Leaving a permanent record of humanity on the moon – in 100 billion pixels

Although the French village of Nuit-Saint-Georges has a population of just over 5,000, the pastoral Burgundy hamlet has a huge moon connection.

It is the birthplace of famed 19th-century astronomer Felix Tisserand, whose name was given to the Tisserand crater located in a vast lunar plain known as the Sea of Serenity. From the Earth to the Moon, the first book to depict such a journey, which featured its characters celebrating their arrival with a bottle of wine from Nuit-Saint-Georges, was written in his style by French author Jules Verne.

The village’s residents received a wine called Cuvee Terre Lune – Lunar Earth Vintage, which was the inspiration for the creation of yet another crater named after the town a century later when Apollo 15’s astronauts passed through the town. Today the square in front of the city hall is called Place du Cratere Saint-Georges – Saint George Crater Plaza.

A new project will forge yet another link between humanity and our own hereafter, which is a enduring trend.

A new international project called Sanctuary on the Moon will provide its creators with a comprehensive overview of our current civilization. Set to launch moonward in just a few years with the support of NASA, UNESCO and French President Emmanuel Macron’s administration (no guarantee has been given about the support of any future administration, however), the project was founded by Benoit Faiveley – who happens to hail from Nuit-Saint-Georges.

The golden record

The Golden Records that were attached to the two Voyager spacecraft were the source of Sanctuary on the Moon, which was a project that had been in motion nearly 50 years ago.

These probes, which were created by NASA in 1977, were intended to look at and record images of the outer planets before moving on to the far side of the solar system, where they will continue to drift for thousands, perhaps even billions of years until something finds them or gets in the way. It was for the unlikely event of the former – that some extraterrestrial intelligence might chance upon the crafts – that the Golden Records were included on board.

The Golden Records, created by world-renowned astronomer Carl Sagan, contain sounds and images meant to give viewers a clear understanding of how life and culture on Earth are organized. DNA, human anatomy, animals and insects, plants and landscapes, food and architecture, and other biosphere and civilisation-related images are included. The music curation spans Bach to Beethoven, folk music to Chuck Berry, and the sounds of humpback whales to brain waves of a person thinking about a range of topics, including the sensation of falling in love.

Despite a common misconception, the Beatles’ song Here Comes the Sun is not included in it. The record company, EMI, turned down the song’s use, according to Sagan’s 1978 book, Murmurs of Earth, which details the creation of the discs. One can only conclude that EMI must have been worried that aliens would rip off the Beatles.

Murmurs toward the moon

Faiveley was working as an engineer and freelance journalist when he came upon Sagan’s book on the Golden Records, and from there, the idea for Sanctuary on the Moon was born. However, Faiveley developed a time capsule that would be kept closer to home, preserved in the vacuum of space on the moon, and that would be rediscovered by humanity’s own descendants, aeons in the future, whereas Sagan’s records were intended for extraterrestrials to be found.

What would we say if we were to leave content in pristine condition on another planet for millions, millions, and millions of years, Faiveley asks? ”

As much as you can, that is the answer. And it turns out that Sanctuary on the Moon can squeeze in a lot of space thanks to cutting-edge manufacturing methods.

The time capsule contents will be comprised of 24 discs, each a mere 10 centimetres in diameter,  There are maps of female and male genomes, maps of space and universe, life and biology, and information spanning a specific area of knowledge, containing up to seven billion pixels.

The pixels are arranged so that when the images are enlarged, they can be seen as a collage of images that can be seen with the naked eye as well as the second hardest mineral on Earth, sapphire, which is used to provide readable text after diamond. The Space disc, for example, shows a space-suited astronaut, the moon’s phases, Earth’s place in the Milky Way, and more. When magnified, the universe’s current state is outlined in detail in this book.

The Sanctuary team currently has 10 of the 24 discs’ preliminary designs ready. The remaining 14 must be designed and all discs carved by 2027 for a launch scheduled the following year as part of the Artemis mission to bring humanity back to the moon.

An unmanned lander delivered via NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, which collaborates with private companies to send technology to the moon, will be enclosed in a protective container of machined aluminum. Where the landing site will end up, the discs will wait until someone finds them, if ever, until that is known.

Back to basics

Although mineralized mineral plates may seem relatively low-tech, they may be essential for communicating over a long period of time.

According to Faiveley, “you have to go back to the basics if you want to communicate information to the far future,” “Who knows if a DVD or CD player will work one million years from now? ”

He explains that you would either need to include the hardware needed to play the time capsule on a medium or provide a description of how to put one together. It is far easier to simply carve something legible, as the Sanctuary team is doing. The only thing you need is a magnifying glass, according to their discs.

A key explaining the International Unit System and defining measurement is located at the center of each disc. On the outside is a sort of “Rosetta Stone” detailing human language via the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which appears in French, English, Arabic, Greek, Chinese, Dhivehi, Inuktitut, etc. Whoever discovers the capsule will have everything they need to understand and interpret it with this information.

Then, the question erupted into, “What do we want to convey?” ” says Faiveley. No one can speak on behalf of humanity, and team geneticist Martin Brzezinski aptly explains that humanity can at least communicate with humanity. ”

predicting the future

Brzezinski says, “Sanctuary is equally scientific and poetic.”

