Reaching Starward: Faces from Earth

by Paul Gilster | Apr 5, 2010 | Culture and Society | 12 comments

by Larry Klaes

Faces from Earth is an ambitious plan to send information about our species to the stars. We’ve done this before, in the form of the plaques mounted on the Pioneer spacecraft and the famous Golden Record of Voyager. What more can we do to ensure that future missions leaving Earth will carry such representation? Larry Klaes puts Faces from Earth in context by looking at how the idea of such messaging has developed and where we might go from here. This post originally appeared as an editorial on the SETI League site and is reprinted with permission.

For the vast majority of human existence, most members of our species rarely ventured beyond the borders of the places they were born and raised in their entire lives. For them, the whole world consisted of their family and their village. As for the other people in distant lands far away, they often had only a limited awareness of them, based mostly on stories told by visitors who had either been to these exotic realms themselves or knew someone who said they had journeyed there.

Then in the last several hundred years, our knowledge and technologies expanded tremendously. These events allowed us to both explore and understand not only the entire surface of our planet Earth and encounter the many human societies that live nearly everywhere upon it, but also to obtain a true grasp of the much vaster Universe beyond our globe.

Our species came to see that our world is neither at the center nor the bottom of existence, but just one of several planets circling an average star in a galaxy of 400 billion suns with worlds and possibly life of their own. In turn our galaxy, which we call the Milky Way, was realized to be one of perhaps 100 billion other stellar islands in the Universe, and some scientists theorize even that immense cosmic arena may have many companions or perhaps even an infinity of them.

Image: This image of Isaac Newton’s System of the World is one of the photographs included on the Voyager Record, now moving through the heliopause. Credit: NASA/JPL/Voyager Project.

When humanity began to venture in the direction of those numerous points of light in the night sky once we had grasped their true natures, first with telescopes and later with rockets and spaceships, we also pondered who or what might dwell in those faraway alien places and what their reactions might be towards us.

As is often the case when people are confronted with the unknown, wishful thinking, concerns, and fears take over their thinking processes. Alien have become everything in our culture from deities saving humanity from ourselves to monsters hell-bent on enslaving or destroying our species and our planet.

The truth is, in this fiftieth anniversary year of SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, when astronomer Frank Drake began the modern SETI era by scanning two nearby stars in April of 1960 with a large radio telescope among the rural hills of West Virginia, we have yet to find any serious evidence for other intelligences or even life itself beyond Earth, despite a number of milestones which include the discovery of over 400 exoplanets since the last decade. Nevertheless, certain astronomers and others contend that the chances remain very good for the existence of other culturally and technologically sophisticated species throughout the galaxy.

Image: From the cover of the Voyager Golden Record. This picture has nothing to do with interpreting the disc contents, but rather is a pulsar map indicating the solar system from which the Voyager spacecraft originated. The cover of the Voyager record also contains an ultra-pure source of Uranium-238 to serve as a radioactive clock for determining the record’s age. This same pulsar map as well as hydrogen atom drawing were also included on the Pioneer 10 and 11 plaques. Each pulsar has its own distinct and rapid pulsing radio frequency that is very slowly changing with absolute linearity. Credit: NASA/Sylvain Kepler.

While various SETI projects run by both amateur and professional people continue to listen and look for other living minds in the Cosmos, a few have decided that with so many stellar systems to investigate, discovering who else is out there might be helped along if we deliberately made humanity’s presence known to the galaxy, thus METI, or Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligences.

The first deliberate METI efforts began in the 1970s. Among those initial projects were the golden plaques and records carried respectively aboard the space probes Pioneer 10 and 11 and Voyager 1 and 2. Realizing that these robotic vessels would become among the first human artifacts to leave the Sol system after their missions to the outer gas giant planets, Drake and his colleague Carl Sagan and others designed messages and information packages for the beings who might one day find them drifting through the galaxy. For though their original missions would be long over and their mechanical systems shut down and frozen from the deep cold of interstellar space, the probes themselves and the METI artifacts bolted on to them would stay intact for many millions and even billions of years if left undisturbed in the preserving celestial vacuum.

