A NASA Spacecraft Could Carry Your Name to Jupiter in 2024 (msn.com) 51
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post:
In 2024, a new spacecraft will hurtle toward Jupiter in a bid to learn whether its moon Europa is capable of supporting life. The craft will carry more than high-tech sensors: It also will bear a poem and hundreds of thousands of human names.
Yours could be one of them.
NASA is asking people to submit their names ahead of the mission's October 2024 launch. Those submitted by the end of 2023 will go into space on the Europa Clipper spacecraft, which should enter Jupiter's orbit in 2030... They'll eventually be stenciled onto a dime-sized microchip in microscopic writing, then attached to a metal plate engraved with the poem that will accompany the craft.
700,000 names have been submitted so far — and they'll all be carried a distance of over 1.8 billion miles.
They'll travel through space with a poem that ends by describing what we humans on earth are made of — including "a need to call out through the dark."
Yours could be one of them.
NASA is asking people to submit their names ahead of the mission's October 2024 launch. Those submitted by the end of 2023 will go into space on the Europa Clipper spacecraft, which should enter Jupiter's orbit in 2030... They'll eventually be stenciled onto a dime-sized microchip in microscopic writing, then attached to a metal plate engraved with the poem that will accompany the craft.
700,000 names have been submitted so far — and they'll all be carried a distance of over 1.8 billion miles.
They'll travel through space with a poem that ends by describing what we humans on earth are made of — including "a need to call out through the dark."
Meat (Score:2)
We are made of meat.
Also, why? I'm a huge space fan, but I just don't see why I would want my name engraved on this microchip.
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It's a way of touching Jupiter. Your name on the microchip will alter the probe's weight by a few femtograms. Over 10 years that femtogram weight difference will affect the probes location and orbit by about one micron which in turn can affect other things slightly. So over a billion years when new life evolves on Europa (just in time to see the Sun's heat death), you may affect the number of ants in a European ant colony by 1.
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But if you don't put your name on it, you won't have any impact on it (though in reality just by existing you actually do have, over time, a dramatic impact on virtually everything due to the butterfly effect .. so unless you were born very recently you probably had some unknown effect on some aspects of this space probe).
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But then, it would be as if you didn't exist. If you make a choice it must result in an outcome that is different than if you didn't exist .. otherwise you have zero impact.
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"The question is if having your name engraved has a different impact than not having your name engraved."
Big picture? No. To me, specifically? Yes. It, in some small way, involves me more with the project than just my anonymous tax dollars.
Besides, I think it's kind of cool. If you don't, that's fine. Don't sign up. Simple as that, really.
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We are made of meat.
Also, why? I'm a huge space fan, but I just don't see why I would want my name engraved on this microchip.
Being jettisoned from a planet infected with narcissism, I'm rather surprised you're asking why. As you can see, no shortage of participation.
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For fun. I didn't use my real name and location though.
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We are made of meat.
Also, why? I'm a huge space fan, but I just don't see why I would want my name engraved on this microchip.
I look at things like this and try to put on my "I'm still a little kid watching that first shuttle launch" cap. If you ask why, you've lost connection with that little kid inside that sees a chance to touch a mission like this, in however small of a way, and starts vibrating from the excitement. Am I seriously thinking this has any impact at all on anything? Nope. Is it cool that they allow the public a chance to tag their name on as, if nothing else, a bit of a tag-along atta-boy? Absolutely. And I see an
Oh great (Score:3)
Why do we need to provide the Europans with a menu?
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Why do we need to provide the Europans with a menu?
Not just that, we already know Europa can support life. I mean, that ice has got to be kilometers thick minimum.
Re:Oh great (Score:4, Funny)
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That's why you give your ex's name and email.
It's a get rich quick scheme (Score:2)
Straight out of any of the Robert A. Heinlein novels.
Almost without changing anything FFS!
This is benign and ought to be common (Score:2)
Imagine if you could pay, say, 1000 USD and get a 1cm^2 bit of real estate on which could be etched whatever you want that meets the basic standard of 'not offensive' on a Mars rover or something? And a copy of the resulting plates would be on a wall in a NASA building or the Smithsonian or something.
Seems like it's an easy way to add funding to a mission.
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And it's nothing new, vanity goes a long way to extract money from people.
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> NASA is not sending buffed up nerds to your house to collect.
YET.
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Let's not get lost in academic discussions.
There are two main ways to extract money from people:
1. Coercion;
2. Deception.
Examples of the former include taxes and mugging;
Examples of the latter include ads, FOMO, vanity tickling.
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Well, to me, it's a deception because it works on your brain to make you pay an amount of money on something which has no real benefit other than dopamine / bragging rights.
Re:This is benign and ought to be commoon (Score:2)
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I wasn't talking about me specifically or you specifically. There's a much greater world out there, and it contains many people. You should try it, sometimes.
