NASA's New Horizons spacecraft may take a message from Earth for the aliens in its next mission. The project called One Earth Message is a crowdfunded effort to take sounds, images and ideas for the extraterrestrials.
Jon Lomberg is the head of One Earth Message and he talked to Space.com about this mission.
"We'll never know if this extraterrestrial audience that we're designing it for will receive it. But we do know that the people of Earth who participate, who play a role in it - it can literally change their lives," Lomberg said.
One Earth Message is set to send the data digitally. After NASA gives its final nod to the project, they will be able to send 150 MB of data to the agency's New Horizons.
He stated and compared the data to a haiku (a Japanese form of poetry) and not to a novel. He added that due to the digital format of the message, it will be more layered, flexible and integrated.
About crowdsourced funding and material, Lomberg said that this is not a photo contest, but a process to come up with things that people wish to send.
Lomberg and his team are hoping that would be able to crowdsource $500,000 from the campaign. The One Earth Message campaign is happening on Fiat Physica. The campaign is called One Earth Message: Send The Ultimate Message In A Bottle. At the time of writing this, the campaign was able to get $13,345 which is 3 percent of the goal with eighty-one backers. A little more than fifty-two days are left before the campaign ends.
Back in 1977, NASA sent images and sounds from across the globe through the Voyager spacecraft. It has to be seen if NASA can connect with the aliens or not.