Leaving a permanent record of humanity on the moon – in 100 billion pixels

With a population of just over 5,000, the French village of Nuit-Saint-Georges may be small, but this pastoral Burgundy hamlet has an oversized connection to the moon.

It is the birthplace of famed 19th-century astronomer Felix Tisserand, whose name was given to the Tisserand crater located in a vast lunar plain known as the Sea of Serenity. He was the contemporary of French novelist Jules Verne, author of From the Earth to the Moon – the first book to imagine such a journey – in which its characters celebrate their arrival with a bottle of wine from Nuit-Saint-Georges.

Then, a century later, when the astronauts of Apollo 15 passed through the village, they were gifted a wine called Cuvee Terre Lune – Lunar Earth Vintage – which inspired them to name yet another crater after the town. Today the square in front of the city hall is called Place du Cratere Saint-Georges – Saint George Crater Plaza.

This is an enduring trend, as a new project will forge yet another link not only from village to moon, but from humanity to our own hereafter.

Sanctuary on the Moon is a new international effort to establish a lunar time capsule that will offer its finder a detailed guide to our present civilisation. Set to launch moonward in just a few years with the support of NASA, UNESCO and French President Emmanuel Macron’s administration (no guarantee has been given about the support of any future administration, however), the project was founded by Benoit Faiveley – who happens to hail from Nuit-Saint-Georges.

The golden record

The inspiration for Sanctuary on the Moon came from a similar endeavour nearly 50 years ago: the Golden Records that were affixed to the two Voyager spacecraft.

Launched by NASA in 1977, these probes were sent to explore and send back photos of the outer planets before continuing beyond the solar system, where they will drift for millions or perhaps even billions of years unless something finds them or gets in their way. It was for the unlikely event of the former – that some extraterrestrial intelligence might chance upon the crafts – that the Golden Records were included on board.

The brainchild of renowned astronomer Carl Sagan, the Golden Records contain sounds and images intended to provide a broad glimpse of life and culture on Earth. Images include DNA, human anatomy, animals and insects, plants and landscapes, food and architecture, and other aspects of the biosphere and civilisation. The music curation spans Bach to Beethoven, folk music to Chuck Berry, and the sounds of humpback whales to brain waves of a person thinking about a range of topics, including the sensation of falling in love.

What it does not include, despite a common misconception: the Beatles track, Here Comes the Sun. According to Sagan’s 1978 book, Murmurs of Earth, which recounts the creation of the discs, permission to use the song was rejected by the record company, EMI. One can only conclude that EMI must have been worried that aliens would rip off the Beatles.

Murmurs to the moon

Faiveley was working as an engineer and freelance journalist when he came upon Sagan’s book on the Golden Records, and from there, the idea for Sanctuary on the Moon was born. But while Sagan’s records were intended to be found by extraterrestrials, Faiveley conceived of a time capsule that would remain closer to home – preserved in the vacuum of space on the surface of the moon – to be rediscovered by humanity’s own descendants, aeons in the future.

“If we were to leave content for millions and millions and millions of years in pristine condition on the surface of another world,” Faiveley asks, “what would we say?”

The answer: as much as you can. And thanks to state-of-the-art manufacturing techniques, it turns out that Sanctuary on the Moon can pack an incredible amount of information into barely any space at all.

The time capsule contents will be comprised of 24 discs, each a mere 10 centimetres in diameter,? engraved with as many as seven billion pixels of information delving into a specific realm of knowledge: Matter and Atoms, Space and Universe, Life and Biology, maps of female and male genomes, and so on.

The discs are made of sapphire – the second hardest mineral on Earth behind diamond – and the pixels are arranged to not only provide readable text under magnification but to portray a collage of images that can be seen by the naked eye. The Space disc, for example, shows a space-suited astronaut, the moon’s phases, Earth’s place in the Milky Way, and more. When magnified, it provides an extensive catalogue of our current understanding of the universe.

As of now, the Sanctuary team has preliminary designs for 10 of the 24 discs. The remaining 14 must be designed and all discs carved by 2027 for a launch scheduled the following year as part of the Artemis mission to bring humanity back to the moon.

The discs will be sealed in a protective container of machined aluminium affixed to an unmanned lander delivered via NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) programme, which partners with private companies to send technology moonward. The exact location of the landing site is yet to be determined, but wherever it ends up, there the discs will wait until somebody finds them, if ever.

Back to basics

While engraved mineral plates may seem surprisingly low-tech, they may be vital to communicating over an immense period of time.

“If you want to convey information to the far future, you have to go back to the basics, so to speak,” says Faiveley. “Who knows if a DVD or CD player will work one million years from now?”

He explains that if you were to put the time capsule on a medium requiring some form of reading device, you would either have to include the hardware to play it or a description of how to build one. It is far easier to simply carve something legible, as the Sanctuary team is doing. To read their discs, “basically all you need to have is a magnifying glass”.

At the centre of each disc is a key explaining the International Unit System and defining measurement. On the outside is a sort of “Rosetta Stone” detailing human language via the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which appears in French, English, Arabic, Greek, Chinese, Dhivehi, Inuktitut, etc. With this information, whoever finds the capsule will have everything they need to decipher and interpret it.

“The question then became, ‘What do we want to convey’?” says Faiveley. “No one can speak on behalf of humankind, and I think [team geneticist] Martin Brzezinski says it very well – that we can at least speak with humanity.”

