Block this: Using satellites to plaster ads over our skies could work, say boffins

"Space: the final frontier" – not just for humanity but also marketeers, it would seem, as Russian scientists have undertaken a feasibility study on satellite-displayed advertising. They conclude that not only is it possible, but it could also turn a profit. Dismissing ad opportunities or sponsorships tied to serious space …

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Targeted advertising

Wouldn't this only be visible to humans on planet Earth ?

We feel that this might be too micro-targeted for our brand's needs

Yours insincerely

Marketing Dept

Sirius cybernetics Corporation

***** Go Stick Your Head In A Pig ********************

[Phil O'Sophical]

Is it bad that my first thought was "someone will hack these, and use them to display pr0n" ?

[Arthur the cat]

The article says 50 12U cubesats. Even if each one can do a 3x4 grid that's not many pixels. Seems like a return to line printer graphics rather than Full HD.

[MrDamage]

That's enough to display 5318008.

[David 132]

Oh I don't know. Depends how big the 5318008 is. Or are.

[bombastic bob]

it would only work in the southern hemisphere

[jake]

Unless you turn your chair around.

[Anonymous Coward]

well, you know that porn drives technology, so, in no time...

p.s. porn and wars. Are we up for another f... industrial revolution v. 65?

[Ken Hagan]

The resolution isn't good enough.

But someone *will* hack these. They'll probably just use the manoevering rockets to create a short firework/meteor display.

[Pirate Dave]

"The resolution isn't good enough."

That didn't stop the computer pr0n industry in the late 80's-early 90's. 'course it took some imagination back then...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's always better with some imagination...

[jake]

But the pR0n industry knew they had something that was nearly universally wanted.

The advertising industry? Not so much. Some would say quite the opposite, in fact.

[Michael Habel]

At least they would becone slightly useful then...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure that even Russian scientists can find/have better things to do than creating astral adverts, which they will almost certainly be hatred for. If there passing aliens wonder what wiped out the human race, they'll find it wasn't from the invasion of ukraine/taiwan that led to nuclear but instead some wankateer who thought it was a good idea to have adverts in space.

[Wellyboot]

We can but hope an engineer on the launch pad fails to notice that the satellite manoeuvring nozzles are hammered flat not as per specification.

[EVP]

Those passing aliens might pre-emptively wipe out the human race to prevent such an repugnant idea from spreading to their planet.

[Anonymous Coward]

well, I would argue that Russian scientists know _exactly_ what they're doing with this research, there's no better thing to do than do your job and go back home alive every day...

[bombastic bob]

my first reaction to this was "thanks for ruining the view". I happen to like looking at the sky, especially at night.

[Marty McFly]

Coming soon from an advertiser near you, or maybe not near you...

Fry : So, you're telling me they broadcast commercials into people's dreams?.. But how is that possible?

Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth : It's very simple. The ad gets into your brain just like this liquid gets into this egg. Although in reality it's not liquid, but gamma radiation.

Fry : That's awful. It's like brainwashing.

Leela : Didn't you have ads in the 20th century?

Fry : Well, sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games, and on buses, and milk cartons, and T-shirts, and bananas, and written on the sky... But not in dreams.

[My other car WAS an IAV Stryker]

Re: Coming soon from an advertiser near you, or maybe not near you...

From Schlock Mercenary, still a cartoon but not animated:

• The microsats we'll end up with, and our hero sees the potential problem
• Advertising and the gossip spreads
• ...and the threat (naturally) comes to pass along with an artist meta-joke

Yes, it's an ad nauseum argument, but enough mirror-sats makes one wonder when* this scenario will* happen. (* Note that I don't use "if" and "could"; just give it enough time.)

[Gene Cash]

Re: Coming soon from an advertiser near you, or maybe not near you...

Hey, I'm STILL crying because Schlock Mercenary ended... although after 20 years of NEVER missing a comic, even when his datacenter caught fire, Howard does deserve a break.

[David 132]

Re: Coming soon from an advertiser near you, or maybe not near you...

