This post isn't at all finance related, just something I'd like to share with my fellow monkeys on the site. Right now, a low key space project is going on called KEO.
KEO is a small passive satellite planned to be launched in 2014 and orbit 1,800 km above the Earth, isolated for 50,000 years in a way leaving no chance at communication with the orbiting metal alloy container.
By now you're thinking "Okay, what's so special about KEO?"
KEO is a time capsule that's currently taking messages from anyone and everyone rich, poor, affluent, or insignificant. They take these messages, and inscribe them onto little formulated glass disks, and load them on, to be sent away into far orbit, for 50,000 years.
Submit Your Message of 6000 Character or Less Here:
http://www.keo.org/uk/pages/message.php
It will be taken as long as what you write reflects something about earth, something financial, political, cultural, ethical, anything with meaning and anything representing our century. Write down your life story if you want, addressed to your grandkids, 80 generations down.
To survive 50,000 years KEO has to be made up only of stable materials: interactive materials like batteries which would have permitted us to communicate with it, would have endangered its life due to their unpredictable decomposition, thus they have taken this component out.
It literally only carries the cargo, and to fly I quote:
"To allow its wings to flutter, KEO uses a leading-edge technology "shape memory alloys". These are metallic alloys that are able to assume different shapes according to different temperature ranges and revert to their original shapes each time they are brought back under their original temperature.
Thus KEO's wings will go down each time the satellite enters the Earth's cone of shadow, and go up as soon as KEO encounters direct sunlight again. Therefore, no form of energy is needed to make KEO's wings function."
What do you guys think?
Will you submit something to preserve a nugget of you alive for 50,000 years? It's free of charge.
Some future finance guy might pour over what models and bottles John Blow the Investment Banker thought 50,000 years back when they wasted hours and late nights on Excel, or maybe they'll find the pitchbook revision horror story of a WSO 1st year analyst.
Might as well try.
Submissions end at the end of 2013 and the project has minimal publicity, you have the lowest entry bar right now before the news catches a whiff and sends people into a frenzy.
