Messages For The Future

Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. This is Earth as seen from Saturn. That is us right there.

And if you look closely, ok, see this little protuberance? That's the Moon.

This image was taken by the Cassini spacecraft on July 19th, 2013 at 21:27

Coordinated Universal Time. The thing is, NASA gave the public advanced warning

of when it would be taken, which means that this image of Earth was the first

ever taken from space that some people on Earth were actually posing for. Our planet

looks so small, insignificant, fragile. I recently attended the premiere of Sky

1's upcoming "You, Me and the Apocalypse" with some cool YouTubers and it got me

thinking. In the show, the characters find out that they're only 34 days left before

a comet smashes into Earth that's likely to end humanity. They all react in

different interesting ways, but what would I do if I found out that there

were only 34 days

of human history left? Ok, my first priority would be to get back to America to be

with my family.

But after that? I don't really have a bucket list. Except that is exactly what

I would want to spend my last few weeks doing. Making a list to put in a bucket

that I would then send far out into space away from Earth's impending

vaporization. The list would contain information about us, all Earthlings. So

that if libraries and monuments and YouTube videos were all destroyed, a

record would still exist somewhere

of what and who we were. Like a stone thrown into a lake, the ripples your life

causes last long after you vanish, the tree you planted is climbed by future

generations, the books you donated inform future readers. But what if it's not just

your stone that vanishes, but the entire pond? Perhaps it's arrogance or vanity, but

getting cosmic messages in a bottle out there, before the end, diversifies our

archive and gives a better chance for future alien visitors, or whatever is

left of humanity, to find out that we were once here,

to show what we learned. Maybe even to warn future life forms of what we did or what

we didn't prepare for. We have already sent some messages about humanity out

there, beyond Earth, and if Earth is completely destroyed, those messages will

be all that's left of us. What are they? Ok, first things first. How do you write

something for the future? I mean, the distant future. The message might not be

found for millions of years or billions. It might be discovered by an audience

that's completely different, not only in language, but in senses? What if

they can't see or hear or feel or taste or smell like we do, or at all.

What if their bodies destroy the very material we write the message on? What language

do you even write it in? Well, in general, math and physics, which are believed to be the

same everywhere in the universe, have been what we write outer space bound

messages in.

Like the Arecibo message, written by Frank Drake, Carl Sagan and others, which

was blasted towards the M13 star cluster in 1974. It's composed of a semi prime

number of binary digits conveying some info about us and it should reach the

center-ish of the M13 cluster in about 25,000 years, at which

point, if something intelligent lives there and detects it, they can respond

and their response will return to us another 25,000 years later. We won't be

around for that. But Earth has also been broadcasting its radio and TV signals

into space. Currently it's about 200 light-years in diameter. Compared to the