And the internets went two by two.

August 18, 2007 4:30 AM

Let's send a knowledge Ark to the Moon, says a French University. The founders of the group Alliance to Rescue Civilization (ARC) agree: "extending the Internet from the Earth to the moon could help avert a technological dark age following "nuclear war, acts of terrorism, plague, or asteroid collisions." Better than sending 1679 binary digits, into space? The French are no strangers to CETI , inventor Charles Cros petitioned the French Government for years for funding to construct a giant mirror to burn giant lines of communication into the deserts of other planets. [previously]
posted by takeyourmedicine (45 comments total)

"A technological dark age" until we are technologically advanced enough to reach the moon again, I presume...
posted by takeyourmedicine at 4:32 AM on August 18, 2007 [1 favorite]

Yeah, that'd come in handy. "Sure -- I've got the bread-making instructions packed away safely -- ON THE MOON!."

Duh.
posted by Devils Rancher at 4:51 AM on August 18, 2007 [2 favorites]

Whitey On The Moon
posted by flapjax at midnite at 5:01 AM on August 18, 2007 [1 favorite]

Since it's my mission in life to bring proper punctuation back, I'm afraid I have to point out that there should be a semi-colon after "The French are no strangers to CETI". The comma is a wonderful piece of punctuation, but it isn't strong enough to hold two complete sentences together. For that, you need the extra-strength semi-colon.

The semi-colon: so powerful, so underused.

/Semi-Colon Marketing Board
posted by Hildegarde at 5:06 AM on August 18, 2007 [13 favorites]

The semi-colon: so powerful, so underused.

“If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts. But do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.” - Kurt Vonnegut
posted by flapjax at midnite at 5:13 AM on August 18, 2007 [7 favorites]

But y'know what? There better be some music by Sun Ra on that gaddam ark.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 5:22 AM on August 18, 2007

And are there gonna be any semi-colons on this ark? I'd vote to include some colons instead. I think they are far more sure of themselves than wishy-washy semi-colons. And apparently, even Hildegarde agrees, if only subconsiously. You'll note that in his endorsement of the semi-colon, she actually used a colon.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 5:37 AM on August 18, 2007

You'll also note that I confused genders in that last comment, and misspelled a word.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 5:38 AM on August 18, 2007

Put various capsules into space, programmed to return to earth every couple of hundred years, and spill their technoknowledge upon ususpecting mortals, seeding our knowledge "from the stars", (if you will).

Or somesuch nonesense like that. Oh, if we do put it on the moon, can it be in the form of a large black monolith nearly buried in the lunar dust?
posted by blue_beetle at 5:44 AM on August 18, 2007 [1 favorite]

YouTube Video:Whitey On The Moon
posted by vhsiv at 5:55 AM on August 18, 2007 [2 favorites]

takeyourmedicine got it in one. This will prove to be slightly more useful, but you'd still have to travel to Norway.
posted by Tullius at 5:56 AM on August 18, 2007

"Sure -- I've got the bread-making instructions packed away safely -- ON THE MOON!."

But we'd also be extending the internet to the moon. That's one giant... ethernet cable...for mankind.
posted by AppleSeed at 5:56 AM on August 18, 2007

I support the proper use of all forms of punctuation; I don't discriminate against the colons, commas, or even the em dash. Though I do bear a bit of a grudge against the ellipsis.
posted by Hildegarde at 5:58 AM on August 18, 2007

Hildegarde, how would you punctuate something that captures the way Neil Armstrong delivered his famous line? By the way, he omitted the indefinite article "a" before "man" in that line. Clearly we need to send some grammarians to the moon.
posted by AppleSeed at 6:49 AM on August 18, 2007

Just imagine how happy we'd be to hear from our extraterrestrial neighbours in the form of a letter burned into the Sahara Desert.
posted by The Card Cheat at 7:10 AM on August 18, 2007

Umm... there would be people on the moon taking care of the stuff, and if you've read enough Sci-Fi you'll know that it's terribly easy to get stuff from the moon back down to earth. Just give it a slight toss in the right direction and gravity will do all the work.

A bunch of big shiny metal balls falling from the sky under giant parachutes filled with tons of useful stuff... medicine, books, solar panels for power, radios, seeds, whatever...

They could even just blast big chunks of rock, drill a hole and cram it full of good stuff, seal it up and chuck it towards the earth... If you see a meteor that looks like somebody drilled a hole in it and patched it up... break that sucker open, there's good stuff inside.

As long as there's a self sufficient colony on the moon, it'll be easier to chuck stuff down than it would be to get to that seed bank out in the middle of the ocean.
posted by zengargoyle at 7:23 AM on August 18, 2007

I, too, hope to finance some of my wackier projects in part through donations from billionaire philanthropists.
posted by sour cream at 7:40 AM on August 18, 2007

Let's blow it up instead.
posted by BackwardsCity at 8:42 AM on August 18, 2007

a technological dark age following "nuclear war, acts of terrorism, plague, or asteroid collisions."

Wasn't the very point of ARPANet to keep command and control communications alive in the event of just such an incident?
posted by aaronetc at 8:56 AM on August 18, 2007

By the way, he omitted the indefinite article "a" before "man" in that line.

Or did he?
posted by thrako at 9:25 AM on August 18, 2007

This is just the sort of excuse that would start the religious nut-balls building the third temple to start the end of days. I mean, why not, we've got everything important stored up on the moon, right?
posted by ranchocalamari at 9:39 AM on August 18, 2007

Let's not forget NASSA.

