A NASA spacecraft, one that NASA has no record of. Like something they've never built, but that has NASA logos all over it and clearly has a NASA origin, just not our NASA.
That's....actually a great premise for a scifi horror movie. The rover rolls up to the Mars base and they're about to let it in when they glance at the monitor and realise the real rover is a mile away.
*beep boop* the doppleganger says
*time to collect samples*
Except they *could* sit down, because the gravity of Mars is much less than Earth's.
Which means we should send all of our chipped lawn chairs to Mars so that they will become functional again.
The rover's cameras fail to capture what lies even 10 feet before them due to an unnaturally severe dust devil.
As the dust slowly begins to subside, a man in black, sitting on a discount gardening chair appears, oddly shuffling through his space suit
Hi I’m Al Harrington from Al Harringtons Wacky waving inflatable flailing arm tube man incorporation here to let you know we have an over stock of wacky waving inflatable flailing arm tube man’s and need to clear them out now and passing the savings onto youuu!!!!
A tungsten disc that, when we properly work it out, is found to be the same basic technology as a phonograph record. That is, a purely analog method of recording sound waves in physical media. When we work out the RPM and other details it turns out it's a recording of David Bowie singing "Life on Mars?" except in every instance "Mars" is "Earth" instead.
The B-side is "Ziggy Stardust".
I'm a geologist, and I can confirm that just placing the wrong type of rock would fuck up science for like 30 years. I often pick up rocks that I know only occur in specific areas and leave them somewhere that would be naturally impossible in the hope that it will break a geochemists mind when they find it
There was that one tumblr story about the teen girl who would go on walks with her geologist dad and some of his work friends and their families and one day she took a regular rock from her back yard and said she found it on the side of the mountain and watched all of the geologists hrming and hawing until she couldn't keep a straight face about it.
I remember that story differently. Pretty sure a friend of hers gave her a volcanic rock from Iceland. She secretly placed in near the path and innocently asked what the rock was.
Haha! I work at an airport and we have to collect samples of bird strikes on aircraft to send in for identification and tracking to the Smithsonian ornithology department. I really wanna acquire some emperor penguin feathers for submission just to see what would happen. For reference I live in the northeast.
Me too. Maybe we could recruit someone from that funny thread about [petting penguins](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/7mjdd4/redditors_who_have_heldpetted_a_penguin_describe/)?
I had a friend who implants microchips into fish for tracking.
He knew where the readers where located on rivers all over the state. He took one chip across the state & scanned it before implanting it in a fish back at work. Someone scanning fish had to be confused.
I do believe that a good portion of the earth-shattering discoveries through history have come as a result of people fucking around with their hobbies.
Remember, the difference between fucking around and science is just whether or not you're taking notes.
Can confirm. My wife is a geoscientist and while on our honeymoon hiking in Japan she randomly stopped and stared at the ground until I'd walked another 20m before loudly announcing "This rock doesn't belong here!"
I don't remember the details but we were up in the mountains and she assures me it was NOT a rock from those mountains
one time I was at a house party and everyone left the party except me, including the people who actually lived in the house.
so I turned every object in the house by 15 degrees.
and I mean, every object I could.
opened the fridge and turned all the condiments, even.
Yeah, and iirc a lot of the earliest xkcd comics posted were just scans of things he drew in the margins of notes or absentmindedly sketched while bored in meetings.
Also do you not link dancing pikachu anymore?
That's correct—we're part of the communications team at NASA HQ, so we're here to share photos, videos and other updates from across the universe (and answer questions when we can).
Feel free to follow us over on /u/NASA!
I’m a professional content writer, and I have to say, being part of the communications team at NASA must make you feel like a total boss.
“What do you do?”
“I’m a content writer.”
“Where do you work?”
“NASA.” *drops imaginary mic*
Edited to make first question: “What do you do?” <— Of course I would make a typo. 🤦🏻♀️
I just got the image of NASA after budget cuts just being one person in a launch room browsing Reddit on a multimillion dollar computer interface. Where's u/shitty_watercolour when ya need em!?
