WE *HEART* PLUTO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

There was not a lot of time to plan for what exactly was needed – and, as Stern has said, his team did not want to be diverted from getting to the launch pad by arguments about what should go. This was not a Voyager or Rosetta development. Time and mass were not a luxury this team had.

I think the list of items is pretty good and it shows a good snapshot of where we are right now.

At one point he had team members make a trip to a local Burger King to find a Florida quarter. This should give you some idea as to how much thought and planning went into sending a message to the future and/or other intelligences.

Decades after leaving Earth and then the Solar System, what is it that most people think about when they think about Pioneer 10 and 11 and Voyager 1 and 2?

You guessed it.

They may think about Clyde Tombaugh' ashes, the stamps, the quarters, and the CDs on NH, but how much can one say about them after stating the basics?

By contrast, people have written whole books on the Pioneer and Voyager messages to the Cosmos. See the 1978 Random House book Murmurs of Earth as one prime example.

As I said, it is too late to do much about NH's amateur time capsule content, but we CAN make sure that information of significance is placed on all future interstellar vessels.

Hopefully many of them will not come from NASA, where they continue to show a lack of imagination and forward thinking when it comes to the much wider picture as evidenced by agreeing with the NH team not to bother with even a Pioneer style plaque.

As a counter example, look what the ESA put on their Rosetta comet probe: A disc containing thousands of human languages provided by the Long Now Foundation. I guarantee there will be many grateful and happy future historians and linguists one day, to say nothing of descendants from those cultures whose languages are dying out.

No — why?

The actions of the New Horizons team certainly is representative of our times, which is not necessarily a compliment.

They just were not interested in the amazing and rare oportunity they were offered, nor did they attempt to ask anyone else to help them in that regard.

One thing is more certain: Future humans will know the probes are out there and will have a chance to find them. Thus these probes serve as very long-lived time capsules of our recent era – longer than any human-made objects will survive on Earth.

To throw merely trinkets and items that will perish in short order is a disservice on so many levels.

And as for Clyde Tombaugh's ashes: Was anyone consulted about sending human remains into the galaxy? Even if they are so much charred carbon, I would think somebody might have had to consult on launching human remains on a government-funded space probe.

As I said, not much consideration was put into the items placed aboard New Horizons. No doubt the cynical members of this generation will say So What, but there may be consequences down the road for our children from this lack of foresight.

Sensors depending on input from "visible light" would not evolve out there. Under those conditions every item linked to recognition through eyesight is questionable.

With the records, a stylus was included. All one has to do is move the stylus needle through the grooves and the audio portion can be recovered if not the images.

Not only will that NOT be possible with the CDs on New Horizons, but cosmic radiation will deteriorate them in a few centuries at most.

The space probe, only the fifth ever sent into the galaxy, was treated like some kind of amateur time capsule. If the NH team did not care about preserving human information for the future, they should have asked another group to help with that part of the mission.

Carl Sagan made the Pioneer Plaques and Voyager Records possible because he thought ahead to the future (NASA wasn't interested in doing any of this before his prompting, and then they made Sagan and his group go through hoops to get it done).

Sadly Sagan is gone – so where are the people to make sure we send all future space vessels heading off into the galaxy with appropriate and useful information packages about us and our world?

Maybe to send to NGC2169 in Orion while on Pluto?

http://www.siowl.com/scripts/query.php?NGC2169

Maybe to send to NGC2169 in Orion while on Pluto?

http://www.siowl.com/scripts/query.php?NGC2169

I know what the posters with their names on board mean… mines on there too. I'm sure the CD won't deteriorate in time – the hard vacum and searing cold will probably prolong it's life indefinately.

The Voyager discs were much more relevant imho…

I hope sending the Plutonians a stamp saying "Pluto: not yet explored" doesn't cause a diplomatic incident: they're still smarting ovr that whole demotion thing.

And 37c for a letter to Pluto sounds like a bargain.