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Posted by: spfrss Sep 28 2005, 12:06 PM

As usual, NASA is embarking names onboard DAWN for the trip to Vesta and Ceres

http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/DawnCommunity/Sendname2asteroid/index_asteroid_blt.aspx

live long and prosper

Mauro

Posted by: ljk4-1 Sep 28 2005, 05:11 PM

And as I have said before, I think NASA et al should be utilizing these information discs being sent into space for ages for something more important and interesting than just a bunch of names.

See here:

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=1220&view=findpost&p=19752

Plus the medium they continue to use - CD-ROMs and DVDs - will be destroyed by the natural radiation of space within just a few centuries at most.

Posted by: Marz Sep 28 2005, 08:38 PM

As you mentioned, not only does the medium degrade, but I think even a trickier information-storage problem is the technology to read the "ancient" formats is lost rather quickly. 50 years from now, people will shake their heads at the idea we had to make due with 2-dimensional memory store. Even if someone could find/build a CD-ROM reader 100 years from now, the idea of flying out to Ceres to nab historical documents is still a huge expense. Case in point, try to find a punch-card reader.

This is an interesting idea, though. I'm sure librarians fret about how to archive digital stuff, and probably have some good ideas on how/what to archive. Perhaps someone would be interested in building a time-capsule that floats in a degrading orbit that parachutes/falls back to earth in 150 years or so?

Posted by: Bob Shaw Sep 28 2005, 09:37 PM

It's the thought that counts. The US flags erected by the Apollo astronauts bleached and decayed within a few years, as did the LM descent stage markings. While what Gene Shoemaker famously called 'the Nixon Experiment' wasn't to everyone's taste (not least the Soviet Union!) it *did* reflect something of the nature of the time, and the nations involved. Now, we have an open and inclusive attempt to inspire people, and it's that message which is important, even if the actual medium - like the Apollo flags - decays.

Oh, and as for the data being 'lost' - fear not. Whether or not an AI Singularity is just round the corner, as some suggest, a Data Singularity certainly is - soon enough, data storage and retreival will be so enormously more available than at present that in effect all data will always be available, for ever. To catalogue it *is* another matter, but something straightforward like a CD-worth of 'hellos' will be no problem at all! So, fear not - once data is truly digital, it will be with us forever - it's just the quasi-analogue stuff which will be iffy, and even that will be recoverable if anyone wants it.

Posted by: ljk4-1 Oct 19 2005, 04:01 PM

I understand what you are saying, Bob, but in addition to the real possibility that no one will be able to read our present computer-stored data in the future, I have serious concerns that anything stored on Earth, even in multiple places, will not last as long as something sent into space.

This is why I say that for a relatively minimum amount of effort, important historical data should be placed on deep space probes *in addition* to the cutesy and promotional signatures and inane messages.

We spend millions to put those probes into the Cosmos, a few extra monetary units can be afforded to preserve part of our culture. Because quite frankly, I have serious doubts about how well our records and other pertinent information is being treated on Earth.

Posted by: djellison Oct 19 2005, 04:12 PM

Consider the 4 big budget genuinely deep space missions ( Voyager 1, 2 and Pioneer 10 and 11 ) - they have included imporant data.

But a mission constrained to the solar system, well, it's pointless.

Doug

Posted by: ljk4-1 Oct 19 2005, 04:40 PM

I must disagree - if anything, a probe confined to the Sol system will naturally have a better chance of being found and utilized by future explorers/
archaeologists/historians/anthropologists from Earth, who will no doubt appreciate every bit of useful data from us.

And even going on the concept of ETI who may come to our system to explore it, being in a relatively concentrated area will increase their chances of finding our space vessels than those flung incidentally into the galaxy.

Posted by: mchan Oct 20 2005, 03:32 AM

New Horizons doesn't have an interstellar record or a plaque. But then Sagan wasn't around to press the case.

Posted by: djellison Oct 20 2005, 07:32 AM

And neither is the cash - this isnt a BIG budget mission.