LOL
Hey are you guys hiring for anything remotely? I have a degree in business an experience as an analyst and want to do something important with my life.
Yes! You can learn more about working for NASA at [nasa.gov/careers](https://nasa.gov/careers); [here's a quick intro](https://www.nasa.gov/careers/business-services) to our careers in business services, in particular.
We do have some positions that are fully remote, but [our centers and facilities are located across the United States](https://science.nasa.gov/about-us/nasa-centers)—there might be one closer to you than you think. There's also a wide variety of opportunities to work with NASA [through our contractors and other affiliated companies and organizations](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/other-opportunities-at-nasa/).
Why is picturing this account as the entirety of NASA responding to Reddit comments so funny to me? Anyways just wanted to say I’m a massive fan, always loved all things space :)
>Why is picturing this account as the entirety of NASA responding to Reddit comments so funny to me?
"Alright people, awesome5185 is asking for a job. Jim, grab a dozen people and start brainstorming a solution, failure is *not* an option!"
Monoliths describing how Charon is actually a big interspace gate or something. Then watch happily as the globe panics, then sets up expeditions for Charon, only to find nothing there
It would say Dan Cooper since that's what he actually went by. D.B. Cooper was a reporting error. Fun trivia. I'm sure NASA would know this, is the only reason I bring it up.
A picnic basket, blanket, food laid out with a note - *Honey, I forgot the potato salad, I'll be back in 20 minutes* - and for good measure, a 1953 Buick. To complete the scene - footprints that walk away and just disappear about 50 yards away
I was actually going to say a colony of extremophile bacteria, lichen and fungus. I don't give a shit about what NASA find, but I would start the extremely slow process of terraforming the planet.
Now i’m imagining the terraforming going unnoticed for several years, and then they find that suddenly a portion of the planet is habitable by small organisms.
One of the 28000 rubber ducks that got spilled in the Atlantic back in 1992.
https://www.npr.org/2011/03/29/134923863/moby-duck-when-28-800-bath-toys-are-lost-at-sea
Edit: clean link
Weird rock formations of molecules that are inherent to life.
They'd work for years getting into the nitty gritty of the calcium deposits which weirdly resemble coral on a sea bed.
After confirming with xenobiologist that this was indeed the truth, topologist would begin to map out truly the extent of these ancient coral reefs.
There would be a meeting that is conducted and a 3d model pulled up showing the overall terrain.
Some junior topologist, excited to present his first findings, would zoom out to show a crowd of people the words, spelled out in coral:
DEEZ NUTZ
I read a Novella years ago by the late sci fi author Brian Aldiss. Don't remember the name of it. But it begins in the space of this solar system called 'Clarke's Belt'. What is now Clarke's Belt was once a planet where the first civilization started in this solar system began. Those people were descended from monkeys, unlike us which descended from apes. And over the millennia they developed cities and technology and ultimately space travel. And they sent a ship to their moon, which landed. However, they destroyed their world in a nuclear war (the remnants of which became Clarke's Belt), and blasted their own moon out into the cosmos, where it got caught in Earth's gravity and became Our moon.
When Earth's science went to our moon, they discovered, a space suit on the moon, with a dead monkey inside it, who never went home, as he watched home being destroyed.
~$200,000 dollars, a parachute, and the body of DB Cooper
I like this one
A NASA spacecraft, one that NASA has no record of. Like something they've never built, but that has NASA logos all over it and clearly has a NASA origin, just not our NASA.
Sounds like a Star Trek: Enterprise episode.
SNASA, Secret Nasa and the skeleton of Neil Patrick Harris in a suit
Even better: something they planned to build but never did. My money's on the Project Orion Mars mission spaceship.
An exact copy of the Antikythera Mechanism.
The missing pieces of the Rosetta stone
Complete with a fourth as yet unknown language.
