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0 pointsgrey-area4y ago0 comments

Etch it onto a metal disk like this[1] inside a capsule that can survive reentry, pay to have it shot into space with a slowly decaying orbit. Then perhaps arrange to have the reentry hit a pond near your ancestral home in about 500 years time.

1. https://longnow.org/artifacts/rosetta-wearable-disk

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kadoban4y ago· 2 in thread

That's got to be ~impossible by today's engineering. Hitting a specific place or even decaying at a specific time in 500 years is just never going to happen.

It'd have to be an active process, which means you need a machine that's still running in 500 years. Even then I bet it's still a hard problem. IIRC NASA aims for like, an ocean and they're happy if they hit the right one.

grey-areaOP4y ago

Yes the last bit was just a little joke - orbital decay is subject to too much uncertainty.

Although I guess if you had propulsion you could deorbit in a specific place at a specific time. SpaceX and icbms deorbit precisely so we have the technology nowadays to do so. Maybe an ion drive could last that long?

influx4y ago

The Minuteman III is an American ICBM that is accurate to 800 feet. Much closer than hitting an ocean.

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