This is great. And pointless. But mostly great. Science fiction and fantasy magazine, SFX, is being beamed into outer space as radio waves. It’s a publicity stunt, but I love it.
“A digital version every edition of the magazine will now be sent to Goonhilly satellite station in Cornwall, UK, and fired into space from a satellite dish, at 671 million miles per hour. The radio waves will continue to travel through the stars for eternity. It is thought each edition will take around five years to reach the nearest star to the earth.”
Of course, by the time it’s picked up by beings on Planet X, the subscription offer will have expired and the review of The Black Dossier will be woefully out of date, but still…
…I wonder if we should beam Skepchick calendar pics into space? I’d hate for anyone to think that Earth girls are easy.
Of course, the further out into space the signal travels, the weaker it will become, until it becomes indistinguishable from the background echo of the big bang.
All of that VHF and AM radio stuff we produced back in the fifties and sixties probably can’t be discerned much past the Oort Cloud.
I wonder how far the focussed beam will travel before petering out.
Rav Winston, resident bubble-burster. =)
If you’re gonna beam the Skepchick calendar pics somewhere, you should pick a terrestrial target. Let’s say Northeast Philadelphia as a purely hypothetical.
Go ahead and send them! You don’t have to be easy, but you can show just how good looking intelligence really is!
Earth girls aren’t easy?
Damned Hitchiker’s Guide.