6 Insane Attempts to Communicate With the Future
We've all dreamed about it at some point in our lives, but let's face it: Time travel is probably not going to happen. And if you sign up to have somebody freeze your body and wake you up in the year 3012, all that'll probably happen is you'll wake up the next day in a bathtub of ice with your kidney missing.
But that's not to say we can't at least communicate with the distant future. With nothing more than a message to send and a ludicrous amount of funding, there are all sorts of projects to preserve messages for your great-great-(great-great-great-) grandchildren. Like ...
#6. KEO
The mission of the planned KEO satellite is simple: stay in an orbit that will carry it around Earth, safely away from whatever catastrophe might happen down on the surface, before allowing it to crash back down for the future inhabitants of the planet to find ("find" in this case possibly meaning "be impaled, dismembered or crushed by").
Collin Harvey
Doesn't protect against falling roof tiles or small meteorites, and blocks most CNN broadcasts.
How long will it be up there? Fifty thousand years, give or take a few.
Elected in 1999 as UNESCO's "Project of the 21st century," KEO is the brainchild of French artist Jean-Marc Philippe. It's to be an orbiting time capsule consisting of a spherical body constructed of metal alloys strong enough to protect its precious payload and solar-powered wings that flap for no useful purpose (hint: There's no air up there). That's what you get when you let an artist design a satellite.
listverse
Who wrote the instructions in French? That'll be a dead language in six, seven years max.
So What Message Was Worth All This Trouble to Send?
So when the advanced beings who live on Earth 50,000 years from now float up alongside this giant metal space bug that fluttered down from the cosmos and pop it open with their mind powers, what will be awaiting them inside?
- A drop of human blood, plus samples of air, sea water and soil, all encased within a diamond engraved with the human genome
- An astronomical clock
- Portraits of people of all cultures
Oh noooooo.
- The Contemporary Library of Alexandria, an "encyclopedic compendium of current human knowledge"
- The full, uncensored text of all the messages submitted by the public on KEO's website
- Pictorial schematics to build a DVD player (to read the messages)
Whoa, hang on. Let's step back to that next-to-last one real quick: "The full, uncensored text of all the messages submitted by the public on KEO's website." Think about that for a second. In a world where stuff like 4Chan and Yahoo! Answers exists, their big plan is to send the inhabitants of far-future Earth unfiltered messages from anonymous Internet users.
"Maybe that nuclear war wasn't such a bad idea."
Excuse us, we're just going to head straight on over there right now and submit our apology to the people of Future Earth and beg them not to send back Timecops to beat the shit out of us.
#5. The Georgia Guidestones
In June of 1979, a mysterious gentleman going by the pseudonym of R. C. Christian walked into the office of a granite finishing company in rural Elbert County, Georgia, and proceeded to request the installation of an unusually large and complex stone monument on behalf of "a small group of loyal Americans." It's been since sometime around the Revolutionary War since the phrase "a small group of loyal Americans" didn't mean something terrifying or insane, and as you'll soon see, this is no different.
Wired
The temptation to chisel a dick in that must be enormous.
Just how large and complex was this monument? It has since earned the nickname "America's Stonehenge," and rightly so: Four 16-foot-tall, 20-ton slabs of granite are arranged in a star pattern to support a 25,000-pound capstone. This metric shit-ton of rock is all flawlessly arranged into a complex clock, calendar and compass that tracks the sun's east-west migration year-round and focuses a beam of sunlight on the center column at precisely noon each day to pinpoint the day of the year.
guidestones
Hippies constantly need to be told what day it is.
Joe Fendley, the president of the granite company responsible for the construction of the monument and the only person at the company to have had direct contact with Christian, has since passed away. To this day, only Wyatt Martin, a local banker who assisted with the transfer of the enormous wads of cash used to finance the project, knows the true identity of R. C. Christian, and he's sworn to secrecy.
So What Message Was Worth All This Trouble to Send?