This collection of far-sighted people assumed and hoped that the recipients, no matter how alien they might otherwise be to humanity, would at least have the languages of science and mathematics in common, since it would require a species with a sophisticated technological ability to travel among the stars to find them. Thus the information content of these packages were prefaced and suffused with these presumed universal keys to ease the task of decipherment.

Image: The plaque aboard Pioneer. Pioneer 10 and 11’s famed Plaque features a design engraved into a gold-anodized aluminum plate, 152 by 229 millimeters (6 by 9 inches), attached to the spacecrafts’ antenna support struts to help shield it from erosion by interstellar dust. Credit: NASA.

Sagan and his colleagues also noted that a good deal of humanity had a strong interest and various reactions to the Pioneer Plaques and Voyager Records. While some of it remained parochial, from fear of hostile aliens discovering our presence to prudery over sending nude human figures to the stars, many others were captivated and enlightened by the makers’ efforts to include a fair sampling of the various human cultures across our world, especially in the case of the Voyager Records, which had music, images, and languages representing a large swath of our species.

These plaques and discs, remarkable as they were, were physically limited in just how much they could tell another species about us or our own descendants who might one day venture into the galaxy and find these artifacts of their ancestors. In addition, not every opportunity to introduce ourselves to the wider Cosmos has been taken up by those who have built later vessels aimed at the stars, stating a lack of time, resources, and interest.

It is so important that a young and developing species such as humanity does not blindly toss its artifacts and eventually members of our own kind into a vast realm full of so many unknowns. Even if we are unaffected by our actions due to our current limitations, our descendants may pay an unfortunate price for our short-sightedness, or we may even cause problems for beings we do not even know exist yet.

Addressing these long-term and far-reaching issues, physicist Tibor Pacher of Hungary has begun a collection of programs aimed at ensuring that all future deep space missions contain information packages that properly represent our species and our world. These programs are also designed to raise awareness and education among the beings of this planet.

The program, known as Faces from Earth, is a part of Dr. Pacher’s Peregrinus Interstellar, which is devoted to promoting interstellar exploration.

The primary goal of Faces from Earth is to make sure that every space mission leaving our Sol system has some kind of proper representation of its makers’ species and their home aboard. Even if the mission team has neither the time nor the interest in adding an information package to their spacecraft, Faces from Earth can provide one for them so that future recipients of vessels from our planet are not left in a state of confusion over who made and sent this craft and why.

One way Dr. Pacher envisions this plan is with Mosaic Earth. This project uses an image of Earth built up from the faces of many people from all over the globe in a holographic form to simultaneously represent our planet and our species. Every human being with access to the Internet can participate in Mosaic Earth and add their face to this representation of our species into the galaxy.

Mosaic Earth and other plans for future information packages on deep space missions will be placed aboard the using the One Kilo Message plan, a container weighing just one kilogram that will carry our messages and information to the stars. The design of these projects is meant to allow the widest capacity and variety of information about humanity that can be placed aboard a spaceship using as little volume as possible to ensure that the main mission of the vessel is not compromised. The Faces from Earth projects will also be designed for flexibility in terms of future improvements in the technology of storing and relaying information.

The other plan for Faces from Earth is bring about a global awareness of the many peoples on our planet and to educate them about astronomy and the Universe in the process. Having many people of all ages and backgrounds involved in this process will naturally lead to these goals.

In summation, the importance of being in essence respectful citizens of the galaxy and giving some kind of valuable legacy to our children is a driving force in the creation of Faces from Earth. It is designed to bring together people from multiple fields and disciplines across human culture to more fully represent the beings and items of our world to the Universe on all future deep space missions. We invite you and those who you think may be interested in such a project to join Faces from Earth to participate in our historic emergence into the Cosmos.

