wrong!
qlm•2mo ago
inglor_cz•2mo ago
And "where this way of thinking ultimately leads"? Nowhere special.
nozzlegear•2mo ago
inglor_cz•2mo ago
hdgvhicv•2mo ago
The records might survive to the end of time if they are lucky and get flung into intergalactic space post andromeda collision.
YouAreMammon•2mo ago
yells at cloud
jdpage•2mo ago
3eb7988a1663•2mo ago
For many years now, NASA has let random people get their name printed on the Mars missions on a little plaque. Perseverance has 11 million names bolted onto the frame. My buddy boasts that he has been on Mars N times.
https://science.nasa.gov/missions/mars-2020-perseverance/nea...
kej•2mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque
KwanEsq•2mo ago
tzs•2mo ago
Spacecraft engineers have been putting easter eggs, credits, and other such things that have nothing to do with the mission on spacecraft since the dawn of space engineering.
This is a well established informal part of space engineering culture.