In 2024, we’ll witness the Europa Clipper spacecraft embark on a thrilling journey to an icy, otherworldly moon of Jupiter. This mysterious moon, known for its rusty-colored gashes, orbits the gas giant and hides an airless ocean that awaits exploration. Equipped with high-tech instruments designed to uncover evidence of extraterrestrial life, the Europa Clipper will carry my name, along with nearly a million others. And if you’re interested in sending your name to space as well, NASA’s free “Message in a Bottle program” awaits your registration here.
Now, why would sending our names to an uninhabited moon matter? The idea may seem abstract and perplexing. Admittedly, I pondered the significance immediately after signing up. After all, our names won’t land anywhere, and there’s no one on Europa to receive our messages. It’s an intangible concept, a notion philosophers and linguists have theorized about for centuries. The question arose – without us, what are our names? Where do they truly exist without anyone to acknowledge them? In essence, participating in this program felt like an introspective journey.
Europa, a world covered in frost, harbors active ice volcanoes and harbors many mysteries, prompting the question of why we’d send our names to a place devoid of life. Perhaps our names are meant to remain on Earth. Yet, through modern technology, they can transcend space and time itself. Although our names may not physically exist, they can symbolically reside in a place beyond the realms of Earth and represent a part of humanity.
NASA’s ingenious “Message in a Bottle program” involves turning names into readable text on silicon microchips the size of 75 nanometers, each etched with incredible precision. These microchips will be placed on the Europa Clipper, which will travel over a billion miles to perform nearly 50 flybys of the moon. With the spacecraft’s advanced instruments, breakthrough discoveries of subsurface oceans and potential biosignatures may come to light.
So, as microchips etched with our names sit on this distant moon, it serves as a reminder that our impact extends far beyond Earth. Indeed, this exercise may only shift our perspectives, but isn’t that enough?
