Timeline for Story about extraterrestrial interstellar spam
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
17 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Oct 1, 2018 at 12:45 | answer | added | FuzzyBoots | timeline score: 0 | |
| Oct 1, 2018 at 10:06 | history | edited | SQB | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Minor improvements
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| Sep 30, 2018 at 10:35 | answer | added | Haydon Berrow | timeline score: 3 | |
| Apr 15, 2018 at 15:23 | comment | added | M Sarvary | I've added the comments to the original question to clarify it a bit more | |
| Apr 15, 2018 at 15:22 | history | edited | M Sarvary | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 1131 characters in body
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| Apr 15, 2018 at 15:19 | comment | added | M Sarvary | 3. I did find the The MAXO signals story when trying to find this one - but I remember a novella/short story, definitely not the MAXO Signals. 4. Bankrupting the earth meant real resources had been used up to create the machine (stuff necessary for humans to survive on the planet). Not money which as Mike Stone points out, is still in circulation. 5. I'm not sure what the Econ 2.0 story is? Thanks! | |
| Apr 15, 2018 at 15:19 | comment | added | M Sarvary | In addition, variants would be added to the message beamed out by the new machine. The idea was that instellar spam evolves - only the most convincing messages get propagated. Some civilizations discover the truth and send out counter messages claiming that the first messages are hoaxes and not to open them but of course, that leads to a confused mess of signals. The message was self-fulfilling because the earth is almost unlivable at the end of the machine construction. | |
| Apr 15, 2018 at 15:19 | comment | added | M Sarvary | 2. If I remember correctly, the message was convincing in persuading humans that there was an almost probability one that the world would be destroyed, so the only option was to digitize the best human beings and beam them out to the stars where they would be reconstituted. Of course, that was just to make the message more convincing, no actual reconstitution would be done. Plus I think this also triggers a war on earth when arguments on the best human are break out (I'm not sure of this one). | |
| Apr 15, 2018 at 15:18 | comment | added | M Sarvary | Answers in backward chronological order: 1. The story was in English and I read it about a dozen years ago - but that does not help narrow down when the story was published since I read voraciously. | |
| Apr 15, 2018 at 0:37 | comment | added | Will Crawford | @starpilotsix maybe the Economics 2.0 from the one with the tiny diamond starship with a solar sail? | |
| Apr 14, 2018 at 21:43 | history | tweeted | twitter.com/StackSciFi/status/985272352102641664 | ||
| Apr 14, 2018 at 15:07 | comment | added | Mike Stone | BTW what does "bankrupting the earth" mean? Unless the money spent on the project has been somehow transferred to another planet, then presumably it is still in circulation on earth - albeit in different hands there. | |
| Apr 14, 2018 at 12:39 | comment | added | starpilotsix | Probably not the answer to this SPECIFIC request, but in the interest of potentially helping people who find this topic in a later search trying to identify a similar story, Charles Stross' story "MAXO Signals" deals with this idea (although it doesn't actually succeed, hence why I don't think it's the right story): nature.com/articles/4361206a | |
| Apr 14, 2018 at 12:19 | comment | added | Lorendiac | Do you remember if the detailed instructions included any promises about what sort of wonderful things were supposed to happen if you built the object? I'm asking because I'm wondering why the human race would be willing to invest so much of our total resources into One Mysterious Project in the first place, just hoping it would be a good idea! (For instance, if this interstellar chain letter was basically promising "this device can give people eternal youth after it's fully functional," that would make some sense as a powerful motive to build it and see if the promise was true.) | |
| Apr 14, 2018 at 12:08 | comment | added | Gallifreyan | When did you read this story, and in what language? | |
| Apr 14, 2018 at 12:03 | review | First posts | |||
| Apr 14, 2018 at 12:08 | |||||
| Apr 14, 2018 at 12:00 | history | asked | M Sarvary | CC BY-SA 3.0 |