I appreciated the motive, but to be honest, there's little point in putting something on NH as no one's going to see it again. There's no point putting something on a solar system spacecraft because if someone does see it again, they've come from this planet to see it.

And it may seem like a fickle, quick, easy thing to impliment, but you would not BELIEVE how much it would cost to flight qualify and buid something to bolt on there.

Doug

Posted by: ljk4-1 Oct 20 2005, 12:51 PM

So how much effort and cost did it take to put a CD with a bunch of names on the probe?

You do not know that someone is never going to see these vehicles again. They will be important historical finds to future generations. Look how excited people get on this forum over probes that are mere decades old.

Yes, it is quite unfortunate that Carl Sagan isn't here to push for a message on NH. So why isn't someone else taking up the slack? I'll make as much noise about it as possible, if that helps.

Posted by: mchan Oct 22 2005, 04:15 AM

I tried but was unable to find the cost to produce the Voyager interstellar record. Any readers know?

NH is not BIG budget in the Galileo, Cassini, or even the Voyager sense, but at $650 million, its budget is about 80% of the MER project (both rovers). I would guess NH is more expensive than Pioneer 10/11 which carried the plaque.

Agreed the point is almost entirely symbolic, and it is much harder to justify expenditures for symbolism only. I suspect the mass penalty of anything larger than the signature CD is also an inhibitor. Still, I wondered if an organization like the Planetary Society might have used volunteer labor and donated funds to do something like the Voyager interstellar record. The record was already qualified to fly on Voyager. I am curious what it would have cost to have another flight copy made.

Posted by: punkboi Oct 25 2005, 06:23 AM

For the record, the names are being put on a microchip aboard Dawn...not CD's or DVDs.

Posted by: ljk4-1 Oct 25 2005, 02:05 PM

While I do not have monetary figures for the Voyager Records, I can tell you that a lot of the work was on a voluntary basis from Sagan and his team, using local resources.

If the signatures will be on a chip on Dawn, then good, that means there is room for another medium to carry information of substance.

Posted by: djellison Oct 25 2005, 02:39 PM

For what purpose? It'll just be sat in the inner solar system, probably end up getting crashed onto an asteroid as an extended mission. If the ability ever exists to find and retrieve it, then we'll have no need for the information.

PS - you can be the one to take a few tens of grammes of RCS prop. out to carry the mass of your info-store at the expense of a few extra days of extended operations

As a Plan.Soc. member, yes, I'd support spending money for the adition of information to misisons leaving the solar system, but I would rather not see money wasted in doing similar exercises for inner solar system missions.

Doug

Posted by: ljk4-1 Oct 25 2005, 06:11 PM

I must disagree with you on the subject of future generations having all relevant information on our era. Hundreds of years from now (or longer), our descendants will have an incomplete picture of us, and it won't take a nuclear war or comet strike to lose records of our civilization. Information preserved off Earth, especially in the accessible reaches of our Sol system, will be appreciated by future historians. And at relatively little expense to us, despite claims to the contrary. Especially if the right folks volunteer for the task, as was done with the Voyager Records.

Indeed, if our descendants are exploring and colonzing our system, they will likely know FAR more about the worlds around Sol than about us. So which do you think will be more valuable to them?

One good question: Where is The Planetary Society's stance on this? I can't recall the last time I heard them supporting anything more than the usual names on a disc/chip publicity stunt. But please prove me wrong here.

Thankfully the Europeans and select US groups have seen the merit of this idea.

They placed a disc containing samples of one thousand human languages on the Rosetta comet mission.

This ESA article, complete with images, contains an excerpt which sums it up quite well:

http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=31242

"The Long Now Foundation is trying to preserve the world's languages for future generations and we are happy to carry the disk on the Rosetta spacecraft in order to ensure that the archive survives for posterity," said John Ellwood (Rosetta Project Manager).

How will Rosetta offer such an enduring home for Earth's linguistic legacy?

"Rosetta will be following a stable orbit that will enable it to circle the Sun for thousands of years," explained Gerhard Schwehm (Rosetta Project Scientist).

