On March 2, at 3:34 a.m. EST, NASA’s Firefly Blue Ghost Mission 1 landed on the moon. Inside the lunar lander was the LifeShip Pyramid, which contained a 1-gigabyte microchip and a small ceramic plate made up of the ASPIRE One Record — a message meant for future generations of humans, as well as extraterrestrial intelligent (ETI) beings.
The lunar message was created by Karen Lewis, an associate professor of philosophy at Barnard, in collaboration with an interdisciplinary team of experts at the Interstellar Foundation.
“I realized I had a lot to say about communicating with aliens,” said Lewis, whose research on philosophical linguistics contributed to the creation of ASPIRE One. “Creating the moon message was an opportunity to [connect with] future humanity or descendants of humans, as it will remain on the moon like a time capsule.”
The Interstellar Foundation, a nonprofit organization in pursuit of sharing humanity’s story with ETI, launched ASPIRE One on January 15 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Upon its launch, the miniature golden monument — which contains depictions of daily life through digital records of photos, music, and aspirations for the future in different languages — orbited Earth for 25 days and slingshotted to the moon’s orbit for approximately 16 days before landing on the eastern edge of the moon.
Lewis and her team saw this project as a way to reflect on what it means to be human and to communicate — as well as a reminder that “we can’t take the conditions of ordinary human communication for granted,” said Lewis.
In this “5 Questions With …” interview, Lewis shares how the ASPIRE One Record offers a glimpse into humanity’s shared dreams and visions for future generations — both on Earth and beyond.
What inspired you to get on board?
One of the core missions of the foundation is to send a message into interstellar space that communicates something interesting about humans for a potential audience of intelligent extraterrestrials — much like the Golden Record that was on NASA’s Voyager in 1977. I was already working with a team of people focused on messaging.
The central question that occupied our team was (and still is) figuring out a message that is as close to universally understandable as possible and still communicates something interesting or complex about humanity. We wanted to develop this idea slowly, carefully, and in a scientifically based way with an aim to have the message done in the early 2030s. I was inspired to get on board with this team because how to communicate to ETI [extraterrestrial intelligence] is a fascinating philosophy of language question.
Even if there is a small chance of something you do achieving its primary goal ... then there is something valuable in the scientific or artistic endeavor of trying.
A lot of my philosophical research focuses on the interaction between content and context, and one of the things that drew me into the project is the challenge of sending a context-less message in every sense of the term. Unlike a communicative interaction between humans or animals, there is no physical context in which this interaction takes place because the potential audience will receive it in a vacuum. They also will not share a broader context — a socio-historical-cultural context — and may differ significantly in how they conceptualize the world. The question that fascinates me is whether we can create a context for this message [that says] something meaningful about the human experience.
What role do you envision this project playing in humanity’s future exploration of space?
This is a stepping stone for future messages with the hope that we can create a detailed, universally understandable message about humanity that will go into interstellar space. It is not so much about our exploration of space but whatever is out there in space learning about us.
How was your experience working with a diverse network of experts at the Interstellar Foundation?
This project is simply not something that could have been completed without the collaboration of people from different disciplines. I loved working with the other members of the messaging team; we met once a week for the duration of the project and beyond as we worked on an academic paper together, along with our next message. Some of us are computer scientists, zoologists, sociolinguists, philosophers, and each approached the question of how to communicate with ETI — or future humans — from different perspectives and with different interests.
We also came to realize that thinking abstractly about how to communicate is not the same as thinking about how to select specific images or videos for a record, so we brought on an archivist from UNESCO. We also worked with a videographer who helped us take the specific clips, images, and ideas we had and edit them into a coherent video. None of it would have been possible without the people at LifeShip who physically implemented our message and placed it inside the pyramid.
We’d like to expand the collaboration [to the public] in future projects and to get ideas from videographers, science content creators, and space enthusiasts. We are likely launching a video competition in the near future — stay tuned!
How did it feel to explore the technical and philosophical aspects of the project?
I am an analytic philosopher who pays attention to the technical details, so combining technical and philosophical aspects is something I am always thinking about. I learned so much: from which physical materials can withstand both time and the atmospheric conditions of space to thinking about how to encode a message in a way that ETI could even begin to view the message, let alone understand the content. I also got the opportunity to talk to people who have thought a lot more deeply than I have about how ephemeral current human artifacts are. I never really thought so much about the fact that the artifacts we create — our art, our historical records — are also not created in a way that will survive thousands of years.
The technical and the philosophical here intersect. To think about leaving a record, about survival, about continuity, we also need to think about the technical. What are the right physical materials for recording these things? And how can we record them in a way that people who find them in the future will understand what we’ve left them?
What message do you hope to share with Barnard and your students? What’s next?
Even if there is a small chance of something you do achieving its primary goal — in this case, reaching and being decoded by ETI — then there is something valuable in the scientific or artistic endeavor of trying. All of us on the mission team know that interstellar space is vast and that even if we succeed in making a message that travels into interstellar space, the chance of it being found by ETI is incredibly tiny. You never know if something improbable is going to happen. We’ll never know if anyone finds it, and if it is found, it will be beyond our lifetime. Still, it’s exciting to think about leaving such a thing behind.
The team has been working on an ASPIRE Two message that will likely use live actors, and we plan to launch a video competition to work with new content creators in making future messages.
