A "Voyager" type spacecraft with a Golden Record but with contents depicting a civilization of Cats in Mars, and the Space Craft + Golden Record are made from materials from Mars. Put this in orbit around Mars, and have it emit a signal on loop with an Arecibo Message depicting the Cat Civilization.
The scientific community would just collapse and we'd be worshipping cats as a world wide religion.
😸
-Sincerely, totally not a cat
The scientific community would just collapse and we'd be worshipping cats as a world wide religion.
You're a couple thousand years late on this one
A teapot in orbit around the sun somewhere between Earth and Mars.
Or a vase of petunias and a blue whale skeleton?
Actually, I think they were referring to Russell's Teapot.
A dinosaur skeleton in a spacesuit.
The truth is out there
That manhole cover from Operation Plumbbob.
Russell's Teapot.
A radio station streaming "Baby Shark" on all frequencies
Possibly the most appreciated song on earth.
Son of a-
A giant ship that can transform into a giant robot maid, complete with a vacuum to suck planets' air.
It went from suck to blow!
Gonna steal an idea from Karl Pilkington and leave a dishwasher somewhere on Mars for one of the rovers to find.
Maybe even an older model.
Bonus points if it was a popular model in a science fiction show.My take of that would be the station from the little martian from Looney Tunes in the full 3D cartoon style.
Sort of like a cell shaded structure in a realistic lighted environment.
"YOU ARE HERE" map.
Everything is already in space. Also, whale songs
Arts and Humanities research.
A paper floating in space that reads 'Probing the 'Other': Conceptions of Zipzorpian-Terran Relations in Early Explorer Narratives'
A lone white lawn chair on the surface of Mars
Moon sized amoeba.
Call it The Amooba.
I'd suggest 35,000 low-earth-orbit satellites but Elon is already working on that.
A single protein molecule.
Something subtle enough to spark debate and controversy but not overplaying it like putting an entire living thing from Earth would be.
Ghosts
NASA: Oh you guys are back early!
Astronaut: Moon's haunted.
NASA: What?
Astronaut: grabs gun and gets back on ship Moon's haunted
Sprinkle some water on the moon
A very small probe that emits an impossible to miss signal at random pretty long intervals and then adjusts its orbit to be very different. It would basically pretend to be various Aliens civilizations trying to contact us. Like every 45 days a new signal from a new part of the sky is picked up and then never repeats and if were just getting tons of messages at once. And since the probe is small and doesnt have a predictable orbit it would be very hard to figure out that its actually a probe and then find it.
Alternatively. A plane full of snakes.
A large military submarine, and/or Porcupine fish. But I'll be very sad if fish dies. And in order to actually break scientists, you need to put in space them.
Dark matter, duh.
TMA-2 / Zagadka / Big Brother (the Jovian monolith).