"Effectively, the spacecraft may become also a linguistic treasure trove comparable to the first Rosetta Stone."

While linguists on Earth struggle to keep the rich heritage of global languages alive, the Rosetta spacecraft will preserve a record of current linguistic diversity far into the future - long after its speakers are gone and many of their languages are forgotten.

Posted by: djellison Oct 25 2005, 08:49 PM

I disagree.

Yes - we have a very poor understanding of anything other than recent history, but because the means to record, archive and document things that happened did not exist in the way it does today.

Doug

Posted by: mike Oct 25 2005, 09:35 PM

I've never been entirely sure that paper and electronic devices will last longer than good old stone.. I guess someone will find out, eventually, or they won't, because they won't realize paper and electronic devices existed, don't you know..

Posted by: punkboi Oct 26 2005, 06:02 AM

All I know is, it was INCREDIBLY LAME that NASA placed the CD that had the submitted names of people onboard the impactor of Deep Impact, not the spacecraft itself.

"Woohoo! My name went to outer space! Too bad it didn't last long 'cause the contraption it was on collided and was vaporized by a comet!!"

Thank you, NASA.

Posted by: ljk4-1 Oct 26 2005, 11:50 AM

And it still will not be complete, plus you cannot be certain that something won't happen to destroy many of our records - a totalitarian regime that wants to rewrite history in its favor ala 1984. With less than 30% of the current nations being only nominally democratic, this scenario is entirely possible.

Once again - a few disks that could contain so much information could be safely preserved on deep spacecraft for ages, and for the ages. I can't believe I have to keep arguing this.

Thank [insert deity here] Sagan and his people were around in the 1970s to at least get something of substance on our first interstellar probes.

Posted by: ljk4-1 Oct 26 2005, 11:54 AM

Yes, showing once again that this whole Put Your Name on a Space Probe bit is just a publicity stunt designed to entice a public that barely knows what mission is going on where.

I can't count how many people I told about Deep Impact who had NO CLUE it even existed, let alone what its mission was. So much for the NASA publicity/education machine.

Want to guess how many people can tell you they know that a Japanese probe is orbiting a small planetoid and is set to land on it and return a sample to Earth?
You would think that would be big news, NASA or othewise, but silly me.

And if they were so gung-ho on preserving those precious signatures, it should have been on the flyby bus.

Posted by: punkboi Oct 26 2005, 03:41 PM

Don't get me wrong-- I'm pretty grateful that NASA is giving us the chance to leave a mark, temporary or otherwise, on space probes that 90% of the public have absolutely no clue about...

But supporting what you said, NASA needs to send its publicity personnel to Hollywood to learn a thing or two about marketing.

And I didn't know about that Japanese probe (err, Hayubasa?) till maybe two days ago--when I read about it on the Planetary Society's website.

Posted by: punkboi Oct 26 2005, 03:47 PM

Oh, and let's applaud NASA for placing 616,400 names onboard the Cassini probe...which will eventually go the way of Galileo and take a nice fiery trip through Saturn's atmosphere at the end of its mission.

Posted by: dvandorn Oct 26 2005, 04:48 PM

That's why James Cameron (who, among other things, made the film "Titanic") was a member of the panel that reported back to NASA about how NASA could get more public support for their programs. A very large part of the recommendations of the public hearings and investigations NASA put together to support Bush's Moon, Mars and Beyond initiative was to make use of Hollywood and other professionals to make people aware of the truly great things NASA is up to...

-the other Doug

Posted by: hendric Oct 26 2005, 05:08 PM

True, but what is being recorded and archived? Think outside the box for a minute.
Are there any records being made of how we actually live our lives today? I'd argue NO. Of course, since we're living through it now, we might not be too interested in it, but somebody in the future might be. Future generations would only have a very limited view of how we lived. Would you want Seinfeld to define to future generations how you live today? Other than TV/movies, the only other repository of how we live is personal photos/movies, and even those aren't unbiased, complete stories about how our society operates today. Most are of vacations or birthdays/weddings etc. An anthropologist 100 years from now won't be able to examine how we live day to day, or have a skewed impression. What does an average person's life in China | US | Africa | etc look like? How long do they work? How do their relationships work? What do they wear? How do we treat our eldery, young, disabled, dead, etc. I have heard of a few projects with people who wear constantly recording cameras, but I doubt that gives an accurate representation of "us".

