I was twenty-three when plans for the Explorer were announced. A new kind of rocket, designed for high-speed travel, the Explorer would carry no humans with its cargo. This was a message in a bottle, a souvenir of Earth, perhaps our last communiqué. It would bring on its journey a gold disc containing information about our planet and its people, in case, in some distant realm of the universe, the ship crossed paths with intelligent life.
A special team was assembled to decide what to include on the disc. Among the final contents were the sounds of waves crashing on a beach, human voices speaking greetings from around the world, images of extinct flora and fauna, a diagram of the Earth’s exact location in the universe. Certain basic facts were engraved in symbols on the outside of the disc, the goal to record in hieroglyphs the whole history of the twenty-first century, to convey in the fewest possible strokes the story of our time.
Not mentioned on the disc was the smell of cut grass in high summer, the taste of oranges on our lips, the way sand felt beneath our bare feet, or our definitions of love and friendship, our worries and our dreams, our mercies and our kindnesses and our lies.