(This is the original version, I think; there is a differently edited version I've also seen on youtube. Caught me completely off-guard.)
posted by maxwelton at 9:54 AM on August 18, 2007 [1 favorite]

going to moon, brb
posted by dirtynumbangelboy at 10:03 AM on August 18, 2007

Meet baby @.
posted by Sailormom at 10:12 AM on August 18, 2007

We really should consult the Moties about this.
posted by LordSludge at 10:13 AM on August 18, 2007

What we really need is some kind of radio/tv station on the moon that could automatically transmit important survival data in the event of a catastrophe -- or maybe just all the time. Is that what they're suggesting? A lunar wi-fi server with all of our civilization's history and knowledge on it?
posted by Avenger at 11:00 AM on August 18, 2007 [1 favorite]

This is such a great idea. Seriously, you could turn this into a fantastic story;

We send a sizable team to the moon, with enough resources that they can become self sufficient. After a few years they are well established, and having watched our stupidity from afar, they decide they have had enough of the petty bickering planetside. As such, they announce that they are now a sovereign state. On top of that, they are in possession of an untouchable weapon system (throwing big rocks at Earth) and we must accept all their demands or they will start leveling cities.

Most of their demands can be summed up as; 'Stop fucking about or we'll turn your biggest population center into a good sized crater.'

And thus, peace on Earth is finally a reality. Though it's because we are all scared shitless of those crazy bastards on the Moon with their mass accelerators.
posted by quin at 11:09 AM on August 18, 2007 [2 favorites]

Quin - isn't that essentially the plot of Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress"?
posted by Anduruna at 11:28 AM on August 18, 2007

It's well established that the only message worth carving into the moon is CHA.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 11:31 AM on August 18, 2007 [2 favorites]

Heinlein ripped off Quin? Next you'll be telling me he has an old man's brain put into a young woman's body.
posted by maxwelton at 11:49 AM on August 18, 2007

"The Moon is a Harsh Mistress"?

Is it? I honestly don't remember if I ever read that one.

But I did just got another great idea about someone going through boot camp. But, and here's the clever bit, it's military training in how to use powered armor...

I think I'll call it 'Spaceship Fighters' or something.
posted by quin at 11:55 AM on August 18, 2007

MetaFilter: so powerful, so underused
posted by brundlefly at 1:35 PM on August 18, 2007

The first link point to the second page of the article rather than the first.
Also, it is because of people like you bickering on the superiority of the semi-colon over the colon that we still haven't gone back to the Moon after more than 30 years.

I kid.
posted by surrendering monkey at 2:52 PM on August 18, 2007

damn that is annoying, apologies guys.

I meant to link to the print/ both page view
posted by takeyourmedicine at 3:16 PM on August 18, 2007

We should put a solar-powered dns root server & a caching proxy of the wayback machine on the moon first. That would be much cheaper.
posted by lastobelus at 3:48 PM on August 18, 2007

Metafilter: So powerful, so underused

Plus, Semi-colons 'R' Us!
posted by humannaire at 7:07 PM on August 18, 2007

We already sent an knowledge Ark to Terminus, but the moon is so much closer. Why didn't Hari think of that?
posted by mds35 at 7:18 PM on August 18, 2007

Listen, o my friends, and hark!
They're going to launch a knowledge ark.
Someday soon it will embark,
Speeding through the spacey dark,
Moving like the swiftest shark
Toward the moon, to make its mark,
Will it contain some MeatFilter?
God, let's hope it's not all Fark.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 8:06 PM on August 18, 2007

Meatfilter. Brilliant. Oh well, a typo on the moon seems appropriate, no?
posted by flapjax at midnite at 8:07 PM on August 18, 2007

REWRITE:

Listen, o my friends, and hark!
They're going to launch a knowledge ark.
Someday soon it will embark,
Speeding through the spacey dark,
Moving like the swiftest shark
Toward the moon, to make its mark,
With snarly MetaFilter snark?
Nah, it's gonna all be Fark.

(There! Now it all rhymes!)
posted by flapjax at midnite at 9:15 PM on August 18, 2007

> We should put a solar-powered dns root server & a caching proxy of the wayback machine on the moon first. That would be much cheaper.

Man, those pingtimes would suck.

You could rent space on it as an off-site backup. I'm sure somebody would buy in.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:03 PM on August 18, 2007

Flag on the moon. How'd it get there?
posted by dirigibleman at 12:18 AM on August 19, 2007

Flag on the moon, pfffft. I won't be impressed til you can flag a comment on the moon.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 5:44 AM on August 19, 2007

But if the communists build a Moon-Ark first - then they can start a nuclear war, and the world's survivors will rebuild civilisation according to the communist Moon-Ark blueprint!

Mr President - we must not allow a Moon-Ark gap!
posted by -harlequin- at 9:35 AM on August 19, 2007 [3 favorites]

Given the spreading shadow of Big Brother (benevolent though You always are, Big Brother), perhaps a 'technological dark age' wouldn't be all bad! But all things considered, I do hope to be dead first.

Re: The comments on the semi-colon and Kurt Vonnegut, the use of semi-colons was the only thing I know of that I ever wholly disagreed with Vonnegut about; well, that and the use of Pall Mall cigarettes. On the subject of a technological dark age, his novel Galapagos (among other works) wryly suggested that we would all be much better off if evolution had left our "big brains" just enough smaller that Armageddon, and lesser mass destruction, were beyond our clever little grasps. (Well, fixing a leak in the plumbing is beyond my grasp, but you see the point.) Rest in peace, Mr. Vonnegut; but I still like my semi-colons.
posted by NetizenKen at 11:00 AM on August 19, 2007