Orbital Billboard
April 15, 2019 5:01 PM   Subscribe

This post was deleted for the following reason: apparently false -- taz



 
PCGamer says no. The linked page tried to clickjack me, so I had to look elsewhere.
posted by Countess Elena at 5:05 PM on April 15, 2019 [3 favorites]


C'mon hackers, gain access to their positioning software and spell out something dirty!! Oh..."MAGA." Right, hackers suck now.
posted by UltraMorgnus at 5:11 PM on April 15, 2019 [1 favorite]


Guillotines it is, then. I don't want my children to need an ad blocker to look at the sky.
posted by mhoye at 5:12 PM on April 15, 2019 [25 favorites]


PC gamer says pepsi has no plans to do it but also, they already did it. Just in case?
posted by ActingTheGoat at 5:13 PM on April 15, 2019


PEP
posted by solarion at 5:15 PM on April 15, 2019 [15 favorites]




wait until the fundies decide to put a movie of jesus up there
posted by pyramid termite at 5:23 PM on April 15, 2019 [1 favorite]


Project Blue Beam! That was actually supposed to be a New Age project to destroy faith in Jesus
posted by Countess Elena at 5:26 PM on April 15, 2019 [2 favorites]


When did this first show up in fiction?
I think there was an Arthur C. Clarke story about it.
posted by doctornemo at 5:28 PM on April 15, 2019


Did someone say orbital branding? (The Tick, ahead of its time...)
posted by MonkeyToes at 5:35 PM on April 15, 2019


A.K.A. Pepsi View.
posted by Nanukthedog at 5:38 PM on April 15, 2019 [5 favorites]


If this did happen, it would be one of very few things that would make me actually thankful for the prolonged Pacific northwest cloudy season.
posted by Greg_Ace at 5:38 PM on April 15, 2019 [3 favorites]


For what its worth, Gizmodo has the same information as the PC Gamer story above that says Gizmodo have an email from Pepsi confirming that:

"...StartRocket performed an exploratory test for stratosphere advertisements using the Adrenaline GameChangers logo,” a PepsiCo spokesperson told Gizmodo in a statement by email. “This was a one-time event; we have no further plans to test or commercially use this technology at this time."

The videos of what StartRocket want to do are awful....oh sure it will be cute the first one or two times (like the Olympics logo over the skies of a host city on opening ceremony night)...but the prospect of having hundreds of different brand logos float around in the night sky is just horrific.
posted by inflatablekiwi at 5:39 PM on April 15, 2019 [3 favorites]


There's also Hancock, where Will Smith carves Jason Bateman's corporate logo into the surface of the moon.
posted by brundlefly at 5:39 PM on April 15, 2019 [1 favorite]


100% comfortable with shooting these down, even if it results in Kessler Syndrome and the consequent extinction of the human race as the result of our failure to settle other planets
posted by chappell, ambrose at 5:41 PM on April 15, 2019 [15 favorites]


I am reminded of Frederic Brown's Sci Fi short Pi In The Sky which I read when I was a kid. Go ahead, read it. It's all there at the link and it's short.
posted by bz at 5:54 PM on April 15, 2019 [3 favorites]


This is incredibly obscene.
posted by codacorolla at 6:00 PM on April 15, 2019 [7 favorites]


This is good. I’ve always disliked Pepsi, and now I have an objective reason to never have anything to do with Pepsico again. I suspect this is actually just a 3ay to get a lot of buzz without any investment...
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 6:02 PM on April 15, 2019 [1 favorite]


I'm returning to visit Yellowstone National Park in a month or so to celebrate a ten year reunion of sorts with friends that worked there that fateful summer. But it's not just a reunion of people, it's a reunion with nature as I best know it. Wilderness at a level that I am really glad to have available to me(us) as humans.

If there was somehow a space billboard showing up on the horizon during the twilight hours I don't even know what I'd think or do but boy howdy would I be pissed and on board with any campaign against the sponsor or what the fuck ever they advertised.

Burn it to the fucking ground doesn't even begin to cover it.
posted by RolandOfEld at 6:06 PM on April 15, 2019 [3 favorites]


Very Blade Runner. And though I love Blade Runner it's not really a world I want to live in.
posted by k8bot at 6:09 PM on April 15, 2019 [2 favorites]


/sighs, goes back to school to learn about rocketry
posted by Pope Guilty at 6:23 PM on April 15, 2019 [5 favorites]


Begun, the cubesat wars have.
posted by runehog at 6:37 PM on April 15, 2019 [3 favorites]


F*ck Pepsi. Seriously f*ck them for wanting to f*ck up looking up at the night sky.
posted by drnick at 6:52 PM on April 15, 2019 [2 favorites]


oh, hey cool

anyone know where I can get some grenade launchers that can shoot into space? and maybe a targeting system? no?
posted by duffell at 7:09 PM on April 15, 2019 [1 favorite]


Sipping her champagne Kirsty Fantori, the star demolition engineer, started programming the nebulon missile. It had to explode at just the right moment to trigger off the reaction in the star’s core which would push it into supernova stage. A star in supernova would light up the entire galaxy for over a month, giving off more energy than the Earth’s sun could in ten billion years. It would be a hell of a bang.
...
For anyone living on Earth the result would be mindfizzlingly spectacular. One hundred and twenty-eight stars would appear to go supernova simultaneously, burning with such ferocity they would be visible even in daylight. And the hundred and twenty-eight supernovae would spell out a message. And this would be the message:

‘COKE ADDS LIFE!’

For five whole weeks, wherever you were on Earth, the huge tattoo would be branded across the day and night skies. Honeymooners in Hawaii would stand on the peak of Mauna Kca, gazing at sunsets stamped with the slogan. Commuters in London, stuck in traffic jams, would peer through the grey drizzle and gape at the Cola constellation. The few primitive tribes still untouched by civilization in the jungles of South America would look up at the heavens, and certainly not think about drinking Pepsi.