The point is, ads are a far cry from those from, say, 20-30 years ago. They heavily rely on specific trigger words and phrases, there's a huge amount of psychology behind them, praying on a large percentage of the population.
I despise ads and am very resistant towards their nudging, but that's because I do realize how evil they are, generally.
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I wasn't talking about me specifically or you specifically.
You literally wrote: "Well, to me, it's a deception because it works on your brain to make you pay an amount of money on something which has no real benefit other than dopamine / bragging rights"
Now you're saying your stated opinion was not your opinion?
There's a much greater world out there, and it contains many people. You should try it, sometimes.
I am not the one who lumped advertising as deception because someone might buy something that was advertised because you cannot see the "real benefit".
The point is, ads are a far cry from those from, say, 20-30 years ago. They heavily rely on specific trigger words and phrases, there's a huge amount of psychology behind them, praying on a large percentage of the population.
That sounds like ". . . . a WITCH! A witch! Burn her!" [youtube.com]. And? It seems like you are blaming others for you
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Nice ad hominem, smooth, but wrong.
Yes, I said "to me", because I am obviously stating an opinion, but the subject of that opinion was a general situation. Now, if you want to discuss why ads are a problem to people, in general, according to how each of us see it, fine. If, however, you prefer to overanalyze my words to find a way to twist them in rather obvious way, find someone else out there, someone preferably dumber.
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. Now, if you want to discuss why ads are a problem to people, in general, according to how each of us see it, fine. If, however, you prefer to overanalyze my words to find a way to twist them in rather obvious way, find someone else out there, someone preferably dumber.
Sorry were you not the one telling about the witching powers of advertisements? So do you wear the lead lined hats outside or just inside when you watch TV?
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I could see that as a funding mechanism for lunar or mars exploration. NASA could sell plots on various space locations. There might have to be various treaties negotiated regarding sovereignty. There will be all kinds of lawsuits because various crackpots have been selling or claiming sovereignty over the moon and mars for a while. But yeah before anyone can legit buy land on a celestial body or even in solar orbit there will have to be a treaty that includes the major space powers, UN, and then government
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Which is actually not difficult to resolve, though it's rarely done.
English only (It's the official language of the US, after all), $5 submission fee which is only refunded (less cc transaction fees) if all available space is sold before your submission is reviewed.
If idiots want to blow $5 on something just for it to be discarded... OK. I guess good for them, they showed us!
$5 ought to be enough to cover having someone look at some text and decide if it's reasonable or not. If not, make it a $10 fee. An
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Actually... let me correct that post. I don't think the US has an 'official' language, but unofficially it's English and in some places Spanish is a close second. Certainly all the diplomatic stuff is English-language.
Re: This is benign and ought to be common (Score:1)
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Probably... But if each stupid inscription adds $1000 to the mission budget in return for a few dollars' worth of extra effort, I think that's a good trade.
And I do think if the price is reasonably high you won't have the problem you get with free contests. A lot of idiots think twice when there is a price tag.
beware of what lurks beneath (Score:2, Informative)
I dont mind sharing my Name/Location/Email with NASA but i do mind sharing it with GoogleTagManager & New Relics tracking comprehensive code, i was going to let my children sign up, but now?, no thanks, i thought the gov had removed all those parasites, your tax dollars at work i guess
Submitted mine, but ... (Score:3)
On a usability point, though, their confirmation page sucks. It doesn't actually tell you that you successfully submitted your name. You can use an option up above to check your submission, but it keeps telling you that it may take 10 minutes for things to go through. After 10 minutes, it still doesn't tell you that your name was registered. It just brings you to a page that wants to connect your submission to social media (FB and X). They need to work on that page.
Already on. My name is also on Mars. (Score:2)
Go Planetary Society, woot woot!
To serve man... (Score:2)
First, collect 700,000 of them....
Too slow ... (Score:4, Funny)
I have a transmitter and satellite dish. Send me the names, and tonight, once its dark enough to aim at Jupiter, they will be on their way!
Who still uses snail mail?
the poem has been leaked (Score:3)
The poem has been leaked:
>My love sent my name,
>seeking my fame,
>What could be stupider?
>She sent it to Jupiter!
Mental midgets (Score:1)
gonna skip this one (Score:2)
waiting for such mission to Uranus
DNA would be better (Score:2)
I'd rather have my DNA sent to space and beyond. Aliens can't do much with a name, especially one that they have no idea who its attached to or where that individual is. OTOH, DNA could theoretically be reconstructed and propogated. Not that I care, but many people do seem to want to seed the Universe with humans, and this seems like it could potentially aid in that endevor. Also, DNA doesn't have to weigh a lot, so it shouldn't affect the economics of the mission.