5 Stupid, Stupid Things Humanity Has Shot Into Space

So why do we need space sperm? Well, if we ever want a colony of people in space, the ability of sperm to perform in microgravity will be relevant. Similar deal if we ever hope to put a permanent settlement on Mars or the moon. And there's reason to suspect the spermies will have trouble in this environment. Previous research with animal sperm has shown that it doesn't quite behave in microgravity as it should. And even if we never want to make space babies, studying sperm in microgravity might reveal things we can't see on Earth -- information that might be useful for improving old-fashioned terrestrial fertilization, as the kids call it these days.

The tests involve nothing gross -- just microscopes, chemicals, and presumably very well-sealed containers. No word on how the samples were collected, whether NASA raided a sperm bank or ran some kind of in-house raffle or something. However it came off (heh), we can only hope that it happened at great expense to the taxpayers.

That image is supposedly inscribed on a small ceramic tile about the size of a thumbnail planted on the Apollo 12 lunar lander. This was part of a covert plan to put art on the moon, each of the six images made by a different artist. Warhol's is the one in the upper left, and as you can see, it's substantially dong-shaped. Warhol claimed the drawing was merely an artistic reinterpretation of his initials, and sure, Andy. Fine. If you don't buy that but want to maintain your innocence, you could also consider it a rocket ship, or a finger with a band-aid, or a short but girthy dildo.

The rest of us know it's dong, though.

And here's the best news of all. There's no atmosphere on the moon, and effectively no erosion. Not only is this dick pic still there, there is a very good chance it will be the last surviving piece of human art ever. Which is not only fitting, but will also give the aliens who eventually show up looking for Doritos something to remember us by.

Again, fucking Bebo.

And what words of wisdom did the users of Bebo send to the aliens? Wishes for world peace, pictures of famous people, and lame jokes. Like requests to not eat humanity's brains or to "please bring a carton of milk if you come to visit," real knee-slappers like that. It strains credibility to imagine the point of any of this. Was Bebo imagining there was life on this world that can receive radio signals, and decipher their particular binary format, and parse the humor, and then not roll their eyes? What terrifyingly narrow window of technological competence and comedic illiteracy would this alien race need to possess?

It'd be the alien equivalent of Bebo itself, wouldn't it? Well that makes sense, then.

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."

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.

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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