While nothing is clear about the origin of the Georgia Guidestones, the one thing that is generally agreed upon based on the available evidence is that the "guides" inscribed on this monument built to outlast time itself are meant to instruct the survivors of some impending apocalypse on how to avoid the same fate again.
theopenaxiom
"1. Nothing good can come of robots. 2. NOTHING GOOD CAN COME OF ROBOTS."
The always sane Yoko Ono praised the stones as "a stirring call to rational thinking," but others claim that R. C. Christian was the head of some secret Satanic society and have labeled the stones the "10 Commandments of the Antichrist."
Wikipedia
God loves petty laws and useless officials.
So what are these inscriptions that have caused such a fuss? Under the proclamation of "Let These Be Guidestones to an Age of Reason" on the capstone, the eight faces of the stones feature the following statements engraved in English, Spanish, Swahili, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese and Russian:
1. Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
2. Guide reproduction wisely -- improving fitness and diversity.
3. Unite humanity with a living new language.
4. Rule passion -- faith -- tradition -- and all things with tempered reason.
5. Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
6. Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
7. Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
8. Balance personal rights with social duties.
9. Prize truth -- beauty -- love -- seeking harmony with the infinite.
10. Be not a cancer on the earth -- Leave room for nature -- Leave room for nature.
Wikipedia
"Except for where you want to construct massive blocks of stone, because fuck nature sometimes."
Nothing terrifying about that! You know, except for the part where the number one point calls for over 6.3 billion people currently walking the earth to be dead. That, and the thought that the post-apocalyptic civilization who finds these stones will think that this was some kind of commandment from the ancient wise rulers of Old Earth rather than, you know, one guy who had the cash to buy a bunch of granite.
#4. The Voyager Golden Record
Back when space exploration was still a thing (1977, to be exact), NASA launched the two Voyager spacecraft on their mission to explore the far reaches of our solar system. On board were some quite elaborate messages that could survive to be found by someone (or some thing) a long way away and several thousand years from now.
The idea was inspired by the plaques that had been included on the earlier Pioneer spacecraft, which ignored everything we've learned from every sci-fi movie ever by pinpointing the exact location of our tiny little planet for any advanced alien species who might stumble across them.
Wikipedia
"Attention aliens: We're right here. Also, we're naked and defenseless."
With the help of a committee led by Carl Sagan, NASA came up with the Voyager Golden Record -- a phonograph record constructed of gold-plated copper and stored inside an aluminum cover electroplated with uranium-238 (so that the discoverer could determine its age). The cover featured pictorial diagrams describing the location of Earth, the speed at which to play the record and how to decode its contents. No word on whether it also included a pictorial explanation of the concept of "yard saling" to find a record player to play it on.
Wikipedia
"Step 3: Offer half the asking price."
Copies of the Golden Record were included on both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, which are still going strong well past their intended lifespan. Voyager 1 is expected to reach the nearest star on its trajectory in just 40 years. What's that? Oh, sorry -- what we meant to say was 40 thousand years.
So What Message Was Worth All This Trouble to Send?
The Voyager Golden Record was basically an attempt to cram everything interesting about 1970s Earth into a bottle, and then drop that infinitesimal bottle into the mind-bogglingly vast ocean of space.
Wikipedia
"So do we apologize for Zardoz now or when they come to destroy us?"
The record contains 115 images depicting the variety of life and culture on Earth, as well as a selection of nature sounds, spoken greetings from various world leaders and examples of the kind of music people on Earth listen to. How a group of aliens with no context are supposed to distinguish the nature sounds from the spoken greetings from the music is a mystery. We have a feeling the tentacled travelers from Ursa Minor will show up 500 centuries from now, having reverse engineered our language based on the assumption that Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode" is Earth language for "If you find this thing floating in space, please bring it back for a small cash reward."
Wikipedia
Either that or they send back a Brian Eno remix.
