Pepsi announced that they were going to advertise in the evening/early-morning sky with cubesats that have reflective mylar sails. They will spell out, like constellations, the image Pepsi wants us to see. This is a horrible idea that will be seen over large swaths of the Earth at a time.
Pepsi may be stupid. They might have missed the cries of foul back in the late eighties when France tried to put up a 100th anniversary of the Eiffel Tower space tribute.
So why could anyone be against advertising no matter the form it takes? After all advertising is the lifeblood of economics, isn’t it?
Imagine two lovers in the twilight. The one might say, “You are as lovely as the stars themselves.”
“Blechhh! The ones that spell out Pepsi and take orders from a mega corporation? Double blechhh!”
Imagine a group of amateur astronomers, pulling an allnighter to see as many of the Messier objects as possible. “Just the M81 and M82 galaxies left and we’ve done it!”
“Oh no!” cries another amateur astronomer. “It’s early morning and the Pepsi logo is advertising in front of M81 and M82. We’ll never succeed now! I’m picking Coke!”
A professional astronomer checks the photographs she has been imaging for a couple hours. She thinks, even with all the space equipment, a surprising amount of astronomy is still done on earth. Anger sets in as she takes the photos from their housing and takes a first glance. There are streaks on the photos all running the same direction, ruining her work of the evening.
With her red light flashlight she examines things more closely. She imagines the streaks as dots placed at the end of each streak. This way she can spell out PEP. Of course. Advertising is much more important than mere science. Imagine once the newness (and expense) of space advertising has settled down. Advertising could be anywhere in the night sky.
Free at last from the way too busy cities, a couple turns out all their lights to see the beauty of the night sky and the milky way.
There isn’t even the glow of streetlights from nearby towns because the couple located many miles from any town or village that had them. They paid a million dollars for this view. And now they have to look at the Pepsi logo constellation even more brightly than it can be viewed in the city.
What is the public to do? We could fund raise to get India to blow up the cubesats. But this creates debris that is dangerous for all the other satellites up there.
A few days after the original article, Pepsi backed out of the deal with the Russian advertiser. But not before getting tons of free publicity once for the announcement and once for the pull back. This free publicity may have been the whole plan.
So to counter Pepsi’s greed, I will boycott products I know are Pepsi made. I will do this for a year, longer if I choose that at the end of the year. This is a huge thing to do because Pepsi makes so much of what is in the stores.
In beverages this means no Pepsi, Mountain Dew, 7 Up or Mug Root Beer. No Gatorade, Aquafina, Lipton or Brisk. No Tropicana juices and other beverages that I have yet to find out about.
Pepsi also owns Frito Lay chips and the host of chip products that company produces. And apparently to get to Gatorade this ravenous company had to buy Quaker, the cereal company.
Now that’s a long list of products I will need to avoid. I have no doubts that I will be able to avoid this company’s products for a year. After all in the early eighties I had a coffee at McDonald’s. It was so grotesquely bad that I don’t purchase or even use coffee from this corporation. McCafe permanently lost a customer. I remember.