Well if we're doing Futurama references, an arguably more relevant one would be

...TOP QUALITY EXERCYCLE FOR SALE...

And look over there! Bigfoot!

[Conyn Curmudgeon]

Queue a hacked comedy knob.

O

| |

( ) ( )

[Tubz]

We have enough crap floating around the planet without letting the <insert explicit description of your choosing> from the advertising industry loose.

[m-k]

well, 'crap' is not an argument for advertising industry. Even a threat of their mass execution wouldn't be an argument, they'd already start with 'well, is the bullet OUR brand?!' They're worse than roaches, will beat them to the surface in the post-nuke world :/

[andy the pessimist]

buy Jupiter.

Read the book.

It's pretty good. Andy

[Richard Pennington 1]

Re: buy Jupiter.

Robert Heinlein: "The Man Who Sold the Moon" (1950).

Jack Vance: "The Face" (1979).

[Jan 0]

Come back Soviet Union, all is forgiven.

For all it's faults, you didn't see advertisements.

[doublelayer]

Re: Come back Soviet Union, all is forgiven.

They had ads, just not for the same thing. Ads that are only for the government don't make them better, they just make the list of people you hate for putting them up shorter. Another reason it seemed like there were fewer of them is that a lot of the places to put ads weren't available yet. There also weren't many ads on the early 1970s internet, and the Soviet communications system didn't get much more advanced than that until modern Russian internet. Admittedly, I haven't watched a lot of Soviet television, but if they operated like many of their allied countries, there are lots of interruptions from the government-approved news for even less factual stuff.

I think that the Soviets would have eagerly accepted the chance to put some propaganda message in the sky at various points in their history, assuming they had enough funding or could get some other benefit from the required research. A lot of their space activities had propaganda goals as well, so it wouldn't be out of character.

[Jan 0]

Re: Come back Soviet Union, all is forgiven.

I meant physical ads like highway bill boards!

[jake]

Re: Come back Soviet Union, all is forgiven.

Oh, they had 'em alright. Propaganda posters were everywhere.

_{They took down all the billboards and put 'em in a billboard museum. Now they charge you 'bout fifty bucks just to see 'em ...}

[M.V. Lipvig]

Re: Come back Soviet Union, all is forgiven.

There weren't ads on the 1970s internet because there wasn't an internet in the 1970s. The closest thing there was to an internet was two computers connected with wire. There wasn't anything resembling the disaster we have today until the 1990s. And one would have to wonder what an internet in the USSR would look like if the USSR had survived beyond Reagan.

[swm]

Re: Come back Soviet Union, all is forgiven.

"There weren't ads on the 1970s internet because there wasn't an internet in the 1970s."

There was the ARPANET in the 1970's

[jake]

Re: Come back Soviet Union, all is forgiven.

We called the ARPANET "the internet" at least by 1970, mainly because it had become an internet ... By 1974, the word "Internet" was even ratified in the RFCs ... See Cerf & Kahn's take on the subject in RFC-675 ... and note that the research (read "bullshit sessions") that resulted in RFC-675 had started several years earlier. The name was already embedded in the collective psyche by about then.

Online ads started (in my life, anyway) when a student at Stanford sent every email account on campus a "wanna buy my bike?" email back when I was stanford!sail!vax!jake (name changed to protect the guilty; I'm archived at DejaGoo under the real name (if the alpha goo kids haven't destroyed that archive entirely)) ... Probably 1982 or thereabouts. He got yelled at, loudly, and had computer privileges revoked for the rest of the year. I'd have hung him from his thumbs in the quad if I had my way.

Footnote to history ... According to some sources (and repeated in this very august publication), HMQE2 personally sent an email addressed to "everybody on the ARPANET" on March 26, 1976. If true, this unsolicited mass emailing touting the Coral 66 compiler would be the first example of spam that we can place a name, face, product and date on. However, I doubt it's true for a number of reasons. First of all, there was no mechanism to "email all" on the ARPANET back then. Still isn't. Thankfully. Second of all, I have searched my archives, and despite having many emails from around and on that date (including roll accounts at around a dozen hosts), I see none that would correspond to the mythical "HME2" email. Gut feeling is that it was merely sent to the list of accounts on that particular machine.

So I'm happy to report that HMtheQ (RIP) was probably not an unwitting international spammer.

[jake]

Re: Come back Soviet Union, all is forgiven.

"And one would have to wonder what an internet in the USSR would look like if the USSR had survived beyond Reagan."

We had X.25 connections into the Soviet Union through hosts in Austria (IIASA and IAEA(??)), with VNIIPAS on the Soviet side. That started in roughly 1980. For "the real Internet", or at least the Usenet portion of it, look up the later (1983ish?) SFMT (San Francisco Moscow Teleport), also through VNIIPAS, sometimes called "Soviet-American net" or sovamnet.

So to answer your question, it probably would have looked a lot like what we in the West had ... in a stunted, censored kinda way. Kinda like what they actually have today. Whodathunkit.

_{And of course there was always the mighty kremvax ...}

[jake]

Ads?

What are these things you call "ads"?

Pardon while I modify my software coronagraph to work on other coordinates ...

[Neil Barnes]

Given that astronomers are already annoyed with the starlink constellations

This is really going to make their day.

(though the thought of someone hacking to play Space Invaders has a certain ironic appeal!)

[Anonymous Coward]

Kill it with fire

Yeah, every version of this idea has already been banned as soon as the instigator tried to actually fund it. For very good reasons. We have F'd up the ground and sea bad enough with the unloved garbage spewed forth from the ass-faced industry that is advertising.

Comms and science satellites are fairly unobtrusive and still manage to be controversial.

Take a hint, you don't own the sky. No space ads. If you try it expect to contend with ground based lasers, and other cube-sats trying to grapple your orbital and tow it to a fiery doom.

[sarusa]

Ah, Russia

Earth's cartoonishly evil vandals are at it again.

[heyrick]

And in utterly unrelated news

Elsewhere, boffins are working on practical methods of using powerful ground-based lasers to blow up annoying satellites.

[Pirate Dave]

Re: And in utterly unrelated news

Do they have a GoFundMe? I just got paid...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: And in utterly unrelated news

Or keep the ads visible all night long...

[Martin Howe]

What do you mean, "It's been done?"

In early issues of 2000AD, in Judge Dredd, there were companies competing to project ads onto the Moon. How long before the technology to do this is available?

[veti]

Re: What do you mean, "It's been done?"

The difficulty with that is, the Moon is a lot bigger than it looks. And we're used to seeing it lit up by the Sun. It would take an absolute metric fuckton of photons per nanosecond blasted at the Moon's surface, even to be visible from Earth. And then you'd realise you'd done all that for a billboard that is, in the scheme of things, pretty tiny really.

See XKCD on a related topic.

[Neil Barnes]

Re: What do you mean, "It's been done?"

Though perhaps it wouldn't take that many tonnes of fluorescent dust to show a visible Coca-cola logo...

No! I didn't have that idea. I wasn't here while I wasn't having it. You can ask my kid brother, he wasn't here either!

[Joe W]

Re: What do you mean, "It's been done?"

I remember that from some comic.

"The Russkies painted the moon red!"

"Yeah, just fly up and write Coca-Cola on it."

Don't know the source.

[Martin Howe]

Re: What do you mean, "It's been done?"

Opening scene from 'Judge Dredd: Loonies Moon' in 2000AD Prog 192:

https://twitter.com/ben_towle/status/1053380256839729152/photo/1

[Jan 0]

Re: What do you mean, "It's been done?"

ObIT: Is that Larry Ellison in the bottom right?

[jake]

Re: What do you mean, "It's been done?"

That IS a pretty good likeness, isn't it?

Good eye!

[Andy Non]

Somone will invent a suitable ad-blocker

likely based upon rocket technology with a suitable warhead.

[cosymart]

Re: Somone will invent a suitable ad-blocker

I'd chip in to a crowd funder to do that.

