Yahoo To Pester Aliens With Earth News
You gotta hand it to Yahoo. When they do a publicity stunt, they do it right. The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company plans to beam a digitized time capsule into space from an ancient Mexican pyramid.
Yahoo says it expects the time capsule, designed by Internet artist Jonathan Harris, to be the largest one in history and is taking worldwide submissions for it beginning Tuesday, and ending November 8.
The best submissions will be projected on the side of the 216-foot tall Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan, Mexico, while also being webcast from October 25-27. The pyramid was chosen "because of its role in the preservation of ancient culture."
The company will also bury the time capsule on the Yahoo campus, donate copies to the Smithsonian and The National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico, and beam the digitized version via "light beam" into space, just in case the aliens missed our previous messages.
With any luck, the Vogons will drop by to pick up long lost fellow bureaucrat Dennis Hastert. Forms for the trip will have to be filled out in triplicate, of course, and plans displayed for a predetermined amount of time on Alpha Centari. So it may be a while.
While we wait, someone should alert Tom Cruise to the expected rise in Thetan levels as Dark Lord Xenu plots his next move, which we've pretty much narrowed down to some sort of Google/YouTube collaboration. This must have been why Cruise visited the Yahoo campus last Spring.
The purpose of the time capsule, says Jerry Yang, cofounder and Chief Yahoo, is "to document this moment in history to celebrate the power of the global online community and to provide a snapshot of who we are in 2006 to share with generations to come."
Future generations and aliens will be wowed by headlines like "Hilton and Richie Seen at L.A. Steakhouse" and "George Clooney Caught Picking Nose At Oscars."
But it's not just American culture Yahoo is trying to capture. The stunt seeks out "what Afghani women feel about love; Brazilian teenagers feel about anger; Chinese men feel about the past; American mothers feel about hope."
"Wherever people use Yahoo! - from Mexico, Germany or China to the U.S. - we want them to represent their culture and show us what's important to them by participating in this historic Internet time capsule event," said Yang. "It will be fascinating to see what people submit as their part of this 2006 snapshot."
Yeah, and the aliens will love the Zidane head butt.
The Yahoo! Time Capsule will be featured on at least 20 localized Yahoo homepages. Users are invited to upload personal photos, stories, thoughts, ideas, poems, prayers, home movies, music and art to the site, for inclusion in the capsule, with a focus on celebrating and understanding the world culture in 2006.
Visitors will be able to browse time capsule contents and compare contributions by country, region, race, age, gender, et cetera, says Yahoo.
After the pyramid projection, the webcast, and the beaming into space, Yahoo says the capsule will be buried at the company headquarters to be opened back up in 2020, the company's 25th anniversary.
That is, of course, unless Thetan levels rise to uncontrollable heights and the Vogons decide to destroy us.
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Jason L. Miller is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.
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