June 23, 2009

Tweet Me to the Moon

How would you like to talk to someone on another continent by bouncing your voice off the moon?

Yes, you can do that, and many of your fellow Wired Science readers and @wiredscience followers entered our moon bounce contest in hopes of scoring a chance to join in a massive translunar conversation in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

We received many attempts at the poetic and profound (and perhaps even a few succeeded), some that nodded to history and others that looked toward the future, and the requisite passel of geeky references (though surprisingly only one “all your base are base are belong to us”), but this tweet was one of the few that made us laugh. The winner is:

@russjosephs Hey Aliens: Yeah, you have cool spaceships that fly at lightspeed and communicate tele-whatically. But you know what we got? Federline

Congrats! The prize is the opportunity to go to a moon bounce station on June 26 to transmit the tweet with your voice to the moon and back down to another spot on the globe, and receive a reply from another lunatic. Your voice will be crossing those of amateur radio astronomers, space enthusiasts, former astronauts and a few celebrities as it travels around 478,000 miles in about 2.5 seconds.

While we could only choose one winner, there were many worthy and entertaining entries. And several themes ran through the tweets. Some such as this one acknowledged the role the moon plays in moving Earth’s oceans:

@puppyfury hi moon, thanks for taking care of our oceans!

The more futuristic tweets focused on the potential for human travel to and colonization of the Moon, such as this rather optimistic one from a follower in Australia (which is one of the main countries participating in world Moon Bounce day):

@bootload “I am convinced that before twenty years are over one-half of our earth will have paid a visit to the moon.”

In addition to our winner, many of our followers sought to converse with other lifeforms:

@sarstar Hello! Is there anybody out there? Please visit!

And of course there were a few nods to Pink Floyd, claims that the Moon landing was a hoax and several versions of Neil Armstrong’s famous, and highly tweetable, lunar transmission from 40 years ago:

@webservant That’s one small Tweet from Sam, one giant Tweet for mankind.

The rest ranged from grandiloquent:

@nonobar Oh radio waves; fly from the earth to the moon and back; remind us what we have learned and how much more we have to learn.

To gobbledygook:

@ajoohoo lol. earth rawwks!!!1 moonz iz teh suk cuz ur all cold n shiz w no air. dynamism, we haz it, let me show you ::turnz:: hotness Our only disappointment was that the Maltian overlords declined to enter the contest. This is challenging to us.

Source: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/06/moonbouncewinner/

Tags: Wired Science, Twitter, Moon tweets, Pink Floyd, Neil Armstrong, Geeks, oceans, Australia, tweetable, moon tourism, world moon bounce day, Global IT News,

Posted via email from Global Business News

No comments: