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 …
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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.
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.
From Schlock Mercenary, still a cartoon but not animated:
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.)
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.
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.
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.
"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 ...
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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"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
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....
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 ...
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