Just as in 1977 the gold discs with material from the Earth were sent through the Voyager probes into space, NASA is considering sending a new message, this time in digital but with a similar amount of information : “maybe 100 images and about an hour of audio; we're writing a haiku, it's not a novel, ”explains Jon Lomberg, research leader and design director for the disks that were placed aboard NASA's twin Voyager spacecraft.
The interstellar message, dubbed "One Earth Message" , would be sent through the New Horizons probe heading towards Pluto and will contain contributions from a team of researchers, teachers, artists and engineers from around the planet. In total, 150 megabytes of data would be uploaded to the memory of the New Horizons spacecraft once NASA officially approves the project.
" We will never know if our initiative will reach aliens , but we do know that the people of Earth who participate and play a role in it, can literally change their lives," says Lomberg.
The novelty of the digital format of the message is not the only thing that differentiates it from its predecessor ; In the gold discs, the information was chosen by a small committee chaired by the astrophysicist Carl Sagan and, on the other hand, the financing, in this case, will be through thousands of individual or business contributions from around the world.