Therefore, the discs are being designed with consideration for both information and aesthetics. The data’s foundation is laid by science. The project is described as a “triptych” that includes three main points: “What we are, what we know, and what we make is art.

“We wanted something that would be appealing to the eye,” he says. a place where a lot of information could be stored. Something that is both serious and funny, as well as straightforward and straightforward. ”

In order to accomplish this, Sanctuary organized workshops on what would be included in the capsule that would bring together experts from different parts of the world, including geneticists, astrophysicists, palaeontologists, particle physicists, engineers, cartographers, and more.

Who doesn’t say, “Yeah, I want to work on something that will take me to space or the moon”? ” Faiveley grins. particularly when it is cultural. ”

It is this element of cultural preservation that drew the interest of UNESCO, and as a result, renderings of all the World Heritage Sites will be included in the final designs.

The Sanctuary team’s goal is to communicate not necessarily the total amount of human knowledge, but at least show where the boundaries of our science are right now. In order to do this, the project must be grounded in science.

When looking at an old map, you would see the contours of the Americas, and at some point the map would be left blank, known as the “terra incognitas,” says Faiveley, “and these blanks were left as blanks. I like those maps because they tell a lot about the civilisation who drew them. What lies beyond terra incognitas, which has always amazed me? In the sense that we are attempting to push the limits of what we know, it applies to Sanctuary. ”

Recent human genome mapping is one of the most important advances in human knowledge. This, the team decided, was so essential to the project that they devoted four of the 24 discs to it.

The genomes are a part of Sanctuary, Brzezinski says, “because they attempt to express who we are as organisms in a literal way.” The genome discs contain the information that is contained within us, while the other discs contain much of the information we generate, including art, science, and ideas. ”

An abridged version of the tree of life that examines humanity’s evolutionary history is included in the first disc’s detailed set of instructions on how to decode the human genome. Then, in full, two male and two female genomes are presented. The individuals were selected via a double-blind process from a cohort of what are known as “super seniors” – people who have reached the age of 85 free of major health issues and are therefore unlikely to have genomic mutations that lead to diseases like cancer. Additionally, there is information on mutations that are frequently observed throughout the human population, which Brzezinski believes are crucial because they represent both individuality and the entire human genome.

He explains, “This was what I wanted to accomplish. “I felt that having the sequences of two individuals was too exclusive, and that we needed to somehow incorporate ‘everyone else’ too. ”

The team decided to add music to the project’s four pertinent discs, which was composed of the Norwegian band Flunk’s song Moon Above, which was composed specifically for the project, even though the dense information of each genome occupied more than 99 percent of the pixels. A mapped genome may say a lot about our biology, but without art and music, it hardly provides a full understanding of what emerges from that genetic soup.

According to Faiveley, the 100 billion pixels in the project “may be a lot, but it also represents a tiny amount of who we are.”

For our distant relatives

Unlike the Golden Records, Sanctuary on the Moon is not intended with an extraterrestrial audience in mind. So, who is it intended to serve?

Our descendants may discover a cemetery in a million years, says Faiveley. “They will probably not look like us, but I think there’s something that is never going to change – the excitement of saying, ‘I found a treasure. What lies beneath this treasure? What is stated in it? ’ I believe that’s still going to be the case a million years from now. ”

He mentions the 19th-century Egyptian hieroglyphics cipher, Jean-Francois Champollion, an Egyptian astronomer. “He opened a door to a civilisation that was completely lost and people couldn’t understand. And I sincerely hope a future Jean-Francois Champollion will be interested in this endeavor. ”

According to Faiveley, working on a project like Sanctuary – which gazes millions of years into the future – changes one’s concept of “deep time”.

You have to go back and examine the past in order to comprehend the magnitude of such a long time, he says. What is the date of Christendom, according to the Bible, 2,000 years ago. Five thousand years from now was the pyramids of Egypt. The paintings in France’s Lascaux caves were 17 thousand years old. The Chauvet Cave paintings in France will be available in thirty-four thousand years. 2 million years from now, Lucy the Australopithecus. How will we evolve, then? What will be left over for us? ”

According to team palaeontologist Jean-Sebastien Steyer, the future may seem preoccupied with it, but it is equally concerned with humanity’s present: “Paradoxically, it pushes us to stop, take a break, and think about who we are. ”

A message from a troubled past

It’s not difficult to see how a time capsule exploring who we are today and where we’re heading tomorrow might raise unsettling questions in a world where global conflict, nuclear proliferation, and climate change are all on the rise. Is Sanctuary on the Moon, for example, intended as a sort of intellectual insurance in the event of civilisation’s collapse?

Faiveley points out that “Sanctuary is not about being survivalist or about preparing for the end of the world.” It is all about bringing up knowledge and bringing up issues that matter to us. That being said, it’s also a statement about the fragility of our world. our own fragility. There will be information on global warming and some environmental issues for which we are not particularly proud. ”

He insists against portraying it as some sort of post-apocalyptic time capsule. Like, “Please find and break things to restart civilization in case of an emergency.” That’s not the case. But I believe it means something to preserve our own fragile biological recipe. ”

“I’m going to paraphrase Ptahhotep,” says Faiveley, referencing the ancient Egyptian writer, whose wisdom has been passed down for some 4,500 years.

Source: Aljazeera