Curating for the future

“Sanctuary is scientific and poetic, in equal measure,” says Brzezinski.

Therefore, the discs are being designed with consideration for both information and aesthetics. Science lays the foundation of the data. Faiveley describes the project as a “triptych” that spans three areas of focus: “What we are, what we know and what we make – and what we make is art.

“We wanted something that would be appealing to the eye,” he says. “Something that would hold a lot of information. Something that would be serious but also funny, complex and simple.”

To achieve this, Sanctuary brought together experts from around the world – geneticists, astrophysicists, palaeontologists, particle physicists, engineers, cartographers, and more – to participate in workshops on what would go into the capsule.

“Who doesn’t say, ‘Yeah, I want to work on something that’s going to space or to the moon’?” Faiveley grins. “Especially when it’s cultural.”

It is this element of cultural preservation that drew the interest of UNESCO, and as a result, renderings of all the World Heritage Sites will be included in the final designs.

But at its core, the project is a scientific endeavour and to that end, the Sanctuary team aims to convey not necessarily the sum total of human knowledge, but at least indicate where the bounds of our science stand today.

“I always had a passion for cartography,” says Faiveley, “and when looking at an old map you would see the contours of the Americas, then at some point the map would be left blank, and these blanks were called terra incognitas. I like those maps because they tell a lot about the civilisation who drew them. I’ve always been amazed by terra incognitas – what’s beyond it? It applies to Sanctuary in a sense that we’re not trying to put everything we know, but we’re trying to put the boundaries of what we know.”

Among the forefront of human knowledge is the recent mapping of the human genome. This, the team decided, was so essential to the project that they devoted four of the 24 discs to it.

“To me,” explains Brzezinski, “the genomes are part of Sanctuary because they are an attempt at explaining literally who we are as organisms. A lot of content on the other discs provide information that we generated – art, science, ideas – whereas the genome discs provide the information that is inside us.”

The first disc provides a detailed set of instructions on how to decode the human genome, including an abridged version of the tree of life that traces humanity’s evolutionary past. From there, two female and two male genomes are presented in full. The individuals were selected via a double-blind process from a cohort of what are known as “super seniors” – people who have reached the age of 85 free of major health issues and are therefore unlikely to have genomic mutations that lead to diseases like cancer. There is also material about mutations commonly observed throughout the human population, which, Brzezinski says, is important for representing not only individuals but the wider genetics of humanity.

“This part was important to me to achieve,” he explains. “I felt that having the sequences of two individuals was too exclusive, and that we needed to somehow incorporate ‘everyone else’ too.”

While the dense information of each genome took up more than 99 percent of the pixels available on the four pertinent discs, the team decided to add music: the song Moon Above by the Norwegian band Flunk, created specifically for the project. A mapped genome may say a lot about our biology, but without art and music, it hardly provides a full understanding of what emerges from that genetic soup.

The project’s 100 billion pixels, admits Faiveley, “may be a lot, but it’s also an awfully small amount to sum up who we are”.

For our distant relatives

Unlike the Golden Records, Sanctuary on the Moon is not intended with an extraterrestrial audience in mind. So who is it for?

“Sanctuary may be found by our descendants millions of years from now,” says Faiveley. “They will probably not look like us, but I think there’s something that is never going to change – the excitement of saying, ‘I found a treasure. What is inside this treasure? What does it say?’ I believe that’s still going to be the case a million years from now.”

He mentions Egyptologist Jean-Francois Champollion, who in the 19th century was the first to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics. “He opened a door to a civilisation that was completely lost and people couldn’t understand. And I hope that this project could land in the hands of a future Jean-Francois Champollion.”

According to Faiveley, working on a project like Sanctuary – which gazes millions of years into the future – changes one’s concept of “deep time”.

“To comprehend the scale of such deep time you need to go back and look at the past,” he says. “What is 2,000 years from now was the beginning of Christendom. Five thousand years from now was the pyramids of Egypt. Seventeen thousand years from now were the paintings in the Lascaux caves in France. Thirty-four thousand from now, the paintings of the Chauvet Cave in France, 3.2 million years from now, Lucy the Australopithecus. So how are we going to evolve? What’s going to be left from us?”

Sanctuary may seem preoccupied with the future, explains team palaeontologist Jean-Sebastien Steyer, but it is just as concerned with humanity’s present: “Paradoxically, it pushes us to stop, to take a break and to think about who we are.”

A message from a troubled time

In an era of rising global conflict, nuclear proliferation and climate change, it’s not difficult to see how a time capsule exploring who we are today and where we’re heading tomorrow may raise disquieting questions. Is Sanctuary on the Moon, for example, intended as a sort of intellectual insurance in the event of civilisation’s collapse?

“Sanctuary is not about being survivalist or about preparing for the end of the world,” Faiveley emphasises. “It is all about conveying knowledge and conveying things that matter to us. That being said, it’s also a statement about the fragility of our world. The fragility of ourselves. There will be information about global warming and some things that we are not very proud of as human beings.”

He stresses that he doesn’t want it caricatured as some post-apocalyptic time capsule. “Like, ‘In case of emergency please break and find stuff to reboot civilisation’. That’s not the case. But the symbolic gesture of preserving our own fragile biological recipe – I think it means something.”

“I’m going to paraphrase Ptahhotep,” says Faiveley, referencing the ancient Egyptian writer, whose wisdom has been passed down for some 4,500 years.

“It is good to speak to the future. It will listen.”