NASA's plan to send a digital message to other beings on the spaceship 'New Horizons'

A team of researchers, professors, artists and engineers has proposed to NASA to rise an interstellar message to the New Horizons spacecraft, which is about Pluto.

This project, known as One Earth Message (The Message of the Earth), is being led by Jon Lomberg, who was design director for the gold discs that were placed aboard the Voyager spacecraft of NASA prior to release 1977, with the idea of ​​showing any aliens that might intercept the probes how humankind and its planet. We will never know if our initiative will reach extraterrestrials, but we do know that the people of Earth to participate can literally change your life.

 The goal now is similar, but the new project would be a more global and collaborative effort, asking people worldwide to contribute pictures, sounds and ideas for this 'message in a bottle'. "This is really an opportunity to try to think of ourselves from a broad perspective," said Lomberg to Space.com. "We will never know if our initiative will reach extraterrestrials, but we do know that the people of Earth to participate and play a role in it, you can literally change your life"

 Unlike metal discs with recordings of Voyager, Earth Message One would be digital. The space agency has expressed his enthusiasm, but has yet to officially approve it, Lomberg said. To have the approval, it will be allowed to team up 150 megabytes of data to the memory of the New Horizons spacecraft.

The message would have the same amount of information as the gold records Voyager, maybe 100 pictures and about an hour of audio, Lomberg said. "We are writing a haiku, not a novel," he said. The digital format allow this message to be more flexible and integrated than was possible with gold records, Lomberg added. For example, the message can be changed over time by transmitting more files to New Horizons. It could also include a map of the world, and every image and sound could be labeled the place from which it came. There is another key difference between messages Voyager and New Horizons: While gold records carry information chosen by a small committee (which was chaired by astronomer Carl Sagan), One Earth Message be composed and funded with contributions from people all the world. "It is not just a photo contest" Lomberg said. "It's a process that will find out what people want to send." Lomberg and his colleagues hope to raise at least half a million people around the world through a campaign of Fiat Physica, to build and maintain a Web presence and to find the best way to program the message.


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