In 2024, if all goes as planned, a spacecraft called Europa Clipper will embark on a journey to Jupiter’s icy, gray moon covered in rust-colored cracks. It will swim along the gravitational tides of the Jovian satellite, half facing the celestial body from orbit, half exposed to the airless ocean of space. Along with a high-tech spectrometer, radar system, optical imaging and other tools designed to search for evidence of alien habitats, Europe Clipper He’ll bring my name. She can bring yours too.
You just have to subscribe NASA’s free “Message in a Bottle” program is here. Campaign ends at 11:59 PM EST on December 31 (0459 GMT on January 1); At the time I write this, nearly 900,000 names have been entered.
If you’re not sure why this is important, you’re not alone. Immediately after signing my name, and frankly before I knew what that would entail, I thought deeply about why I wanted this to happen. After all, the spacecraft isn’t going to land anywhere. There’s no one on Europe To receive our message. Each name is one among hundreds of thousands of others. Even our names are merely intangible concepts created to denote our existence, an idea that linguists and philosophers have pondered for years. Without us what are our names? Without anyone reading them, where did they really go?
This sent me into a spiral. I felt like I was participating in a very abstract concept.
Related: Ode to Europe Clipper: American poet Ada Lemon unveils an ode to flying on NASA’s mission to the moon
I ultimately decided that the point of this might not be to achieve any physical consequences, or even any observable theoretical consequences for that matter. I think I sent my name to Europe because it’s not supposed to be there. I’m tied to the Earth, so if my name is meaningless without my presence, maybe it should stay here too. However, thanks to modern technology, this is no longer necessary.
Even if my name has no tangible presence in reality, and therefore should be able to “travel” across light years and perhaps transcend dimensions, I’m not sure it can “be” somewhere unless someone is in that place to think about it . from him. No one in Europe (as far as we know, I think) is thinking about it. Or to think about you. Maybe so NASA It offers us the next best thing, which is to allow our names to settle somewhere besides Earth’s neighborhood, the only neighborhood ever thought of.
So, after sorting all of this out, and telling my family members, who I also recorded (which my dad would predictably respond with a thumbs up emoji and an “Okay”), I figured out exactly how a message in a bottle works.
In short, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have designed a special “silicon wafer” that looks like an ultra-shiny metal disc. They can then convert small images, such as the bubble letter “A”, into very small, readable text. These small images are called “bitmaps.” Each name entered into the project will undergo this process, eventually becoming text at a scale of 75 nanometers, or a thousandth of the width of a human hair. All the names can then be “printed” on silicon microchips, made from the original chips, via an electron beam.
All of these chips can then be loaded onto Europa’s Clipper, which will hopefully travel more than a billion miles as it hurls itself through the forces of other planets until it reaches Europa’s gravitational embrace. The spacecraft will then make approximately 50 flybys of the Moon at altitudes closer to just 16 miles (25 kilometers) above the surface. At the same time, you will be devotedly searching for evidence of, and perhaps even proof of, the existence of subterranean oceans Biosignatures.
So, to take a line from one of my favorite passages The novel “Red Mars” Microchips engraved with words representing nearly a million people will sit in a location from which Earth appears only as a star.
Ultimately, this whole exercise may not change anything except my perspective, but I think that’s enough.
