Another Amazing Find by Sawsee!

Again, I'm going to offer apologies to my good buddy Sawsee and cross post something he has on his blog.

You and I will never have the opportunity to leave the gravity well of this planet. As unfortunate as that reality is, there is little any of us can do about it. Even if "Space Tourism" becomes a reality, the simple fact is that the low Earth orbit achieved by such a venture would still be inside the gravity well of our home planet. The astronauts who travelled to the moon are the only humans to come close to leaving that gravity well, but since Luna is trapped in orbit around Earth, they did not accomplish the feat either.

One day, humans will visit Mars and that will be the first time we will truly slip the surly bonds.

For the vast, vast majority of humans, even low Earth orbit is beyond our reach.

The stars are not beyond the reach of human thought, however. Between now and November 1, 2008 there exists a unique opportunity to send 500 words of your thoughts soaring beyond the gravity well of this tiny planet.

That amazing opportunity comes courtesy of the Kepler Spacecraft. When Kepler launches, it will carry with it a DVD copy of messages from people like us. People who will likely never have another opportunity to speak to the stars and to the future.

I encourage you all to click here and send your thoughts to the stars and that unknowable future.

There may never be another chance.

As you might have guessed, I already put my 500 cents on board. They even give you a chance to download a nifty certificate to show that you participated:



When this message is found and translated, I will be long dead, long dust. Those reading it will be as different from I as I am from the first humans who harnessed fire, perhaps even more so.

Yet for all our differences, we share something; the longing to know.

The longing to know what is over the rise, across the water, past the moon, beyond the stars.

For this reason we commit this craft to the cold void of space, in the hope of finding other planets like our own and perhaps to one day make contact with beings like ourselves.

It is even remotely possible that this message is reaching just such a being and not the long distant progeny of the third planet of the star we call Sol.

I wish I could offer this greeting in person, whoever you are, wherever you come from.

In a small way this message and the ones with it offer a measure of immortality. Not for myself, nor even those I know, but for the entire race. By the time this message is retrieved and translated, not only will I be long dead and long dust, but the civilization that I know shall also be long past extinct.

I offer my tiny voice from the past to an unimaginable future.

If the technology exists to find this archive on this tiny craft in the vastness of space, I envy just how much more is known and knowable now. As of the writing of this message, we have not found a world that could reasonably be expected to cradle life like our own. We are barely able to send members of our species as far as our local satellite, let alone far enough to find and retrieve this craft at the distance it is now.

I envy a future free of those limitations.

With a limit on the number of words each person can send, the messages on this craft are too short to say much.

Why go to the trouble of sending so few words across the ages?

If that long dead ancestor of mine struggling to harness the power of fire had been able to send a short message across the centuries, the text of that message, the heft of those ancient words would mean more to me than all the artifacts dug by all the archeologists in history. I would treasure them beyond all things.

As it is, we scrabble in the dirt, piecing together a picture of what that long dead ancestor did with his life and by extension what might have been important to him and what he might have thought.

This archive and the messages it holds are our precious gift to you. These voices you have found in the cosmic wilderness offer you something more than just guesses about our thoughts, our hopes, our lives.

Listen to the voices. Treasure them.

They offer you the opportunity to know.

James Richardson, Homo sapiens, Sol III.