Earth’s Miniaturized Creativity Will Come to the Moon: ‘Message in a Bottle for Future Generations’

Thirty thousand artists, writers, musicians and directors from 161 countries with their works are about to arrive on our favorite satellite. The first moon landing is scheduled for December: this will be followed by three more. They have the ambition of introducing possible aliens to Earth. Through art.

The project is called The Lunar Codex and will arrive on the Moon aboard unmanned rockets. Their content – ​​miniaturized – will tell the story of the world, our world, through works of figurative art, poetry, music, films, even podcasts.

The idea came from a Canadian physicist (who received his PhD in physics from the University of Wales) and poet, Samuel Peralta, which, through galleries and publishers, contacted the artists asking to participate in the project. Some took the proposal as a joke, others enthusiastically joined, still others proposed on their own. There will also be war-ravaged Ukraine, poems from countries devastated by climate change, and then magazines, images, paintings, as well as a collection of poems from every continent. The choices themselves provoked some skepticism: there are no great literary classics. But the works should be able to tell, in the creator’s intentions, life on Earth.

The previous

Since 1969, the Moon has hosted works of art from the Earth thanks to The Moon Museum, a ceramic tile engraved with drawings of Forrest Myers, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, David Novros And John Chamberlain. She had been brought by the Apollo 12 Mission, attached to the lunar module, and left there. In 1971, the Apollo 15 crew deposited on its surface the work “Fallen Astronaut”, an aluminum sculpture by the Belgian artist Paul van Hoeydonck.

‘NanoFiche’ technology

The technology used by The Lunar Codex is NanoFiche: “NanoFiche is an analog technology that stores orders of magnitude more content in the same space as microfiche, is impervious to temperature and humidity, and has a degradation factor close to zero,” explains Peralta. “As a storage medium, it can be expected to last hundreds of thousands of years, if not longer. Some have called it the best medium for millions of years of archive.” The micrograph of a nickel NanoFiche disk is the size of a dime: it contains hundreds and hundreds of small square images, each 2Kx2K pixels in size, in groups of three: one channel each for red, green and blue.

A shared dream

“I dreamed of going to the Moon and knew that one day it would be possible. I share that dream with many artists, authors, musicians and directors whose work I love,” says Samuel Peralta. “The Lunar Codex is that dream realized, a collection of works by tens of thousands of creative artists from around the world, launched in time capsules to the Moon.”

NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) plans, with the Artemis program, to return humans to the Moon in 2026, for the first time in over 50 years. In parallel with the Artemis program, NASA will send scientific instruments to the Moon between 2023 and 2026. And it will do so through Commercial Lunar Payload Service (CLPS) partners, such as Astrobotic Technologies and others. Their lunar landers will be launched as commercial rocket platform payloads by United Launch Alliance (ULA) or SpaceX. Along with NASA instruments, these missions will carry commercial cargo, including the time capsules that make up the Lunar Codex.