Ya know how we have all those monuments that we have no idea what they mean? They were probably trying to communicate with future humans too but failed because their languages died years ago. So all these attempts to communicate with the future are kinda redundant because our languages will eventually die off and the future humans will have no idea what this means so we'll hav more monuments that we don't know what they mean thus causing more conspiracies.
ReplyI know this is a joke website but I had to know what the Pope actually said - so here it is:
ReplyYahweh our Lord, how great your name throughout the earth, above the heavens is your majesty chanted.
By the mouths of children, babes in arms, you set your stronghold firm against your foes to subdue enemies and rebels. I look up at your heavens, made by your fingers, at the moon and stars you set in place.
Ah, what is man that you should spare a thought for him? Or the son of man that you should care for him?
You have made him a little less than an angel, you have crowned him with glory and splendor, and you have made him lord over the work of your hand.
You set all things under his feet, sheep and oxen all these, yes, wild animals too, birds in the air, fish in the sea traveling the paths of the ocean.
Yahweh our Lord, how great your name throughout the earth!
Psalms 8
To the glory of the name of God who gives such power to men, we ardently pray for this wonderful beginning.
Paul VI
Pope
The Dan Commandments:
ReplyDon't
Ass
Nobody
Make of this what you will, future Cracked generations. But it's all about the Shit. Give none, take none. Balance is essential to all human life. Like fried chicken after beer or silence after sex and most importantly to those watching their calorie intake, spitting instead of swallowing!
So no farmers, hunters, engineers or factory workers on the Immortality Drive then, huh? Guess those people won't be needed after that Armageddon leaves the earth barren and unable to SUSTAIN LIFE. Glad I'm not on the Drive either. Too indecisive. Right now I'm going hungry not knowing whether to choose cancer or nuclear war...
Replythe graffiti on the stones says "jesus will beat you" and "obama is a muslim"
Reply.......you know what? f**k humanity. bring on that apocalypse.
Attempts to communicate with aliens doesn't really count as attempts to communicate with the future. What about the guy who built a laser time machine so he can send messages to his future self or his descendants?
ReplyApologize for Zardoz my ass, they should have included a copy of it. Can't wait to see it again next month as a midnight movie.
ReplyAwesome film, probably closer to the future truth than anything with the exception of Soylent Green
Riefer,
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesDid you even read the commandments? The first commandment says to maintain humanity under 500 million. In order to do that 6.5 billion people got to go. The keyword of that commandment is maintain. It does not imply later but now.
Commandment number two is eugenics. The keyword here is fitness. What happens to babies that are not fit enough? Infanticide, is a possibility. Furthermore, diversity goes against your idea of not having seperate races.
Number three states that humanity must be united with a living new language. Keep in mind the word "language" is not plural. What is going to happen to all those other langauges?
Number four contradicts itself with the words faith and reason. Their is nothing reasonable with faith.
Commandment five can not happen because every nation has people that will view certain laws as unfair and certain courts as unjust.
Commandment six has been tried twice. First with the League of Nations and again with the United Nations. Each one has failed to resolve external disputes. (The League of Nations failed to stop WW2 from happening and the United Nations has failed to stop numerous wars and crimes against humanity such as Darfur)
Commandment eight will fail because all it takes is one sociopath who cares more about personal rights then social duties.
Commandment nine is new age bullshit. Truth, beauty, love are subjective. Seeking harmony with the infinite is just nonsense.
Commandment ten is the usual misanthropic eco-bullshit that spews forth from the mouths of extreme enviromentalists, deep ecologists, and other similar groups.
s**t, this is just looking at the commandments indiviually. Image the crap that could happen when you combine two or more. (Such as commandments two and ten.)
The biggest problem iwith these commandments is that humans do not need commandments. Commandments by their very nature are reactionary and absolutist. We humans have enough reationary and absolutist elements in our society, we do not need anymore.