[EVP]

Re: Somone will invent a suitable ad-blocker

Count me in. Finally a legimate use for nukes.

[Joe W]

Re: Somone will invent a suitable ad-blocker

Yup, my first thought was "c'mon somebody, do a kickstarter to nuke this!"

[entfe001]

Re: Somone will invent a suitable ad-blocker

That's more like an "ad-destroyer" than an "ad-blocker"

Given that current Internet ad-blockers do not affect the source, as others can still see them -only just you and other ad-blocker users won't-, we already have a real-world counterpart contraption for this threat: umbrellas

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Somone will invent a suitable ad-blocker

I live in the UK. We already have a cloud-based ad-blocker suitable for this.

The rain coat --------->

[DS999]

OK now this is something

Where the UN ought to step in and get countries of the world to all agree to ban this. I can't imagine any governments would be against it, even if SpaceX would love to have Google pay them big bucks to launch a bunch of satellites so Google's unlimited appetite for shoving ads in people's faces can reach low orbit.

[Claptrap314]

Re: OK now this is something

Heh. UN and a useful action in the same sentence? Don't give up your day job just yet, but a bit of working the open mic circuit & you'll be ready to turn pro!

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: OK now this is something

I suspect Russia isn't on good terms with the UN just now.

[Michael Habel]

Re: OK now this is something

Lets face reality the UN is a joke, always has been.

[Throatwarbler Mangrove]

Bah!

Kessler Syndrome will bring sweet release.

[Emir Al Weeq]

Fuel?

If they have to shuffle around for every different city they zip over they will go through their fuel rather quickly.

[jvf]

what's old is new again

Adverts in space were foreshadowed long ago. As a child in the 50s, I was a voracious Science Fiction reader. I’ve forgotten ALL the details of a long ago story but I believe the gist of the ending was that they (early NASA?), trying to drum up public support for space projects, were going to send a rocket to the moon and it was going to shoot off a dazzling display that could be seen through a telescope on earth. Well, someone infiltrated the project on behalf of a well known corporation and the resulting display was the two word name of its flagship product. The author was very discrete as he remarked that the Cs in the script were a little wobbly and the L near the end was somewhat deformed but all in all it was quite legible.

With a splash of dark Koloa rum, it makes for a tasty drink.

[eswan]

Re: what's old is new again

Heinlein's 'The Man who Sold the Moon'?

[jake]

Re: what's old is new again

About fifteen years ago (or thereabouts) a company called "Moon Publicity" was going to sell advertising on the Moon itself, using a technology they called "Shadow Sculpting". These forever visible adverts were supposedly going to be sold for as little as $46,000 each.

I have no idea what happened to the company, I assume they folded after "suddenly" discovering that it would cost far more than $46,000 just to survey the regolith to be sculpted ... But not before the owners trousered a couple million from credulous investors, of course.

[Laura Kerr]

Re: what's old is new again

It was part of Arthur C Clarke's Venture To The Moon short stories - it was called Watch This Space, originally published in 1956. The quote you're thinking of is:

Whatever I thought of them, I couldn't help admiring the ingenuity of the men who has perpetrated the scheme. The O's and A's had given them a bit of trouble but the C's and L's were perfect.

[yetanotheraoc]

wait for version 2

1. "Hello Advertisers! Your message here. Only $xx MM per hour."

2. "Hello Astronomers! Contact us to turn off this display. Only $yy MM per hour."

[Michael Habel]

Re: wait for version 2

Can you turn off the Sun? I cant imaging Musk's Starlink trash is artificially lit. Doesn't stop them being somehow becoming magically invisible though. and, with a cheap set of Binoculars you can easily track upwards of 20 of them in a 5 minute span, and that was just in on quadrant of the Sky.

[Pirate Dave]

Wow

Somebody finally figured out a worse-for-humanity idea than a Cyberdyne neural-net chip...

[Michael Habel]

Re: Wow

What has become of the Rat-brained Autopilot thingy? WE NEED UPDATES!

[Snowy]

Do not

Look up!

