The twin probes just launched toward Mars have an Easter egg on board | Hacker News Reader

The twin probes just launched toward Mars have an Easter egg on board

arstechnica.com

70 pointspseudolus39 comments

My name is on the blue plaque. I (and many others) spent countless hours on these two vehicles. Many of us are now working 12-hour shifts performing initial operations tasks.

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.

and in a thousand years your name will be displayed in some space museum :)

I often imagine future school kids bored out of their mind on a field trip to visit Neil Armstrong's footsteps on a lunar museum. Their exasperated teacher trying to get them to pay attention and recognize the gravity of what they are seeing but they are too distracted playing mind-pokemon or whatever is cool in 2350 AD.

will space-edition pokemon go be the only reason some people go to visit earth one day?

So like in Futurama, where the Moon is a theme park.

> recognize the gravity

Inherently lighter on the moon. ;)

For me its not Neils' footsteps, but the actual multiple moon art exhibits, which I wonder about:

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 ..

[0] - https://artificialmuseum.com/list/#2/52.49/13.37

Space museum on mars?

When they sent the voyagers out, they had plaques that represented the species, with an attempt at universally communicating who we are. These ones have the equivalent of spray painted tags, or a name scratched into a desk: “John woz ere”. Different times.

These things are only ("only"!) going to Mars, anybody getting that close to us and wanting to know more can go right to the source.

K'Breel, Speaker for the Council of Elders, Responds

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.

10/10 comment—has it all: intrigue, interplanetary sociopolitical commentary, K’Breel, terms like “gelsac”

> Let the Council make this perfectly clear: Your probes do not "visit." They trespass

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.

Here -- achoo -- have a cold.

To an archeologist both artifacts are worth having, just look at Pompeii the frescoes tell you alot but the graffiti on the sides of the buildings tells you something as well.

I think the implication is that within that time period which separates Voyagers from today, we have become distrustful or ashamed of the higher parts of the culture, and that such a dysbalanced situation is fairly new, with hard-to-predict consequences.

Sounds like reactionary nonsense to me. It's just some names. It's not indicative of the debasement of society.

In isolation, yes. But other things have happened as well. People dress like slobs; interestingly, in my country, where GDP per capita skyrocketed since 1989, standards of clothing seem to have gone down, especially for formal occasions. We have a major problem with physical fitness, Westerners of the 1970s were much thinner and moved more. People read fewer books and spend their days consuming brainrot on Tiktok, Instagram and YouTube shorts.

(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.

> standards of clothing

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".

I think you just re-formulated what I said, in a more intellectuallish and dismissive way.

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.

You were the one who insisted that "standards of clothing have gone down" (emphasis mine).

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.

Yes, I can live with it, but I think the standards have gone down. It also seems to me that you basically consider that change irrelevant. We can surely disagree on that.

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.

> When it comes to culture, I believe that things change rather than go up or down.

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."

> People will now turn out for a funeral in a tracksuit.

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

No, because they lost that meaning in the meantime.

Yes, it is possible that tracksuits will become the to-go clothing for funerals and theatres as well as gyms.

“Standards of clothing” is not a set with a total order, and society has never had one way to dress. You’re unfairly projecting your values (of a certain style of dress) onto society as if it’s shared by everyone.

This is not maths, and nothing is shared by everyone in a human society.

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.

One theory is that you, like myself, has reached the age where many modern ways seem dumb and younger people aren't even aware of what has been lost.

Importantly: even if this is the case, it doesn't mean we're wrong!

I suggest you reflect on the value you are placing on aesthetics, and where this way of thinking ultimately leads.

You don't really know how much of a value I place on aesthetics (not that much, in fact, just more than zero, which is enough to make some judgments).

And "where this way of thinking ultimately leads"? Nowhere special.

Surely the people at NASA who are launching probes aren't the ones who've become distrustful or ashamed of higher culture.

Do the launch people have influence on what precisely they launch? IDK. In a massive organization like NASA is, I would expect such responsibilities to be isolated.

Those voyager plaques will last millions, even billions of years.

The records might survive to the end of time if they are lucky and get flung into intergalactic space post andromeda collision.

They just don't make em like they used to!

yells at cloud

This strikes me as a rather uncharitable view. I think it's okay for people to be proud of their work on a difficult project, and want to have their names on it.

I would be a bit sad if most mega projects (space stations, battle ships, international probes, dams, etc) do not have some kind of honorary tribute to the many people who came together to make it happen. A little plaque costs nothing but would be meaningful.

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...

Not that it changes your point, but the plaques were on the Pioneer probes; Voyager had the golden record.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque

Huh, I wonder why we would put potential interspecies messages on the probes we're sending into interstellar space, but not on the ones we are only putting into orbit around our neighbouring planet. Real mystery.

No, it is not different times.

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.

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