- Red Dwarf, Rob Grant and Doug Naylor
posted by drnick at 7:18 PM on April 15, 2019 [12 favorites]


Thanks, I hate it
posted by potrzebie at 7:22 PM on April 15, 2019 [1 favorite]


Pepsi Wild Blue Yonder?
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:32 PM on April 15, 2019


Can we hack these things to make an orbital goatse
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 7:33 PM on April 15, 2019 [4 favorites]


bz: "I am reminded of Frederic Brown's Sci Fi short Pi In The Sky which I read when I was a kid. Go ahead, read it. It's all there at the link and it's short."

Surely, Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold the Moon"!
posted by Chrysostom at 7:50 PM on April 15, 2019 [1 favorite]


So why can't Pepsi buy a giant projector and put ads on the bottoms of clouds? Whatever's stopping them from doing that, use it against the space ad idea.
posted by ctmf at 7:55 PM on April 15, 2019


I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.
posted by humboldt32 at 8:06 PM on April 15, 2019 [3 favorites]


When I said I was tired of living in the darkest timeline, I meant figuratively darkest.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 8:48 PM on April 15, 2019 [1 favorite]


Apparently, you can take the sky from me.
posted by bryon at 10:07 PM on April 15, 2019 [6 favorites]


I've seen things drunk sodas you people wouldn't believe.

FTFY
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:11 PM on April 15, 2019


Pepsi Blue Gamergate
posted by Skwirl at 12:33 AM on April 16, 2019


Judge Dress story 'Loonie's Moon' has ads projected on the moon back in 1980.
posted by biffa at 12:51 AM on April 16, 2019


There's also Hancock, where Will Smith carves Jason Bateman's corporate logo into the surface of the moon.

If we're going that way, let's go with MeFi's own and Hitler's face (and apparently a gazillions others - warning, TVTropes).
posted by Pink Frost at 1:23 AM on April 16, 2019


Also Jack Vance's The Face.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 3:55 AM on April 16, 2019


Has the Planetary Defense Officer beeen notified of this?

F*ck Pepsi. Seriously f*ck them for wanting to f*ck up looking up at the night sky.
You can just say 'fuck', ya know.
posted by thelonius at 3:59 AM on April 16, 2019 [1 favorite]


The first Carmen Sandiego animated series once featured a plan to paint Carmen's image on the moon, and similarly, in an episode of the animated The Tick series, Cha
posted by BiggerJ at 4:07 AM on April 16, 2019


The Arthur Clarke story is "Watch this Space" from his Venture To The Moon set of short stories, 1956. As the Wikipedia precis has it -

"Watch this Space" tells how a scientific experiment conducted on the Moon - creating a giant sodium cloud that is made luminescent by the Sun's rays and visible from Earth - is sabotaged by "the greatest advertising coup" in history (strongly implied to be by Coca-Cola).
posted by Devonian at 4:39 AM on April 16, 2019 [1 favorite]


For everyone who is rushing to outrage and missed the first comment in the thread,

THIS IS FAKE NEWS

It's not just our parents getting riled up watching Fox News, it's just as effective when it is pushing our buttons.
posted by Rock Steady at 4:40 AM on April 16, 2019 [2 favorites]


‘hung in the night sky next to the stars’
posted by Segundus at 4:41 AM on April 16, 2019


THIS IS FAKE NEWS

You should not use that term, which now only legitimatizes Trump's discourse. Although its origins were in describing the use of false pro-Trump stories (Hillary dying of cancer, etc) on social media, Trump has succesfully appropriated it to mean media critical of him, or telling the truth about anything he wants concealed. Use of the name "FAKE NEWS" should become a tell that the user is a Trumpist.
posted by thelonius at 4:50 AM on April 16, 2019 [4 favorites]


Almost every 'space stunt' is made up. (Musk actually launched his car, though, which caught a lot of my nothing-gets-past-us mob of gnarled old tech hacks by surprise.)

And I'm very happy talking about that. There is a huge fuzzy area out there, hard to map and hard to test, festooned with press releases and Kickstarters and lazy journalism and bad actors with agendas, where 'science' stories that aren't possible are dressed up just enough to seem plausible. Sometimes, they originate with people who believe what they're saying and either lack the discipline, knowledge or skills to test their own ideas, or have ignored their own doubts because they so want it to be true. Sometimes, it's just plain fraud. Sometimes, it's an advertising gimmick, the moral nature of which is its own black rabbit hole. Sometimes, it's bits of all of the above and more.

One of the few tools we have for exploring this phenomenon is our cultural history with it and its antecedents, which is why I love being reminded of (or discovering for the first time) the SF tropes that link in, and another is us testing our perceptions against each other's. Here is a great place for both.
posted by Devonian at 4:54 AM on April 16, 2019 [1 favorite]


I hope this is what India is going to use that anti-satellite missile for.
posted by Gev at 4:55 AM on April 16, 2019 [1 favorite]


It's like the Cold War-era joke:

“Mr. President, sir! The Soviets have painted the moon red!”
“Well don't just stand there, send someone up with some white paint to paint “Coca-Cola” on it!”
posted by acb at 5:06 AM on April 16, 2019 [1 favorite]


Trump has succesfully appropriated it to mean media critical of him

I hear you, but I refuse to let him succeed in anything. I also own a red (Boston Red Sox) cap. I don't usually wear it, because I know it can make folks uncomfortable, but I look forward to putting it on again once MAGA is a relic of shameful history.
posted by Rock Steady at 5:17 AM on April 16, 2019 [1 favorite]


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