A “summary” of human heritage will soon be sent to the Moon

The “Moon Shelter” project, launched this week in partnership with UNESCO and NASA, is inspired by the golden disc launched in 1977 aboard the Voyager space probes, a “bottle in the cosmic sea” that presents life on Earth in the form of images and sounds.

“Talk to future humans”

says Benoit Faivelle, the French engineer who helped create the project, which was led by about a dozen scientists and artists. He explained that a capsule with a mass of 1.4 kilograms will be placed on the surface of the moon by a NASA robotic space probe, “in advance in 2027.”

It will contain 24 sapphire discs measuring 10 centimeters in diameter, engraved with micropixel precision – between 3.4 and 7 billion per disc – some of which are manufactured at the Atomic Energy Authority (CEA). The data stored in analog form will attempt to paint a “diverse picture of our species”, with a selection of knowledge in science, mathematics, paleontology and art… as well as the human genome coding for our “biological recipe”. . It's all told in text, pictures and diagrams, in a mosaic with multiple reading levels.

“The idea is that information is transmitted over time, with permanent storage, by putting oneself in the place of the archaeologist of the future,” says Jean-Philippe Ozan, an astrophysicist at the National Center for Scientific Research, and one of the initiators of the project. The scientist adds that, unlike Earth, the moon is a “permanent location” because it has a surface that is resistant to floods and earthquakes, and is far from any “human degradation.”