[HN Gopher] The twin probes just launched toward Mars have an Ea...
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The twin probes just launched toward Mars have an Easter egg on
board
Author : pseudolus
Score : 61 points
Date : 2025-11-15 11:49 UTC (7 days ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| clickety_clack wrote:
| 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.
| BigTTYGothGF wrote:
| 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.
| dotancohen wrote:
| _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.
| iammattmurphy wrote:
| 10/10 comment--has it all: intrigue, interplanetary
| sociopolitical commentary, K'Breel, terms like "gelsac"
| DarmokJalad1701 wrote:
| > 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.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Here -- _achoo_ -- have a cold.
| hidroto wrote:
| 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.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| 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.
| qlm wrote:
| Sounds like reactionary nonsense to me. It's just some
| names. It's not indicative of the debasement of society.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| 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.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > 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".
| inglor_cz wrote:
| 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.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| 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.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| 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.
| gcanyon wrote:
| > 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."
| BigTTYGothGF wrote:
| > 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
| inglor_cz wrote:
| 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.
| tired-turtle wrote:
| "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.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| 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.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| 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!
| qlm wrote:
| I suggest you reflect on the value you are placing on
| aesthetics, and where this way of thinking ultimately
| leads.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| 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.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| Surely the people at NASA who are launching probes aren't
| the ones who've become distrustful or ashamed of higher
| culture.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| 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.
| hdgvhicv wrote:
| 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.
| YouAreMammon wrote:
| They just don't make em like they used to!
|
| _yells at cloud_
| jdpage wrote:
| 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.
| 3eb7988a1663 wrote:
| 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.
| ..
| kej wrote:
| 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
| KwanEsq wrote:
| 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.
| tzs wrote:
| 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.
| tantony wrote:
| 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.
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| and in a thousand years your name will be displayed in some
| space museum :)
| takinola wrote:
| 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.
| yehoshuapw wrote:
| will space-edition pokemon go be the only reason some
| people go to visit earth one day?
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| So like in Futurama, where the Moon is a theme park.
| layer8 wrote:
| > recognize the gravity
|
| Inherently lighter on the moon. ;)
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