Following up my recent piece on time capsules, the most audacious time capsules ever are those attached to four spacecraft that have left our Solar System and are headed to the stars.
The mission of Pioneer 10 and 11, and Voyager 1 and 2, was to explore the outer planets. Launched in the 1970s, each was a historic triumph. Until they flew past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, our only views of those distant worlds were blurry photos through Earth-bound telescopes.
Astronomer Carl Sagan convinced NASA to put messages in those far-flung bottles. Each Pioneer has a gold-coated plaque illustrating where the spacecraft came from and what humans look like. The Voyagers carry a gold-plated record (and stylus!) which, if aliens figure out how to use it, will play images and sounds from Earth.
Each could soar for billions of years, surely long after humanity and perhaps Earth itself are gone, before anyone recovers them—assuming there’s anyone out there at all. Our civilization’s last artifacts.
I love and admire the effort, but I might have taken a different approach.
Keeping in mind that weight on a spacecraft is at a premium, I’d have sent two specimens: a fruit fly and a sesame seed, perfectly preserved in the frozen vacuum of space. Their chemical composition, cellular structure, genes and DNA would tell aliens nearly everything about life on Earth, because we are certainly more closely related to fruit flies and sesame seeds than we are to whatever would find them.
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