Or just Wingdings. That would do it well.
Comic Sans "Hello world!"
A brochure about extending your car warranty.
A big map of Earth with several points of interest marked on it.
And an extra continent, with a big X through it.
Atlantis.
Smack bang in the southern Pacific, and it turns out all the Pacific Islands are actually the bits sticking above the surface.
But its got to be random ass places. E.g. Gary, Indiana is circled 3 times with big stars around it.
Gary, Indiana isn’t just a random place. That is where the portal to Hell will open.
With New Zealand 5x its normal size
Make it a map of the earth 66 mil years ago(so breaking apart from Pangea, but not quite modern continents yet) and X the spot the meteor landed.
An exact copy of the Mars rover (or whatever they use to discover it)
That's....actually a great premise for a scifi horror movie. The rover rolls up to the Mars base and they're about to let it in when they glance at the monitor and realise the real rover is a mile away. *beep boop* the doppleganger says *time to collect samples*
Watch the movie Moon (2009) sometime if you haven’t yet
hell yeah it’s on HBO Max adding that to my weekend pile for this week lol
That’s probably one of the better mind f*cks
A small sign saying 'Caution: uneven surface'
A white plastic lawn chair.
With a slight chip in one of the legs so they’d be scared to sit down.
Except they *could* sit down, because the gravity of Mars is much less than Earth's. Which means we should send all of our chipped lawn chairs to Mars so that they will become functional again.
That makes sense, they’re still perfectly usable in the right scenario, I guess OP just didn’t understand the gravity of the situation.
Shit vergil made it to mars
The rover's cameras fail to capture what lies even 10 feet before them due to an unnaturally severe dust devil. As the dust slowly begins to subside, a man in black, sitting on a discount gardening chair appears, oddly shuffling through his space suit
Is the storm approaching?
With Bury the Light playing in the distance
Simple, velociraptor skeletons in a space shuttle.
One of them holding a Bible, so a velocipastor
Another wearing giant gold chains, a clock medallion and an Adidas tracksuit. A Velocirapper.
Another wearing a slouch hat and carrying a SPAS-12, velocitracker.
Whacky inflatable tube man on the highest peak.
Hi I’m Al Harrington from Al Harringtons Wacky waving inflatable flailing arm tube man incorporation here to let you know we have an over stock of wacky waving inflatable flailing arm tube man’s and need to clear them out now and passing the savings onto youuu!!!!
A page from a Martian newspaper, pondering the possibility that there might be life on Earth.
A tungsten disc that, when we properly work it out, is found to be the same basic technology as a phonograph record. That is, a purely analog method of recording sound waves in physical media. When we work out the RPM and other details it turns out it's a recording of David Bowie singing "Life on Mars?" except in every instance "Mars" is "Earth" instead. The B-side is "Ziggy Stardust".
The turns have tabled
Not to be a debbie downer but what language would this newspaper be in?
English, but with modern teen slang. NASA couldn't release it without giving ammo to conspiracy theorists.
A fully crewed (by preserved corpses/skeletons of course) Viking Longship.
🎶 We're whalers on the moon! 🎶
We carry a harpoon! But there ain’t no whales so we tell tall tales and sing our whaling tune!
With a note that says “We were here first —Leif Erikson”
In English. So when the first picture of the note comes in, they don't even need a translator. "Do we have a 'Nordic runes' guy?"
It's just scratched into the rocks all over the site, "Leif Erikson was here"
Liquid water in a mason jar
"Scientists have found evidence of a 2012 barn wedding on Mars"
I'm a geologist, and I can confirm that just placing the wrong type of rock would fuck up science for like 30 years. I often pick up rocks that I know only occur in specific areas and leave them somewhere that would be naturally impossible in the hope that it will break a geochemists mind when they find it
There was that one tumblr story about the teen girl who would go on walks with her geologist dad and some of his work friends and their families and one day she took a regular rock from her back yard and said she found it on the side of the mountain and watched all of the geologists hrming and hawing until she couldn't keep a straight face about it.
