NASA Is Sending A Message For Future Humans Into Space

NASA Is Sending A Message For Future Humans Into Space

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NASA’s Lucy mission will study ancient asteroids that orbit the Sun near Jupiter, but it’ll also be carrying a plaque with messages to future humans.

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NASA Is Sending A Message For Future Humans Into Space

NASA’s Lucy mission, which is launching in October, will study the large, enigmatic “Trojan” asteroids that orbit the Sun near Jupiter, and it’s going to be taking a time capsule with it. Messages to the future in the form of a plaque, not unlike the plaques NASA created for the Pioneer missions into deep space and the Voyager twins which carry golden records with sounds from Earth, will accompany Lucy on her journey to study remnants of the early solar system.

Space exploration has always been based on our desire to know what’s out there. While you’ll rarely hear NASA say it’s searching for aliens, the undeniable fact is that we’d really, really like to find someone out there to talk to. To that end, NASA’s early deep-space missions like Pioneer 10 and 11 and later Voyager 1 and 2 included messages to extraterrestrial civilizations that might one day discover them. The idea being that if some distant alien race were to find the spacecraft they would learn of our existence and perhaps even come and try to find us. That obviously hasn’t happened… yet, but it still could in the future.

The Lucy spacecraft is another story. As NASA reveals, it will indeed carry with it a sort of “time capsule” revealing a lot about the present state of humanity, but unlike the Pioneer and Voyager packages, Lucy’s payload is meant to be discovered by future humans. This does sound a little bit silly when you consider that information is relatively well-preserved these days, and if a mission far into the future comes across Lucy they might be able to search the internet (or whatever new form of worldwide data network exists at that time) and read all about it without studying the plaque the spacecraft carries. Still, we already reach a point in human civilization where we’ve lost records of what came long before us, and digital information isn’t immune to decay.

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Dear Future, This Is 2021

So, what will future humans have to look forward to if they stumble across Lucy’s long-dead remains orbiting Jupiter? “This time-capsule contains messages from prominent members of our society; individuals who have asked us to contemplate the state of the human condition as well as our place in the universe,” NASA explains. “These thoughtful leaders were asked to provide words of advice, words of wisdom, words of joy, and words of inspiration to those who may read this plaque in the distant future. These messages were solicited from Nobel Laureates in Literature, United States Poet Laureates, and other inspirational figures including the members of the band that indirectly inspired the Lucy mission’s name.”

Along with inscriptions from these individuals selected by NASA, the plaque will also show the status of the solar system on its launch date of October 16th, 2021. Lucy’s trajectory is shown on a two-dimensional depiction of our system, complete with the Sun, planets, and the cluster of asteroids that Lucy will be studying. It’s impossible to say whether Lucy’s message to humans in the distant future will ever actually find its target audience, but if it does, whoever finds it will have plenty to enjoy.

Source: NASA Goddard

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/nasa-time-capsule-lucy-mission-plaque/

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