What Are Our Monuments?
I’ve often wondered what our monuments would be in a thousand years, how would posterity remember us? The Nugegoda flyover? Most of what we build today is for five year investment horizons, not for eternal life or the Gods. Here’s a novel thought though, what about our communications satellites, in geosynchronous orbit around the earth? These satellites aren’t going anywhere, and could remain there long after life disappears from the earth.
Seeing them as a monument, the photographer Trevor Paglen is packing the EchoStar XVI television satellite with 100 photographs micro-etched onto a silicon and gold disc. I think this is the actual images, not a data representation. Perhaps this will be our monument to the stars, preserved in a man-made satellite, circling the earth in what they call a graveyard orbit. Check out the Creative Time project for more.
Posted on Thursday, August 2nd, 2012 in Future, Photography, Tech.
Mohsin Hamid, author of How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia, has a nice 
I’m happy to be featured in Echelon magazine’s 40 Under 40 feature, profiling young people who contribute to the economy in some way, mainly in business but also in terms of innovation and thought leadership. It’s an interesting article not just in that I’m in it (mainly for work on indi.ca and 
I won’t add too much commentary, but just read I guess. The youngest Rajapaksa, Rohitha (Chi Chi) has given an amazing interview to the 
In 2009 this strange character appeared on the Sri Lankan Internet scene, getting angry, flaming, trolling whatever. Then he started naming anonymous bloggers, posting comments as people’s kids, nasty stuff, for which I removed him from 
You know that satellites eventually fall to earth, right?
As a monument to the stars, I suggest dumping all our garbage to the outer-space, so that empty Coca Cola bottles may become monuments (for a while, until they get sucked into a black hole or fall into a star, or recycled by aliens).
Aiyoo, didn’t you know? We dont need aliens to recycle glass bottles. We can do it ourselves.
Well, you are missing the point.
But anyway, you made me think about something. Perhaps, in the future, we might find aliens who are specialized in recycling glass bottles. If comparative advantage works at the interstellar level too, we should totally outsource the aliens to recycle our glass bottles. Something to remember when I make my own universe.
Ah. So we’ll be still using glass in this universe of yours. Not very original.
I’m limited by the fact that a human brain functions at 100Hz. Even most desktop computers work at least 2.8GHz. It’s a wonder we get anything done at all. So basically, we are more RAM than processors. We do most of our stuff using cached memory. So it’s kind of difficult to design a new universe where everything is original, if you are designing it using a human brain. But wait till I upload myself to a quantum computer.
Hopefully the quantum computer has a good virus guard.
It’s a shitty virus so windows defender should be more than enough.
LOL
ROFL. Bitter Losers.
Satellites don’t eventually fall to the earth any more than the moon does. It depends where they are in orbit.
If there are no humans to take care of the satellites, they are more likely to fall than to float away from earth into the outer-space. Overtime, satellites will slow down due to various factors, like atmospheric drag, solar radiation pressure, gravity field, dust etc. and these forces lower the satellite’s orbit. Satellites don’t usually start going faster and faster without fuel, which is what it takes to float away from the earth. The satellite has to put some effort to be stable in its orbit, actually, due to the forces that I mentioned above. The satellite is not moving in somewhere there are absolutely nothing to slow it down.
So anyway, when the satellite’s orbit degrades further and further, making to closer to earth and experience more atmospheric drag, at some point earth’s gravity field will overpower the satellite and pull it onto the earth, and the satellite will fall.
Not just man made satellites, but moon, earth, they all will eventually fall. They are just more stable than our own small satellites. I mean, the earth has been in a stable orbit for 4 billion years now. Now, it will eventually fall. But don’t worry. In another 5 billion years, the sun would enter its red giant phase, and expand out to meet earth, and evaporate the whole thing.
Cosmic bothal-patthara karayas. I like it. :D
LOL some more.