I HEREBY OFFER ONE MILLION U. S. dollars to the first person, corporation or agency with the vision to proclaim humanity’s name to the cold eternal stars.
To wit: the construction of a suitable solar-powered visual display in the lunar crater Tycho, for the purpose of looping Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A space odyssey.
The display may be black-and-white or color. It must be large enough for resolution by a 90 mm telescope, yet invisible to the unaided eye. A sound broadcast is optional, but must correct for the 1.2 light-second delay.
The location corresponds to the site of the buried monollith in the film, which is why this is so cool.
Full disclosure: My current financial position far, FAR precludes me from providing the promised reward. However, given that the project will generate far more than this sum in acquired skills and spinoff technologies (not to mention sales of telescopes and astronomy media) , I am willling to settle for 10 per cent, payable per annum. Please direct all serious inquiries to scoop at sonic dot net.
UPDATES (5/16/10):
APftMoE goes back to the drawing board: we’re no longer building a MegaJumboTron. Instead, we’re going to do it via rocket-delivered “TVA1” module as detailed in http://metaphorager.net/lunar-update-back-to-the-redrawing-board/. Know anybody with a metal shop?
UPDATES (4/6/10):
Sign APftMoE’s “Lunar Immortality Now!” petition at http://www.petitiononline.com/2001shot/petition.html. (By G?d and George Pal, we’ll get this thing built yet.)
APftMoE is now listed 413159th (as of 4/16/10) on http://www.goodideas.org/‘s list of 509 Good Ideas. Vote it into reality by going to http://www.goodideas.org/a/dtd/37744-6782.
UPDATES (3/26/10):
– “A Proposal for the Moon of Earth” now has its own Facebook page, with 12 fans at this writing. Click to become one.
– APftMoE is also soliciting donations at http://tinyurl.com/moonbucks. (Donors should probably send an email to scoop at sonic dot net so I don’t spend it on something else.)
ROTFLOLWTIME