Company Wants to Carve Ads On The Moon, Supervillain-Style

By Dan Smith Posted 07.20.2009 at 11:16 am 8 Comments

Last week, a fly-by of the moon showed impressions remaining on the surface from the Apollo 11 landing. That was 40 years ago, and those impressions linger on undisturbed. It's that longevity that one company wants to exploit, carving messages into the surface in the moon for the purpose of selling ad space. The company seems serious enough, and even released a fancy 3D animation of a little robot digging trenches and defiling our precious moon.

Sure, it's the world's largest billboard, but the idea of writing on the moon sounds like cartoonish supervillainy. It also raises the question: Are soulless multinational corporations really soulless enough buy ad space on the moon? Who knows how serious this company is, or if it's a simple cash grab, but if they succeed, those ads could be there for a long time. At least until we can send a mission up to tamp out the message. By that time the product the ad is plugging may have gone the way of Pan Am or Crystal Pepsi.

[via Gizmodo]

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8 Comments

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seatellite

07/20/09 at 1:30 pm

just a terrible idea... horrible.... The moon is owned by the people of earth... not some stupid ad company... as if we need MORE ads per day than the average 20,000 we see... horrible...

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NOM

07/20/09 at 6:07 pm

Any company dumb enough to grafiti the Moon will quickly regret it as consumers flock to their more responsible competitors.

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ford2go

07/21/09 at 1:00 am

I don't think that the moon is actually owned by anyone.

That being said, I would think that trying to mark up the moon would be fairly unpopular. Also, it might be a bit tough to get anybody to take the robot to the moon.

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Ike R.

07/21/09 at 9:08 am

Absolutely stupid and irresponsible! For thousands of years, man has looked at the sky and witnessed beauty, and drawn inspiration from the moon! If your freaking ads can't work on Earth, that should already tell you something! Once you ruin the surface of the this masterpiece, there's no returning it to original format, idiots. Find something else to make money with.

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extremechiton

07/21/09 at 1:49 pm

ruining the lunar surface is a disgrace to the natural astronomical beauty of it.

when we look at the moon we want so see a giant glowing ball of rock and dust.

not just a giant billboard in the night sky.

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Yeah Right

07/26/09 at 8:54 pm

Interesting idea but a little too far fetched. One would have to carve up an entire hemisphere to even come close to making a message legible from earth without the aid of a telescope. And no one has that kind of technology, much less the money to develop it. Furthermore, I think it would be quite difficult to create enough contrast using simple compacting or plowing machines.

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Moebius

08/03/09 at 9:39 am

This is completely ridiculous!

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quasi44

08/04/09 at 4:58 pm

And when the lawsuits come from groups such as AIM that attach true significance to the moon? Which holds true sway, the construct legal entity corporation, or the construct legal entity religion?