I remember that story differently. Pretty sure a friend of hers gave her a volcanic rock from Iceland. She secretly placed in near the path and innocently asked what the rock was.
Haha! I work at an airport and we have to collect samples of bird strikes on aircraft to send in for identification and tracking to the Smithsonian ornithology department. I really wanna acquire some emperor penguin feathers for submission just to see what would happen. For reference I live in the northeast.
I'm 80% sure that a zoo would be willing to give you some spare penguin feathers if you ask. There's always a bunch lying around.
Especially if he explains why. I want to give this guy penguin feathers and I've never touched one.
Me too. Maybe we could recruit someone from that funny thread about [petting penguins](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/7mjdd4/redditors_who_have_heldpetted_a_penguin_describe/)?
I had a friend who implants microchips into fish for tracking. He knew where the readers where located on rivers all over the state. He took one chip across the state & scanned it before implanting it in a fish back at work. Someone scanning fish had to be confused.
TIL there are geologist dickheads, I like it
[удалено]
It would be amusing if he accidentally stumbled upon an earth-shattering discovery.
I do believe that a good portion of the earth-shattering discoveries through history have come as a result of people fucking around with their hobbies. Remember, the difference between fucking around and science is just whether or not you're taking notes.
Can confirm. My wife is a geoscientist and while on our honeymoon hiking in Japan she randomly stopped and stared at the ground until I'd walked another 20m before loudly announcing "This rock doesn't belong here!" I don't remember the details but we were up in the mountains and she assures me it was NOT a rock from those mountains
one time I was at a house party and everyone left the party except me, including the people who actually lived in the house. so I turned every object in the house by 15 degrees. and I mean, every object I could. opened the fridge and turned all the condiments, even.
*taking notes*
That is the best thing I will see today, probably this week.
I just love how NASA responding to someone with the user name StirFryTaint. Never thought I’d say NASA and StirFryTaint in the same sentence.
Holy crap, it's the space dudes
Please tell me at least one person there has that on their business card.
Quick look busy, it’s NASA!
love your work, dudes.
Especially the probes. Love Mars ones. Big fan of the Jupiter ones.
Everyone loves a good probing
Holy shit it’s the real NASA, check the profile.
NASA at its core is a bunch of nerds, did you expect them not to be on here?
Anyone working at NASA could be making more money with less stress in the private sector. What I'm saying is, yes, they're nerds. Wonderfully so.
The xkcd guy left his job at NASA because he was making more money making comics for nerds than he was making at NASA lmao.
Yeah, and iirc a lot of the earliest xkcd comics posted were just scans of things he drew in the margins of notes or absentmindedly sketched while bored in meetings. Also do you not link dancing pikachu anymore?
Holy fucking shit lmao. NASA browsing Reddit instead of working
I think it’s an official account. So they’re browsing Reddit *for* work?
That's correct—we're part of the communications team at NASA HQ, so we're here to share photos, videos and other updates from across the universe (and answer questions when we can). Feel free to follow us over on /u/NASA!
u/NASA what am I doing right now?
...reading our reply?
Psssshhh. Wha…you don’t know me. You’re not my mom!
Ha! u/IcyCryos is being spied on from space!
I’m a professional content writer, and I have to say, being part of the communications team at NASA must make you feel like a total boss. “What do you do?” “I’m a content writer.” “Where do you work?” “NASA.” *drops imaginary mic* Edited to make first question: “What do you do?” <— Of course I would make a typo. 🤦🏻♀️
*mic takes off like a rocket*
I just got the image of NASA after budget cuts just being one person in a launch room browsing Reddit on a multimillion dollar computer interface. Where's u/shitty_watercolour when ya need em!?
If it ain’t on the toilet it’s not the true reddit experience.
LOL Hey are you guys hiring for anything remotely? I have a degree in business an experience as an analyst and want to do something important with my life.