[Sceptic Tank]

Ad to our troubles.

Wouldn't it be simpler to launch one powerful laser that can illuminate various pieces of space junk at 60Hz?

[Mike 137]

Rehashing old ideas on a trivial scale

See "Buy Jupiter", Isaac Azimov, Venture May 1958 {reprinted in "Buy Jupiter and other stories", Granada Publishing 1976).

The planet was sold to an alien species that emblazoned it with the slogan "Use Mizzarett Ergone Verticies For Health and Glowing Heat"

[Potemkine!]

Bad, bad idea.

There's nothing good coming from Russia in these days.

== Bring us Dabbsy back! ==

[David Hicklin]

UK will be OK then

Its always cloudy here

[M.V. Lipvig]

Re: UK will be OK then

Nah, ground based lasers will not be your friend there. Kinda surprised that one hasn't turned up yet considering we all know what a searchlight does on a cloud.

[The Indomitable Gall]

Re: UK will be OK then

Yeah, but how is summoning a hereditary millionaire playing dress-up as a flying mammal going to help us here...?

[Anonymous Coward]

don't look up

look down, our ground-sprayed tech works much better!!!!!!!

[Michael Habel]

Re: don't look up

"Look down what do you see? I see my Shoes. Correct! What do you do to cheer yourself up? I buy a new pair. Now, imagine everyone does the same thing. What happens? Everyone feels nice?

Ah, forget the button! Concentrate! Everyone buys new shoes. What happens? More shoes. And? More shoe shops. Correct! Can I - ? No, no. Oh-oooo. And in order to support all these extra shoe shops, what must happen? Everyone… must keep buying shoes. And how is that arranged? Manufacturers dictate more and more different fashions and make shoes so badly that they either hurt the feet or fall apart. So that? Everyone has to buy more shoes. Until? Until… everyone gets fed up with lousy, rotten shoes. And then what? Why can’t I press the button? And then what?! Come on! Massive capital investment by the manufacturers to try and make people buy the shoes. Which means? More shoe shops. And then we reach what point? The point where I press the button again. Oh, all right. Wa-hoo! Ahhhh… So nice, that’s really nice! And then we reach what point?! The Shoe Event Horizon! The whole economy overbalances; shoe shops outnumber every kind of shop! It becomes economically impossible to build anything other than shoe shops, and bingo, I get to press the button again!" -- Douglas Adams

[Andy the ex-Brit]

New paper needed

Anyone have time to write a similar paper on the cost to crowdsource bringing such a satellite array down in a lovely fiery display?

[M.V. Lipvig]

Re: New paper needed

All you need is to find their ground control center, then a few guys with weapons and explosives to get in, crash the birds, burn the center down and get out. Call the A Team, they'll probably do the job pro bono.

[Alter Hase]

Nothing new...

Advertising in the sky is nothing new -- I am old enough to remember "skywriters" -- planes that wrote advertising messages with smoke in the sky.

In some cases a single plane performed acrobatic maneuvers to write the message, and in other cases a group of planes flew in parallel to write the message using "dot matrix" techniques.

And even today, we have planes towing advertising banners, not to mention blimps....

[jake]

Re: Nothing new...

Skywriting still exists. I know a couple dudes who do it here in Northern California. My much modified A152 has smoke capability, but I've never seen a need for it. I should probably pull it to save a couple pounds.

The "dot matrix" version is called "sky typing", and also still available.

Towing banners goes back to the dawn of flight.

I've never seen an airplane towing a blimp, and is still available.

_{Have a beer for that last one ...}

[okra]

Re: Nothing new...

...or planes spraying geoengineering adjuvants to help the little peeps on the ground.

[Michael Habel]

WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE NIGHT SKY!

Such that still exists, where it still exists. Bad enough Musk had to go and spew his trash up their, so when you do find something reasonable you have to contend with his sheet obscuring the night sky further.

[ITS Retired]

Oh goodie

More light pollution and junk in the sky.

With so many advertisements now, does anybody pay any attention to what is being advertised?