Along with this is the technology problem of keeping archived material "alive" when its viewer is no longer produced. Even NASA has problems with old archived material not being usable anymore because the technology to read it has disappeared. Very soon it will be impossible to purchase a new VCR. Unless everyone tranfers their old movies to DVD or digital, several decades of "us" will be lost.

What's the right answer? I dunno. Maybe we should create our equivalents of "stone tablets" using modern technology to etch photos into titanium plates or something. Or create a giant repository that is upgraded to each new technology as it appears, with several backups around the nation/world. Not likely to happen due to lack of economic return, but it a real shame our future generations won't get to know "us".

Posted by: mike Oct 26 2005, 05:31 PM

Realistically no one ever really knows what it was like to be anyone but themselves, but you state well things that I've thought myself forever.

You don't write a book about the 'boring things' that everybody already knows about - the things that EVERYBODY does. It makes me wonder just how much we really know about Roman life, Greek life, and even life in Victorian times, etc. etc. etc. Of course, no one will ever know, because I am highly doubtful that time travel into the past will ever exist, but you see, that's just how things work. I dare say things are even set up that way on purpose, because, let's face it, there's not a whole lot to do, and if everyone knew that we were all just doing virtually the exact same things as cavemen.. well, actually, they wouldn't care, because, ultimately, sex is fun, food tastes good, and drugs are enjoyable.

Posted by: dvandorn Oct 26 2005, 06:41 PM

In reality, more about how we live has been captured in the past 100 years than has ever been captured by previous generations. True, the media of storage are not as permanent as we might like, and most of the information captured is at least "flavored," if not actually skewed, depending upon the reason for the capture (news, entertainment, amateur photography, etc.).

What it comes down to, I guess, is what you define as "what it's like to live in these times." That's a really variable thing in the first place -- it depends on where you live, how much money you have, how well connected you and your family happen to be, etc., etc. In fact, "what it's like" varies from person to person, and I doubt we have the desire or the resources to record fine details about six billion lives.

The things that will give future generations a better idea of what life was like in these times are the cultural elements that are shared by larger and smaller groups. Those tend to be captured on film and video more often than not, if only because film and video are the primary means by which people experience the world beyond their own neighborhoods. So, since what we share as a people is already disseminated by film and video, it's already captured.

As much as we might not want future generations to judge us by episodes of Seinfeld, it's a fact that Seinfeld both disseminated and reflected elements of culture that are shared by millions of Americans. A small fraction of American culture, yes, but Seinfeld was a small fraction of the information captured during its run.

I have just recently celebrated my 50th birthday. I can tell you that American media has not always reflected the ways in which I have lived over that half-century, but it has provided the backdrop for the world in which I live. Future anthropologists will have worse things to look at than the volume of media stored from film and video.

I'm not the guy y'all probably would want to pick and choose what we should save for future generations -- but then again, no one else is, either. That's why we want a LOT of people making those decisions, and saving what seems important to them. That way, what is saved will better reflect who we were and what we went through...

-the other Doug

Posted by: mike Oct 26 2005, 07:21 PM

The world is definitely becoming more and more information-dense, more so than it ever has in the past.. I agree with you, if nothing else we will have more of reality recorded than ever before - and who was it that said reality was entirely objective in the first place? I'd like to see them prove it..

At any rate, we're all nothing without the knowledge gained through the hard work of our billions of ancestors, and as our knowledge increases so too does the maturity of the human species as a whole, and who knows in what this may one day result, though complete control of the universe seems pretty dull, so uhh. How about 99% control, or we can induce our own randomness, oh wait, we already are, what am I talking about again, oh yeah, it would be cool to fly around on Venus wearing just a light suit. I'd settle for that, at least until I got bored of it..