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We've Bombarded Some Poor Planet With Hundreds Of Inane Text Messages

Think for a moment about the level of professionalism and craftsmanship which goes into a Doritos commercial. It seems ridiculous that a 30-second show about corn triangles is made by professionals with years of experience, but they are. Doritos commercials are maybe not the height of our culture, but they're not that far off the top.

Now imagine you took all that professionalism and replaced it with the exact opposite: the mewlings of hundreds of internet strangers, a random selection of photos and drawings and text messages stripped from a social media site. Because we've sent that into space too. And not even from a good social media site either, but fucking Bebo. In 2008, Bebo sent 501 messages collected from its site to Gliese 581d, a planet some 21 light years away.

Again, fucking Bebo.

BeboBebo: The #1 social network ... in the UK ... in 2007.

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We Sent 100,000 Craigslist Postings Into Open Space

As you're probably seeing by now, there's a pretty low barrier to pointing a radio antenna into space and spraying whatever nonsense you want out there. And as you'd hope and expect, entire companies have sprung up specifically to take your money while doing this. And yes, you're correct, they do have some of the ropiest-looking websites imaginable.

That company in particular, Deep Space Communications Network, managed to get itself in the news a couple times by broadcasting garbage at literally no one. The first time appears to be in 2005, when they bundled up 100,000 postings from Craigslist and fired it off into space. No particular part of space; they were just spinning their antenna around at the sky. So if you were hoping to finally get a taker on that 13-year-old ad for a stained couch, don't get your hopes up.

In 2008, the same company also broadcast the Keanu Reeves remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still at Alpha Centauri, either as a publicity stunt or because nobody on Earth wanted to see it.

It was effectively another waste of a perfectly good radio telescope, although considering that Alpha Centauri is about four and a half light years away, and plenty of time has elapsed for a round trip radio conversation to have happened, this stunt may have inadvertently proved the system is barren of intelligent life, simply from the fact that we have yet to receive a signal to "fucking knock it off."

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The Unhinged Ramblings Of Turkmenistan's Dictator Are Orbiting The Earth

But what if you've got something insane, inane, or both to put in space, and you want to actually put it there? Launching something heavier than photons is expensive. Spraying blog posts into space doesn't require much effort, but putting your physical diary there does. At minimum, it'd require a lot of money and not a lot of common sense.

Which brings us to the former president of Turkmenistan. For 30 years, Saparmurat Niyazov ruled his country with a stupid iron fist. He had his portrait put on walls everywhere, he renamed months of the year after himself, and he once changed the word for "bread" to be his mother's name. He was great. It was the law. He also notably wrote a book about everything that made Turkmenistan great -- which was largely rambling, poorly documented stories about himself -- and then made everyone in the country read it.

Goodreads"You don't want to know what the mandatory book clubs were like."

But it wasn't enough to make his poor citizens read the thing; he wanted the rest of the Universe to suffer it as well. So in 2005, he had a copy fired into space. "Just park it near the Craigslist ads," we imagine he instructed.

The book only made it as far as orbit, mind you, so it's not threatening any aliens just yet. It's also apparently in a low enough orbit that it won't hang out up there forever. It will come crashing back down in 150 years or so. So keep those eyes skyward. If you happen to spot a particularly stupid shooting star in the night sky, you now know what it is.

It's just as fun to get a map of the stars and think about all this insane stuff up there at the same time.

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For more, check out The 6 Most Bizarre Things Ever Discovered In Space and 5 Real Planets Way Weirder Than Anything In Science Fiction.

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