Nehaveigur

The Voyager Golden Records and the Pioneer plaques will remain legible for billions of years. Where they travel, they’re protected from the destructive powers of Earth’s elements. This together with their simplicity – diagrams and records etched into metal plates – make it possible that they will be the last testaments to humanity, persisting long after we and even Earth itself are gone.

The likelihood of an alien civilization or even our own distant descendants encountering and deciphering these artifacts, using whichever sensory organs they may possess, is small. There are only four probes that have left the solar system and it will be millions of years before they reach another star. Even if, by some improbable chance, they are discovered, the information they carry about humanity is scant.

The Pioneer plaques contain a diagrammatic image of a man and a woman and Earth’s location, but nothing else. The Voyager records are more detailed but still provide a mere glimpse of Earth and its inhabitants. Because the way information is encoded on the Voyager records it’s also not clear that it’d be intelligible to another intelligence.

The finders would learn that someone once existed in the Solar System but almost nothing about who we were. Nothing about the diversity of Earth’s plants and animals, nothing about the beauty of our flowers or the grace of our birds, nothing about how humans live or love or think or worship, nothing about our engineering, our art, or wars, nothing about tall ships, nothing about trade, nothing about how we like to sit and drink and talk together, nothing about how our children play. They would leave the finders with only the barest hint of our existence, and no way to learn more.

The solution is to send many more probes in different directions, each with a set of plaques that show who we are. There’d be enough plaques to tell them about what it means to be human, with diagrams and simple drawings that are interpretable to any intelligent species, without a need for decoding or data processing, and that can persist for eons. 

The probes would deposit the plaque sets at different points in our solar system, on Mars and on Jovian moons and on prominent asteroids, secured in containers that make them easy to discover and that make it obvious they are artifacts. Other probes would leave the solar system, targeting stars that have planets that may harbor life. They will not reach them for millions of years, but since the probes will last for billions of years, some of them will be found. Other plaque sets will be deposited on Earth, in caves and under the ice of Antarctica, to be discovered by our descendants tens of thousands of years from now. 

Those plaques will be a testament to humanity that will outlast the pyramids and most or maybe even all of our other creations. Making them and sending them will be one of the most important things we ever do.