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Sim Shows How Far Hit Songs have Traveled in Space

posted by LaminatorX on Wednesday July 15 2015, @04:38PM   Printer-friendly
from the Mothership-Connection dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

You start out in Earth's orbit, then push back through the cosmos with a running ticker of how many light-minutes, -hours, or -years you are from our planet. Depending on how far you are from Earth, you'll hear a chart-topping song from the corresponding month or year. You can either just kick back and enjoy the ride, scroll your mouse wheel to activate hyperdrive, or manually scrub through time and space using the timeline on the left of the site.

It may sound complicated, but calculating the reach of radio waves over time and space is really straightforward. Radio waves travel at the speed of light, so if you were one light year away from Earth—that's 5.9 trillion miles—you'd hear broadcasts from a year ago. And it may have taken New Horizons nearly a decade to get close to Pluto, but the dwarf planet is a mere five light-hours or so from Earth. Every known planet or former planet in our solar system would still be hearing contemporary jams broadcast in the last few hours.

Three of the members (writer Chris Baker, developer Mike Lacher, and designer Brian Moore) of Lightyear.fm's team have worked together before on independent creative projects. Lacher built the audio system for the site, Moore designed the site interface, and Baker made sure the tunes were legit.

So Gliese 86 is listening to the best metal guitar riff of all time.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 15 2015, @05:48PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 15 2015, @05:48PM (#209477)

    Javascript, cookies, XHR, and a whole slew of domains you need to pull data from.
    The web is broken!

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 15 2015, @06:22PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 15 2015, @06:22PM (#209491)

    LOL they say it doesn't even work over time, it was just hardcoded for today's date. People will print anything these days. The worst part is, being in a news headline probably helps these guys get better jobs where they can write broken pointless software for tons of money.

  • (Score: 2) by captain normal on Wednesday July 15 2015, @08:20PM

    by captain normal (2205) on Wednesday July 15 2015, @08:20PM (#209558)

    Maybe that's why it didn't work for me. My browser won't accept 3rd party cookies and I have to give permission for java script to run. At 69 light years out, all I got was hip hop and rap. I'd have thought in 1947 most pop music would be jazz: Big Band and BeBop.

    --
    When life isn't going right, go left.

    • (Score: 2) by inertnet on Wednesday July 15 2015, @11:47PM

      by inertnet (4071) on Wednesday July 15 2015, @11:47PM (#209689) Journal

      Doesn't work for me either, I just wanted to check if the music is sped up or slowed down correctly while traveling from or to earth.