Apocryphal Tales and Long-Term Results

by Paul Gilster | Apr 1, 2010 | Culture and Society | 38 comments

Since starting this site in 2004, I’ve periodically emphasized the value of long-term thinking as we consider interstellar flight. This is not to suggest that travel to other stars will not undergo some kind of breakthrough that lets us manage it within a single human lifetime — we can hope and work for such technological advances. Rather, the idea is that interstellar flight is unlikely to be achieved in the near future, and that being the case, we have to recover an older way of thinking, one that looks beyond immediate reward to achieving benefits for our descendants.

That notion of carrying things forward motivated me when I wrote Centauri Dreams (the book), and naturally led to comparisons with long-term projects from the past, such as the great cathedrals of Europe. It also brought me to the well traveled story of the Oxford beams. It’s a fascinating tale, one that gets across exactly the point I wanted to make in the book, but the more I researched it, the more I realized there was no proof. The story involves New College, Oxford, which was founded in 1379 and has, among its other glories, a dining hall with massive oak beams, each forty-five feet long and reaching two-feet square, across the ceiling.

Image: New College dining hall, whose oak beams are designed for the long haul. Credit: Holly Hayes/sacred-destinations.blogspot.com.

Having discovered that the ancient beams had become infested with beetles, the College Council realized the beams needed to be replaced, and inevitably the question became, where do we find beams of that size? The story is admirably continued in the wonderful Atlas Obscura site, which bills itself as “A Compendium of the World’s Wonders, Curiosities and Esoterica,” and which lives up to that promise on a daily basis. From Atlas Obscura:

One of the Junior Fellows stuck his neck out and suggested that there might be some worthy oaks on the College lands. These colleges are endowed with pieces of land scattered across the country which are run by a college Forester. They called in the College Forester, who of course had not been near the college itself for some years, and asked him if there were any oaks for possible use.

He pulled his forelock and said, “Well sirs, we was wonderin’ when you’d be askin’.”

Upon further inquiry it was discovered that when the College was founded, a grove of oaks had been planted to replace the beams in the dining hall when they became beetly, because oak beams always become beetly in the end. This plan had been passed down from one Forester to the next for over five hundred years saying “You don’t cut them oaks. Them’s for the College Hall.”

A great tale, no? The problem is, there seems to have been no patch of trees specifically assigned and maintained over the centuries to replenish these beams. College foresters routinely planted oaks, hazel and ash, letting the oaks grow large for use in construction. Moreover, the trees used to rebuild the hall came from land that the college did not acquire until sixty years after the hall was originally built. The tale is, then, apocryphal, but somewhat rescued by the fact that foresters have indeed managed lands whose trees were intended, over the course of time, to replace wood in various college buildings. Long-term planning is still the point, and you can learn more about the process in this video clip with Stewart Brand.

In any case, here is a tale about long-term thinking that does check out across the board: Vice-admiral Cuthbert Collingwood, who died almost exactly 200 years ago, was Nelson’s second in command at the battle of Trafalgar, and it was he who took command of the fleet when Nelson received his mortal wound. The British oak used in the ships that fought the Napoleonic wars was planted during the reign of the Stuarts some 200 years earlier and allocated for future use in the Royal Navy. Knowing this, Collingwood went on to encourage the planting of oaks that would be made ready for future Royal Navy ships, oaks that matured long after the heyday of sailing ships.

In one sense, long-term thinking is about shepherding our resources to allow for their replacement in the future. In another, though, it is about being aware of our position in a long sequence of scientific inquiry, one that has built upon each previous generation to achieve new perspectives. Breakthroughs happen because people in the past did the necessary legwork. It will take that sense of patience and resolve to push toward a goal that has long seemed unattainable if we are ever to reach the stars, and if we cannot achieve it within our own lifetimes, doing strong, foundational research that can build new possibilities for our grandchildren is no small endeavor.