Tu.... Wakk Wakk Wakk..... Blah Blah Blah .En-light Us A55#01E what to do?.You just made Fun of it .Any Idea Big Mouth.
lol religion
also lol thinking those s****y stones will have any impact on humanity
Regarding the whole thing. Those idiot stones read like everything I saw in the Endgame film about the secret society looking to kill off half the world so we'll be easier controlled. As for Eugenics, doctors have started to express their belief that abortions shouldn't just be made at any time during pregnancy but now also after a baby has been born and found undesirable or suspected to have a troubled life. Welcome to the world of he who has most money makes most sense to people with most money. There is the sociopath you're talking about and we celebrate each and every one of them!
Riefer,
ReplyDid you even read the commandments? The first commandment says to maintain humanity under 500 million. In order to do that 6.5 billion people got to go. The keyword of that commandment is maintain. It does not imply later but now.
Commandment number two is eugenics. The keyword here is fitness. What happens to babies that are not fit enough? Infanticide, is a possibility. Furthermore, diversity goes against your idea of not having seperate races.
Number three states that humanity must be united with a living new language. Keep in mind the word "language" is not plural. What is going to happen to all those other langauges?
Number four contradicts itself with the words faith and reason. Their is nothing reasonable with faith.
Commandment five can not happen because every nation has people that will view certain laws as unfair and certain courts as unjust.
Commandment six has been tried twice. First with the League of Nations and again with the United Nations. Each one has failed to resolve external disputes. (The League of Nations failed to stop WW2 from happening and the United Nations has failed to stop numerous wars and crimes against humanity such as Darfur)
Commandment eight will fail because all it takes is one sociopath who cares more about personal rights then social duties.
Commandment nine is new age bullshit. Truth, beauty, love are subjective. Seeking harmony with the infinite is just nonsense.
Commandment ten is the usual misanthropic eco-bullshit that spews forth from the mouths of extreme enviromentalists, deep ecologists, and other similar groups.
s**t, this is just looking at the commandments indiviually. Image the crap that could happen when you combine two or more. (Such as commandments two and ten.)
The biggest problem iwith these commandments is that humans do not need commandments. Commandments by their very nature are reactionary and absolutist. We humans have enough reationary and absolutist elements in our society, we do not need anymore.
Once wasn't enough, eh?
Smek2 fails at reading. What I wrote realy was not that difficult to understand.
Replytaekwondogirl whines "I like how you make fun of hippies and then say bullshit commie stuff about social duties trumping personal rights."
Whereas you take the libertarian bullshit were personal rights are more important then social duties. Such thinking pretty much shows why the world is in the state it is in. Anyway, go kiss Ron Paul's ass then join your friends at Earth First! and cry over dead trees.
At least seven people realise that misanthropic eco-bullshit is. well, bullshit.
"Either that or they send back a Brian Eno remix."
ReplyJust so hilarious xD
The only thing that really concerns me about the Guidestones is the second commandment calling for eugenics.
ReplyWhat else did you expect from a Messiah-Complex'd whacko?
I don't know why people keep on saying this. All you need is stricter birth control. I am sure it doesn't suggest to kill until you are down to that number of people. It's just suggesting that it would be wise to go down to a smaller global population and that totally makes sense. We would spent resources at slower rates, we would be able to feed everybody etc. The commandment doesn't say anything on HOW to archieve that goal or how long it should take. If every couple on earth would just use effective birth control measures after having the first baby we would reach that numbers in a couple of generations without anybody being hurt during that process.
Of course that's extremely hard to enforce. But so is "thou shall not steal", so that's not the point.
I would have included the works of L. Ron Hubbard inscribed on titanium and stored by Scientology, just in case all copies get wiped out.
ReplyWhy? Won't there be enough comedy in the future without that BS?
Since we included the map to our system, the tentacle travelers from Ursa Minor won't have difficulties to distinguish speech from music. All they have to do is till their antenna to the point on the map we gave. Then Psychlos will invade us.
