Pepsi plans to use cubesats to display ads in the night sky

And how long does the light from these supernovae take to reach the earth?

Vulva line art

That is, by far, the worst drawing of Boba Fett’s helmet I have ever seen.

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Well at least I’m not drawing Darth Vader’s helmet like everybody else.

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A Russian company called StartRocket says it’s going to launch a cluster of cubesats… its first client, it says, will be PepsiCo…

StartRocket, not Pepsi, is claiming to have a spectacular plan and a big famous client.

How would this even work? How would a few tiny satillites produce any sort of visible, let alone legible, display from ~200 miles away?

StartRocket’s website talks about tests and development happening at SkolTech, which is some sort of newfangled college in Moscow. SkolTech’s website doesn’t seem to mention StartRocket.

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Thank you. God forbid “Futurist” would do that much research, or hire anyone old enough to know that this is an old Onion joke.

See above…

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It’s not that distant objects are moving away from us, it’s that the space in between is stretching.

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How about artificial 6 mile wide asteroid strikes?

My first thought exactly.

Both. IIRC, the Earth diamonds exceeded the max payload (or the guy forgot to bring them), but the astronaut found diamonds on the moon anyway.

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Well, it’s hardly just the one blog reporting this. (Also reporting the “story”: Wired, Popular Mechanics, Newsweek, NBC, etc.)
Obviously it’s not going to really happen. (Just looking at the website, I would have assumed it was just an art provocation, if they weren’t associating themselves with a real brand.) I’m just not sure what Pepsi is getting from being associated with this - presumably Olga in the Russian Pepsi office feels there’s no such thing as bad publicity. It doesn’t seem like much of a benefit, though - Pepsi will get some mention for a while, then, when nothing happens, they’re presumably banking on people forgetting the negative context of the mention - but it doesn’t seem like that much attention, relative to the existing size of the brand.

And

Not a bad return on a few hundred rubles for a crap website.

“Pepsi, the Corporate trolley Generation, Now With More Scintillation!”

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Which also means there are creatures in distant galaxies who will be able to see this shit but won’t be able to blow our dumb asses up.

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I think it sounds pretty neat, actually. I mean, I can see how it’d be prone to abuse, but spelling out what seems to be a PEPSI constellation seems pretty cool. #unpopularopinion, I know.

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i havent read thru all the comments above, but has anyone else taken bets that this won’t even happen? sounds like something they can get publicity from just talking about and technologically too complex and expensive to actually do.

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Have you seen the page? It looks like someone spent some money on it. And I’m just not sure how that’s worth some news outlets simply mentioning the Pepsi name in a negative context, no less. I mean, I guess it’s less than an actual marketing campaign (by some orders of magnitude), but as a viral campaign, it’s… lacking.

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I’ve tried, and coincidentally it always ends up looking like a power button symbol…

Thus move may be a random grasp at virality, but it’s also entirely possible that Pepsi’s main demographic has dwindled to anti-internet-outrage counter-boycotters, and they knew they could reinvigorate their army of detached ironicists on The Tears of The Attached.

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Dear. God. No.

And here I thought that Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves was a work of mostly fiction, and that the “White Sky” and “Hard Rain” events depicted in the book were just thought experiments with some good physics and available current facts.

:scream:

Previously on bOINGbOING… whoops looks like @RickMycroft beat me to it… “Japanese company develops artificial meteor showers…”

Well, it was nice knowing y’all.
Really.

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it sure helps get the taste of boot out of your mouth!

image

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