Story about extraterrestrial interstellar spam

Question

I read a story about an extraterrestrial message being delivered to earth that consists of a detailed list of instructions to make something (like in Contact). However, this ends up bankrupting the earth (real resources are used up to create the machine (stuff necessary for humans to survive on the planet)) and eventually the message is revealed as a spam message that is sent from civilization to civilization. The purpose of the message is to persuade the civilization to propagate the message onwards regardless of what happens to the civilization in question. I've been racking my brains in trying to remember the title or author.

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 who are the best humans break out (I'm not sure of this one). In addition, variants would be added to the message beamed out by the new machine. The idea was that interstellar 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's construction.

Story in English, about a dozen years ago.

Answer 1

This description sounds very like an excerpt from Existence by David Brin but doesn't match it perfectly. I've always thought that Existence reads like a collection of short stories loosely sewn together but with some threads still hanging free, so I wonder if the short story you are describing is by David Brin and was used to construct the full book.

I'll have to read the book again to draw out the full parallel so this is from hazy memory but one of the threads through the book is interstellar contact and one of the methods of interstellar communication is by encoding virtual worlds in meteors. If a sentient being touches one of these meteors then it is activated and moving images of aliens are displayed on the surface. These aliens will offer the technology to add virtual copies of the viewers to the internal encoding and disseminate the result by building vast numbers of the resulting artifacts and scattering then through the galaxy.

At least two such artifacts are discovered in the solar system with different histories and both of them have accumulated travellers from different worlds. At least one world was bankrupted by the poisoned chain-letter but Earth didn't succumb.

Answer 2

This is a partial match, I suspect, but Eric Nylund's Signal to Noise has a similar premise of aliens sending us instructions to an amazing machine to help save us from ourselves, a form of teleportation, in exchange for information on human genetic sequences.

Jack Potter puts computer cryptography to work for the highest bidder: sometimes for private corporations, sometimes for the government. Sometimes the work is legal; if not, Jack simply raises his price. But one day, Jack discovers something cloaked in the hiss of background radiation streaming past the Earth from deep space: a message from an alien civilization. One that's eager to do business with humanity -- and its representative.

Before he knows it, Jack has entered into a partnership that will open a Pandora's Box of potential profit and loss. The governments, the multinationals, and mysterious players more powerful still, all want a piece of the action -- and they're willing to kill, even wage war, to get it. Now Jack is entangled shifting web of deceit and intrigue in which no one, not even his closest friends, can be trusted. For Earth's cloak-and-dagger business practices are writ large in the heavens...and hostile takeovers are just as common across light years as they are across boardroom tables.

As it turns out, there's a massive market for information in the galaxy and Wheeler, the alien who contacted Jack, has less than scrupulous motives. Among other things

He does not disclose that the teleportation device he provides only works terrestrially, and uses up a bit of the Earth's rotation every time its used, eventually resulting in the destruction of the planet, which Jack and a handful of others escape via another device that does allow for interstellar travel.