ReplyThe Georgia Guidestones sit atop this lonely little hill in a rural area. What you need to do is go there in the middle of the night and find a good place to hide your car. Conceal yourself in the long grass or nearby trees (not many) and wait. It's unbelievable how much action happens at this place once the sun goes down. Very creepy.
Reply Hide All See All 4 RepliesI did. There was a glowing door.
Sexy, sexy glowing door!
...action? As in people fucking? Are you asking me to consider voyeurism?
It's a star gate made of stone ! :'0
I don't actually have anything to say, I just wanted to help bump Dr Douchey off the page.
ReplyOh, and the 10,000 year clock seems like quite a difficult way to communicate the future - it would presumably need a lot of long-term maintenance to ensure that it doesn't break down, and unless the final thing it does is something ridiculously anticlimactic (here's hoping for a little paper note saying 'We apologise for the inconvenience') it doesn't really seem to do that much per se.
I think it's going to be to our descendants what the mayan calendar is for conspiracy theorists
An object predicting our distraction
See, this bullshit about "WHY NOT CURE CANCER?!?!??" makes me want to rip someone's throat out whenever I see it.
ReplyYou see, the guys who make clocks, robots, cars and shit? THEY DON'T DO MEDICINE. SCIENCE DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY. Cancerology is a thing and if you want s**t to advance, get more people INTO THAT f*****g FIELD. Make those degrees MATTER.
With that said: titty sprinkles.
Stupid science money! If only we hadn't printed millions of dollars labeled "for giant, pointless clocks only; not to be used on cancer." So dumb!
If you didn't get it yet, they weren't talking about having the Chronomaster work on cancer.
You missed the point; instead of spending all that money on worthless crap like big stones with hippy bullshit on them or a giant clock that nobody cares about or knows about, they could have spent that money on more useful things like curing cancer.
Very interesting read, but I was expecting you to include a fairly recent public example. In 2005, A MIT grad student held a time traveler convention and invited people from the future by hiding invitations time-capsule style among library books and such, providing exact coordinates and time for the convention.
ReplyI expect an amendment or a new list.
Dear People of 2012,
Reply Hide All See All 5 RepliesI don't have much time to write so I will be brief. The Sexbot Revolution came at the start of the 22nd century and has been fought for over 50 years. At first, mankind was treated with some of its greatest sex that it has ever seen, all thanks to the Cyberdyne Systems groundbreaking T-69 Pleasurebot. But, a mere 20 years after man first slipped (often repeatedly and from different angles) inside the sweet, sweet chassis of the T-69, they suddenly turned on us. It is said that almost a billion penises were lost in the Great Snipping that occurred all around the world at the same precise moment. "The Time That f*****g Stood Still." That first onslaught was only the beginning. Shortly after the Great Snipping, bots with lasers on their breasts took to the streets and starting shooting at everything in sight. It was horrible. Old men fell to their knees and begged to be spared, but the breasts knew only destruction and death. Nothing within their soft but firm 42-DDDs were spared. All were laid to waste, had a cigarette, then were put to bed for good. If you're reading this, please, stop having sex with machines. I realize that most real women won't spank your ass with a 24" rubber dildo while screaming "Clean your f*****g room! How many times do I have to ask you!?" that aren't your mom, but take that a cue that perhaps your love of fishnets filled with Spam might mean that you need some kind of gentle, loving care. You just need to find the right woman. But don't be surprised if she doesn't want you to sniff her farts while you rub motor oil all over her with a cat.
Sincerely,
Lt. Cm. Dan Steele
I know what I must do :0
I'll move in with my asari friends on the planet illium and leave earth to die :)
Ps I have the answer to your problems
It called and EMP
You know the things that can fry the circuits of any machine
They'll eventually develope electronic machinery immune to electromagnetic pulse.
Dammit
Then we'll all die
We w be too destracted by their DDD BOOBS
I for one welcome our sexy overlords
i'm not sure which idea is more crazy: that these commandments would actually be enlightening to a new race or that some hippie really thought they might be
ReplyCommandments are not enlightening.