Yes! You can learn more about working for NASA at [nasa.gov/careers](https://nasa.gov/careers); [here's a quick intro](https://www.nasa.gov/careers/business-services) to our careers in business services, in particular. We do have some positions that are fully remote, but [our centers and facilities are located across the United States](https://science.nasa.gov/about-us/nasa-centers)—there might be one closer to you than you think. There's also a wide variety of opportunities to work with NASA [through our contractors and other affiliated companies and organizations](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/other-opportunities-at-nasa/).
Why is picturing this account as the entirety of NASA responding to Reddit comments so funny to me? Anyways just wanted to say I’m a massive fan, always loved all things space :)
>Why is picturing this account as the entirety of NASA responding to Reddit comments so funny to me? "Alright people, awesome5185 is asking for a job. Jim, grab a dozen people and start brainstorming a solution, failure is *not* an option!"
[What I imagined](https://imgur.com/a/H3r1cdu) I never used photoshop before, excuse me for this bad ps job.
That's pretty damn good for someone who's never used photoshop before.
Holy cow it's actually him! It's James Nasa himself!
This is going to be linked in an AskReddit thread 10 years from now about famous reddit moments.
"Welcome to Venus!"
I mean… of course a Mars bar wrapper.
like a giant one covering the entire planet under a slight layer of dirt and dust or just the one regular size thing
Regular size would be funny. Imagine when it would leak and it would get on the news "Singular mars bar found on Mars"
King Size would be easiest to find, but my vote goes to Fun Size simply it’d be most confusing (that was the task, right?)
Monoliths describing how Charon is actually a big interspace gate or something. Then watch happily as the globe panics, then sets up expeditions for Charon, only to find nothing there
>or something. It's ok you can just call it a Mass Relay
”Scanning for resources”
Soviet era space suit with a skeleton
With the name tag 'Rasputin'
Or possibly "Hoffa"
"D. B. Cooper"
It would say Dan Cooper since that's what he actually went by. D.B. Cooper was a reporting error. Fun trivia. I'm sure NASA would know this, is the only reason I bring it up.
They’d know this was fake because Rasputin cannot be killed.
He cannot be killed by any force on Earth, but force on Mars are a different matter
There was a cat that really was gone
I'd go with North Korean, to further confuse things
Gotta go with technological empires that don't exist in our timeline. SPQR
Fuck it, Aztec astronaut suit.
With or without an apple tv logo?
You should watch For All Mankind
Hi Bob!
[удалено]
A pyramid combining all the different appearances of the different pyramids on earth.
Filled with booby traps and xenomorphs?
An Egyptian obelisk, inscribe with mathematics relating to something like a spatial fold engine or warp drive
You could confuse the scientists by developing mathematics related to a spatial fold engine or warp drive.
I could. But unfortunately im not great at the tensor calculus required yet
A picnic basket, blanket, food laid out with a note - *Honey, I forgot the potato salad, I'll be back in 20 minutes* - and for good measure, a 1953 Buick. To complete the scene - footprints that walk away and just disappear about 50 yards away
I want to read that story, Mr. Bradbury.
Statue of Liberty half buried in the ground.
You maniac!
Damn you all to helllll!
Matt Damon
MATT DAMON
myatt deiiimon
Watched this yesterday. Brilliant film. “Fuck you Mars”
A cthuhlu statue. Just the biggest one I could possibly find.
Surrounded by thousands of twisted human skeletons that appear to be burned.
A partially-vaporized radioactive manhole cover. ETA: Thanks kind Internet strangers for the awards!
I like to think that thing is still screaming at the space to this day, further than any of our other probes even went.
I like to think that is our civilization’s greatest yeet
For the uninitiated: https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/fastest-manmade-object-manhole-cover-nuclea-test/
A petri dish worth of bacteria, they’d go crazy if they found it.
I was actually going to say a colony of extremophile bacteria, lichen and fungus. I don't give a shit about what NASA find, but I would start the extremely slow process of terraforming the planet.
