I have a feeling this “device” has no chance of ever even being built, let alone used.
And I really hope I’m right, because this would truly be the ultimate eyesore. Can you imagine not being able to look at the stars anymore without seeing some company’s advertisements? I guess amateur astronomers would be pretty much screwed, huh? Ever go camping, just to get away from it all? Imagine it with a fucking Sunday supplement spread across the sky! Not so appealing anymore, is it?
And it’s sad, but I can actually see some companies going for this. Particularly media companies and banks that issue credit cards. I think it’s arrogant bordering on pure evil to think that people would rather look at ads for your companies products than the night sky.
Now this may amount to no more than the Pinky And The Brain-esque pipedream of a crazy Russian scientist. What I’m pitting here is a trend. It seems like I’m always hearing about some new unwelcome, obnoxious, usually environmentally unfriendly marketing scheme that will target consumers in an even more invasive way. Billboards, junk mail, telemarketing, spam email, spam text messages on my cell phone that I have to pay for!!! It’s all part of the same fucked priority system. “Nothing shall interfere with anyone’s efforts to sell shit!” say the gods of commerce. Well I’m tired of it.
And if this “space-ad” technology does turn out to be practicable, what are we going to do? Make laws against it? This is intercontinental advertising! Seriously, how does that work? How could something like this be regulated, and (hopefully) stopped? Can it? If it can’t, could the people of the world react so negatively to such an egregious and cynical display of raw greed that no company that wants to stay in business even thinks about defacing the sky like this?
Ha! That reminds me of a Heinlein short story (or was it Bradbury?) in which an advertising company paid megabucks to subvert a lunar experiment involving dispersement of luminescent dust so that it spelled out the the name of a certain soft drink in its distinctive cursive script on the surface of the moon.
If there were ever serious signs that anyone was working towards actually implementing such a scheme, I’d go all-over-Unabomber in a heartbeat. Oh yeah.
I don’t remember any Heinlein stories like that (though I’ll fully admit I can remember all of them anyways), but it seems remarkably similar to Red Dwarf, which had several interstellar ships nuking particular stars to send them into nova. The resulting star pattern would spell out the name of a popular soft drink, “and tribesmen in sub-Saharan Africa would look into the skies and definitely not think of drinking Pepsi.”
At ski resorts they use light projectors at night to put ads on the sides of the mountains. We’re almost at the “ads-on-every-conceivable-place” point already.
Once upon a time, a real estate developer thought it would be a great idea to build 30-foot-high white letters on the hills overlooking his residential development. He populated the letters with numerous light bulbs and it could be seen for many miles.
Years later, with only some of the letters still standing, the sign is considered an international icon. Money has been raised and the sign (2/3’s of it) has been restored and maintained.
But as much as the Hollywood sign is revered and admired today, it is unlikely that it would be built now. How things change.
I hate the practice of selling the naming rights to public buildings. I HATE having to call the local sports arena “Safeco Field.” Hate it hate it hate it hate it.
At this point in history, my particular ire is reserved for various forms of internet advertising.
#1: popups that immediately center themselves on the screen, blocking out whatever you actually came there to see, and forcing you to hunt around in the ad itself for the X=Close command.
#2: Sites that give you the first page of an article… and then require you to watch a little commercial in order to access the remainder of the material.
I make a list of things I will never, never, never buy, use, finance, or patronize, and companies that use those forms of advertising are right at the top.
Heinlein’s novella The Man Who Sold the Moon chronicles D.D. Harriman’s efforts to send a man to the moon; one of his fund-raising strategies involved meeting with the head of a popular soft drink company (presumably Coca-Cola) and implying that he was in negotiations with his chief competitor to have the competitor’s logo (6+, an obvious reference to 7 Up) displayed on the moon in luminescent dust. The point was made that this could not be done with the [Coca-Cola] logo and still be legible from Earth, but Harriman would be willing to drop negotiations with [6+] if [Coca-Cola] was willing to outbid them.
Uncannily, this was my first thought exactly, but I didn’t want anybody to accuse me of threatening terrorism, so I left it out of the OP. You got spunk, Larry Mudd… I HATE SPUNK!!! No, just kidding, I like spunk, but only in a figurative sense. :eek:
That sounds about right, but I think he used the idea in a short story, too.
The story that I’m (not) remembering centered on an experiment concerning the dispersal of luminescent dust from the moons surface. In the last paragraph, it’s revealed that advertising executives have bribed some of the people involved with the experiment to introduce a stencil-like grid into the issuing device, bearing their corporate logo. It’s mentioned that one letter is fudged, the loop of an “l” kind of smudging together, but that the distinctive cursive script was so familiar to everyone that it didn’t really matter. Then some observation that the inside people responsible would never work in the industry again, but that in all likelihood they wouldn’t have to…
Speaking of The Man Who Sold The Moon, here’s a little quote from the script of a psychedelic/cut-up animation project I’ve been working on, off and on, for about ten years:
cuauhtemoc, I think that the conditional nature of my statement keeps it from actually being a threat of terrorism, because I’m confident that anyone actually evil enough to consider getting behind such a scheme would surely be recognized as such very early on and suffocated by their mother.
First is a Robert A. Heinlein one: The Man Who Sold The Moon, where the protagonist sells advertising rights to the moon’s surface to a company that wouldn’t be able to use it for their logo, so that their competitor can’t put their distincitive logo across the moon, where it would be recognized across the globe.
The second is an Arthur C. Clarke story: I can’t recall the title, but there was to be a test involving sodium ions being sent into the high atmosphere. The distinctive curly letters were there, but not permanently. As the dust dissipated the message was lost. Clarke made a point about how the scientific findings of the experiment wouldn’t be harmed at all… the ions were still flourescing as they were supposed to. But he also pointed out that the crew member who did it got a GREAT retirement bonus.
