Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. This is Earth as seen from Saturn. That is us right there. And if you look closely, ok, see this little protuberance? That's the Moon. This image was taken by the Cassini spacecraft on July 19th, 2013 at 21:27 Coordinated Universal Time. The thing is, NASA gave the public advanced warning of when it would be taken, which means that this image of Earth was the first ever taken from space that some people on Earth were actually posing for.
Our planet looks so small, insignificant, fragile. I recently attended the premiere of Sky 1's upcoming "You, Me and the Apocalypse" with some cool YouTubers and it got me thinking. In the show, the characters find out that they're only 34 days left before a comet smashes into Earth that's likely to end humanity. They all react in different interesting ways, but what would I do if I found out that there were only 34 days of human history left? Ok, my first priority would be to get back to America to be with my family. But after that? I don't really have a bucket list. Except that is exactly what I would want to spend my last few weeks doing. Making a list to put in a bucket that I would then send far out into space away from Earth's impending vaporization.
The list would contain information about us, all Earthlings. So that if libraries and monuments and YouTube videos were all destroyed, a record would still exist somewhere of what and who we were. Like a stone thrown into a lake, the ripples your life causes last long after you vanish, the tree you planted is climbed by future generations, the books you donated inform future readers. But what if it's not just your stone that vanishes, but the entire pond? Perhaps it's arrogance or vanity, but getting cosmic messages in a bottle out there, before the end, diversifies our archive and gives a better chance for future alien visitors, or whatever is left of humanity, to find out that we were once here, to show what we learned. Maybe even to warn future life forms of what we did or what we didn't prepare for. We have already sent some messages about humanity out there, beyond Earth, and if Earth is completely destroyed, those messages will be all that's left of us. What are they?
Ok, first things first. How do you write something for the future? I mean, the distant future. The message might not be found for millions of years or billions. It might be discovered by an audience that's completely different, not only in language, but in senses? What if