Now i’m imagining the terraforming going unnoticed for several years, and then they find that suddenly a portion of the planet is habitable by small organisms.
One of the 28000 rubber ducks that got spilled in the Atlantic back in 1992. https://www.npr.org/2011/03/29/134923863/moby-duck-when-28-800-bath-toys-are-lost-at-sea Edit: clean link
A thousand year old stone tablet describing how humanity had to leave Mars for Earth after global warming got too out of control
Spirit Halloween
A whole ass Dollar General.
Dollar Generals exist in the most random rural places already that I'd be like "ok this makes sense"
Usually in groups of two or three in towns with a population of 382.
Spirit Halloween
Dinosaur remains holding a bible.
The fossilised remains of non-human biped with a sign that says "No more nuclear testing".
>non-human biped A chicken?
Only if it's plucked
Well if it's plucked then it's not non-human.
A Jumanji board game.
A NASA Scientist. “Hey, is that…. Jeff’s frozen corpse?” “Nonsense, Jeff is right…. Over….. there…. Uh, guys, where the fuck is Jeff?!”
Not to mention how confused Jeff was for a few moments.
That "S" design we all drew in middle school
Flat earth society logo
Pieces of flight MH370
the ID of the person who finds it. just to mind fuck them
One functioning Furby, modified to have a power source that would last for centuries.
The skeleton of Hitler (I've had it for decades)
Why stop there? Leave a fully functional Nazi base in a random cave
🗿. Need I say more?
maybe the feet of one of these things just sticking out of the dirt
A hat & tshirt reading "1992 Super Bowl Champion Buffalo Bills"
Man, I knew they shipped those things far off to less developed areas, but I had no idea they were going to those lengths.
Pink lawn flamingo
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370
Weird rock formations of molecules that are inherent to life. They'd work for years getting into the nitty gritty of the calcium deposits which weirdly resemble coral on a sea bed. After confirming with xenobiologist that this was indeed the truth, topologist would begin to map out truly the extent of these ancient coral reefs. There would be a meeting that is conducted and a 3d model pulled up showing the overall terrain. Some junior topologist, excited to present his first findings, would zoom out to show a crowd of people the words, spelled out in coral: DEEZ NUTZ
A viking drakkar.
A sign that says KILROY WAS HERE
Submarine wreckage.
A monolith with a QR code to scan and Rickroll.
Well played, now we just need to wait for NASA to send a rover with speakers and watch them blast Rick Astley on the red planet.
Watching NASA get rickrolled on a livestream while billions watched would be the peak of humanity
A picture of a dolphin waving, and the caption "So long and thanks for all the fish. "
A set of car keys.
MY lost car keys
A handbag, containing a disposable camera, a towel and a copy of *Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy*.
A singular furby
A baja blast
One clean sock.
The sphinx nose
A little sign saying “Made in China”
A bad dragon dildo
There it is
Right where you left it
Lying upside down
A T-rex skeleton
A motion-activated LED sign that says "Level 2" when approached
A half-eaten, yet still warm hot pocket.
Me, a NASA engineer working on the Mars Sample Return mission , perusing the top comments so I’m not caught off guard in the future
I read a Novella years ago by the late sci fi author Brian Aldiss. Don't remember the name of it. But it begins in the space of this solar system called 'Clarke's Belt'. What is now Clarke's Belt was once a planet where the first civilization started in this solar system began. Those people were descended from monkeys, unlike us which descended from apes. And over the millennia they developed cities and technology and ultimately space travel. And they sent a ship to their moon, which landed. However, they destroyed their world in a nuclear war (the remnants of which became Clarke's Belt), and blasted their own moon out into the cosmos, where it got caught in Earth's gravity and became Our moon. When Earth's science went to our moon, they discovered, a space suit on the moon, with a dead monkey inside it, who never went home, as he watched home being destroyed.
An autographed picture of David Bowie